The Murder Road: A Cooper & Fry Mystery Page 7

  A double garage built on to the side of the house was solidly locked too. In a paddock was an old farm building with tiles missing from the roof. Irvine walked down and peered through the door. It had probably been an old cow byre, he guessed. Some building work had been going on here – there was a pile of breeze blocks, some bags of cement and several neat stacks of new roofing tiles. Another conversion, then. But no sign of anyone taking shelter here.

  And that seemed to be it for outbuildings at this address, apart from a wood store piled high with split logs. It was open at the front and there was no room for anyone to conceal themselves among the stacks of wood.

  Irvine gazed about him. A small water feature tinkled in the garden, a fountain in the shape of leaping fish, spouting water from its mouth into an ornamental pond. There were plenty of other outbuildings in sight, but they were on the other side of a fence. They looked as though they belonged to Higher Fold Farm – which Top Barn probably did once too. There was a much bigger and more modern barn now, a giant steel structure that overshadowed the original and was built right up to the boundary.

  And that was another reason not to live in a barn conversion. You were still pretty much on the farm.

  Irvine twisted round, thinking he’d seen a movement out of the corner of his eye. But it must only have been his own reflection in one of the windows of the house. He peered through the French windows and saw himself in a large mirror on the wall of the sitting room.

  ‘Go back to the Hibberts and ask them if they know where their neighbours are,’ said Sharma.

  Immediately, Irvine felt himself bridling at being given instructions by someone he’d only just met.

  ‘Me?’

  But Sharma barely glanced at him. ‘Who else?’

  Reluctantly, Irvine did as he was told. This situation was going to take some getting used to.

  The road through Shawhead ended in the yard of a property called Cloughpit House. Beyond were fields and rough grazing, which Cooper assumed must belong to Shaw Farm.

  Higher Fold Farm had looked in excellent condition compared to these two holdings round the bend. The yard of Shaw Farm had been bad enough with all its half-dismantled vehicles. But Cloughpit House had been converted to a smallholding, with a series of sheds and outbuildings sprouting from the original house like fungus and spreading down the slope of the field.

  Most of the house crouched low in a hollow of ground, with ancient stone walls that wavered and bulged. At the rear the roof line changed dramatically, forming a taller section that you would almost call a tower, three storeys high at least.

  When they entered the yard, a young woman came towards them from a shed. She was dressed in old jeans and a baggy sweater, and her feet were shoved into black wellies that were a size too large for her. But she also had studs through her nose and eyebrows. Her hair was dyed magenta and pulled into tangled clumps.

  Villiers checked her list, as if she couldn’t quite believe she was in the right place.

  ‘Tania Durkin?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, that’s me. Are you the cops?’

  Cooper and Villiers introduced themselves. Tania didn’t seem interested in their identification, but studied them with open curiosity, looking from one to the other and back again. Perhaps she too couldn’t believe she was having this encounter. She’d never expected to be chatting to the police in her own yard.

  ‘No one comes up this far,’ she said when they explained the reason for their visit and enquired for sightings of Malcolm Kelsey. ‘It’s a feed lorry, is it? One of those big ones? He’d never get it round that bend, even if he made it under the bridge.’

  ‘Haven’t you seen the lorry?’ said Cooper, surprised.

  ‘No. When did it get stuck?’

  ‘Late yesterday afternoon, it seems.’

  Tania shook her head. ‘We haven’t been out today. We’ve been busy on the smallholding. There are always jobs to do with the animals.’

  She pulled a small knife from her pocket. It had a wooden handle and a tightly curved end. She cackled when Cooper and Villiers both took a step backwards.

  ‘I’ve been trimming hooves,’ she said. ‘Look, it’s just a hoof trimming knife.’

  Cooper relaxed, recognising that what she said was true.

  ‘Is Vincent Durkin at home?’ he asked.

  ‘Vinnie is down the field somewhere,’ she said. ‘Do you really need to talk to him? I’d call him, but he’s probably not in any fit state to speak to.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘He’s mucking out the pigs.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘We only have two sows here. And there are the goats, of course, and the hens. We’re not proper farmers like the Swindells. We don’t have the land for it. We really just want to be self-sufficient, but you’ve no idea how difficult that is. We still have to pay bills and the council won’t take payment in cabbages or pints of goat’s milk.’

  ‘So how do you manage?’

  ‘Vinnie has to work part-time at a garage in New Mills. He’s a good mechanic. Better with his hands than he is with words. But at least it’s a proper job. You want to ask that bloke Hibbert what he does.’

  ‘Mr Hibbert at Shawhead Cottages? What does he do?’

  ‘He says he works for a marketing consultancy in Manchester. Something to do with financial planning. That sounds like nothing to me. A made-up job. Another useless sod who doesn’t produce anything.’

  Two pygmy goats ran into the yard, their tiny hooves clattering on the concrete like tap dancers. They scampered round Villiers’ feet and began chewing at her coat.

  ‘They’re quite cute, aren’t they?’ she said. ‘I’ve always liked goats.’

  ‘They’re great, but they’re little buggers for escaping,’ said Tania.

  One of the goats drew back its head, backed up a couple of feet and gave Villiers a friendly butt on her leg with its stubby horns.

  ‘Ouch,’ said Villiers.

  ‘That’ll probably bruise,’ said Tania, without a trace of sympathy.

  ‘Not so cute, after all.’

  ‘Here’s Vinnie now anyway,’ said Tania.

  Vincent Durkin had dark, spiky hair and tattoos on both sides of his neck, the blue lines snaking round his ears to disappear into his hair-line. His face was gaunt, his cheek bones prominent. But he looked to have a wiry strength, and the fingers of his hands were long and bony where he clutched a steel fork encrusted with soiled straw.

  Tania told him who they were, and he gave them a non-committal nod and a grunt that might have been a monosyllabic version of ‘hello’.

  ‘I gather you don’t have much land of your own, then?’ said Cooper.

  ‘No,’ said Tania. ‘We’ve tried to get a bit of grazing off Grant Swindells, but he won’t part with a single acre. It’s a shame, because he obviously can’t manage it on his own. He has to get contractors in for all the big jobs and that’s got to be costing him a fortune. And there are bits of land just going to waste, full of bracken and weeds. Odd corners we could make use of. But he’s a stubborn old bugger.’

  ‘I take it you don’t get on with your neighbours?’ said Villiers.

  ‘We don’t fit in really. That’s the top and bottom of it. I wish people would take us as we are. But you know what it’s like – you end up living in a barn conversion and suddenly you think you’re someone special.’

  ‘Top Barn?’ said Cooper, checking Villiers’ list. ‘That would be Mr and Mrs Schofield.’

  ‘I didn’t mention any names.’

  ‘But there are no other barn conversions in Shawhead.’

  ‘Maybe not.’

  There was no sign of a car in the Durkins’ yard, but a Yamaha motorbike was parked under a length of corrugated iron roofing and the back doors of an old VW van were visible in a wooden garage. It wasn’t clear whether it was a viable vehicle or just another metal carcass slowly rotting away like the classic models at Shaw Farm.

  ‘Do you wa
nt a brew or anything?’ she said. ‘I’m just going in the house anyway. You look a bit cold out there, not doing very much.’

  Tania Durkin was taking her boots off in a porch, or perhaps more accurately a conservatory. It had a glass roof, but the glass was green with mould and hardly let any light in.

  ‘I don’t think we have time, thank you,’ said Cooper, moving to the door so that he could see inside.

  Tools were piled here and there, and Vincent Durkin added his fork to the stack after wiping it on a patch of grass. Dark brown compost spilled onto the floor from half-open bags of compost. A bale of straw sat next to a teetering stack of plastic bread trays marked with the name of a well-known supermarket chain.

  Near the door into the house a dozen bulging black bin liners were lined up against the wall. Cooper got a distinct whiff from them of, well . . . bins. It was the smell from the bottom of his wheelie bin after the council refuse men had emptied it. Did the Durkins not believe in putting their rubbish out for collection like everyone else? Or didn’t the council bin lorries manage to get this far up Cloughpit Lane either? One of the disadvantages of living in Shawhead perhaps.

  Villiers was still being pursued by the pygmy goats, which had now been joined by two others. They danced around her, trying to tempt her into chasing them.

  ‘They’re so small,’ she said. ‘Surely you don’t get much milk from them, do you?’

  Tania laughed. ‘No, not from them. We have some bigger goats for that.’

  ‘So what are these for?’ said Villiers. ‘Pets?’

  Cooper noticed Tania and Vincent exchange a glance. He was familiar with that look. He saw it often from farmers and from people who worked as butchers or had jobs in slaughterhouses. They didn’t know how much of the gory truth they could tell people without upsetting them. The reactions they expected made them keep their mouths shut.

  ‘Pygmy goats were originally bred in Africa,’ said Cooper. ‘They were developed to provide a small carcass instead of having too much meat that would go off in a hot climate.’

  Villiers looked as though she didn’t really believe him, but Tania Durkin laughed. Even Vincent grunted in agreement.

  ‘What chance would we have of being self-sufficient if we didn’t eat everything we raised?’ said Tania.

  But Cooper’s eye had been drawn to a stone structure on the other side of the yard from the house. When he approached it, he realised it was a sealed well. An iron grille had been cemented across the opening.

  Cooper peered through the grille into the blackness. It was much too dark down there to see any water in the bottom, but he could sense it. He could almost taste its acidity and feel its chill. He wouldn’t fancy drawing it up and trying to drink it – though people must surely have done that at one time.

  ‘They call that the Boggart Well,’ said Tania, coming to stand next to him.

  She was wearing soft-soled shoes now and he hadn’t heard her cross the yard. When he turned he could smell the odour of animals on her clothes, the sour whiff of half-decayed muck that was scraped out of overgrown hooves. Her face was pink from the cold and the physical exertion, and the stud in her eyebrow glinted from a bead of sweat.

  ‘That’s the name it’s marked with on the old maps,’ she said. ‘The Boggart Well. You know what some folk are like around here. Very superstitious.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  Cooper wondered what sinister presence the well was supposed to contain. In local folklore a boggart might be a spirit or a ghost, but it might equally be an embodiment of some evil that had been perpetrated here. Memories of dreadful incidents were sometimes dealt with by creating a physical symbol to focus or contain them, putting them away safely where people could point at them as something from the past, no longer representing any threat.

  ‘This business with the delivery – it’s just another satnav mess-up, isn’t it?’ said Tania. ‘It happens all the time round here. They don’t usually ram their lorries into that bridge, though.’

  ‘That might be the case. We can’t say yet.’

  ‘Well, he wasn’t following a diversion sign, that’s for sure,’ she said. ‘They wouldn’t divert traffic up Cloughpit Lane, no matter what. It goes nowhere.’

  ‘Well, it goes to Shawhead,’ said Cooper.

  ‘That’s what I mean. Nowhere.’

  ‘That back part of the Durkins’ house is an odd shape,’ said Villiers as they left. ‘It must be a conversion from some old farm building, I suppose. A windmill, do you think?’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  Villiers tilted her head sideways and squinted her eyes. ‘Mmm. I’m not sure. It doesn’t look quite right for a windmill.’

  But Cooper had lost interest in vernacular architecture. He was gaining an overall impression of Shawhead and it wasn’t positive. The word ‘community’ seemed alien to the residents here. They seemed to live in a state of mutual unhelpfulness and suspicion.

  Was this really the idyll that people converting that barn and those old farmworkers’ cottages had dreamed of?

  When Cooper and Villiers walked back round the corner, Irvine was still talking to a slightly frazzled-looking woman with short blond hair, while Sharma chatted to an old lady leaning on her gate across the road.

  ‘Oh, this is Mrs Hibbert,’ said Irvine. ‘My boss, Detective Inspector Cooper.’

  Cooper hadn’t yet got used to anyone calling him ‘boss’. But he could see that it made the woman look at him with a bit more respect than he normally expected from members of the public. So perhaps it could be a good thing.

  ‘I’m Amanda Hibbert,’ she said.

  ‘Ah, the lady who reported the incident.’

  ‘Yes, that was me, for my sins,’ she said, laughing rather nervously.

  ‘I’m sorry that we’re not able to clear the road for a while yet,’ said Cooper. ‘I appreciate it must be very inconvenient.’

  ‘Oh, we’re used to getting cut off here,’ she said. ‘Snow, floods, fallen trees. We even had a sinkhole open up once. It took us days to get that filled in. You realise, if this road gets closed, there’s no other way in or out. We’re completely trapped.’

  Cooper nodded, wondering why she was stressing that.

  ‘Do you know this company the lorry belongs to?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, we get our horse feed from them sometimes,’ said Mrs Hibbert. ‘But not today. We’re weren’t expecting anything.’

  ‘I’m going to have to send someone to take your fingerprints, Mrs Hibbert.’

  ‘Mine? For heaven’s sake, why?’

  ‘For elimination purposes, that’s all. You must have touched parts of the lorry.’

  ‘Well, yes – the door handle, I suppose. And the papers on the seat, you know . . .’

  ‘Of course. So if we find prints around the cab, we need to be able tell whether they’re yours. I’m sure you understand that.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘But don’t worry. They’ll be destroyed afterwards. We don’t keep them on file.’

  She didn’t look entirely convinced. Cooper didn’t think he would find her prints on record in the database. But some members of the public just hated the principle of the police having possession of their fingerprints or DNA. They saw it as a kind of violation of their privacy.

  Suddenly, Cooper realised that stopping had been a mistake. He should have headed straight back to the bridge. A small crowd was starting to gather in the road between Higher Fold Farm and Top Barn. Grant Swindells had come out, Ian Hibbert had emerged from Shawhead Cottages and even the Durkins were slouching at the corner with a lurcher on a lead, as if they were taking the dog for a walk. Only the Lawsons from Shaw Farm were missing. And of course Mr and Mrs Schofield from Top Barn. Where were they?

  ‘Have you spoken to the Schofields, Luke?’ Cooper said quietly.

  ‘There’s no one home,’ said Irvine. ‘No sign of them. We did a check round the property while we were there.’

 
‘If you’re looking for the Schofields, I think they’re away,’ said Ian Hibbert. ‘Last time I spoke to him, he said they were thinking of going on holiday to Thailand.’

  His wife looked as though she was about to correct him, perhaps to point out it was Turkey, not Thailand. But he scowled at her, and she shrugged and stayed quiet. It was a fairly normal exchange between a married couple, in Cooper’s experience. And with a crowd gathering round him, it was hardly the time to pursue it anyway.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask everyone to stay in their homes until we’ve processed the scene,’ he said.

  ‘What does that mean?’ asked Ian Hibbert.

  ‘We have to examine it thoroughly for evidence before we can move the lorry. I’m sorry, that means the road will remain closed for a while yet. If you’re due to go to work, please phone in and explain to your employers.’

  ‘Stay at home?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Are we going to miss another day tomorrow, or what?’

  ‘We don’t have much choice, do we?’ said Mrs Hibbert. ‘We can’t get out.’

  ‘If we lose business because of this, there’ll be compensation claims.’

  Cooper threw his hands out. ‘That’s up to you, sir. We’re doing our best to expedite things.’

  When he heard himself say that, Cooper realised that he’d never used the word ‘expedite’ out loud before. He’d only written it in reports laden with other jargon and buzz words.

  ‘I can tell you, my employers aren’t going to be happy,’ said Hibbert.

  For the first time Cooper looked at him properly. He’d hardly taken notice of Ian Hibbert so far. He’d been spoken to by Irvine and Sharma. Wasn’t he the one who worked for a marketing consultancy in Manchester? Something to do with financial planning. It didn’t sound too exciting. Not a job where his absence for a day would be life threatening.