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

‘You know, it must be really nice to have so many friends,’ she said, ‘and such a close family too.’

He took his eye off the ball, puzzled by the change in her voice.

‘I don’t suppose you’ll ever move away from here, will you, Ben? You’ll marry somebody, maybe some old schoolfriend, and you’ll settle down here, buy a bungalow, have kids, get a dog, the whole bit.’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘It sounds great.’

‘I can’t think of anything worse,’ she said, and smashed the ball into the ceiling lights.

Charlotte Vernon had found Daniel in Laura’s room. On the dresser was a pile of letters that had been tied neatly in a pink ribbon. Charlotte had seen the letters before, but had not touched them. She had not touched anything of Laura’s yet. It seemed too much of an acknowledgement that she had gone for ever.

‘I wrote to tell her that I would be home last weekend,’ said Daniel. ‘She wanted to talk to me, she said.’

‘What about?’

‘I don’t know. It sounded serious. I told her I would be home for the weekend. But I wasn’t. I didn’t come home.’

‘You always wrote to her far more than you wrote to us, Danny.’

‘To you? You never needed letters – you always had your own concerns. But Laura needed contact with the outside world. She felt she was a prisoner here.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘Is it?’

Daniel turned over another letter and ran his eyes briefly over his own scrawl. His mother walked to the window and fiddled with the curtains as she peered down into the garden, squinting against the sunlight reflecting from the summerhouse. She moved a porcelain teddy bear back into its proper place on the window ledge, from where it had been left by the police. It was a Royal Crown Derby paperweight with elaborate Imari designs on its waistcoat and paws, a gift to Laura from Graham after a business trip. Charlotte averted her eyes from the room and turned to stare at her son, studying his absorption until she became impatient.

‘What exactly are you looking for, Danny? Evidence of your own guilt?’

Daniel went red. ‘I certainly don’t need to look for yours. Yours or Dad’s. It’s been pushed in my face for long enough.’

‘Don’t talk like that.’

Charlotte had been upset herself by the fact that her son had failed to return to his home, even for a day or two, between the doubtful attractions of a holiday spent in Cornwall with his friends and the peculiar sense of obligation that drew him back to university so long before the start of term. She didn’t know the reason he stayed away. Now she pulled a face at the streaks of dirt on Daniel’s jeans, the scuffs on his shoes and the powerful smell of stale sweat. He looked tired, his fleshy face shadowed with dark lines and a day’s growth of stubble. He reminded her so strongly of his father as he had once been, nineteen years ago, before success and money had superimposed a veneer of courtesy and sophistication. Graham, too, had been a man whose passions were barely kept in check.

‘There’s one missing,’ said Daniel suddenly.

‘What?’

‘A letter. I wrote to Laura from Newquay last month. But it’s not there; there’s a gap. Where is it? She always kept them together.’

‘The police have been through them,’ said Charlotte uncertainly. ‘I suppose they might have taken one.’

‘What the hell for?’

‘I don’t know. It depends what was in it, doesn’t it?’

‘Are they allowed to do that?’

‘I suppose your father will have given them permission. You’ll have to ask him. I don’t know what they were looking for.’

Daniel put the letters down. He tied them together again with the ribbon, securing it carefully and neatly despite the trembling in his hands.

‘It’s bloody obvious what they were looking for.’

As he headed for the door, Charlotte caught his arm. She could tell he hadn’t washed today, perhaps for more than one day. The back of his neck was grubby and the collar of his T-shirt was stained. She longed to propel him physically to the bathroom and demand his filthy clothes for the wash, as she would once have done when he was a year or two younger.

But Charlotte knew her son had passed well beyond her control. What he did in Exeter was a mystery to her. He no longer told her about his course, about his friends or where he lived. She could no longer understand the angry, disapproving young man he had become.

‘Danny,’ she said. ‘Don’t condemn us so much. There’s no need to stir up old arguments that aren’t relevant to all this. Let the police find out what happened to Laura. The rest of us have to go on living together without her.’ She watched his sullen expression and saw his face was closed against her. She felt his muscles tense to pull away from her, to shake off the last physical link between them. ‘Your father –’

But it was the wrong thing to say. Daniel knocked her hand from his arm. ‘How can I not condemn you? You and my father are responsible for what happened to Laura. You’re responsible for what she became.’

He paused in the doorway of Laura’s room, his face suffused with rage and contempt as he looked back at Charlotte. ‘And you, Mum, you couldn’t even see what it was that she’d turned into.’

The three old men were crammed into the front of Wilford’s white pick-up as it wound its way down from Eyam Moor towards the Hope Valley. They had avoided the main routes, leaving them to the tourists. But when they reached the A625 they would meet the evening traffic coming back from Castleton.

They huddled among empty feed sacks and neglected tools. The floor of the cab was littered with crumpled newspapers, an old bone, a plastic bucket and a small sack containing a dead rabbit. Sam was squeezed uncomfortably between the other two, shifting his bony knees to find room for his stick under the dashboard and wincing at every bump they hit. Wilford was driving, his cap pulled low on his head to stop his hair blowing about in the breeze from the open window. He drove with sudden twists of the steering wheel and sharp stabs on the brake as they approached each bend. Harry, on the outside, looked as though he was sitting in a limousine. His hands were spread on his knees, and his head moved slowly from side to side as he studied the passing scenery.

In the back of the pick-up, riding in the open on a bed of hessian sacks, was the brown and white goat. It was tethered securely to the backboard of the cab with a short length of chain so that it could not reach the sides. Every now and then it turned its head and bellowed at a startled cyclist.

The snaking twists of the road slowed a lumbering quarry lorry ahead of the pick-up. All around them were the familiar tucks and folds of the hills and the strange, unpredictable rolls of the landscape that concealed the history of the ancient lead mining industry. There were overgrown hollows and mounds running across one field, indicating the line of a rake vein. Here and there stood an isolated shaft, walled off for safety. Many years ago, two bodies had been pulled out of one of these shafts in a notorious murder case.

‘Even with all their scientific tests,’ said Harry, ‘the coppers still go round asking a lot of questions.’

‘’Course they do,’ said Wilford.

‘But it’s like in the song,’ said Sam.

‘What’s that?’

Sam began to sing quietly in a cracked, off-key voice. The tune was just recognizable as one familiar to them all – ‘Ol’ Man River’ from the musical Showboat. After a moment, the other two joined in with the song, tuneless and punctuating their singing with laughter.

‘Don’t say nothing,’ said Sam firmly, when they had finished.

Just outside Bamford, Wilford drove the pick-up into an untidy farmyard and sounded his horn. Two half-bred Alsatians ran out of a kennel until they hit the end of their chains and barked and snarled at the wheels of the vehicle. A man of about forty with wild hair and a vast bushy beard came out of the house and wandered towards them.

Wilford greeted him as ‘Scrubby’.

‘You brought the young nanny then?’ he said.

The goat screamed hysterically from the back of the pick-up. The noise was so loud in the yard that the dogs stopped barking, stunned into silence.

‘Aye, happen that’ll be her now,’ said Wilford.

‘Bugger’s been giving directions all the way here,’ said Harry. ‘It’s worse than having the wife in the car.’

‘You’ve not brought any dogs, have you?’ said Scrubby. ‘Only it upsets them two over there.’