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

‘Harry sent ’em up. I needed a bit of labour, and he said his great-nephew was a willing lad.’

‘His great-nephew! This is to do with Harry Dickinson again?’

‘They’re good lads, those two. You leave ’em alone.’

‘I do believe,’ said Sam, staring at the activities around the compost heap, ‘that those blokes of yours are actually counting the turds.’

Cooper trailed after the disgruntled DCI as he strode off back towards the bottom of the field. The compost had begun fermenting as soon as the heap had been constructed, and steam could be seen rising in several places. The surface of the heap was alive with thousands of the reddish-brown dung flies. They rose in shimmering clouds when they were disturbed, only to settle again on the exposed patches of manure as work began on shifting the entire heap to one side.

The digging was hot and sweaty work, and the policemen could feel the pervasive smell of the manure infiltrating their boiler suits and being absorbed into the perspiration on their bodies. It was worst for the men working on top of the heap, where the heat rising from the compost itself made them feel as though they were slaving in the heart of a blast furnace, or stoking the boiler of a vast steam engine. They stopped for frequent rests, their places being taken by other officers who had been moving the manure aside, turning and separating it as they did so to make sure no evidence went unobserved.

As the digging went on, the smell got steadily worse and Cooper became more unpopular. Many venomous glances came his way as the top of the compost heap shrank and nothing more incriminating appeared than a tangle of blue baling twine or a rotted apple core.

Then a fork hit a solid object. Immediately, an officer dropped to his knees and used his gloved hands to dig into the stinking debris. Someone spread a plastic sheet on the ground, and the next few inches of manure were carefully transferred to the sheet, in case the material had to be packed up and sent to the forensic laboratory. The SOCO, who had finished with the fire, knelt alongside the officer, oblivious to the muck staining his knees and the swarms of flies that hovered around their sweating foreheads.

Finally, as a large clump of manure was scraped away, something white appeared among the dark fibres. It had been pierced by a tine of the policeman’s fork, and now a burst of exposed muscle and tendon appeared like a bullet hole in the middle of the bare, white flesh.

19 (#ulink_3eadf328-a1b4-5a34-83b7-8f74b20059a8)

Fry switched channels on the TV in her room until she landed on a news programme. She watched an item about a sex scandal involving a government minister, heard about a breakdown in talks in Northern Ireland, and listened to news of a long-running war in some African country where thousands of people had already died in an inexplicable tribal conflict. It was all very predictable.

She lay sprawled on her hard bed, nibbling one of the complimentary biscuits from a cellophane-wrapped packet on the bedside table. She had kicked off her shoes and taken off her sweaty clothes, and was wearing her black kimono over her underwear. She was wishing she had been able to find the time to call in at a shop in Skipton for some chocolate.

Then a shot of the woods at Moorhay came on the screen. It looked as though the camera had been positioned on Raven’s Side, where the bird-watcher, Gary Edwards, had stood. It focused in on the site where Laura Vernon had been found, but all that could be seen was the police tape. Then a reporter with a microphone appeared with a brief summary of the enquiry, and the scene switched to a shot of Edendale Police HQ, followed by a crowded room full of lights and microphones. At a table sat DCI Tailby, a police press officer and Graham and Charlotte Vernon. The familiar photo of Laura appeared in a corner of the screen. They were about to broadcast the appeal recorded that morning.

Several minutes were given over to coverage of the Vernon enquiry. To be of real interest to the media, Fry knew that these days murders had to involve children or teenage girls, or possibly young mothers. But it also seemed to make a difference what part of the country they happened in. Somehow it seemed to strike at the heart of English middle-class conceptions for a murder to take place on their own rural doorstep. If Laura Vernon had died on wasteland in a run-down area of London or Birmingham, it would not have been seized on so eagerly. But this was a murder in scenic, sleepy Moorhay, and the tabloid newspapers had been full of it all week. Where Diane Fry had come from, there were murders for the papers to report every day. Some weren’t given a high profile, even locally. And there were other crimes that hardly seemed worth mentioning. Like rape, for example.

After a few words of introduction from Tailby, it was Graham Vernon who was doing the talking. Fry knew that the film clip would be recorded and played back over and over again at Edendale, where they would be looking for little giveaways in the Vernons’ performance, for discrepancies between the account they gave on screen and the statements they had given the police.

It was accepted practice to encourage the relatives in such cases to tell their story under the glare of the lights and cameras, knowing their words were being heard by millions of viewers. It put a pressure on them in a way that could no longer be legally done in the privacy of an interview room.

But Vernon looked well in control. He appealed in a steady voice for anyone who had seen Laura on the night in question, or who knew anything about her death, to come forward and assist police. He encouraged people to consider whether they had noticed anything strange about the behaviour of their husbands, sons or boyfriends. Any bit of information, however trivial it might seem, could prove useful to the police. He sounded as though he had been coached in the phrases by Tailby himself.

Then Vernon changed to a slower, more intimate tone as he talked about Laura. He called her ‘our little girl’ and described her as a bright, clever teenager who had had her whole life to look forward to, but had been brutally struck down. He talked of how well she had been doing at school, and described her love of music and her passion for horses. He told the watching millions that Laura had been due to take part in a horse show today. But her horse, Paddy, was still in his stable, wondering where she was. As an actor, he was only second rate. But that was how some people coped with these things.

Finally, the microphone was presented to Charlotte Vernon. Her eyes were dry and staring, and Fry wondered if she was still on some form of medication. She didn’t say much, but at least she sounded sincere.

‘We’re pleading with everybody: just help the police to catch whoever did this to Laura.’ And she stared directly into the cameras, gaunt and grief-stricken, while her husband put an arm round her shoulders to support her. It was the image that would appear in all the newspapers tomorrow.

The news programme drifted off into a weather forecast – more sun tomorrow and no cloud until the evening. Fry reflected on the past few hours, the frustrating, time-consuming interviews with the student hikers. One after another they had been dragged reluctantly from their tents to the little office at the camp site near Malham. None of them had seen a thing – a fact which Fry thought could have been established quite easily by a couple of North Yorkshire bobbies.

She wondered whose idea it had been for the two of them to travel all this way from Derbyshire, with the necessity of staying overnight in the little hotel in Skipton. Someone had felt sure the hikers would have seen something useful – or they had said they did. And why a detective inspector, who should have been heading one of the enquiry teams? A sergeant would have been quite adequate, or even two DCs.

Of course, it must have been Paul Hitchens’s idea. She had left him in the bar, fuelling up on beer and whisky, enjoying the freedom of being away from the office. He had looked sour when she had taken only one glass of white wine and had refused further drinks, pleading tiredness. Late-night boozing in a Yorkshire pub was not her style.

Meanwhile, no doubt, the main part of the enquiry was getting along fine without her back at Edendale. She wondered what Ben Cooper was doing right now. Bubbling with brilliant insights and unerring flashes of instinct, probably. Like last night. It had been the most stupid thing she had ever seen, to go trailing through the woods in the dark and bursting in on a suspect without proper back-up, or even calling in to tell control where they were. If that’s where instinct and intuition led you, then you could keep it as far as she was concerned. She could not forget the moment that she had seen the gun in Lee Sherratt’s hands. Then her instinct had taken over. But that was a different kind of instinct – a physical reaction, an essential defence mechanism honed by months of training.

In this case, though, she knew she had reacted not in self-defence, but out of a gut-wrenching fear of seeing Ben Cooper injured. She knew it was terror that had made her strike the second, unnecessary, blow. Once she had disarmed Sherratt, he could have been arrested easily. But she had struck again out of fear and anger. Her old instructor would have been furious with her. It showed lack of discipline.

Fry wondered whether she had apologized to Cooper properly for the comments she had made about his father. He had seemed withdrawn and moody afterwards. The escapade in the wood could well have been his way of proving something – in which case, had it been partly her fault that it had happened? Sighing in exasperation, she put it out of her mind. People were too complicated when they started having feelings. Why couldn’t they all just get on with the job in hand?

Another old film was starting. Some romantic comedy from the 1950s with James Stewart. She switched off the TV and lay back on the bed. For a while she lay listening to the footsteps and other small sounds in the hotel corridor. She was wondering whether Paul Hitchens would come to her room.

‘Sound asleep.’

Ben Cooper had just come from saying good night to his nieces. Matt and Kate were watching television, curled up on the sofa together, a picture of domestic contentment. Life had to go on, after all.

But the sight gave Cooper no comfort; it only made him feel worse. Since Monday he had been finding it difficult just to walk up and down the stairs at the farmhouse, remembering the things he had seen.

He and Matt had spent an hour at the hospital, though their mother was still asleep. They had been warned she would be under heavy sedation for at least two days. She would not be awake and able to communicate with them until tomorrow. Yet the two brothers had still wanted to sit by her bed, looking at her face, watching her movements, and discussing, in quiet voices, their hopes and fears for the future. Matt said that the house and the phone had been busy for two days with members of the family calling to ask how Isabel was and offer their help. The Coopers were a large, close family, and nothing brought them together more effectively than a crisis. The same had happened two years ago, when the brothers and their sister, Claire, had never been alone after their father had been killed.

The death of their father had been a sudden, shattering blow. The illness of their mother had been a slow, lingering torture. Cooper’s mind drifted away again, seeking memories of the times when they had all been together. It had only been two years ago, but it seemed like a century. It was called changing circumstances.

This time, though, he could not understand why he was finding little solace from the constant presence of his family. Their closeness seemed to create a weight of expectation which he no longer felt capable of fulfilling. They all thought he was a clever, popular policeman and never doubted for a moment that he was destined for great things. It was a burden that he could no longer live up to.

Suddenly it seemed to him as though everything in his life was going wrong, one thing after another. The solid planks he depended on were being kicked away; his hopes were being trampled on remorselessly, one by one. Why had the crisis with his mother coincided with the arrival at Edendale of Diane Fry? He couldn’t get out of his mind the idea that the two things were connected. They were a joint assault on his private and professional life, and he didn’t know how to cope with the effects they were having on his feelings, his moods and his judgement.

He had to admit that he had made a mistake in ignoring procedures to go after Lee Sherratt, and it had nearly ended in disaster – though he told himself that if Fry had not been with him, he would have done things differently. And then, out of the blue, he had found himself thinking about Helen Milner; he had been thinking about her ever since they had met for the first time in years during his visit to Dial Cottage on Monday.

In quiet moments since then he had speculated about the possibility that he had found someone he had enough in common with to think they could share a life together, someone outside the family. He had pictured himself introducing Helen to his mother, and knowing that she would approve. It was one of the two things that she wanted most – for Ben to find someone to marry; the other was her confident belief that he would make sergeant, like his father. Only that morning, he had been presented with an opportunity to renew the relationship they had once developed. But he had let the opportunity pass, and he had done it because of the job.

On top of that had come the humiliating fiasco with the compost heap at Thorpe Farm. He could imagine what was being said about him at the station. Within a few hours it would be the subject of gossip for every police officer in E Division, probably the whole county. The mountain he had to climb to be worthy of his father’s memory was getting higher and higher. At this moment, it looked like Mount Everest.

‘You’ve just missed the appeal by the Vernons,’ said Matt.

‘Yeah? What was it like?’

‘Stagey,’ said Kate.

Cooper nodded. He slumped into an armchair and stared at the TV screen without seeing it. His mind was a whirl of anxieties. He wondered how he was going to face going back into work tomorrow. And how he was going to face the visit to the hospital in the afternoon, which he had arranged to take time off for – the visit when his mother would be out of sedation. He didn’t realize that Kate was speaking to him for several seconds.

‘Sorry, what did you say?’

‘Are you all right, Ben?’

‘Yes, I’m fine.’

‘I was asking if you were in for the night now. I’ll make some supper for later, if you are.’

He couldn’t admit that he found the idea of staying in the farmhouse for any length of time unbearable. There was a constant urge to go up the stairs and open the door of his mother’s room, knowing she wouldn’t be there. An urge to relive the worst moments of her illness as if it was some penance he had to go through.

‘Er, no. I thought I might go out for a drink. Do you fancy coming, Matt?’

He didn’t fail to see the quick squeeze that Kate gave to his brother’s arm, which communicated her feelings sufficiently.

‘No, thanks, Ben. I’ll stay in tonight. I’m getting up early in the morning to shoot some of those rabbits in the south field. Maybe tomorrow, eh?’

‘Fine.’