Blind to the Bones (10 page)

‘I understand.'

Cooper looked at the flourishing undergrowth all around them in the churchyard. There ought to be flower borders under the church walls on either side of the porch, but instead the soil was hidden under elder saplings and clumps of ladies' bedstraw. Later in the year, there would be a good crop of blackberries from the brambles covering the vestry. And it wasn't even the beginning of May. At this rate, the church would have vanished completely by July.

Alton followed his gaze, and sighed again.

‘Are the words “losing battle” hovering on your lips?' he said.

‘Something like that,' said Cooper. ‘Or is it “Fight the good fight with all thy might”?'

Alton intoned: ‘“Lay hold on life, and it shall be; Thy joy and crown eternally.”' He swung the scythe as he sang, and Cooper warily took a pace back. He saw that Alton had unintentionally beheaded a clump of dandelions. Their yellow petals fell at Cooper's feet, like tiny shards of spring sun.

The vicar seemed to see the petals, too. ‘Fight the good fight,' he said. ‘The darkness and the
light
.'

W
hile PC Udall went to call in to see if the suspects were ready for interviewing, Ben Cooper tried to identify Waterloo Terrace, where the Oxley family lived.

There weren't many places to choose from. Apart from the church, the pub, and the farms, there were a few detached homes and a little crescent of bungalows. But beyond the car park and below the road, Cooper could see a roofline and a series of brick chimney pots, just visible behind a thick screen of sycamores and chestnut trees. He began to wander towards it, intending only to take a look at the place.

Without the presence of any troublesome youngsters, Withens seemed eerily silent. There was no traffic on the road through the village, and it was protected from the noise of the A628 by the black humps of the peat moors in between. Cooper could hear only two sounds. One was the harsh cacophony of calls from a flock of rooks somewhere in the trees below the road. The other was the equally harsh, but higher-pitched, voice of a petrol-driven chainsaw.

To get to the houses that he could see, he had to pass the entrance to one of the farms. He paused at the farm gate and looked down through a jumble of buildings. Near the gate was an ancient stone barn with narrow, unglazed windows like arrow slits. Further from the road, the buildings were more recent, and a tractor was parked in the space between them. Cooper found he was looking downhill through a tunnel of buildings to a spectacular view of heather-covered slopes in the distance. The dark mass of Bleaklow lay directly across the valley.

He moved on a few yards, sticking to the grass verge because there were no pavements and the edges of the road were starting to crumble. There were streams of small stones at the roadside that had been swept down by the water running off the hills. Here and there, scraps of black plastic from torn silage bags lay like tattered oil slicks on the verges.

In Withens, water seemed to run wherever it chose. At this moment, it was running directly into the entrance to Waterloo Terrace. Because the terrace was on the downhill side of the road, the water was draining towards it in large quantities. And it had been doing so for some time, judging by the holes scoured in the surface of the track leading down to the terrace. Cooper had to step over vast, muddy puddles to reach the safety of drier ground.

In the wide entrance, there were gate posts, but no gate hung between them. Ceramic drainage pipes had been stacked in neat, geometric shapes nearby, so perhaps someone was thinking of putting proper drainage in one day. Horseshoes had been turned upside down and nailed to the gate posts – they were ready to catch luck or trap the Devil, whichever folklore you chose to believe.

There was nothing about Waterloo Terrace that resembled the romantic idea of a holiday cottage in the Peak District. There were no mullioned windows, no rose-filled front gardens, no honeysuckle growing on the walls. The eight houses were built of black brick that had weathered badly. It had become discoloured and was beginning to crumble at the exposed edges. Between each pair of houses, Cooper could see the arched mouth of a narrow passageway that ran towards the back of the terrace. The passages were completely enclosed and must run underneath the front bedrooms.

He stood where he could see into one of the passageways, and he could make out no light at the end of the brick tunnel. The passage seemed to turn a sharp corner at the far end, maybe providing access to a back yard, and all he could see was a blank wall. The builders hadn't thought to install lights in these passages, either.

There was a sudden crack like a gunshot in the air above the rooftops. But it was only a couple of wood pigeons taking off, their wings clapping loudly as they accelerated and performed a circuit of the houses.

Waterloo Terrace puzzled Cooper. It stuck out like a sore thumb in this area, where all the buildings were built in the traditional style, from local stone. Gritstone was so plentiful on the hills all around here that it was difficult to imagine why anyone should have decided to use brick. And black brick at that.

In front of the row of houses there was a long stretch of garden that had been converted to growing vegetables at some time. But the effort had been abandoned, and weeds had been allowed to take over where the earth had been disturbed. There were a few sickly cabbages gradually being smothered by thistles and couch grass. Cooper wasn't surprised by that. Withens was surely one of those places where the wind was strong enough to blow cabbages clean out of the ground – and not just during the winter, either.

Only in one part of the garden had the weeds been held at bay – and that was because black plastic sheeting had been laid over the earth. It was held down by stones and a variety of rusted metal objects that looked as though they had been lying around somewhere waiting for a useful purpose to be found for them. The plastic had torn in a few places, and strips of it flapped lazily in the breeze. The soil under there would be warm and weed-free, and full of worms and insects. But would anything actually be growing?

Across the track from the terrace stood a row of brick privies, with bright blue doors and sloping roofs of stone tiles overgrown with grass and moss. The iron hinges of the doors had been replaced several times, leaving their marks in the paintwork. And now the old privies were padlocked and unused.

Cooper walked on a bit further. The track felt gritty underfoot. The water running down it towards the road had washed away whatever surface had been there originally, leaving a wide channel between banks of grass splashed with dirty water. The wheel ruts of some heavy vehicle had worn through the remaining layer of grit in places to expose the hardcore underneath. Some of it was broken black bricks – presumably what was left over after Waterloo Terrace had been built, or perhaps the remains of some other buildings that had been demolished.

The rookery he had heard was in the chestnuts beyond the track. The birds were setting up a noisy accompaniment to his progress along the front gates of the terrace gardens. The overgrown gardens looked damper than they should have been, even after the morning's showers. In fact, they looked impossibly wet – the peaty soil was waterlogged and washed away in places. No wonder the cabbages weren't flourishing. Rice might have been a better crop to plant here. Presumably the water cascading off the hillsides ran straight through the gardens, too.

Cooper must have been tired, or lulled into inattention by the silence. He had lost awareness of his surroundings, and was taken completely by surprise when he heard the voice.

‘Don't come any further, or you'll regret it.'

D
iane Fry and Gavin Murfin had arrived outside a modern office building made of steel, concrete blocks and aluminium cladding. It stood in the middle of a business park on the southern outskirts of Edendale, constructed on what had once been the flood plain of the River Eden.

‘This is it,' said Murfin. ‘Eden Valley Software Solutions. Have you seen all that smoked glass and fancy furniture? It looks like a brothel.'

‘You must know some high-class brothels in Edendale,' said Fry.

‘OK. A hairdresser's, then.'

As Murfin got out of the car, Fry glanced suspiciously at a paper bag he had left on the ledge over the fascia.

‘What's in the bag, Gavin?' she said.

‘Don't worry. It's for later,' he said.

‘Much later, I hope.'

Fry had taken her Peugeot to be valeted only two days before, and it was largely because she could no longer stand the debris left by Gavin Murfin when he had been a passenger. There had been crumbs and sticky traces of all kinds ground into her carpet and upholstery. In fact, the man at the valeting company had asked her how many children she had. He had imagined her to be a mum who got lumbered with a car full of whining toddlers on the nursery school run every day. It had been embarrassing, and it was Murfin's fault.

As soon as they announced themselves at Eden Valley Software Solutions, Alex Dearden emerged from a corridor to meet them in the reception area. He was wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt with a designer logo on it that was so small Fry would have had to rest her nose on his left nipple to read it. Dearden's face was slim and fine-boned, but his looks were spoiled by two little pouches at the sides of his mouth, which made him look a bit like an angry hamster. His beard might have disguised the effect, except that current fashion dictated he could only have a goatee.

‘You have to sign in and get ID badges,' said Dearden. ‘Sorry about that. Security, you know.'

‘That's quite all right, sir,' said Fry. ‘We're lucky that you're open at all on a Saturday.'

‘Oh, it's seven days a week for some of us here at the moment.'

When they had signed in, Dearden went to a solid-looking door and stood with his back carefully turned towards them as he keyed numbers into a keypad. The door clicked, and he pulled it open. A burst of noise came down the corridor – voices talking and laughing, someone shouting, a printer humming.

‘It's just like going into our custody suite back at the station,' said Murfin. ‘I guess they don't want
your
inmates escaping and running amok on the streets either?'

Dearden laughed politely. ‘Actually, we're thinking of switching over to fingerprint-recognition technology,' he said. ‘Much more secure. Code numbers are too easy to get hold of.'

‘Absolutely. We can't fault you for your security measures.'

‘You have to be careful,' said Dearden. ‘There's a lot of crime about.'

‘Have you ever had any problem with break-ins here?'

‘Actually, no. We had a bit of vandalism a while ago. Somebody broke the window in the front of reception. We've had reinforced glass put in since then. They scrawled graffiti on the outside wall, too. Something about Manchester United FC, all spelled wrong.'

‘That doesn't sound like Edendale's gang of notorious computer software thieves, anyway.'

Dearden stopped. ‘My God, who are
they
?'

‘Just joking,' said Fry. But she saw that Dearden wasn't amused.

‘There's an awful lot of money tied up in what we're developing here,' he said. ‘Unbelievable amounts of money. There's no way of calculating how much.'

‘I'm sorry, sir.'

‘You don't appreciate what we're developing here. It's really ground-breaking stuff. If we roll some of these programs out for all platforms –'

‘There's no need to explain,' said Fry. ‘That wasn't what we came about.'

But Dearden wanted to explain. Or at least, he wanted to talk about a subject that had nothing to do with a visit by the police.

‘We've actually used top consultant psychologists in the development of this concept,' said Dearden. ‘That's how serious we are about it.'

‘Mmm.'

Dearden had led them down the corridor and into a small conference room, where there was a long table, a flipchart on a stand, and a projection screen against the end wall. It looked like a million other meeting rooms that Fry had been in for briefings and training sessions. She looked around for an overhead projector to go with the screen. But of course presentations here would be done in PowerPoint from someone's laptop.

To her surprise, Alex Dearden sat at the head of the table as if he were about to chair a meeting. Fry had expected to be facing him across the table. This way suited her, though. It meant she and Murfin could be on either side of him. Dearden couldn't concentrate on both of them at once.

‘It's about Emma Renshaw,' said Fry, taking a chair.

‘Emma? But that's a long time ago,' said Dearden. ‘It was all dealt with a long time ago.'

‘It wasn't exactly dealt with, sir. Emma has never been found.'

‘Of course, I know that. And it's been very distressing for all of us who knew her.'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘But, I mean, I told the police everything I knew at the time, which wasn't very much. It was all gone through over and over, though it didn't do any good. Tragic though it is for her family, I think there comes a point when we have to put these things behind us and move on, don't you?'