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

Sam shifted his feet in the dry earth. One of them seemed to stick and move suddenly sideways, as if he had lost control of it through cramp. His shoe clanged against the side of an enamel bowl half full of water, left there for the geese, presumably.

‘Mr Beeley, we’re asking everybody what they might have seen in the area of the Baulk at about the time Laura Vernon was killed,’ said Fry.

‘Oh, you want my alibi, eh?’

‘No, that wasn’t what I asked for, sir.’

Sam chuckled. ‘Only I don’t go in much for running after young girls these days. It’s my legs, you see. Got them both bust once, in the mine. They mended, but they were never right after that. Now that I’m getting older, they don’t work too well at all.’

‘Were you in the area on Saturday night?’ asked Fry. ‘Or Sunday morning?’

‘What’s that accent?’ asked Sam, cocking his head and scratching his ear with the knife. ‘You Welsh, or what?’

‘I’m from the Black Country.’

‘Eh?’

‘Birmingham,’ snapped Fry.

‘Ah. I’ve never been there. Wouldn’t want to, either.’

‘Saturday night, Mr Beeley?’

‘Saturday night? Well, I’d be in the Drover till about eleven o’clock, with Wilford. It was a bit busy that night. Tourists, you know, in the summer. B & B people. A lot of cars about too.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘I don’t live far from the pub. I can just about walk that far. And we do tend to have a few drinks on a Saturday. No driving to do, you know.’

‘There were tourists in the pub. Strangers to the village, then.’

‘Full of them,’ said Sam.

Wilford and the van driver emerged from the hut, tugging at several bulging sacks. A cloud of dark feathers drifted out of the hut behind them, settling on their shoulders and sticking in their hair. From the sacks came a steady complaint of trapped birds and an occasional rustle of feathers. The two men were sweating and dishevelled and breathing hard. Wilford was very red in the face and giving a series of faint, gasping laughs. The little man from the van looked wild-eyed, even frightened by his experience in the hut.

‘Sunday morning,’ said Sam. ‘Well, I don’t get up too early these days. But I was dressed by about half past ten, when my son came to collect me. That’s Davey. Him and his wife always take me for Sunday dinner at their place in Edendale.’

‘Do you come up here much to help Mr Cutts?’ asked Cooper.

‘I’m not much use to him really. But I have to find something to fill my time.’

‘Does he have any other help?’

‘A lad or two, that he pays a few bob for the heavy work. And Harry comes up here too, to help.’

‘Harry Dickinson again?’

‘Yes, that Harry. You’ll know him,’ he said to Cooper.

The sacks thudded one after another into the back of the Transit, and the driver clambered in and began to coast back down the track. No money seemed to have changed hands between the two men.

‘Give us a hand here, Sam,’ called Wilford. ‘We’ve got one that’s badly. Broke its legs on the wire, I reckon.’

‘Goat’s out again, Wilford.’

‘She’ll wait.’

Sam limped over towards the hut, and Wilford tossed him a hen that had been hanging upside down from his hand, its wings outspread, its beak gaping and panting. Fry had never seen a hen so close before, and was startled to see the thin red sliver of flesh that protruded from its beak, like the darting tongue of a snake. The bird had soiled itself, and the soft feathers round its anus were stained yellow. Fry swallowed, swearing never to eat an egg again.

‘Sam’s a dab hand at this,’ said Wilford cheerfully. ‘He doesn’t look to have much strength in his wrists, does he? But it’s all in the technique, see.’

‘It’s just practice and a bit of a knack,’ said Sam, taking a firm grip on the bird. He tucked its body under his armpit, folding its wings closed and pressing it tight against his side. Then he closed the fingers of his right hand around the hen’s scrawny neck and pushed his thumb hard into its throat. He twisted and pulled suddenly. There was a faint crack and the bird’s eyes went dull. The wings beat desperately, their dying strength defeating Sam Beeley’s efforts to hold it still as they flapped wildly, releasing a spray of pinion feathers that drifted on to his trousers and boots. The bird’s legs kicked frantically and its tail lifted to eject another spurt of yellow. Then its claws relaxed and hung downwards, pointing limply at the ground with pitiful finality.

‘You’ve killed it,’ said Fry, astonished.

The two old men laughed, and she was amazed to see Cooper smiling too.

‘It’s called putting them out of their misery,’ said Sam. ‘If you do it right, and do it quick, they feel no pain.’

‘It’s disgusting,’ said Fry. ‘It’s revolting.’

‘I suppose,’ said Sam, holding out the limp bird towards her, ‘that you won’t want to take it home for your tea then.’

Fry took a step back as a dribble of saliva ran out of the bird’s gaping beak and dripped into the dust. Its scaly legs looked cold and reptilian where they were gripped in Sam’s bony fingers.

‘No?’

‘Never mind. I’ll take it in for Connie,’ said Wilford.

Cooper and Fry got back into the car. Fry wound up her window to keep out the musty smell of dried poultry droppings drifting from the door of the shed. The two old men stood watching them turn round, and Sam gave them a small, cheerful wave.

When they reached the bottom of the track, another van was turning in.

12 (#ulink_fec2103d-c98f-542e-8dd8-63e23c7dc8ef)

‘And now the good news,’ said DCI Tailby.

Tired heads perked up all around the incident room. Most of the officers were finishing the daytime shift, winding down from the hectic first full day of a murder enquiry. Others were taking over for the evening, beginning their stint by getting up to date at the evening briefing.

Ben Cooper and Diane Fry sat together, reluctant, despite themselves, to break the professional bond that had formed between them by being paired up as a team. Fry still looked alert, her eyes fixed on Tailby, her notebook open on her knee. Cooper was weary, almost dazed, as if things weren’t connecting for him properly. But he felt the tension within him increasing as the day came to a close. He couldn’t stop his mind drifting away from the job towards a clamouring swarm of formless anxieties about his mother – sudden, stabbing fears about the immediate future, mingled with piercingly clear little memories of how she had once been, before her illness, in the not so distant past. He knew he would have difficulty tonight in making the transition from work to home. Wasn’t the one supposed to be an escape from the other?

As Tailby began to speak, Cooper looked down at Fry’s pen, which was already starting to move across her notebook. He was surprised to see the page half covered in drawings of spiders with black, hairy bodies and long legs, their shapes etched deep into the paper with heavily scrawled ballpoint pen.

‘Make sure you all read the reports,’ Tailby was saying. ‘But I’ll sum up the main points. Late this afternoon a witness came forward. A gentleman by the name of Gary Edwards. Mr Edwards is a bird-watcher. On Saturday evening, he was positioned on the top of Raven’s Side on the north of the valley at Moorhay. He was, it seems, watching for pied flycatchers, which are a rare species known to breed in this area. Mr Edwards had travelled from Leicester purely on the chance of seeing a pied flycatcher, so that he could tick it off on a list of British species. I’m told this activity is called twitching.’

Cooper saw some of the officers smiling, but he knew Tailby wasn’t joking. It was very rare that he did. The DCI looked up at them over his reading glasses, then back down again at the report in his hands.

‘Mr Edwards thought the oak and birch woodland near the stream was a likely site. At one stage, though, he says he was watching a pair of merlins nesting on the cliff face below him. While he was doing this, his attention was taken by a bird flying towards the woodland, which he felt might be the said pied flycatcher. He followed the flight of this bird with his binoculars.’

In Cooper’s hands was a summary of interviews conducted with Graham and Charlotte Vernon, and with Molly Sherratt, as well as with the bird-watcher. Some of the details were marked as new information, and would be followed up with actions the next day. There were also reports of the attempts made by DI Hitchens’s team to trace Lee Sherratt, without success. From the tone of the summary, Cooper was left in no doubt that Sherratt was considered the obvious suspect. All they had to do, it was inferred, was to find Sherratt and let the forensic evidence establish his guilt. The rest was all for show.

‘It should be stated at this point,’ said Tailby, ‘that Mr Edwards was equipped with a pair of Zeiss roof-prism-type binoculars with a magnification of x 10 and a 45 mm diameter object lens. A powerful bit of kit. He says he trained these binoculars on the area of woodland into which the bird had disappeared, and he waited to see if there was any further movement. There was. But it wasn’t a bird.’