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

‘Are you nervous?’ he asked.

‘Of course not.’

‘We could leave it until tomorrow, if you like. I could suggest it at the morning briefing, and see if anyone can be bothered to put out an action for it. We’re not getting overtime for this, after all. It doesn’t make good business sense, does it? If you want to look at it like that.’

‘Since we’re here, let’s just do it, then we can go home.’

‘On the other hand, if he is down there, he’ll probably have moved on somewhere else by tomorrow.’

‘Can you just shut up and get on with it?’

Diane Fry found the darkness disturbing. The deeper they moved into the wood, the more she wished that she had brought a torch of her own, that she had refused to go along with the idea, that she had stayed in the car after all. Or better still, that she had never stupidly agreed to play squash with a jerk like Ben Cooper. She had known it had been a mistake from the start. She should never have let herself get involved, not even for one evening. And now it had ended up like this. With a stupid escapade that she could see no way of getting herself out of.

In front of her, Cooper was walking with an exaggerated carefulness, lifting his feet high in front of him before placing them cautiously back on the ground. He pointed the torch downwards, shielding its light with his hand so that it would not be visible in the distance. At one point he stopped to rest against a tree. When he straightened up again, Fry felt him stagger as if he was drunk. She grabbed his arm to support him, but felt no resistance in his muscles. Peering into his face by the dim light, she saw that his cheeks were drawn, and his eyelids were heavy.

‘You’re exhausted,’ she said. ‘You can’t go on with this. We’ll have to turn back.’

‘Not now,’ said Cooper. ‘I’ll be all right.’

He shook himself vigorously and they set off again. Soon, a darker area of blackness began to form up ahead. Cooper switched off the torch and signalled her closer so that he could whisper into her ear. His breath felt warm on her cheek, which was starting to feel a faint chill in the night air.

‘That’s the hut. You stay here while I take a look through the window at the side there. Don’t make a sound.’

Fry began to protest, but he hushed her. Then he was gone, creeping through the trees towards the side of the hut. Soon his shape had vanished into the gloom, and she found herself on her own. Immediately, she felt the sweat break out on her forehead. She cursed silently, knowing what was about to come.

As soon as she was alone, the darkness began to close in around her. It moved suddenly on her from every side, dropping like a heavy blanket, pressing against her body and smothering her with its warm, sticky embrace. Its weight drove the breath from her lungs and pinioned her limbs, draining the strength from her muscles. Her eyes stretched wide, and her ears strained for noises in the woods as she felt her heart stumble and flutter, gripped with the old, familiar fear.

Around her, the night murmured and fluttered with unseen things, hundreds of tiny shiftings and stirrings that seemed to edge continually nearer, inch by inch, clear but unidentifiable. Next, her skin began to crawl with imagined sensations. It was as if she had stood in a seething nest of tiny ants that ran all over her body in their thousands, scurrying backwards and forwards, scuttling in and out of her intimate crevices, tickling her flesh with their tiny feet and antennae. Her flesh squirmed and writhed as an icy chill seeped into her bones.

She had always known the old memories were still powerful and raw, ready to rise up and grab at her hands and face from the darkness, throwing her thoughts into turmoil and her body into immobility. Desperately, she tried to count the number of dark forms that loomed around her, mere smudges of silhouettes that crept ever nearer, reaching out to nuzzle her neck with their teeth and squeeze the air from her throat.

And then she seemed to hear a voice in the darkness. A familiar voice, coarse and slurring in a Birmingham accent. ‘It’s a copper,’ it said. Taunting laughter moving in the shadows. The same dark, stained pillars of menace all around, whichever way she turned. ‘A copper. She’s a copper.’

The light fell on her face, blinding her. She knew there was a person behind the light, but she couldn’t make out his eyes. She tensed automatically, her hands closing into fists, the first two knuckles protruding, with her thumbs locked over her fingers, and her legs moving to take her balance. Concentrate. Pour the adrenaline into the muscles. Get ready to strike.

‘Are you OK?’

A concerned voice, northern vowels. Whispering. Unthreatening. Fry let the muscles relax slowly, coming back to an awareness of the woods, to the fact she was in Derbyshire, many miles from Birmingham. The reality of the horror was months behind her, and only the wounds in her mind were still raw and terrible where they were exposed to the cold wind of memory. She took a breath, felt her lungs trembling and ragged.

Cooper leaned towards her face, so they were only a few inches apart. ‘Are you OK, Diane?’

Instinctively, she reached out a hand to touch him, like a child seeking affection, a protective embrace. She felt his solidity and his reassuring warmth, and closed her eyes to grasp at the elusive sensations of tenderness and affection. The feeling of another human body so close was unfamiliar. It was a long time since she had wanted someone to hold her and comfort her, a lifetime since there had been someone to wipe away the tears that she now felt gathering in the corners of her eyes.

‘What’s wrong?’

Fry pulled back her hand, blinked her eyes, drew herself upright. Control and concentration, that’s what she needed. She breathed deeply, filling her lungs, forcing her heartbeat to slow down. Control and concentration.

‘I’m fine, Ben. What did you see?’

‘He’s in there, all right. He’s got a candle lit, and I could see his face in a sort of half-profile.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘It’s definitely him.’

‘What do we do now?’

‘Are you joking? We nick him.’

Fry sighed. ‘All right. Let’s nick him then.’

Cooper put his hand on her arm, and gave it a squeeze. She bit her lip at the friendly gesture, and firmly shook him off.

‘There’s just the one door, and there’s no lock on it,’ he said. ‘We’ll go in fast, one either side of him, take him by surprise. I’ll do the words. OK?’

‘Fine by me.’

They approached the door, paused to look at each other. Cooper nodded, flicked the catch and kicked the door backwards on its hinges. He was in the hut fast, moving to his right, allowing Fry space to get alongside him.

A young man was bending over a wooden table against the far side of the hut. A candle threw a fitful light on his face and cast his shadow on the opposite wall. There was an old chair and a small cupboard in the room, and even a worn carpet on the floor. But the hut smelled of earth and mouldy bread.

Cooper began to reach for his warrant card, which was deep inside the inner pocket of his jacket.

‘Lee Sherratt? I’m a police officer.’

Sherratt turned round, slowly and deliberately, and only then did Cooper see the gun. It came up in his hands as they lifted from the table, the barrel swinging outwards and upwards, with Sherratt’s fingers turning white where they gripped the stock, one index finger creeping towards the trigger guard, a blackened fingernail touching the steel of the trigger, applying the first pressure …

Cooper stood numbed with surprise, his right hand pushed into his pocket, immobile. His mind had come to a halt, no instincts sprang up to tell him what to do. The last thing he had been expecting was that he would die here, in the poacher’s hut, on a threadbare carpet gritty with soil and fragments of stale food.

Then Diane Fry came into view. She was moving at twice the speed of Sherratt. Her left foot lashed out in a straight-legged sideways kick that impacted with Sherratt’s wrist and knocked the rifle out of his hands towards the wall of the hut. Even before the gun had landed, she regained her footing, shifted her balance and was striking a closed-fist rising blow to his solar plexus. Sherratt folded backwards into the table, then collapsed face down on to the floor and vomited on the carpet. Fry stepped back to avoid the mess.

‘You don’t have to say anything unless you wish to do so, but what you say may be given in evidence,’ she said.

‘Shit,’ said Cooper.

Fry dug into her pockets and pulled out her kwik-cuffs and her mobile phone.

‘I suppose I could have called in first and waited for the back-up,’ she said. ‘But, like I said, there are times.’

15 (#ulink_2642edcf-9056-5aa8-a58c-9d19af82f46b)

‘But where are they, sir?’

‘We don’t know exactly. Somewhere on the Pennine Way, we think.’

‘But that’s two hundred and fifty miles long.’

‘And there are twenty-two of them, apparently,’ said DCI Tailby. ‘And they’ve all got to be interviewed. Paul?’