Текст книги "Black Dog"

Автор книги: Stephen Booth

Соавторы: Stephen Booth
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They stood in a narrow hallway, made even narrower by a heavy mahogany sideboard loaded with cut-glass vases and a fruit bowl, all standing on lace mats. In the middle was a colour photograph of a large family group, taken at the seaside somewhere. Recently applied magnolia woodchip wallpaper could not disguise the unevenness of the walls underneath. An estate agent would have called it a charming period look.

Cooper stood still for a moment, fighting to get back his breath, his chest heaving. He wiped the back of his hand across his brow to stop the trickles of sweat running into his eyes.

‘We had a report at the station,' he gasped. 'A phone call.'

‘It's Ben Cooper, isn't it?'

‘That's right.' He looked at the young woman again, recognition dawning only slowly, as he found it did when you saw someone out of their familiar surroundings.

‘Helen? Helen Milner?'

‘That's it. I guess I've changed a bit since the sixth form at Edendale High.'

‘It was a few years ago.'

‘Nine years, I suppose,' she said. 'You've not changed much, Ben. Anyway, I saw your picture in the paper a while ago. You'd won a trophy of some sort.'

‘The Shooting Trophy, yes. Look, can we -?’

‘I'll take you through.'

‘Do you live here then?'

‘No, it's my grandparents' house.’

They stepped through into a back room, hardly less gloomy than the hallway despite a window looking out on to the back garden. There was a 1950s tiled fireplace in the middle of one wall, scattered with more photographs and incongruous holiday mementoes – a straw donkey, a figure of a Spanish flamenco dancer, a postcard of Morocco with sneering camels and an impossibly blue sea. Above the fireplace, a large mirror in a gilt frame reflected a murky hunting print on the opposite wall, with red-coated figures on horseback galloping into a shadowy copse in pursuit of an unseen quarry. Cooper smelled furniture polish and the musty odour of old clothes or drawers lined with ancient newspapers.

There were two elderly people in the room – a woman wearing a floral-patterned dress and a blue cardigan sitting in one armchair, and an old man in a pair of corduroy trousers and a Harris wool sweater facing her in the other chair. They both sat upright, stiff and alert, their feet drawn under them as if to put as much distance between themselves as they could.

In front of the empty fireplace stood a two-bar electric fire. Despite the warmth of the day outside, it gave the impression of having been recently used. Cooper, though, was glad of the slight chill in the room, which had begun to dry the sweat on his face as the two old people turned towards him.

‘It's Ben Cooper, Granddad,' said Helen.

Aye, I can see that. Sergeant Cooper's lad.’

Cooper was well used to this greeting, especially from the older residents around Edendale. For some of them, he was merely the shadow of his father, whose fame and popularity seemed eternal.

‘Hello, sir. I believe somebody phoned the station.' Harry didn't answer, and Cooper was starting to form the idea that the old boy might be deaf when his granddaughter stepped in.

‘It was me, actually,' said Helen. 'Granddad asked me to.’

Harry shrugged, as if to say he couldn't really be bothered whether she had phoned or not.

‘I thought it'd be something you lot would want to know about, like as not.’

And your name, sir?'

‘Dickinson.’

Cooper waited patiently for the explanation. But it came from the granddaughter, not from the old man. 'It's in the kitchen,' she said, leading the way through another door. An almost brand-new washing machine and a fridge-freezer stood among white-painted wooden cupboards, with an aluminium sink unit awkwardly fitted into place among them. Neither of the old people followed them, but watched from their chairs. The rooms were so small that they were well within earshot.

‘Granddad found this.’

The trainer lay on a pine kitchen table, lumpy and grotesque among the bundles of dried mint and the brown-glazed cooking pots. Someone had put a sheet from the Buxton Advertiser underneath it to stop the soil that clung to its rubber sole from getting on to the surface of the table. The trainer lay in the middle of an advertising feature for a new Cantonese restaurant, its laces trailing across a photograph of a smiling Chinese woman serving barbecued spare ribs and bean sprouts.

On the opposite page were columns of birth and death notices, wedding announcements and twenty-first birthday greetings.

Cooper wiped his sweaty palms on his trousers and took out a pen. He gently prised open the tongue of the trainer to look inside, careful not to disturb the soil that was starting to dry and crumble away from the crevices in the sole.

‘Where did you find this, Mr Dickinson?'

‘Under Raven's Side.’

Cooper knew Raven's Side. It was a wilderness of rocks and holes and tangled vegetation. The search parties had been slowly making progress towards the cliff all afternoon, as if reluctant to have to face the task of searching it, with the expectation of twisted ankles and lacerated fingers.

‘Can you be more specific?’

The old man looked offended, as if he had been accused of lying. Cooper began to wonder why he had thought it was cooler inside the cottage. Despite the open windows, there was no breath of air in the kitchen. The atmosphere felt stifling, claustrophobic. The only bit of light seemed to go out of the room when Helen went to answer a knock at the door.

‘There's a big patch of brambles and bracken down there, above the stream,' said the old man. 'It's where I walk Jess, see.’

Cooper was surprised by a faint scrabbling of claws near his feet. A black Labrador gazed up at him from under the table, responding hopefully to the sound of its name. The dog's paws were grubby, and it was lying on the Eden Valley Times. The sports section, by the look of it. Edendale FC had lost the opening match of the season.

‘Was there just the trainer? Nothing else?'

‘Not that I saw. It was Jess that found it really. She goes after rabbits and such when she gets down by there.'

‘OK,' said Cooper. 'We'll take a look in a minute. You can show me the exact spot.’

Helen returned, accompanied by an exhausted PC Wragg.

‘Is it . . . any use?' she asked.

‘We'll see.' Cooper took a polythene bag from his back pocket and carefully slid the trainer into it. 'Would you wait here for a while, please? A senior officer will probably want to speak to you.’

Helen nodded and looked at her grandfather, but his expression didn't alter. His face was stony, like a man resigned to a period of necessary suffering.

Cooper went back into the road and pulled out his personal radio to contact Edendale Divisional HQ, where he knew DI Hitchens would be waiting for a report. He held the polythene bag up to the light, staring at its contents while he waited for the message to be relayed.

The trainer was a Reebok, size-five, slim-fit. And the brown stains on the toe looked very much like blood.

4

The E Division Police Headquarters in Edendale had been new once, in the 1950s, and had even earned their architect a civic award. But in the CID room, fifty years of mouldering paperwork and half-smoked cigarettes and bad food had left their mark on the walls and their smell in the carpets. The Derbyshire Constabulary budget had recently stretched sufficiently to decorate the walls, replace the window frames, and install air conditioning in some of the offices. They had also replaced the old wooden desks with modern equivalents more in keeping with the computer equipment they carried.

DC Diane Fry was reading the bulletins. She had started off by catching up with the fresh ones for the day, then had continued casting back over recent weeks. Her intention was to make herself familiar with all the current enquiries in the division. Although she had been in Edendale nearly two weeks, she still felt as new as the white glosswork that for some reason was refusing to dry properly on the outside wall near the window. All the windows on this side of the building looked down on Gate C and the back of the East Stand at Edendale Football Club, a team struggling in the lower reaches of one of the pyramid leagues.

The priority problem of the moment was car crime at local tourist spots. From the weary tone of some of the memos Fry came across, it sounded as though it always was the priority problem in E Division at this time of year. Many thousands of visitors were drawn into the Peak District National Park during the summer, bringing with them what appeared to be their own crime wave, like the wake trailing behind a huge cruise liner. These visitors left their cars at remote spots, in makeshift car parks on rough ground, in abandoned quarries and on roadside verges. The cars were invariably full of cameras and binoculars and purses stuffed with cash and credit cards, and God knows what else. At the same time, travelling criminals from the big conurbations around Sheffield in the east and Manchester in the west were touring the Peak District looking for just such victims. A few minutes with an unattended vehicle and they were away back to their cities, leaving a trail of distraught visitors and ruined holidays.

It presented an apparently insoluble problem. It was impossible to get the message across to the car owners, since they were a constantly changing flood – here one day, then moving on the next, to be replaced by another group of visitors. It was impossible for the police to keep surveillance on vulnerable sites with the resources available; it was feasible only to identify possible perpetrators and ask neighbouring forces to keep them under observation. It was called living in hope.

Diane Fry looked across the room at DS Rennie. He was on the phone, and had been for some time. She couldn't hear what he was saying, but she was fairly sure he hadn't yet taken a single note with the ballpoint pen he was chewing. He was thick-shouldered and thick-necked, a veteran prop forward in the divisional rugby team, as she had learned from his conversation with one of the other DCs. She also knew that Rennie's first name was David, and that he was married with two children in their early teens.

She had soon become aware of his sly sideways appraisal, a slithering of the eyes towards her when he thought she wasn't looking. She had observed this in the past to be a common tentative first manoeuvre towards a junior female colleague, designed to culminate in an office affair. Many men, of course, never got past this first sign – it was more an indication of hope than intention. But there were others who were more of a nuisance, and Fry couldn't tell just yet which Rennie was. It was helpful, though, to have the early warning, so that she could decide on her own terms when the time was right to put him down. Affairs with colleagues were not on her agenda. Not at all.

She could see Rennie was not making the effort to appear busy, even though there was a DCI somewhere in the building and liable to appear in the CID room at any moment.

‘Sarge?' said Fry, when at last he put the phone down.

Rennie looked round, as if surprised that she was still there. Then he smiled, contorting his face until it was almost a wink. His tie was something dark green, with a small gold crest, and his suit was a good cut for his heavy shoulders, but not recently cleaned. He pulled out a bar of his habitual chewing gum, which Fry had guessed might mean he was a reformed smoker.

‘What can I do for you, Diane?'

‘This project group looking at the auto crime figures.'

‘Yeah?'

‘I wondered if a check had been done on the computer. Matching up locations and timings. An analysis of MOs. We could set up a computer model.'

‘Ben Cooper usually does that,' said Rennie. 'You'd better not mess with the computer until you've asked him about it.’

A computer model could come up with a set of predictions, suggest target locations. It's worth a try, Sarge.'

‘I told you, speak to Ben. They've got him out at Moorhay, but he should be back in the office later, thank God.’

Fry had already heard Ben Cooper's name several times during her first week in Edendale. Apparently he was some paragon of all the virtues who knew everything. DC Cooper knew the area like the back of his hand, they said. He knew all the local villains and even their families, they said. He knew how all the systems in the CID office worked, too. He knew exactly how to fill in the vast quantities of paperwork that baffled other detectives. Now, apparently, he was the only one who knew how to use the computers. But Diane Fry had an information technology qualification to her name, and she had done a course on intelligence data analysis at the National Crime Faculty in Bramshill. At the first opportunity, she would show them who knew how to use the computers around here.

For now, though, she decided to try another tack. 'Someone from the NCIS did a paper on this problem a few months ago. It was mentioned when I was at Bramshill.'

‘Really?’

Rennie sounded uninterested.

‘The National Criminal Intelligence Service.’

‘I know what the NCIS is, thanks.'

‘I wondered if someone had researched it. I can't see any mention in the paperwork. Maybe the project group have followed it through?'

‘I doubt it.'

‘I'll look it up, if you like, Sarge.’

Rennie looked sour, pulled at his tie, scrabbled about on his desk for a bit of paper and picked up the phone to dial another number.

‘Shall I, Sarge?'

‘Oh, if you like.’

Fry made a note for herself in her notebook and asterisked it. Then she put the car crime reports aside and picked up that morning's bulletin on the missing girl, Laura Vernon. She had already read it once and had memorized its admittedly sketchy details.

Her memory was excellent for jobs like this. She knew exactly what the girl had been wearing when last seen, down to the blue pants and the size-five slim-fit Reeboks. If she was the first officer to come across any of these items, she knew she would recognize them straightaway. But she would have to be allocated to the search first, of course.

All available hands had already been called to the task of finding Laura Vernon. All hands, that was, except Detective Constable Diane Fry and Detective Sergeant David Rennie. Fry was new to the division, of course, but what had Rennie done wrong? He was currently in charge of day-to-day crime in E Division, and Fry constituted his staff. It wasn't a combination that looked likely to crush any crime waves. At this moment, they weren't even trying.

Fry got up from her desk and walked over to check the action file on the Laura Vernon enquiry. Although the enquiry was less than forty-eight hours old, the file was already getting thick. The apparatus of a major enquiry was beginning to swing into operation, even though it hadn't yet been designated a murder enquiry – not until a body was found. Teenage girls ran away from home all the time, of course, and generally turned up a few days later, hungry and shamefaced. Laura had money – her parents estimated there could have been as much as thirty pounds in her purse; obviously she was not a girl who was kept short of cash. But she had taken no clothes and no possessions with her. That was a significant factor.

And reactions had been quicker in this instance for two other reasons. One was the fact that a witness report had placed Laura Vernon talking to an unidentified young man behind her house shortly before her disappearance. It had been the last sighting of her for nearly two days now.

The other pressing reason, understated in the action file but discernible as a thread running through the reports, was the so far unsolved murder of sixteen-year-old Susan Edson in neighbouring B Division a few weeks earlier.

Everyone knew that the first two or three days of an enquiry were vital, if it did turn out to be a case of murder, or other serious crime. Within the first seventy-two hours the memories of witnesses were fresh, and the perpetrator had little time to dispose of evidence or construct an alibi. At the same time, speedy action also meant they had a better chance of finding Laura Vernon alive.

Fry was interested to see that a name had been offered up to police as a 'possible' right from the start. A youth called Lee Sherratt had been named by the parents and had been interviewed by officers in the initial sweep. He had denied being the young man seen talking to Laura, but his alibi was unsupported. Sherratt's record had been pulled from the Police National Computer -a few petty crimes, some as a juvenile. It wasn't much, but it was enough to leave his name at the top of the file until he could be eliminated.

According to the reports, a uniformed inspector from Operational Support was now in charge of the search on the ground. DI Paul Hitchens was CID investigating officer, reporting to Detective Chief Inspector Stewart Tailby. Officers had already called at every house in the village of Moorhay, since there weren't all that many. Enquiries had been made with all known friends and relatives in the area. No sign of Laura Vernon, no leads to her possible whereabouts.

By now the painstaking inch-by-inch search of the surrounding countryside was well under way – off-duty officers had been called in, the search dog teams were out and the helicopter was in the air. Peak Park Rangers and Countryside Rangers were helping the search, and the Mountain Rescue Team was somewhere up on the tops of the moors above the village. And, of course, Detective Constable 'Mr Perfect' was also out at Moorhay in person. Case solved, then.

Fry had met DI Hitchens on her first day. He was her CID boss – after DS Rennie, anyway, and she had already decided Rennie didn't really count. Hitchens was younger than the sergeant, and better educated. So an early promotion; maybe he was a fast-track graduate, like herself. He would certainly be destined for higher things, and his voice would be listened to by more senior officers. Fry ached to be out there, on a major enquiry, at the right hand of DI Hitchens, getting the chance to impress. She wasn't intending to hang around looking at car crime statistics for long. A murder enquiry was just the thing. But it had come too soon, while she was still too new. Hence her presence in the office with Rennie.

In an hour or two they would have to call off the search for Laura Vernon anyway. Even in August dusk fell eventually over the hills, and the lines of men and women would disperse and wander dispiritedly home.

Tomorrow there would be appeals in the papers and on TV, and civilian volunteers would be queueing up to swell the numbers of the search parties.

Fry knew she had two choices. She either coasted along and filled in time until Rennie thought fit to allocate her some tasks; or she could speak up, take the initiative, start to show what she was made of. But she held her tongue. Now was not the time – she needed to be in a stronger position. Meanwhile, DS Rennie was not worth the effort of trying to impress.

Then the door opened and DI Hitchens put his head round. 'Who's here? Oh yes.’

He looked disappointed, like a captain left with the choice of the players no one wants when the teams are being chosen. Hitchens was in his shirt sleeves, with his cuffs rolled up a few inches over strong wrists covered in dark, wiry hair. He was in his thirties, and seemed to be permanently about to break into a smile. Fry caught his eye, looked from him to Rennie, who had barely moved except to shift his foot from his desk.

Hitchens nodded. 'All right to hold the fort for a while, Dave?'

‘Sir.’

Fry jumped up eagerly. 'Where are we going, sir? Is it the missing girl, Laura Vernon?'

‘What else? Yes, we've had a find called in. We've got a good man out in the field now checking it out, but it sounds positive. Can you be ready in two minutes?’

‘I'll be ready.’

When the DI had left, Diane Fry went back to her desk to clear away the car crime reports. She was careful toturn her back to Dave Rennie, so that he wouldn't see her smiling.

*

Edendale sat astride a wide valley in the gap between the two distinct halves of the Peak District. On one side the gentle limestone hills and wooded dales of the White Peak rolled away past Bakewell and Wyedale into B Division and the borders of Staffordshire. On the other side were the grim, bare gritstone moors of the sparsely populated Dark Peak, where the high slopes of Mam Tor and Kinder Scout guarded the remote, silent reservoirs below Snake Pass.

It was one of only two towns that sat within the boundaries of the Peak District National Park – the other being Bakewell, a few miles to the south, where one of the E Division section stations was based. Other towns, like Buxton, headquarters of B Division, had been deliberately excluded from the National Park when the boundaries were drawn.

At Buxton, as at Matlock and Ashbourne, the boundary took wide sweeps around the towns and back again. But Edendale was too deep within the hills to be excluded. It meant that the restrictive Peak Park planning regulations applied to the town as much as they did to the face of Mam Tor or to the Blue John caves of Castleton.

Diane Fry was still learning the geography of the town and the dale. So far she was familiar only with the immediate area around the Victorian house on the outskirts of Edendale where she had rented a first-floor flat, and the streets near the station – including the view of the Edendale FC stand. But she was aware that, no matter which route you chose out of Edendale, the only way was up – over the hills, to the moorland hamlets or the villages in the next valley.

Fry was a good driver, trained in the West Midlands force driving school to handle pursuit cars. But DI Hitchens chose to drive himself as they headed out of the town towards the great hump of moorland separating Edendale from the next valley.

‘It's just the one shoe,' said Hitchens.

A trainer?' said Fry. 'Reebok, size-five?’

The DI looked at her, surprised, raising his eyebrow. 'You've been reading up on the Vernon enquiry.’

‘Yes, sir.'

‘It was always a possibility from the start that something had happened to her, though you can't tell the parents that. She had cash with her, but had taken nothing else. We'd already traced all her friends and contacts. Negative all round. It's inevitable, I'm afraid, that her body will turn up somewhere.'

‘What sort of girl is she?'

‘Oh, comes from a well-off family, comfortable background. Never wanted for anything, I'd say. She attends a private school called High Carrs, due to take her GCSEs next year. She gets piano lessons, has a horse that her parents bought that's kept at some stables just outside Moorhay. She takes part in riding events sometimes.'

‘Show jumping?'

‘I suppose so.’

And is she good at any of those things?’

Hitchens looked at her and nodded approvingly. 'If you believe the parents, she's perfect at everything. Bound to get a place at Oxford or Cambridge and do her degree, but might decide to pursue a career as a concert musician later on. Unless she wins an Olympic gold medal in the meantime, of course. Her friends say different.'

‘Boys?'

‘Of course. What else? Mum and Dad deny it, though. They say she's too busy with her studies and her horse riding, all that. But we're tracing the boyfriends, gradually.'

‘Rows at home? Anything like that?'

‘Nothing. At least . .

‘Not according to the parents, right.'

‘Got it.’

Hitchens was smiling again. Fry liked her senior officers to smile at her, within reason. She watched his hands on the steering wheel. They were strong hands, with clean and carefully trimmed fingernails. His nose was a little too large in profile. It was what they called a Roman nose. But a man could get away with that – it gave him character. She looked again at his left hand. There was no wedding ring on his finger. But now she noticed a white scar that crawled all the way across the middle knuckles of three of his fingers.

‘The parents say that Laura had been shopping with her mother that afternoon,' said Hitchens. 'They'd been to the De Bradelei Centre at Belper.'

‘What's there?'

‘Oh – clothes,' he said vaguely.

‘Not Dad?'

‘I don't suppose it was his sort of thing. Anyway, the females were buying him a birthday present, so he wouldn't have been wanted, would he? He stayed at home to catch up on some work. Graham Vernon runs a financial consultancy business and says it's going well. They do seem to be pretty well-off.’

And after they got home?'

‘It was about half past five by then. It was still hot, so Laura changed and went out into the garden for a while. She didn't come back for her evening meal at half past seven. That's when the Vernons began to panic.’

Fry admired the way he had all the details in his mind and could produce them without effort. Hitchens obviously had the sort of brain that was much valued in the police service these days. Many coppers could not have repeated the information without reading it from their notes.

‘Parents alibi each other?'

‘Yes.'

‘But she was seen talking to a young man before she disappeared, wasn't she?'

‘Very good, Diane. Yes, we found a lady who was out collecting wild flowers on the edge of the scrubland at the top of the Baulk. She's a WI member and is helping to create the decoration for a well dressing at Great Hucklow. She was embarrassed about admitting it, can you believe it? She thought we might arrest her for stealing wild flowers. Her children had told her it's a crime against the environment. But the well dressing was obviously important enough to turn her to evil ways. Anyway, she came forward and identified Laura Vernon from her photograph as the girl she saw. She. couldn't describe the boy, though. Too far away.’

And now a trainer.'

‘Yes, that's all we've got so far, but it looks hopeful. We've got Ben Cooper on the spot there – he was with one of the search parties. Ben's got good judgement.'

‘I'm sure he has.'

‘Oh, you've met Cooper, have you? He's only back from leave today.'

‘No, but I've heard the others talk about him.’

‘Right.' Hitchens said nothing for a few minutes, negotiating a crossroads where heavy lorries thundered by at regular intervals, dusting the roadside verges with a coating of lime. Fry tried to read his thoughts, wondering if she had said something wrong. But she was sure of her ability to keep any emotion out of her voice. She had practised long and hard, and now, she felt, she only ever sounded positive.

‘How's it going then, Diane? Settling into the CID room OK?'

‘Fine, sir. Some things are done a bit differently from what I've been used to, but nothing I haven't been able to pick up on pretty quickly.'

‘That's good. Dave Rennie treating you all right?'

‘No problem,' said Fry. She noted that she had become

‘Diane' since getting into the car alone with the DI. She liked to keep a track of these things, in case they had any deeper meaning. Maybe she could manage without the 'sir' in return, and see if it struck the right note – a closeness of colleagues rather than a senior officer with a junior. But no further.

‘Not finding Derbyshire too quiet for you after the West Midlands?'

‘It's a nice change,' said Fry. 'But I'm sure E Division has its own challenges.’

Hitchens laughed. 'The other divisions call it "E for Easy Street".’

Fry had already been informed by her new colleagues that Edendale had been chosen over Bakewell or Matlock as E Division Headquarters for purely alphabetical reasons. It was one of the oddities of the Derbyshire Constabulary structure that the territorial divisions were all based in towns that began with the right letter – A Division in Alfreton, B Division in Buxton, C Division in Chesterfield and D Division in Derby.

So it was inconceivable that E Division should have been based in Bakewell or Matlock. It would have been an outrage against corporate neatness. In fact, if there hadn't already been a town called Edendale, some PR person in an office at County HQ would have had to invent one.

‘But I was thinking of the social life,' said Hitchens. 'Edendale isn't exactly the night spot capital of Europe. A bit tame after Birmingham, I expect.'

‘It depends what you're looking for, I suppose.’

He turned to look towards her, his hands resting casually on the wheel. 'And what is Diane Fry looking for exactly?’

What indeed? There was only one thing that Fry wanted to acknowledge to herself. Maybe it wasn't what Hitchens was expecting to hear. But it was something he ought to know, now rather than later.

‘I want to advance my career,' she said.

Ah.' He raised his eyebrows, a smile lighting up his face. He was quite good-looking, and he wore no wedding ring.

‘I'm good at my job,' she said. 'I'll be looking for promotion. That's what's important to me. At the moment.’

‘Fair enough. I like your honesty.’

The main road towards Buxton climbed and climbed until it reached a plateau where the limestone quarries competed with the moors as background scenery. There was a well-placed pub here called the Light House, with tremendous views over two neighbouring valleys and the hills beyond. Hitchens turned off the road before they reached the quarries, and they began a gentle rollercoaster ride over smaller valleys and hills, dipping gradually towards Wyedale. Farm gates flickered past occasionally, with black and white signs advertising the names of dairy herds and stacks of huge round bales of straw or black plastic-wrapped silage lying in the fields behind stone walls.

‘I've seen your record, of course,' said Hitchens. 'It's not bad.’

Fry nodded. She knew it wasn't bad. It was damn good. Her exam results had been in the top few per cent all along the line. Her clear-up rate since her transfer to CID had been outstanding. She had had a good career lined up in the West Midlands, and they had been grooming her for big things; anybody could see that.

‘It was a pity you had to leave your old force,' said Hitchens.

She said nothing, waiting for the comment that she knew would have to come.