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

‘No, but like Parkin says …’

‘It’s in the history books, right. Well, I must be reading the wrong history books. All that stuff passed me by. I suppose I must have overlooked it somewhere between the assassination of President Kennedy and the end of the Vietnam War.’

‘Well, probably,’ said Parkin, and sneered.

Cooper winced. ‘I think I’ll just pop to the gents before we leave.’

It was a relief to get inside the Drover and out of the heat. The landlord, Kenny Lee, nodded to Cooper from the bar as he slipped into the toilets. The sudden solitude and the smell of urine did nothing to help Cooper keep his mind off the previous night. It had been a very long night, as the farmhouse had filled with members of the family – his brother first, then his sister and her husband arriving from Buxton, and then his uncle and his cousins, all pitching in to help clear up the mess, to support Kate and look after the children, Amy and Josie. Meanwhile, the doctor had called to sedate his mother, and later the ambulance had arrived to take her to Edendale General, where it would not be her first visit to the psychiatric unit. And then the endless discussion had begun – a discussion that had gone on until the early hours of the morning, by which time they were all exhausted and no nearer to an answer to an insoluble problem.

There was a payphone in the passage near the bar, and Cooper fished in his pocket for a few coins. He was put through to the psychiatric unit at the hospital, where the staff were professionally cautious. All his call established was what he already knew – that his mother was still under sedation and not fit to have visitors. Try again tomorrow, they said.

In the meantime, tonight there might finally be a family decision. And he knew that there was a chance his mother would have to be taken away permanently from the home she had known all her life. It would be the final humiliation in her descent into schizophrenia.

When he came out of the pub and walked back out into the beer garden, something made Cooper stop and stand still in the shade of the side wall. He was standing several yards behind Diane Fry, and he saw what he might not have seen from his seat across the table. He saw DI Hitchens’s arm on the back of Fry’s chair as he leaned close towards her to speak directly into her ear. He saw the DI’s hand move upwards from the chair to rest for a moment on her shoulder. Behaving like a courting couple, as his mother would have said.

And then he saw Fry nod briefly before Hitchens took his hand away. And Parkin told another poor joke that nobody laughed at.

The phone was ringing again. It had hardly stopped ringing for days. Though the answerphone had been left on and she had been told to take no notice of it, the continual noise was driving Sheila Kelk mad.

Sheila came to the Mount three days a week to clean, and Tuesday was one of her days. The fuss about the girl being found murdered had not put her off coming – far from it, in fact. Mr and Mrs Vernon would need her, she had told her husband. A house still needed cleaning. She might be able to provide some other service to poor Mrs Vernon, to be of some comfort to her. Mrs Vernon might, just might, want to confide in her, to tell her all about what had been going on.

But here she was, going over the sitting room carpet for the second time, wishing the sound of the Dyson would drown out the constant ringing. She had been here longer than her four hours already, and no one had so much as spoken to her.

In a temporary silence from the phone, Sheila switched off the vacuum cleaner, flicking a cloth over a piece of pine furniture that she had never quite been able to put a name to. She thought of it as a cross between a sideboard and a writing desk.

While she polished, she listened for the noises from upstairs. From Mrs Vernon’s bedroom, of course, there was still no sound. But the heavy footsteps were still moving directly overhead, where Sheila knew Laura’s room lay. Mr Vernon was still up there with the policemen. He had not been in a good mood; he had been angry, in fact. Understandable, of course. But being rude and refusing even to speak to her was going too far, Sheila thought.

The phone began to ring again. Four rings before the answering machine cut in. She couldn’t understand why the Vernons were getting so many phone calls. Back home at Wye Close, the phone often didn’t ring from one week to the next, and then it would only be some girl she didn’t know, who would try to sell her double glazing.

Sheila Kelk was so absorbed in listening to the movements above, that she didn’t notice someone had come into the room behind her until she heard the voice.

‘Working overtime, Mrs Kelk?’

She jumped, her hand going to her mouth as she turned, then she relaxed as quickly.

‘Oh – it’s you.’

‘Yes, it’s me,’ said the young man. His jeans were grubby, and when he walked across the carpet towards the far door, his shoes left imprints on the pile. Sheila wanted to complain, but knew it would make no impression on Daniel Vernon. He was dark and fleshy, like his father, but sullen and quick-tempered where Graham Vernon was polite and sometimes charming, on the outside at least. Daniel was wearing a white T-shirt with the name of some rock group on it that Sheila Kelk had never heard of. The armpits and a patch on his back were soaked with sweat. She guessed that Daniel had probably walked from the main road after hitching his way from Devon.

‘Where’s my mother?’ he asked.

‘Taken to her bed and won’t get up,’ said Sheila.

‘And I suppose these apes tramping about the house are policemen.’

‘They’re looking at Laura’s room.’

‘What for, for God’s sake? What do they think they’ll find there?’

‘They don’t tell me, I’m sure,’ said Sheila.

When the phone went again, Daniel automatically walked over and picked it up on the second ring.

‘No, this is Daniel Vernon. Who am I speaking to?’ He listened impatiently for a moment. ‘Your name means nothing to me, but I take it you’re some sort of associate of my father’s? Yes? Then, in that case, you can fuck off.’

Daniel slammed the phone back down and glared at Sheila.

‘Oh, I don’t think your father would like you to do that,’ she said, shocked.

He walked towards her angrily, and she backed away from him, dragging the vacuum cleaner with her so that it remained in between them, like a lion tamer’s chair.

‘My father, Mrs Kelk,’ said Daniel, his face contorted into a snarl. ‘My father can fuck off as well.’

Tailby was watching Graham Vernon carefully, not asking too many questions, content to let the silence prompt the other man to talk.

‘We’re a very close family,’ said Vernon. ‘We’ve stayed very close to our children. In other families, they start to drift away when they reach their teens, don’t they?’

Tailby nodded, as one father to another, understanding the way it was with teenagers. In his own case, though, they had done more than drift – they had positively stampeded.

‘Charlotte and I, we have … we had a good relationship with Laura. We took an interest in what she was doing at school, in who her friends were, in how she was progressing with her music and her riding. And she took an interest in what we were doing. Not many families can say they have that sort of relationship, can they? Laura used to ask me how business was. She would ask me about some of the people she had met. Business contacts, you know. She was so intelligent. She knew who was important without me telling her. Amazing.’

‘She met your business contacts here?’ asked Tailby. ‘They visit you at home?’

‘Oh yes. I think entertaining is important. We both do, Charlotte and I. You have to treat your clients right. It’s a question of mixing business with pleasure, if you like. A nice house, a good meal, a decent bottle of wine or two. A normal, happy family around. It makes a good impression on clients, I can tell you. It’s the key to long-term success.’

‘Of course.’ Tailby wondered where a happy family came in the list of requirements. Somewhere between the Bordeaux and the beef Wellington?

‘And your son, Mr Vernon?’

‘Daniel? What about him?’

‘Is he part of this … I mean, does he meet your clients when they visit?’

‘Well, he has done, on occasion.’ Vernon got up from the chair and poured himself another whisky. He didn’t offer the policeman one, having already been refused once.

Tailby had noted that there was a drinks cabinet in Vernon’s study as well as in the sitting room, and no doubt another in the dining room. Not that Vernon himself called this room his study. It was an office, and it looked like one – with a personal computer and laser printer, a fax machine, a phone and a bookcase full of presentation folders in tasteful dark blue with gold block lettering. From the high sash windows there was an excellent view of the garden, right down to the avenue of conifers and the rocky summit of Win Low in the distance.

‘He’s at university, Chief Inspector. Exeter. Studying politics. Not my idea of a subject, but there we are. He’s a bright boy, and he’ll make a success of something one day, I suppose.’

‘He was close to Laura?’

‘Oh, very close. They doted on each other.’

‘He’ll be extremely upset then, by what’s happened.’

‘He was dreadfully cut up when we told him. He’ll take it very hard indeed.’

Tailby considered this. He wondered if the son would put on a better show of being cut up than the father was doing. Shock and grief took people so many different ways, of course. And Graham Vernon had already had three days in which to go through the range of emotions expected of a man whose fifteen-year-old daughter had gone missing and had then been found again, battered to death. There had been emotions, certainly. Anger most of all – but directed almost obsessively in one direction, towards the boy called Lee Sherratt, who had, it was claimed, lusted after young Laura. The intelligent, innocent, extremely attractive Laura. But if there had been genuine grief in Graham Vernon’s heart, then Tailby had missed it.