Black Dog

The two men were through the outside door and at the top of the mortuary steps when Tailby spoke again. To their right, through a screen of dark conifers, they could see the lighted windows of the medical wards of Edendale General Hospital, a series of modern two-storey brick buildings added to the rambling Victorian original. The lights looked cheerful and bright in contrast with the plain facade of the mortuary and its discreet car park.

‘Apart from the fact that he seems to have temporarily disappeared, there is no firm evidence at this stage to link Lee Sherratt with the death of your daughter,’ said the DCI reasonably.

‘That’s your job, surely, Chief Inspector. It’s up to you to find the evidence. I just hope you’re going to get on with it now.’

His voice had grown louder once they were free of the atmosphere of the mortuary. He had reverted to the brusque and impatient businessman. It had been interesting to observe the change in him in the presence of his daughter’s body. But the change had been short-lived.

‘All we know of Lee Sherratt, sir, is that he was employed by you as a gardener for the last four months. You gave him employment after he answered an advertisement in the window of Moorhay post office. Until then, he seems not to have known your family at all. His skills appear to have been of a labouring nature – digging and weeding, using a lawn mower and pushing a wheelbarrow rather than anything requiring horticultural expertise, since he has absolutely no training and no experience in that field. Am I right?’

‘That’s all we wanted – a labourer. My wife has all the expertise we needed.’

‘Indeed. And though he is twenty years old, this was the first job Sherratt had ever obtained, apart from a short spell as a warehouse assistant at the Tesco supermarket here in Edendale. He likes drinking, he admits he has had several casual girlfriends, and he is known to follow the fortunes of Sheffield Wednesday FC. It hardly seems much to reach a conclusion from, sir.’

‘Look, his father’s in prison for receiving stolen goods,’ said Vernon. ‘And the boy himself was involved in stealing a tourist’s car. What do you make of that?’

‘A criminal background, eh? Then why did you employ him, Mr Vernon?’

Vernon turned away, staring at the police car waiting in the car park. ‘I wanted to give him a chance. I don’t believe young men like that should be hanging around idle with nothing to do but get into trouble. Is that so wrong? Also, he looked like a strong youth who could cope with the heavy work. All right, I admit I made a mistake, but how could I have known what he would turn out to be?’

‘His mother says he’s just an ordinary young man who likes girls and beer and football.’

‘Crap!’ said Vernon. ‘Look a bit deeper, Chief Inspector. You’ll find Sherratt is a violent yob who was obsessed with my daughter. I warned him off, I sacked him. And a few days later she’s found attacked and murdered. Who else are you going to suspect?’

Vernon stalked off and got into the car that was waiting to take him home to Moorhay. But Stewart Tailby stood thoughtfully for a moment on the mortuary steps, considering the last question. On reflection, he was glad that Vernon hadn’t waited to be given the answer.

Diane Fry had got a lift back into Edendale with two traffic officers. She had been sent off duty for the night, while DCI Tailby himself had made the journey up to the Mount to ask the Vernons to identify the body.

As she sat behind the traffic men rustling in their yellow fluorescent jackets, she began to feel the familiar sensation of growing despondency as the tension left her and the adrenaline subsided. Very shortly she would have to walk away from the job and face up to the bleak reality of her personal life for another depressing evening.

‘Thanks, fellers!’ she called as the car dropped her in the station yard.

The driver waved a hand nonchalantly in her direction, but his partner turned to look at her as the Rover pulled away. He eyed her curiously and said something to the driver which Fry couldn’t make out. She dismissed it from her mind as not worth bothering about. She had seen female colleagues rushing like lemmings to destroy their own careers in the force because they had let totally petty incidents get out of proportion and fester in their minds.

First she walked up to the CID room. All the lights were on, and one or two of the computer screens were flickering with screen savers that looked like all the stars of the galaxy rushing past the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise. But the place was devoid of human life, not even a DC on night duty. Fry sat at her desk and wrote up her notes of the interview with Harry Dickinson. She knew that Tailby would be demanding them first thing, before the morning briefing, and she wanted them to be there for him before he had to ask. It would mean another small credit to her name – and it would also mean she would be available immediately for allocation to an enquiry team.

The report didn’t take her long. She was a competent typist, and her note-taking was accurate and legible. She hesitated for only a moment when she reached the end of the interview, but decided to include the final comment from Harry Dickinson for the sake of completeness. As she wrote that Dickinson had told DCI Tailby to ‘bugger off’, she was surprised to find herself smiling. She quickly changed the expression to a grimace, then a frown, looking round the empty office to be sure that no one was watching her. It wasn’t her style to laugh at senior officers – she had never joined in the irreverent banter and rude jokes of the canteen, either here or at West Midlands. She couldn’t understand what there was about Harry Dickinson’s comment that could have made her smile.

She printed out two copies of her notes and dropped one into the tray on DI Hitchens’s desk. Then she walked up to the incident room, where a DS and a computer operator were huddled together over a telephone and a screen full of data. They both ignored her as she cast around for the action file to insert the second copy of her report. She knew that, in the morning, when the regular day shift came on, the room would be buzzing with activity. From what she had seen of Tailby, she was sure he would be fully up to date and reminded of the details of the day by the time everyone arrived for briefing.

Then, finally, there was nothing left for her to do. She shut the incident room door quietly and walked back down through the almost empty building to the car park.

After she had deactivated the alarm on her black Peugeot, she stood for a moment, looking at the back wall of the police station. There was nothing at all to see, but for a few lighted windows, where shadowy outlines could be made out occasionally as officers went about their business. Probably some of them were resentful about being on duty when they would rather be at home with their families or out at the pub or whatever else police officers did in their free time. Fry guessed that very few of them would resent having to leave the station and go home. She started the Peugeot and drove too quickly out of the yard.

In Edendale, as in any other small town, the evening often meant almost deserted streets for long periods, interrupted by straggling groups of young people heading for the pubs between eight and nine o’clock, and the same groups, stumbling now, returning home at half past eleven or looking for buses and taxis to take them on to night clubs or parties.

Many of the youngsters who littered the streets at night were not only the worse for drink, but were also plainly underage. Diane Fry knew enough to turn a blind eye when she passed them. Every police officer would do so, unless some other offence was being committed – an assault, a breach of the peace, abusive language or indecent exposure. Underage drinking could only be tackled in the pubs themselves, and there were always more urgent things to do, always other priorities.

Today was Monday, and even the young people were thin on the ground as Fry drove down Greaves Road towards the town centre. She circled the roundabout at the end of the pedestrianized shopping area and automatically looked to her right down Clappergate. There were lights on in the windows of Boots the Chemists and McDonald’s, where three youths slouched against the black cast-iron street furniture, eating Chicken McNuggets and large fries prior to adding their cartons to the debris already littering the paving stones.

Most of the shops were shrouded in darkness, abandoning the town to the pubs and restaurants. Fry had not yet got used to the mixture of shops in Edendale. By day, there was a small baker’s shop in Clappergate with wicker baskets and an ancient delivery boy’s bicycle strung with onions and a painted milk churn, all standing outside on the pavement. A few doors down was a New Age shop rich with the smell of aromatherapy oils and scented candles and the glint of crystals. In between them lay SpecSavers and the dry cleaners and a branch of the Derbyshire Building Society.

Further along, on Hulley Road, a couple in their thirties stood looking into the darkened window of one of the estate agents near the market square. They were probably weighing up the prices of properties in Catch Wind and Pysenny Banks, the more picturesque and desirable parts of old Edendale, where the stonewalled streets were barely wide enough for a car and the river ran past front gardens filled with lobelias and lichen-covered millstones. Diane Fry wondered why the couple had chosen to visit the estate agent’s at night. Where were they going, where had they come from? What intimate plans were they making for themselves, the two of them together?

She had to stop at the lights at the far end of the square. On her right, running down the hill, were steep cobbled alleys with names like Nimble John’s Gate and Nick i’th Tor. Narrow pubs and tea rooms and craft shops filled the corners of these alleys like latecomers crowding round the edges of the main shopping area. Of course, they really were latecomers – attracted by the twentieth-century influx of tourists rather than by the traditional trade of a market town.

Fry had researched her new area, and knew that a fair share of the Peak District’s twenty-two million visitors found their way to Edendale each year, in one form or another. By day, the market square was frequently impassable because of the volume of traffic passing through or seeking parking spaces on the cobbles near the public toilets and the recycling skips.

A huge Somerfield’s lorry rolled slowly across the junction, heading for the back of the supermarket that had recently opened on Fargate, replacing a derelict cotton mill. Beyond the junction, the Castleton Road began to climb past rows of pebble-dashed semis. On either side, close-packed residential areas spiralled up the hillsides, houses lining narrow, winding roads that took sudden twists and turns to follow the humps and hollows of the underlying contours. The roads were made even narrower up there by the cars parked nose to tail at the kerb, except on the worst of the bends. The bigger houses had made room for short drives and garages, but the humbler cottages had not been built for people with cars.

Further out, the houses became newer as they got higher, though they were built of the same white stone. On the edge of town were small council estates where the streets were called ‘Closes’ and had grass verges. Finally, there was an area where the housing petered out in a scattering of smallholdings and small-scale dairy farms. In some places, it was difficult to see where town became country, with farm buildings converted into homes and mews-style developments, lying shoulder to shoulder with muddy crewyards, fields full of black and white cows and pervasive rural smells.

Eventually, the pressure for more housing would force up the price of the farmland, and the town would continue its spread. But for now, Edendale was constrained in its hollow by the barrier of hills.

Turning from Castleton Road into Grosvenor Avenue, Fry finally pulled up at the kerb outside number twelve. The house had once been solid and prosperous, just one detached Victorian villa in a tree-lined street. Its front door nestled in mock porticos, and the tiny bedsitters on the top floor were reached only by hidden servants’ staircases.

Her own flat, on the first floor, consisted of a bedroom, sitting room, bathroom with shower cubicle and a tiny kitchen area. The wallpaper was striped in a faded shade of brown, and the pattern on the carpet was a complicated swirl of washed-out blues and pinks and yellows, as if designed to hide any substance spilt on it. Judging by the background smell, there must have been many things spilt in the flat over the years that she would not have liked to name. Most of the other occupants of the house were students at the High Peak College campus on the west side of town.

Fry made herself cheese on toast and a cup of tea and took a Müller low-fat yoghurt from a fridge that smelled suspiciously of rotting fish and onions. No amount of cleaning had removed the smell, but in any case she intended to keep only a minimum amount of food in the fridge, preferring to visit the shops as often as required, glad to take any excuse to be out of the flat. There was an Asian corner shop a quarter of a mile away where the young couple behind the counter had seemed pleasant enough. A friendly greeting over the sliced bread and gold top could be welcome at times.

After her meal, she spent ten minutes going through some gentle exercises, winding down from the day as she would after a practice session at the dojo, flexing her muscles and stretching her joints and limbs. Then she showered and put on her old black silk kimono with the Chinese dragon on the back and the Yin and Yang symbols on the breast.

Tomorrow, she decided, she would make a point of getting hold of the Yellow Pages and looking up names and addresses of local martial arts centres. She would not find an instructor quite like her old shotokan master in Warley, and she would have to adapt to new techniques. But she could not let her skills go rusty. The ability to defend herself had become too important to her now. Besides, she relished the renewed feeling of confidence and power that karate had brought her. And it required total concentration. With shotokan and her job, she might never have to think about anything else.

Fry didn’t spend too much time considering the Laura Vernon killing. At present, her mind was a blank, awaiting data on which to base deductions, to make connections. She was looking forward to the morning, when she expected to be able to take in a barrage of facts that would be presented at the briefing, to see lines of enquiry open up like so many doors of opportunity.

For one brief moment, a small niggle entered her mind, a passing irritation that might have to be dealt with at some stage. It concerned DC Ben Cooper. The detective everyone loved; the man most likely to stand in her way. The picture that entered her mind was of a six-foot male with broad shoulders and perfect teeth, smiling complacently. She considered him fleetingly, then pushed him off the stage with an imaginary hand in the face. There were no obstacles that couldn’t be overcome. There were no problems, only challenges.

Finally, she switched on the television in the corner to watch a late-night film before bedtime. It was some sort of old horror film, in black and white. From her place in the old armchair, she was able to feel under the bed with one hand, her eyes on the TV. She pulled out a two-pound box of Thornton’s Continental and fed a Viennese truffle into her mouth. On the screen, a woman walking alone at night turned at the sound of following footsteps. As a dark shadow fell across her face, she began to scream and scream.

Five miles away from Grosvenor Avenue, Ben Cooper bumped his Toyota down the rough track to Bridge End Farm, twisting the wheel at the familiar points along the way to avoid the worst of the potholes. In places, the track had been repaired with compacted earth and the odd half-brick. The first heavy rain of the winter would wash it all away again when the water came rushing down from the hillside and turned the narrow track into a river.

In passing, he noticed a stretch of wall where the topping stones had fallen away and the wall was beginning to bulge outwards towards the field. He made a mental note to mention it as a job he could do for Matt on his next day off.

Cooper was consciously trying to readjust his mind to such mundane things. But his thoughts were lingering on the Laura Vernon case. It was going to be an enquiry that he would not find easy to forget. He was baffled by the old man, Harry Dickinson. He had seen many reactions among people who became accidentally involved in incidents of major crime, but he could not recall such a puzzling mixture of indifference and secret enjoyment.

Unable to find a ready explanation for the old man’s attitude, he considered the leading suspect, the missing Lee Sherratt. He did not know Lee, and had never had any dealings with him. But he did recall his father, Jackie Sherratt, a local small-time villain. He was currently serving two years in Derby for receiving, but was better known in the Edendale area as an experienced poacher.

Most of all, though, Cooper’s thoughts kept straying back to the moment he had found the body of the girl. The physical impressions had stamped themselves on his senses and would not go away. Even the evening air blowing through the open windows of the Toyota could not take away the smell of stale blood and urine that seemed to linger in the car. Even a Levellers tape on the stereo could not drown out the buzzing of the flies that had laid their eggs in Laura Vernon’s mouth, or silence the derisive cry of the ragged-winged crow that had flapped away from her face. Directly in his field of vision, as if imprinted on the inside of the windscreen, hung the images of a ravaged eye socket and the startling contrast between a strip of bleached white thigh and a thick coil of black pubic hair. Even at the moment that he had first seen the body, Cooper had registered the fact that Laura Vernon had dyed the hair on her head a rich, vermilion red.

It was not his first body by any means. But they didn’t get any better with experience. Certainly not when they were like this one. He knew that the sight would stay with him for weeks or months, until something worse came along. Maybe it would never go away at all.

Cooper also knew that he had sensed something wrong in the cottage at Moorhay where Harry and Gwen Dickinson lived. Something that the granddaughter, Helen Milner, was aware of too. It was not anything he could put his finger on; not a cold fact that he could have included in an interview report; not a logical conclusion that he could have justified in any way. There wasn’t even any firm impression in his mind that the atmosphere had anything to do with the finding of Laura Vernon’s body. But something wrong at Dial Cottage there had certainly been. He was sure he was not mistaken.

The Toyota rattled over a cattle grid and into the yard of Bridge End Farm. Its tyres splashed through trails of freshly dropped cow manure left by the herd coming down to the milking shed from their pasture and back again after afternoon milking. A group of calves destined for Bakewell Market bellowed at him from a pen in one of the buildings at the side of the yard. But he ignored them, slowing instead as he passed the tractor shed to look in at the big green John Deere and the old grey Fergie, and the row of implements lined up against the walls. There was no sign of his brother, although Matt would normally be found tinkering with a bit of machinery at this time of the evening.

When he reached the front of the house, Cooper’s heart began to sink. His two nieces, Amy and Josie, were sitting on the wall between the track and the tiny front garden. They were not playing and not talking to each other, but sat kicking their heels against the stones and stirring the dust with the toes of their trainers. They looked up as he parked the Toyota, and neither smiled a greeting. He could see that Josie, who was only six, had been crying. Her eyes were red and her nose had been running, leaving grimy tracks on her brown cheeks. A comic lay discarded on the wall, and an ice cream had melted into a raspberry-coloured puddle on the ground.

‘Hello, girls,’ he said.

‘Hi, Uncle Ben.’

Amy looked at him sadly, with big eyes that showed hurt but no real comprehension of what was hurting. She glanced apprehensively over her shoulder at the farmhouse. The front door stood open, but there was silence from within. A black and white cat emerged from the garden, walked to the doorstep and paused, sniffing the air of the hallway. Then it seemed to change its mind and trotted quickly away towards the Dutch barn.

‘Mum’s in the kitchen,’ said Amy, anticipating the question.

‘And where’s your dad?’

‘He had to go up to Burnt Wood straight after milking. To mend some gates.’

‘I see.’

Cooper smiled at the girls, but got no response. They were totally unlike the two children who would normally have come running to greet him. But he didn’t have to ask them any more questions to guess why they were so subdued.

In the big kitchen he found his sister-in-law, Kate. She was moving about from table to stove stiffly, like a woman with arthritis, or one whose limbs were badly bruised. Her short fair hair was dishevelled and the sheen of sweat on her forehead looked as though it was caused by something more than the heat of the day or the steam from a pan which was simmering on the hotplate with nothing in it. She, too, had been crying.

When she saw him, she let go of the carving knife she was carrying as if it was a relief to part with it. The kitchen normally smelled of herbs and freshly baked bread, and sometimes of garlic and olive oil. Tonight, though, it smelled of none of those. The smell was of disinfectant and several less pleasant odours that made Cooper’s stomach muscles tighten with apprehension.

‘What’s wrong, Kate?’

His sister-in-law shook her head, sagging against the pine table, weary with the effort of trying to keep up an appearance of normality for the girls. Cooper could have told her, even from his brief glimpse of them outside, that it had not worked.

‘See for yourself,’ she said. ‘I can’t bear it any more, Ben.’

He put his hand on her shoulder and saw the tears begin to squeeze from her eyes once more.

‘Leave it to me,’ he said. ‘You look after the girls.’

He went out into the passage that ran through the centre of the house and looked up the stairs. When he was a child, the passage and the stairs had been gloomy places. The walls and most of the woodwork had been covered in some sort of dark-brown varnish, and the floorboards had been painted black on either side of narrow strips of carpet. The carpet itself had long since lost its colour under a layer of dirt which no amount of cleaning could prevent from being tramped into the house by his father, his uncle, their children, three dogs, a number of cats of varying habits and even, at times, other animals that had been brought in from the fields for special attention. Now, though, things were different. There were deep-pile fitted carpets on the floor and the walls were painted white. The wood had been stripped to its original golden pine and there were mirrors and pictures to catch and emphasize what light there was from the small crescent-shaped windows in the doors at either end of the passage.

Yet he found that the stairs, light and airy and comfortable as they were, held more terrors for him now than they ever had as a child. The immediate cause of his fear lay on a step halfway up. It was a pink, furry carpet slipper, smeared with excrement.

The slipper lay on its side, shocking and obscene in its ordinariness, its gaudy colour clashing with the carpet. It turned his stomach as effectively as if it had been a freshly extracted internal organ left dripping on the stairs.

Slowly, he climbed the steps, pausing to pick up the slipper gingerly between finger and thumb as he would have done a vital piece of evidence. On the first landing, he paused outside a door, cocking his head for a moment to listen to the desperate, high-pitched whimper that came from inside. It was an inhuman noise, a mumbled keening like an animal in pain, forming no words.