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

Simeon Holmes wasn’t quite so stupid as he pretended. Fry could see him figuring it out. A question about his sexual techniques, and a request for a mould from his teeth. They hadn’t exactly been subtle with their questions. Because of his casual manner, Holmes might be easy to underestimate. But he had a choice now. He could work out that a mould might prove his guilt, if he was guilty. But if he was innocent, it might also clear him and get the police off his back. Fry and Hitchens both waited patiently to see which way he would jump.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘No problem.’

Hitchens’s face fell in disappointment. But before he could say anything else, there was a knock on the door and DS Rennie stuck his head into the room. He did a quick double take at the fetid atmosphere and his face screwed up in disgust. Hitchens announced a break in the interview, switched off the tapes, and went out into the corridor to speak to Rennie.

Left alone with Simeon Holmes, Fry was able to study him afresh. The young man met her eyes directly. But a layer of affectation seemed to have dropped away from him in the last few minutes, the final shreds of some assumed role dissipating as DI Hitchens left the room. Fry couldn’t quite figure out what it was. She didn’t think he had been lying during the interview. And yet … How old was Holmes? Seventeen?

‘You must be in the sixth form at the Community School now, Simeon,’ she said.

Holmes raised his eyebrows, saying nothing, but looking meaningfully at the motionless tape machines.

‘Just asking,’ she said.

He grinned slowly – that annoying, self-satisfied grin he had. But still nothing.

‘Only I was thinking,’ said Fry, ‘that I bet you’ve got a bit more brain than most of your mates.’

‘Dead right.’

‘And I bet you do quite well at school when you turn your mind to it. What are your best subjects? Let me guess – mechanical engineering? Car maintenance, perhaps?’

Holmes sneered. ‘Chemistry and biology, actually. I take my A levels next year.’

Intrigued, Fry found herself looking at a new Simeon Holmes, one who even sounded quite different.

‘Not much use for stripping a bike, surely?’ she said.

The guarded look began to fall back across the youth’s face. Fry could almost see the transformation taking place in his features as he reverted to his role with a dismissive snort.

‘Perhaps you were thinking of going on to university,’ she said. Then she held herself quite still, tingling with satisfaction, as she saw the beginnings of a blush seep into Simeon’s neck and across his cheeks. She had found something that embarrassed him. Something that he wouldn’t want to talk about with his biker mates.

‘With good grades in chemistry and biology you could study – what? Medicine?’

His mouth opened, moving compulsively. Deep in his eyes there was a small spurt of pain and distress, as if Fry had struck close to the most vulnerable part of his anatomy. She hurried to press home her advantage.

‘Is that it? Would you like to be a doctor one day, Simeon?’

But the spell was broken as DI Hitchens opened the door just in time to hear the last two sentences. His face contorted at the thought that he might go along to his local surgery and find this youth was his new GP. Then he nodded Diane Fry out of the room, leaving Simeon Holmes starting to grin again in the midst of his peculiar smell.

‘We can hand this one back to Morgan,’ said Hitchens. ‘They’ve found those hikers. We’re off to West Yorkshire, Diane.’

Ben Cooper had not seen Daniel Vernon before. He wasn’t impressed at first sight, but had learned not to judge people younger than himself too quickly. It was a mistake to dismiss someone because they did not dress as you did or behave in quite the same way. Daniel Vernon was a student. That probably meant he went to all-night raves and took cannabis and Ecstasy. He probably took a different girl home every night and lay in bed all day. He probably thought nothing of stealing traffic signs from the roadside, beer glasses and ashtrays from pubs. But in a few years he would be a respectable, well-off member of the community demanding better protection from the police.

Daniel looked as though he had drunk too much cheap beer in the Students’ Union. He was dressed in a grubby white T-shirt with the name of an American university written across the front. The T-shirt smelled of sweat.

Cooper took Daniel up to an interview room, where Tailby was waiting. They hardly needed to ask any questions before Daniel had begun to talk. He was eager to get something off his chest, and it quickly became clear what it was.

‘I find it astonishing,’ said Tailby a few minutes later, ‘that you should be so eager to come in here and tell me such things about your parents.’

‘It’s true,’ said Daniel. ‘I couldn’t give a toss what they do among themselves or with their tacky friends. But they were blind to what it was doing to Laura. She thought it was OK, all that. She wanted to try things out for herself. She got a taste for sex when she was about thirteen. She told me all about it, though she would never listen to my advice. Mum, she never suspected, even now. Dad –’ He shrugged. ‘Who knows?’

‘You tried to talk some sense into her, didn’t you, Daniel?’

‘I tried. But it was a waste of time.’

‘We found your letters, you know.’

‘Yes, I know you did. You took the one I wrote to her after she’d told me about Simeon Holmes.’

‘Yes, Holmes,’ said Tailby. ‘Do you know him?’

‘No. But it was the way Laura talked about him that made me write to her like that. It sounded more serious this time. She wasn’t just playing any more. My big worry was that she would let someone like him get her pregnant. I wanted to be sure she was still taking the pills she got from the doctor. She told me she was.’

Daniel looked up at Tailby with a question.

‘She wasn’t pregnant,’ said the DCI, though he refrained from explaining how they knew. Or rather, how the pathologist knew. There was such a thing as too much information. ‘But why have you decided to tell us all this now, Daniel?’

‘I don’t doubt that my father has been telling you things about Lee Sherratt and Laura. I won’t have you believing them. Laura wasn’t interested in Sherratt, or him in her.’

‘But your mother …’

‘My mother had the hots for him. She likes them young. And he was quite willing. My father knew, of course. He knew what was going on. He always knows.’

‘You’re saying that your mother was actually having an affair with her gardener?’

‘Sounds very D. H. Lawrence put like that, doesn’t it?’

‘Does it?’

‘But Lee Sherratt is just a youth from the village who saw the chance of getting his end away with an older woman. He isn’t exactly a Mellors.’

Tailby wasn’t sure what he was talking about. ‘Your father believes Sherratt may have killed your sister.’

‘If he did,’ said Daniel. ‘If he did kill her – it was my father’s fault.’

‘Ah. How do you make that out?’

‘He let it go on,’ he said. ‘Until it had gone too far. He enjoyed it.’

‘What?’

‘Oh yes.’

Daniel pulled at his T-shirt, which was sticking to his sides where the sweat was beginning to dry. He fidgeted in his chair, his jeans squeaking on the leather. He looked from Tailby to Cooper, the expression in his eyes shifting and changing. When he spoke again, his voice had altered. It was quiet, less aggressive, with an adolescent edge to it that spoke of an inner pain he could no longer conceal.

‘One day,’ he said, ‘I came across my father in his room. I wanted to speak to him about something I needed for university, just before I went away. I knocked on the door, but he must not have heard me. It turned out he was otherwise engaged.’

Daniel gave him a small, ironic smile. Tailby didn’t react. His face was expressionless, but for one eyebrow lifted slightly – indicating a mild interest only. It spurred Daniel on more than a probing question would have done.