Cooper and Fry Crime Fiction Series: Books 1-3

Black Dog Dancing with Virgins Blood on the Tongue
STEPHEN BOOTH

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Black Dog

Dancing with Virgins

Blood on the Tongue

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

BLACK DOG
STEPHEN BOOTH

DEDICATION

For Lesley

EPIGRAPH

black dog: 1. melancholy, depression of spirits; ill humour. In some country places, when a child is sulking, it is said ‘the black dog is on his back’.

(Oxford English Dictionary)

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

Copyright

1

The sudden glare of colours beat painfully on the young woman’s eyes as she burst from the back door of the cottage and hurled herself into the brightness. She ran with her bare feet slapping on the stone flags and her hair streaming in red knots from her naked shoulders.

A harsh voice was cut off suddenly when the door slammed behind her, isolating her from the house. As she sprinted the length of the garden, she stirred the dust from a flagged path whose moisture had been sucked out and swallowed by the sun. A scarlet shrub rose trailed halfway across the path and a thorn slit the flesh of her arm as she brushed against it, but she hardly felt the pain.

‘Wait!’ she called.

But the old wooden garden gate had banged shut on its spring before she could reach it. She threw herself on to the top of the dry-stone wall, flinging out an arm to clutch at the sleeve of the old man on the other side. He was wearing a woollen jacket, despite the heat, and his arm felt stiff and sinewy under the cloth. The young woman scrabbled for a firmer grip, feeling his muscles slide against the bones under her fingers as if she had plunged her hand deep into his body.

Harry Dickinson paused, held back only by the hand that touched his arm, turning his face away from the appeal in his granddaughter’s eyes. The only change in his expression was a slight tightening in the creases at the sides of his mouth as his gaze slipped past Helen to the row of stone cottages. The stone walls and the white-mullioned back windows were at last starting to cool in the early-evening shade, but the sun still glared low over the slate roofs, bad-tempered and unrelenting. The pupils of Harry’s eyes narrowed to expressionless black points until he tilted his head sideways to turn the peak of his cap into the sun.

Helen could smell the impregnated odours of earth and sweat and animals in the wool, overlaid by the familiar scent of old tobacco smoke. ‘It’s no good walking away, you know. You’ll have to face it in the end. You can’t run away from things for ever.’

A loud juddering sound made Harry flinch as it passed across the valley behind him. For an hour now the noise had been moving backwards and forwards over the dense woodland that covered the slope all the way down to the valley bottom. The sound echoed against the opposite hillside like the beating wings of an angry bird, battering the gorse and heather and alarming the sheep scattered on the upper slopes.

‘We’ll understand,’ said Helen. ‘We’re your family. If only you’d tell us …’

The old man’s right arm was held out at an unnatural angle, creasing the sleeve of his jacket into an ugly concertina of fabric. She knew that Harry felt himself being physically tugged towards the woods along the valley side; his body was tense with the effort of resisting the pull. But emotionally he was being drawn in two directions. The conflicting pressures only seemed to strengthen and toughen him, setting his shoulders rigid and hardening the line of his jaw. His face held no possibility of turning away from whatever he had decided to do.

‘Granddad? Please.’

The sharp edges of the stone wall were digging into her thighs through her shorts, and the skin of the palm on her left hand stung where she had scraped it on the jagged topping stones. There had been a sudden, desperate rush, a moment of overwhelming emotion, and now she didn’t know what to say. She felt the impotence of the conventions that surrounded the communication between one adult and another, even when they were members of the same family. She shared with her grandfather an inborn shortage of the words she needed to be able to express her feelings to those closest to her.

‘Grandma is very upset,’ said Helen. ‘But she’ll calm down in a minute. She’s worried about you.’

Helen had never needed many words before, not with Harry. He had always known exactly what she wanted, had always responded to the message in her eyes, to the shy, adoring smile, to the gleam of sun on a wave of flame-coloured hair, and to a small, trusting hand slipped into his own. She was no longer that child, and hadn’t been for years. A teacher learned a different way of communicating, a calculated performance that was all surface gloss and scored no marks for feeling. Harry still understood, though. He knew what she wanted him to do now. But it was too hard for him, a thing completely against a lifetime’s habit.

Gradually the juddering noise was fading to the edge of audibility, muffled to a dull rattle by the trees and the folds of the land. Its temporary absence released the subtler sounds of the evening – a current of air stirring the beech trees, a cow moaning for the bull across the valley, a skylark spilling its song over the purple heather. Harry cocked an ear, as if listening for a voice that no one else could hear. It was a voice that deepened the sadness in his eyes but stiffened his back and tautened the clench of his fists and his grip on the loop of worn black leather held in one hand.

‘Come back and talk to us. Please?’ she said.

Helen had never heard that voice. She had often tried, staring intently up at her grandfather’s face, watching his expression change, not daring to ask what it was he heard, but straining her own ears, desperate to catch an elusive echo. Like most men who had worked underground, Harry spent as much of his time as he could outside in the open air. As she stood at his side, Helen had learned to hear the sounds of the woods and the sky, the tiny movements in the grass, the shifting of the direction of the wind, the splash of a fish in a stream. But she had never heard what her grandfather heard. She had grown up to believe it was something uniquely to do with being a man.

‘If you don’t want to talk to Grandma, won’t you tell me about it, Granddad?’

And then the noise began to grow steadily louder again, clattering towards them as it followed the invisible line of the road that meandered along the valley bottom. It drew nearer and nearer across the rocky slopes of Raven’s Side, skirting a sudden eruption of black basalt cliff and veering north once more towards the village until it was almost overhead. The din was enough to drown out normal speech. But it was then that Harry chose to speak, raising his voice defiantly against the clattering and roaring that beat down on him from the sky.

‘Noisy bastards,’ he said.

The helicopter banked, its blue sides flickering in the fragmented shadows of its blades. A figure could be seen, leaning forward in the cabin to stare at the ground. The lettering on his door read ‘POLICE’.

‘They’re looking for that girl that’s gone missing,’ said Helen, her voice scattered and blown away by the roar. ‘The Mount girl.’

‘Aye, well. Do they have to make so much row about it?’

Harry cleared his throat noisily, sucking the phlegm on to the top of his tongue. Then he pursed his thin lips and spat into a clump of yellow ragwort growing by the gate.

As if taking offence, the helicopter moved suddenly away from the edge of the village, sliding towards a row of tall conifers that grew in the grounds of a large white house. The pitch of the noise changed and altered shape as it passed the house, tracing the outline of the roofs and chimneys like an echo locator sounding the depths of an ocean trench.

‘At least it’ll wake that lot up as well.’

‘Granddad –’

‘There’s nowt more to be said. Not just now.’

Helen sighed, her brain crowding with thoughts she couldn’t express and feelings she couldn’t communicate. The old man only grimaced as his arm was stretched at an even sharper angle.

‘Have to go, love,’ he said. ‘Jess’ll pull me arm off, else.’

Helen shook her head, but dropped her hand and let him go. A thin trickle of blood ran down her arm from the scratch made by the thorn. It glittered thickly on her pink skin, clotting and drying fast in the warm sun. She watched as her grandfather set off down the hillside towards the woods at the foot of the cliffs. Jess, his black Labrador, led the way along the familiar path, tugging eagerly at the end of her lead, impatient to be allowed to run free when they reached the stream.

No, you couldn’t run away from things for ever, thought Helen. But you could always bugger off and walk the dog for a bit.

Down on the lower slopes of the hill, Ben Cooper was sweating. The perspiration ran in streams through the fine hairs on his chest and formed a sticky sheen on the muscles of his stomach. The sides and back of his T-shirt were already soaked, and his scalp prickled uncomfortably.

No breeze had yet found its way through the trees to cool the lingering heat of the afternoon sun. Each clearing was a little sun trap, funnelling the heat and raising the temperature on the ground into the eighties. Even a few feet into the woods the humidity was enough to make his whole body itch, and tiny black flies swarmed from under the trees in irritating clouds, attracted by the smell of his sweat.

Every man in the line was equipped with a wooden pole to sift through the long grass and push aside the dense swathes of bracken and brambles. The bruised foliage released a damp, green smell and Cooper’s brown fell boots were stained dark to an inch above the soles. His pole came out of the undergrowth thick with burrs, and with small caterpillars and insects clinging to its length. Every few minutes he had to stop to knock them off against the ground or on the bole of a tree. All along the line were the sounds of men doing the same, the thumps and taps punctuating their muttered complaints and sporadic bursts of conversation.

Cooper found that walking with his head down made his neck ache after a while. So when the line stopped for a minute to allow someone in the centre the time to search a patch of dense bramble, he took the chance to raise his head and look up, above the line of the trees. He found himself gazing at the side of Win Low across the valley. Up there, on the bare, rocky outcrops they called the Witches, it would be so much cooler. There would be a fresh wind easing its way from the west, a wind that always seemed to come all the way from the Welsh mountains and across the Cheshire plain.

For the last two hours he had been wishing that he had used his common sense and brought a hat to keep the sun off his head. For once, he was jealous of his uniformed colleagues down the line, with their dark peaked caps pulled over their eyes and their starburst badges glittering in the sunlight. Being in CID had its disadvantages sometimes.

‘Bloody hell, what a waste of effort.’

The PC next to Ben Cooper was from Matlock section, a middle-aged rural beat manager who had once had aspirations to join the Operational Support Task Force in Chesterfield. But the Task Force were deployed further along the hillside, below the Mount itself, while PC Garnett found himself alongside an Edendale detective in a makeshift search group which included a couple of National Park Rangers. Garnett wore his blue overalls with more comfort than style, and he had been swinging his pole with such ferocity as he walked that his colleagues had gradually moved further away to protect their shins.

‘You reckon so?’

‘Aye, certain,’ said Garnett. ‘They say the lass has run off with some boyfriend.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Cooper. ‘I’ve not heard that. It wasn’t in the briefing. Just that she was missing.’

‘Huh. Missing my arse. Mark my words, she’ll be off shagging some spotty youth somewhere. Fifteen years old, what do you expect these days?’

‘Maybe you’re right. We have to go through the motions all the same.’

‘Mind you, if one of my two did it, I’d murder ’em all right.’

Garnett thrashed at a small elder sapling so hard that the stem snapped in two, the tender young branches collapsing to the ground and leaking a tiny trickle of sticky sap. Then he trod on the broken stem and crushed it into the grass with his police-issue boot. Cooper hoped that, if there were any fragile evidence to be found in the woods, he would see it before Garnett reached it.

Then he looked at the PC and smiled suddenly, recognizing that the man had no harm in him. He might be a middle-aged dad whose ambitions were withering as his waistline expanded, but he had no harm in him at all. Cooper could almost sense the ordinary little niggles that teemed in Garnett’s mind, from his disappearing hairline to the recurring ache at the base of his spine and the size of his telephone bill.

‘Just be thankful for the overtime,’ he said. ‘We could all do with a bit of that.’

‘Ah yes, you’re right there, lad. Too right. It takes something like this to get the fingers of those tight-fisted bastards off the purse strings these days, doesn’t it?’

‘It’s the budget cuts.’

‘Budgets!’ Garnett said the word like a curse, and they both paused for a moment to listen to its sound, shaking their heads as if it symbolized the end of everything they had known.

‘Accountants, you can keep ’em,’ said Garnett. ‘We’re not coppers to them any more, just a load of figures on a sheet of paper. It’s all flashy operations and clear-up rates. There’s no room for old-style coppers these days.’

He threw a bitter glance along the hillside towards where the Task Force squad was beating its way through the scrubland beyond a row of Lombardy poplars like a set of dark spikes dropped into the landscape.

‘Of course, you’ll know all about that, lad. You’re different. A chip off the old block, they reckon. Good for you. Wish you luck, though.’

‘Yeah, thanks.’

Cooper had only just returned from a fortnight’s summer leave. On his first day back on duty he had been thrown straight into the search for Laura Vernon, fifteen years old and missing from home since Saturday night. They were looking for a girl with short dark hair dyed red, wearing a silver nose stud, five foot six inches tall, mature for her age. Failing that, they were looking for her clothes – black denims, a red short-sleeved cotton T-shirt, a white sports bra, blue bikini pants, blue ankle socks, a pair of Reeboks, size-five, slim-fit. Nobody thought it necessary to point out that if they found her clothes, they were also looking for a body.

‘This lass, though. She’s miles away, if you ask me,’ said Garnett. ‘Run off with the boyfriend. Some yob on a motorbike from Manchester, maybe. That’s what teenage girls get up to these days. The schools teach them about contraceptives before they’re twelve, so what can you expect? ’Course, the parents never have a clue. Not parents like this lot, anyway. They don’t know the kids exist half the time.’

Cooper’s legs were still aching from the rock climbing he had done on the sheer, terrifying faces of the Cuillin Hills of Skye. His friends Oscar and Rakesh were members of the Edendale Mountain Rescue Team and could never get enough of the mountains. Just now, though, he could really have done with a quiet day behind his desk at Division, making a few phone calls maybe, catching up on what had been happening during the last fortnight, getting up to date with the gossip. Anything but clambering up and down another hillside.

But he knew this area well – he was himself from a village a few miles down the valley. Most of the men recruited for the search parties were from the section stations, or even from out of the division. A few of them were city boys. On the hills around here they would be falling down old mine shafts in their dozens without someone to tell them which way was up and which was down.

And, of course, PC Garnett could well be right. It had happened so often – youngsters bored with life in the villages of the Peak District, attracted by the glamour and excitement of the big cities. And very likely there was a boyfriend, too – no doubt someone the parents found unsuitable. According to the initial reports, the Vernons claimed there had been no trouble at home, no family rows, no reason at all for Laura to walk out. But didn’t parents always say that? So much could remain misunderstood among families, or never even suspected. Especially if they were a family who didn’t have the time or the inclination to talk to each other much.

But there were other factors in this case. Laura had taken no clothes with her, very little money, no possessions of any kind. And initial enquiries had brought a sighting of her talking to a young man on Saturday night, at the edge of the expanse of hillside scrub and woodland known as the Baulk.

Once he got out on the hill below the village of Moorhay, Cooper had remembered that he had even been to Laura Vernon’s home once. It was the big white house they called the Mount, which stood somewhere above the search party, hidden behind the trees on its own spur of land. It was a former mine owner’s house, big and pretentious, with formally laid out grounds full of rhododendrons and azaleas, and with a stunning view over the valley from the terrace. Cooper had been invited to the Mount for the eighteenth birthday party of a classmate, a lad everyone at the old Edendale High School knew had well-off parents even before they were given the tour of the big house. That hadn’t been the Vernons, but the people before them – they had been local people, the family of a man who had inherited a string of small petrol stations scattered throughout the Peak. The business had expanded from Edendale and its surrounding villages, beyond the borders of Derbyshire, in fact, into South Yorkshire and the fringes of the cities.

Eventually, of course, he had sold out to one of the larger companies, cashed in and moved away to somewhere better. Abroad, they said. The South of France and Italy were popular guesses.

The Mount had stood empty then for some time, waiting out the recession. Photographs of its elegant facade featured regularly in the adverts of upmarket estate agents in glossy county magazines. The village people would sit in the doctor’s waiting room, pointing out to each other the multiplicity of bathrooms, wondering what a utility was and shaking their heads in astonishment at the number of noughts in the asking price. Then the Vernons had moved into the Mount. No one knew where they had come from, or what Mr Vernon did, except that he was ‘in business’. He drove off every day in his Jaguar XJS in the direction of Sheffield, sometimes staying away from home for days on end. Was he another one just pausing for a while in the Peak while he booked his ticket to Tuscany?

‘You’ll be glad of the extra cash too, though, won’t you? Just been on holiday?’ said Garnett.

‘Scotland,’ said Cooper.

‘Bloody hell. Scotland? It’s just the Peak District, but with a bit more water, isn’t it? Can’t see the point of that, myself. Me, I want a bit of sun and sand when I go on leave. Not to mention the cheap booze, eh? I like Ibiza. There’s loads of English pubs and casinos and stuff. A few bottles of sangria, a paella, and a go on the fruit machines. You can’t beat it, that’s what I say. Besides, the wife’d divorce me if I suggested anything else. She’s on about the Maldives next year. I don’t even know where it is.’

‘Somewhere east of Ibiza, I think,’ said Cooper. ‘But you’d like it.’

The line was moving forward again, and Cooper waved away a cloud of flies from his face. Sun and sand and cheap booze were far from his mind. Even during his fortnight on Skye, his thoughts had kept slipping away from the rock face, back to the promotion interviews that were coming up, now just a few days away. There would soon be a detective sergeant’s job available at E Division. DS Osborne had been on sick leave for weeks now, and it was said that he would go the usual way – early retirement on health grounds, another pension to be paid for from the creaking police authority budget. Ben Cooper thought he was the natural successor to Osborne. Ten years in the force, and five in CID, and he had more local knowledge than most of the rest of his shift put together. The sergeant’s job was what he wanted and needed. More – it was what his family wanted. Cooper thought of his mother, and the desperately hopeful look in her eye when he came home from work, the question as often unspoken as asked out loud. He thought about her many times a day, every time he saw someone ill or old. He thought of her seemingly endless pain and grief, and the one thing she thought might ease it. He ached to give her what she longed for, just this once.

The line of men were deep into the trees again now, the canopy over them muffling the noise of the police helicopter that was still moving along the valley, sweeping the woods with its thermal imaging camera. The sudden transition from glaring sun to deep shade made it difficult to make out the details of the undergrowth below the trees. In places there could have been an entire SAS platoon lying concealed in the chest-high bracken and willowherb, waiting for some bobby in blue overalls to stumble into them armed with nothing but a slug-encrusted pole.

A pheasant clattered in alarm and took off somewhere nearby. From further away, there was another sound. The trees were too thick to tell which direction it came from, or exactly how far away it was. But it was the sound of a dog, and it barked just once.

2

Charlotte Vernon had been in the same position for a quarter of an hour. Whether it was the effects of the tablets or the alcohol, or simply the frantic activity of her imagination, throughout the day she had been alternating between phases of restlessness and immobility. It was as though she managed to blank out her thoughts entirely for short periods before being overwhelmed afresh by surges of terror. The waiting had become an end in itself.

Now Charlotte stood on the terrace, leaning against the stone balustrade, watching the helicopter passing overhead. She followed the movement of the rotor blades as if she hoped to read a message in their flickering blur. On a table near her hand stood a half-drunk glass of Bacardi and an ashtray filled with damp and crushed butts, their filters stained with smears of vermilion.

She had been on the terrace all afternoon, hardly seeming to notice as the heat of the sun gradually moved away from her shoulders and dipped behind the house until she stood in shade and the stone flags around her began to whisper and contract. She had stirred only when the phone rang behind her in the house, her muscles tensing, her fingers gripping tighter on the balustrade for a few seconds each time, as Graham answered it. She would strain to catch his muttered words, then cover her ears as if she didn’t want to hear them at all.

But all the calls were enquiries from friends. Some were even business calls, which Graham dealt with in a lowered voice, glancing towards his wife’s back as he turned guiltily away. He seemed relieved to have an excuse not to look at her as she posed against the view of the Witches, her head raised to the sky like a heroine in an Arthurian romance, waiting for news of a distant battle.

After the latest call, Graham replaced the phone and turned back towards the windows.

‘That was Edward Randle from AET,’ he said. ‘He sends his thoughts. And he wanted to know whether he and Martina should still come tomorrow night.’

Graham waited for Charlotte to speak. But he could only hear the faint buzzing of the fans and the distant bark of a dog somewhere down in the village.

‘I told him of course they should come. We can’t put people off, can we? Life goes on.’

Graham wondered whether she had heard what he said. She was in some world of her own where Allied Electronics and other such trivialities didn’t exist. Graham moved closer to her, wondering whether he should offer to touch her, whether it would be what she wanted just now, or whether it would only make things worse. He couldn’t tell.

When he stepped on to the terrace, he could smell the sun oil on her body. Her bleached hair hung straight on her neck, falling slightly on to the collar of her wrap. The backs of her slim, well-tanned legs were visible to the edge of her bikini, her muscles tense and stretched. Graham felt a surge of physical desire, but tried to suppress it. Maybe tonight his wife would be restored to her usual receptive mood. Maybe tomorrow.

‘Did you hear me, Charlie?’

‘I wish we could take the phone off the hook.’

‘But then we wouldn’t hear … if there was news.’

‘When they find her, you mean.’

Charlotte’s voice was tired now, the strain of the past forty-eight hours taking its toll, though she would be reluctant to admit it.

‘They will find her, won’t they, Graham?’

‘Of course they will.’

Graham repeated the same reassurance he had been giving for two days. He put as much sincerity as he could into his voice, though he doubted his wife really believed him. He certainly didn’t believe it himself.

The helicopter started to turn, its rotors dipping and fading from sight against the hillside behind it. Charlotte looked dejected at its disappearance, as if she had failed to decipher the message because she had not tried hard enough. From the terrace, none of the houses in the village were visible. The only human habitation in view consisted of a couple of farms high on the opposite slope, their weathered stone walls blending into the hillside as if they had grown there. No wonder Charlotte hadn’t wanted the helicopter to go away. It was the only sign of life she could see from the Mount.

‘You hear of girls running off and disappearing for ever,’ she said. ‘To London. Would she go to London, Graham? How would she get there?’

‘She’s only fifteen,’ he said. ‘They would bring her back.’

‘How would she get there?’ she repeated. ‘Where would she get the money? She could have hitched, I suppose. Would she know how to do that? Why didn’t she take any clothes?’

For two days she had asked too many questions that Graham couldn’t answer. He would have liked to tell her that he was sure Laura could have got no further than Bakewell, and that the police would pick her up before the night was over. He had tried to tell her, but the words dried up in his throat.

‘Don’t you want to come in now? It’s time to eat.’

‘Not just yet,’ she said.

‘It’s starting to go dark. You’ll want to change at least.’

‘I want to be out here,’ she said.

‘Charlie –’

‘As long as they’re still looking,’ she said. ‘I want to be out here.’

A book had been turned face down on to the table. Very little of it had been read, but it didn’t need to be. Graham could see from the cover that it was the latest in a best-selling series about an American pathologist who was for ever dissecting dead bodies and catching serial killers. The illustration showed a barely identifiable part of a naked body, set against a dark background.

‘I can’t think of anywhere else that she might have gone,’ said Charlotte. ‘I’ve been trying and trying, racking my brains. But we’ve tried everywhere, haven’t we, Graham? Can you think of anywhere else?’

‘We’ve tried them all,’ said Graham.

‘There’s that girl in Marple.’

‘We’ve tried there,’ said Graham. ‘Her parents said she was in France for the summer.’

‘Oh yes, I forgot.’

‘If she’s met up with the wrong sort of people …’

‘How could she?’ said Charlotte quickly. ‘We’ve been so careful. How could she meet the wrong people?’

‘We have to face it, it does happen. Some of her friends … Even if they’re from the best families, they can go astray.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I’ve heard there are these rave things. Some of them go on all weekend, they say.’

Charlotte shuddered. ‘That means drugs, doesn’t it?’

‘We’ll have to talk to her about it seriously, when she’s back.’

After the helicopter had moved away to hover somewhere along the valley, the faint sound of voices could be heard, carried towards the house on the evening breeze. Graham and Charlotte could see no one because of the heavy tree cover, but both of them knew, without discussing it, that there were many men out there on the hillside, calling to each other, searching for their daughter.

‘Of course, there were probably friends she didn’t tell us about,’ said Graham. ‘We have to face up to that. Places she went that she didn’t want us to know about.’

Charlotte shook her head. ‘Laura didn’t keep secrets from me,’ she said. ‘From you, of course. But not from me.’

‘If you say so, Charlie.’

A small frown flickered across Charlotte’s face at his calm acceptance. ‘Is there something you know, Graham? Something that you’re not telling me?’

‘Of course not.’

He was thinking of his last conversation with Laura. It had been late on Thursday night, when she had slipped into his study and persuaded him to let her have a glass of his whisky. Her face had been flushed with some other excitement, even before the whisky had begun to take effect. She had perched on the edge of his desk and stroked his arm, smiling at him with that mature, seductive smile she had learned had such an effect on their male visitors. She had dyed her hair again, a deeper red than ever, almost violet, and her fingernails were painted a colour so dark it was practically black. Then she had talked to him, with that knowing look in her eyes and that sly wink, and told him what she wanted. The following morning, he had sacked Lee Sherratt. The second gardener they had lost that year.

‘No, of course not, Charlie.’

She accepted his word. ‘And the boy, Lee?’

Graham said nothing. He closed the abandoned novel, slipping a soft leather bookmark between the pages. He collected the book and the half-full glass of Bacardi from the table. The sun had almost gone from their part of the valley now. But the jagged shapes of the Witches were bathed in a dull red light that was streaked with black runnels where the rocky gulleys were in shadow.

‘What about him, Graham? What about the boy?’

He knew Charlotte still thought of Laura as pure and innocent. It was the way she would think of her daughter for ever. But Graham had begun to see her with different eyes. And the boy? The boy had already been punished. Punished for not dancing to the tune that Laura had played. Lee Sherratt had been too stubborn to play the game – but of course, he had been busy playing other games by then. And so Graham had sacked him. It was what Laura had wanted.

‘The police have spoken to him. He told them he hasn’t seen Laura for days.’

‘Do you believe that?’

He shrugged. ‘Who knows what to believe just now?’

‘I want to speak to him. I want to ask him myself. Make him tell the truth.’

‘I don’t think that would be a good idea, Charlie. Leave it to the police.’

‘They know about him, don’t they?’

‘Of course. They’ve got him on their records anyway. Over that stolen car.’

‘What?’

‘You remember. The car that was taken from the car park at the top of the cliff. It belonged to some German people. Laura told us about it.’

‘Did she?’ said Charlotte vaguely.

At last she allowed him to lead her back into the room, where she began to touch familiar objects – a cushion, the back of a chair cover, the piano stool, a series of gilt-framed photographs in a cabinet. She opened her handbag, touched up her lipstick and lit another cigarette.

‘Who else is supposed to be coming tomorrow night?’ she said.

‘The Wingates. Paddy and Frances. And they’re bringing some friends of theirs from Totley. Apparently, they’re building up a big computer business, installing systems in Doncaster and Rotherham. Paddy says they’ve got a really good future. They’d make an ideal account, but I need to get in quickly and make the contact.’

‘I’d better see to the food then.’

‘Good girl.’

As she turned towards Graham now, her eyes showed no sign of any tears. Graham was glad – she was not a woman given to tears, and he would not have known how to deal with it. Instead, she fiddled with the front of her wrap, letting him glimpse her brown thighs and the gentle slope of her belly above the edge of her bikini briefs.

‘You like Frances, don’t you?’ she said.

Graham grinned, recognizing the opening. ‘Not as much as I like you, Charlie.’

He took a step towards her, but she turned suddenly and picked up one of the photograph frames from the cabinet and began to stroke its edges.

‘Won’t you go and see the Sherratt boy, Graham? To help get Laura back.’

‘Leave it for now, Charlie.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the police will find her.’

‘Will they, Graham?’

The photograph frame she was holding was bare and empty. The picture had been given to the police to enable them to identify Laura when they found her. Graham took the frame from her and replaced it in the cabinet.

‘Of course they will,’ he said.

The old woman’s burst of anger was over, but her thin hands still jerked and spasmed on the floral-patterned arms of her chair. Helen watched her until she was calm, and pulled her cardigan closer round her shoulders from where it had slipped.

‘I’ll put the kettle on, Grandma.’

‘If you like.’

‘Do you want your Special Blend?’

‘The bags’ll do. But make sure you put an extra one in the pot. You know how I like it.’

Helen stood at the narrow window of the kitchen of Dial Cottage while she waited for the kettle to boil. The electrical appliances that her father had bought for his parents-in-law left hardly any room in the kitchen to turn round. There was certainly not enough space for two people between the cooker and the oversized pine table crammed in lengthwise to the sink.

The table was scattered with cooking equipment, place mats with scenes of a North Wales seaside resort, sprigs of mint and thyme tied with bits of string, a jar of marmalade, a jar filled with wooden ladles and spatulas, a potato peeler with a wooden handle, a chopping board and half an onion soaking in a bowl of water. By the back door a pair of wellington boots and a walking stick stood on the blue lino, and a dark-green waxed coat with a corduroy collar hung from the hook where Harry’s cap would normally have been. The coat had been Helen’s present to him on his seventy-fifth birthday.

‘He was never like this before,’ said her grandmother from her chair, not needing to raise her voice over the short distance to the kitchen. ‘Never this bad. Now he can’t speak without biting my head off.’

‘Have you asked him what’s wrong?’

‘Asked him? Him? I might as well talk to the wall.’

‘Perhaps he’s ill, Grandma.’

‘He had a cold the other week, I suppose.’

Helen could see that her grandmother thought that Harry was just being a bad-tempered old man, that she had done something to annoy him. But Helen’s thoughts were running on some serious illness troubling him, something he was keeping to himself, an awful secret he wouldn’t want to inflict on his wife and family.

There were so many possibilities when you were in your late seventies, when you smoked, when you had spent most of your working life in a lead mine, when you had fought your way through a vicious war. Her grandmother, Gwen, would not think of these things. She would believe that Harry had a bad cold right up to the moment they put him in the ground at St Edwin’s.

‘But if he’s ill it doesn’t stop him going off down there with Jess. It doesn’t stop him going off with those friends of his, either.’

‘No, Grandma.’

Helen put hot water into the teapot and emptied it out again, dropped three tea bags in and poured on the boiling water from the electric kettle.

While she waited for the tea to brew, she looked out of the window, across the back garden towards the valley. The garden itself was bright with beds of petunias and violets, rows of potato plants with white and yellow flowers, and canes wrapped round with runner beans. But beyond the garden, the woods that ran down the valley looked dark and brooding. Helen could see the police helicopter hovering over the tops of the trees half a mile away. They were still looking. Still hoping.

‘They’ve changed him. He thinks more of his cronies than he does of me. More than he does of his family.’

‘Granddad thinks the world of his family.’

‘They’ve changed him. That Wilford Cutts and the other one, Sam Beeley.’

‘Them? They’re just Granddad’s friends. His old workmates. They’re nothing to do with it.’

‘It’s them that’s done it.’

‘I’m sure they haven’t done anything, Grandma. They’re just his friends from Glory Stone Mine. He’s known them for years.’

‘Not like now. It was different before, when they were working. But now they’ve led him away, filled his head with thoughts.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Helen.

But she had wondered herself, sometimes, about what the three old men got up to when they were together out on the hill, or up on Wilford’s untidy smallholding with the flock of hens and the odd little collection of ageing animals. Sometimes Harry brought home a capful of speckled brown eggs from the Cuckoo Marans or a bag of potatoes from the disused paddock that he and Wilford had converted into a huge vegetable patch. At other times, the three of them just went to the pub, where Sam Beeley came into his own and bought the drinks.

‘Since he’s had no work, he’s been different,’ said Gwen. ‘All of them have. It doesn’t do for men to be at a loose end. Not men like them. The devil makes evil work.’

‘You’re talking nonsense now, Grandma.’

Helen found a carton of long-life milk in the fridge and dropped a tiny amount into a cup. Then she poured the tea, making sure it was good and strong.

Her grandmother had kept her old lino on the floor in the kitchen. She had protested so much when they had laid the new fitted carpet in the sitting room that her son-in-law, Andrew, had been forced to give in on this one point. She had said it was easy to keep clean. For Helen, looking at the blue lino now, it also seemed to be inseparable from the dark oak panelling and the bumpy walls and the whitewashed stone lintels over the doors.

‘He thinks more of them than me, anyway. That’s what I say. He’s proved it now.’

‘Let’s forget about it for a bit, Grandma. Enjoy your tea.’

‘You’re a good girl. You were always his favourite, Helen. Why don’t you talk to him?’

‘I will try,’ promised Helen.

She stood by the old woman’s armchair, looking down on her white hair, so thin she could clearly see the pink scalp. She wanted to put her arm round her grandmother’s shoulders and hug her, to tell her it would be all right. But she knew that Gwen would be embarrassed, and in any case she wasn’t at all sure that it would be all right. A sudden surge of affection and frustration made her turn away.

Then she saw her grandfather, a small figure way down at the bottom of the hillside path, just emerging from the trees at the foot of Raven’s Side. Whether it was something about the way he moved or the set of his shoulders, she couldn’t say. But she knew immediately that there was something badly wrong.

Gwen cocked her head and peered at Helen, sensing the tension in her silence.

‘What is it, dear?’

‘Nothing, Grandma.’

Helen unlatched the back door and stood on the whitewashed step. Suddenly she felt an irrational flood of memories streaming out of the old cottage behind her like coils of smoke escaping from a burning house. They were childhood memories, mostly of her grandfather – memories of him taking her by the hand as they walked on this same path to look at the fish jumping in the stream, or to pick daisies for a daisy chain; of her grandfather proudly sitting her on his knee as he showed her how he filled his pipe with tobacco and lit it with the long coloured-paper tapers. Fleeting smells flickered by her senses, passing in a second, yet each one with enough emotional power to fill her eyes with instant tears. They were the remembered smells of pipe smoke and Brylcreem and boot polish.

Harry had always seemed to be polishing his shoes. He still did. It was one of those signs that she knew her grandfather by even as he had changed over the years. Without those signs, she thought, old age might have made him unrecognizable to the child who had known the strong, indestructible man in his fifties.

It was in just the same way that, at this moment, she knew her grandfather only by his walk. It was a slow, purposeful walk, upright and solemn, the pace of a soldier at a funeral, bearing the coffin of a dead comrade.

She heard the helicopter turn again and come straight towards her. Two faces stared down at her, expressionless behind their dark glasses. She felt as though the watching policemen could see straight into her heart. Their presence was somehow personal and intimate, and yet for ever too far away.

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