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

‘Sorry,’ said Harry.

Outside the shop, by the swinging Wall’s ice cream sign, Sam Beeley slipped on a discarded Coke can and hit the pavement with a painful thump, his ivory-headed stick clattering into the gutter. There was a flutter of consternation until two tall young men with Australian accents helped him to his feet and picked up his stick. Three girls who had leaned their hired mountain bikes against the shop window made a great fuss of asking the old man if he was all right and dusting him down, eyeing the Australians. They all circled round Sam in a kaleidoscope of colourful shirts and brown limbs, like butterflies momentarily attracted to a dry, leafless plant before passing on to seek new scents elsewhere.

Finally, they left him to Harry and Wilford, who assured them he only lived a few yards away. Though supported by his friends, Sam didn’t get very far before he had to stop and rest on a wall, gasping with the pain from his legs. He lit a cigarette and squinted at the churchyard across the road, where the gravestones gleamed white in the sunlight.

‘You’ll be carrying me over yonder soon,’ he said, without self-pity.

‘We’re all heading that way,’ said Wilford.

‘I’ll not race you. It’ll happen soon enough.’

‘You have to accept the fact,’ said Harry, ‘that when you get to our age, death is always just around the corner.’

‘Do you remember that time in the mine, when I nearly got killed,’ said Sam.

‘That was a good few years ago.’

Sam looked down at his legs. ‘Aye, but it left me a memento.’

The three men were silent, staring at the houses opposite, not seeing the cars that went past, or the young hikers who had to step off the pavement to get round them.

It had been over twenty years since the accident had happened at Glory Stone Mine. They had been in a six-foot-wide worked-out vein, nearly a hundred feet high. The face sloped upwards in a bank of calcite like scree, with a miner drilling at the top, fifty feet up, silhouetted against the speck of his light. The sloping face was dimly lit, and the air was smoky from the blasting, with the roof nothing but a dusky darkness way beyond the reach of the lights. It was a vast and misty cavern of greys and blacks, thick with the acrid stink of explosives and dust.

Sam had been the miner at the top of the face. He had been in his fifties then, an experienced man who had spent most of his working life in the mines. When his drill split the brittle rock and the face had opened under his feet, his body had been thrown instantly backwards, his arms and legs tumbling among their own thrashing shadows until he hit the foot of the slope and had been buried by an avalanche of calcite. Wilford had found Harry in the darkness, and together they had dug Sam out with their bare hands and dragged him to safety. They hadn’t realized his legs were broken until he started to scream.

‘If the pain got too much,’ said Wilford, to nobody in particular. ‘Would you think of doing away with yourself?’

Sam looked thoughtful. ‘Aye, I suppose so.’

Harry nodded. ‘If there was nothing left for you. No hope. I reckon you’d have to.’

‘Depends on what you believe in, though,’ said Wilford. ‘Doesn’t it?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Some folk don’t believe it’s right to do away with yourself.’

‘Ah, religion.’ Sam smiled.

‘Well, it’s a sin, suicide,’ said Wilford. ‘Isn’t it, Harry?’

Then Harry lit his pipe. The others waited, sensing an impending judgement or decision. They knew Harry did his best thinking when his pipe was lit.

‘It seems to me,’ he said. ‘There’s different sorts of sin. Sin isn’t the same as evil. God would forgive you a sin.’

They nodded. It sounded right and reasonable. None of them had got through almost eight decades without committing the odd sin.

‘It’d take a bit of courage, though. There aren’t any easy ways.’

‘There’s sleeping pills.’

Harry cleared his throat contemptuously. ‘That’s a woman’s way out, Sam.’

‘You could throw yourself off somewhere high. Raven’s Side cliff,’ suggested Wilford.

‘Messy. And you wouldn’t necessarily kill yourself.’

They shuddered. ‘You wouldn’t want that.’

‘I can’t stand heights anyway. They make me dizzy.’

‘That’s a point.’

‘There’s hanging,’ said Harry. ‘If you know how to tie a knot right.’

‘And you have to get the drop just right, else.’

Wilford pursed his lips, ran his fingers through his white hair. ‘Else what?’

‘You don’t die quick, you strangle yourself. Slowly.’

‘I’ve read somewhere that blokes pretend to hang themselves,’ said Sam. ‘They almost hang themselves, but not quite. For a bit of fun, like.’

‘Bloody hell, why would they do that?’

‘Sex,’ said Sam solemnly. ‘They say it gives you a bloody great hard-on.’

‘Ah. Well, that’d be a novelty, all right.’

‘You never know. It might be worth it, for once.’

‘There was a bloke in the paper,’ said Sam. ‘Seventy-four years old, he was. He had fastened his nipples and his testicles up to electrical terminals. They called it an autoerotic experiment.’

‘Aye? What happened?’

‘He had the charge too strong. It killed him. Blew his balls off, for all I know.’

‘Old age doesn’t stop you wanting it. It just stops you doing it properly,’ said Harry.

They nodded wisely, watching the three young girls from the post office cycle past, long legs whirling as their spinning spokes flickered in the sun.

‘That lass in the shop,’ said Sam. ‘The one with the big bum and the bolt through her tongue. That was Sheila Kelk’s girl, from Wye Close.’

‘Oh aye?’ said Harry, uninterested.

‘They live near the Sherratts.’

The council dustbin wagon rumbled and hissed somewhere on Howe Lane. The wheelie bins still stood on the pavement waiting for it, painted with white numbers or the names of houses. Inside the bins was the accumulated debris that could tell the whole story of people’s lives.