Cooper and Fry Crime Fiction Series Books 1-3: Black Dog, Dancing With the Virgins, Blood on the Tongue

8 (#ulink_56128792-c3f8-52da-a158-d0c761888b1d)

‘Found by a man walking a dog.’

There was a wary silence. Diane Fry tried to look efficient and attentive, with her notebook open on her knee. At the moment, her hand was moving slowly through an elaborate series of aimless doodles that might, from a distance, have been taken for shorthand. A bluebottle buzzed fruitlessly against a window of the conference room, someone shuffled their feet, and the metal legs of a chair creaked uneasily.

‘Found by a man walking a dog,’ repeated the superintendent dangerously.

Some of the officers in the room looked at the ceiling; others tilted their plastic coffee cups to their faces, hoping to hide their expressions from the superintendent’s eye. Fry wondered why bluebottles always chose to ignore open windows in favour of the determined futility of bashing themselves incessantly against the closed ones.

‘It was some old bloke called Dickinson, sir,’ said DS Rennie. ‘Apparently he has his own regular route across the Baulk every night.’

Rennie had not been involved in the search operation. But, like everyone else in the room, he recognized the time for covering your back, for limiting the damage, for claiming any shreds of credit where it could be found. Those responsible for the search were keeping sensibly silent. So it followed that if you spoke up, the super would register you as blameless. Rennie watched for the brief flicker of the blue eyes towards him that said he had been heard and acknowledged.

‘So. A man walking a dog. Some old bloke called Dickinson, in fact. Thank you for that, Rennie.’ The superintendent nodded and smiled like a sewage worker gifted with an exceptionally keen sense of smell. ‘And here we are, Her Majesty’s finest. We had a helicopter up in the air at God knows how much a minute, and forty officers on the ground searching those woods for five hours, without turning up so much as a decent used condom. The police, like the papers used to say, are baffled. And then – and then what happens?’

Nobody answered him this time, not even Rennie. Fry found she had drawn an entire swarm of small blue flies flitting across her page, their flimsy wings beating fast, but going nowhere.

‘The body,’ said Jepson, ‘is found by a man walking a dog.’

‘Given another day or two –’ began DI Hitchens. But it was unwise – as duty inspector, Hitchens had been technically responsible for the search, though he had not been present. The superintendent cut straight across him.

‘Just tell me why,’ he said. ‘Why is there always a man walking a dog? You might start to suspect they were put there specifically to expose the shortcomings of the police force, eh? Lost a body somewhere in the woods? Don’t worry, chief, some old bloke walking his dog will find it for us. Got no description of the getaway car used in that armed robbery last night? No problem – some insomniac dragging poor old Rover round the streets is bound to have made a note of the registration number. Got no positive ID of your suspect to place him at the scene of the offence? Albert and Fido are sure to have clocked him stashing the loot while they were wetting a lamppost somewhere. Yes. Men walking dogs. If only they advertised their services in the Eden Valley Times, we’d save a fortune.’

‘Chief, I don’t think –’ said Hitchens.

‘And then,’ said Jepson, ‘we could disband the entire Derbyshire Constabulary and replace it with a few dozen blokes walking their dogs. They’d have the detection rate up in no time.’

Diane Fry relegated Hitchens a few rungs in her mental hierarchy. She had to make the best impression she could among all these new faces and stay alert, try to pick up the names and ranks and figure out who was the most likely to be influential. Hitchens had started off near the top of the scale as her DI, but was gradually fading on the rails.

A detective Fry didn’t recognize had put his hand up, like the bright boy in class wanting to get himself noticed. He had already drawn unwelcome attention to himself by arriving very late for the briefing, which had always been considered a disciplinary offence in stations Fry had worked at. He had looked hot and flustered and dishevelled when he came in, as if he had only just got out of bed, and he had suffered a prolonged glower from Jepson. Now all eyes turned to him, welcoming a sacrificial victim, amazed that he was going to throw himself into the pit voluntarily. He looked to be in his late twenties, but carried an air of innocence lacking in those around him. He was tall and slim, and he had messy, light-brown hair that fell untidily across his forehead.

‘Excuse me, sir, but I don’t understand.’

‘Oh aye? What don’t you understand, lad?’

‘Well, we got the dog section out from Ripley to go over the ground, didn’t we? So why didn’t the Ripley lot find what the old bloke’s dog found?’

Jepson looked at him sharply, a scathing put-down hovering on his lips. But he saw the expression on the detective’s face, noticed his cheeks already starting to go a shade of pink. The superintendent sighed, his irritation suddenly spent.

‘I think you’ll find the key to that, Cooper,’ he said, ‘is not the dog. It’s the old bloke.’

Finally, Jepson handed over to DCI Tailby as senior investigating officer. Amid muffled sighs of relief and a flood of comforting conference room jargon, the discussion moved on into safer areas – the prioritization of lines of enquiry, the division of staff into enquiry teams, the allocation of action sheets. But several days later, Diane Fry was amazed to find that, in among the detailed anatomical drawings of common winged insects, she had recorded the superintendent’s last words exactly.

‘Preliminary report from the pathologist suggests death was caused by two or three heavy blows to the side of the head with a hard, smooth object. Task Force will commence a search for the weapon this morning.’

All eyes in the room were fixed on the photograph of the crime scene which had been projected on to the screen behind Tailby. The full-length shot of the body lying in the undergrowth changed to a closer view of the head. The colour of Laura Vernon’s hair looked garish and unnatural in the photograph, and the dark, matted bloodstains were not easy to make out. Her red T-shirt made the accuracy of the colour balance even more doubtful.

‘First indications, based on temperature of the body and the stage of development of fly larvae found in the eyes, mouth and vulva, suggest Laura Vernon was killed within a couple of hours either side of the first report that she was missing – i.e. eight o’clock Saturday evening. As you know, we already have one early report that Laura was seen talking to a young man at about six-fifteen on a footpath in the scrubland just a few yards from her own back garden. This is some distance from where she was found, which was in the wooded area called the Baulk. Therefore we need to re-trace that final journey. House-to-house teams will concentrate on recording movements of anyone in and around the Baulk at about the time. Including, of course, any sightings of Laura Vernon herself.’

The picture changed to the lower half of Laura’s body. Black denims were pulled down to her knees, showing the top edge of a pair of blue pants, and several inches of deathly white flesh above and below the dark bush of hair.

‘As you see, Laura’s clothing was disturbed. However, subject to the full postmortem, which will be carried out later this morning, the pathologist’s initial view is that there is no evidence that any sexual assault took place, either before or after the victim’s death. There is one possible exception to that.’

Tailby nodded, and the picture changed again, the camera zooming in to a small area near the top of the dead girl’s right thigh. The assembled officers frowned and peered closer. A discolouration of the skin could be seen, some sort of bruising, but bearing an oddly regular shape.

‘Mrs Van Doon,’ said Tailby, ‘believes this injury probably occurred around the time of death.’

The room stirred uneasily. Some of the officers were sweating, and the atmosphere was becoming humid.

‘I know you’re all anxious to get started,’ said Tailby, sensing the restlessness. ‘DI Hitchens will give you your action forms very shortly. Bear with me for a few more minutes.’

The picture disappeared from the wall behind the DCI, and some in the room breathed a sigh of relief.

‘First of all, we are urgently enquiring into the whereabouts of one Lee Sherratt, aged twenty, recently employed as a gardener at the Mount. Details are in your files. But we also want to know about any other boyfriends Laura Vernon may have had a relationship with. Particularly those her parents might not have been aware of.’

‘Are we assuming the family are in the clear, sir?’ asked DS Rennie.

‘We never assume, Rennie,’ said the DCI with a little smile. ‘It makes an “ASS” out of “U” and “ME”.’

Rennie paused for a moment, puzzled. Then someone sniggered, and he realized he had been put down.

‘Thank you, sir,’ he said.

‘Both Graham and Charlotte Vernon will, of course, be interviewed again. There is also a brother, I believe, away at university. Otherwise, we are told that Laura Vernon did not mix much with people in the village of Moorhay. This is what the parents tell us, at least. If that isn’t the case, it will be your job to find out. Meanwhile, the usual checks on all our known sex offenders are being carried out. We have DI Armstrong here from B Division, who will be coordinating that aspect of the enquiry.’

The chief inspector indicated a female officer to one side of the room. She was rather overweight and the grey suit she was wearing didn’t fit too well around her shoulders. Her dark hair was collar-length and cut very straight.

‘Some of you may know that DI Armstrong has been working on the team investigating the death of Susan Edson near Buxton five weeks ago. Some of this ground has already been covered in B Division in the last few weeks, so we are avoiding duplication of effort.’

Some of the officers shifted uneasily and looked sideways at each other. Tailby seemed to sense it, and responded. ‘For public consumption, there must be no suggestion of a link between these two cases. I do not want to hear the words “serial killer” mentioned by any member of this team or see them appearing in the press.’

He looked to one side, glaring at a civilian wearing a suit, a colourful tie and a pair of large, blue-framed spectacles. Fry pegged him as one of the force’s press officers, whose job it was to deflect press attention and distribute as little information about the case as possible.

‘All these lines of enquiry will take time, of course,’ said Tailby. ‘And I don’t need to remind you that the first hours are important.’

Diane Fry was busy studying DI Armstrong when Ben Cooper tentatively put his hand up again. Tailby regarded him with something like pity.

‘Yes, Cooper?’

‘Harry Dickinson, sir. The gentleman who found the trainer.’

‘Ah, the old bloke,’ said someone, breaking the tension.

‘With the dog,’ said someone else.

‘Will he be interviewed again, sir?’

Fry wondered for a moment whether Cooper had seen her transcript of the first interview with Harry Dickinson and was taking the mickey out of the DCI. But Tailby obviously decided that it wasn’t Cooper’s style or intention.