Blind to the Bones (42 page)

‘There's a burnt-out house at the top of the road,' said Cooper.

‘I remember that. It was empty for years and getting derelict. It had got so bad that nobody wanted to spend money on repairing it, I suppose. The local kids broke in and were using it. Then it started getting fires. We were called out there several times. Each time, there was a bit less of the building left. The roof fell in quite early on, and it wasn't really considered dangerous any more after that. But it still got set on fire regularly. I reckon the kids were dragging bits of wood up there to burn, once all the beams and doors and window frames had gone up in smoke.'

‘Whatever happened to saving up the wood for bonfire night?' said Cooper.

‘You're joking. What century are you living in?'

‘It's what we did when I was kid. And that's only –'

‘Last century, I expect.'

‘Kids never did that where I lived,' said Cooper. ‘They used to let other folk collect wood and pile up their bonfires, then they'd sneak in and set fire to them a few days before the fifth. They thought that was much more fun than collecting their own.'

The Ranger looked at him. ‘Do you have any children of your own?'

‘No.'

‘Let me know in a few years' time, when you've managed it, and I'll come and give them a talk about fire safety.'

‘Thanks a lot.'

The Ranger looked over Cooper's shoulder and gestured at something behind him. ‘Well, look at him.'

Cooper turned and looked. It took him a moment to register what he was seeing. A small boy was walking past him, leaning forward to pull on a rope that was attached to a makeshift trolley. Its wheels rattled on the pavement as he passed. The trolley was full of sticks, perhaps a dozen of them, all a yard long and solid-looking.

‘Hold on, son,' said Cooper.

But the boy was already a few yards past him and heading down the hill towards the Quiet Shepherd. He showed no intention of stopping.

Cooper began to walk behind him in the same direction. He noticed the limp in his left leg, and felt sure this was Jake Oxley.

‘Where are you going with those sticks?'

‘To the pub,' said the boy.

‘What for?'

‘You're a copper, aren't you?'

‘Yes. What are you doing with those sticks?'

‘That's my business. It's not copper's business.'

‘It might be. Tell me, and we'll see. Where did you get the sticks from?'

The boy began to speed up as he approached the pub car park. The sticks bumped together and clattered as the trolley went over a kerb. Cooper lengthened his pace, aware of the ranger watching him.

‘Stop a minute, son. I want to ask you something else.'

‘You can't talk to me,' said the boy. ‘I'm only nine.'

‘So?'

‘It means you have to talk to my dad.'

‘And who's your dad?'

‘I don't have to tell you that. I don't have to tell you anything. I'm only nine.'

Cooper noticed that the boy's limp didn't seem to hinder him.

‘Is your name Oxley, by any chance?' he said.

‘I'll report you to the Social Services. Then you'll get in trouble. You're not allowed to talk to me, because I'm vulnerable.'

‘And you're only nine,' said Cooper.

‘Yeah.'

The boy broke into a run across the car park and vanished into a side door of the pub. Cooper wasn't going to run. He didn't want to appear to be pursuing a nine-year-old child. It never looked good.

‘With any luck, you won't make it to ten,' he said to the closed door.

Then he looked at the hill he would have to walk back up. With a sigh, Cooper sat down on the low wall around the pub car park. The parking area consisted of a wide patch of crushed stone, and large boulders had been left in position near the entrance and exit. There was even an outcrop of rock right in the middle. He couldn't figure out whether the rocks had been too big to bother moving when the car park had been created, or had been left there for picturesque effect.

Cooper noticed a building at the back of the pub. It was some kind of storage shed or garage, with wide doors that stood open at the moment. The interior looked intriguing.

He got up and strolled over towards the door, hoping no one was watching him from the windows of the pub. Inside the doors, trestles had been set up. At the moment, they supported wooden boards, much like the ones he had seen being fished out of the river a few days ago. If these were the same ones, they had been washed clean of slime and duckweed. They'd also had hundreds of nails hammered through them, so that the points protruded above the surface of the wood by a centimetre or so. Each board might have been a bed of nails for an Indian fakir, except that a layer of clay had been spread over the nails and smoothed out. A skin was starting to form on the clay.

Cooper shrugged, imagining some garden feature. Perhaps the landlord of the pub had been watching one of those gardening makeover programmes on TV.

He looked at the pub again. There was no sign of the boy with the sticks. But Cooper was sure he had been speaking to the Tiny Terror.

‘W
ell, we all need a moment's rest from our labours.'

Cooper turned to find the Reverend Derek Alton watching him. Either he had moved very quietly, or Cooper hadn't been paying attention.

‘I wasn't actually thinking of going into the pub. Not when I'm on duty.'

‘Well, I'm off duty. Besides, I have a special dispensation.'

‘Mr Alton, there was a young boy here a minute ago. Nine years old, with a slight limp.'

Alton nodded. ‘That would be little Jake Oxley. Lucas's youngest boy.'

‘I thought so. What happened to him? Did he have an accident?'

‘You mean his leg? Yes, he was knocked down in the road, right in front of Waterloo Terrace there.'

‘He was? By somebody passing through? No. I don't suppose so …'

‘It would perhaps have been better that way,' said Alton. ‘But not many people pass through here. Only those going to Shepley Head Lodge.'

‘Did one of the Deardens knock him down?'

‘Yes, it was Michael, in his four-wheel drive. It wasn't his fault, by all accounts. Jake seems to have run out of the entrance to Waterloo Terrace, right in front of him. Michael wasn't even speeding, but he couldn't stop in time. In fact, Jake was lucky – the car only caught him a glancing blow, but his leg was shattered. Because his bones are growing, they haven't healed properly, I think.'

‘The Oxleys must have been very upset.'

‘Oh, yes. But so was Michael. He was never charged with any offence, but guilt can be a terrible thing, all the same.'

Cooper looked up the road towards Shepley Head Lodge. ‘Is that why Mr Dearden tries to avoid driving through Withens?'

‘Well, wouldn't you? He has to drive past the same spot every time. And the Oxley children are always out playing by the side of the road, including Jake. Michael would rather go out of his way to avoid seeing Jake every day.'

‘Thank you, Mr Alton.'

‘Have I been of some help?'

‘Yes, I think so.'

‘I'll leave you to your work, then.'

Alton walked across the car park and went into the pub through the same side door that Jake Oxley had used. He was carrying a long bag over his shoulder, like a cricket bag or a soft case for a musical instrument of some kind.

Cooper watched him go. Maybe it was time to pay a visit to the pub. If he was lucky, he might be able fit it in after his drive into Sheffield.

‘Well? Did you find out anything from the boy?' asked the Ranger, as Cooper struggled back to the car.

‘Oh yes,' said Cooper. ‘I found out he's only nine.'

T
he house in Darlaston Road was occupied by another group of students now, of course. As far as they were concerned, Neil Granger, Alex Dearden and Debbie Stark might as well never have existed, let alone Emma Renshaw.

But Diane Fry found it helped her just to stand outside the house and look up the road towards Birmingham, to note that the nearest bus stop was only about fifty yards away and to imagine Emma walking along the pavement towards the stop.

Emma could easily have walked that distance with her luggage. But did she? Or had Neil Granger or someone else given her a lift? How could she ever know? No witnesses to Emma's last journey had been found at the time, let alone more than two years later.

Nevertheless, Fry had to make the attempt. She and Gavin Murfin took a side of the road each and tried desperately to jog people's memories, with the help of the photographs of Emma.

‘Most of them weren't even living around here then,' said Murfin, crossing the street to speak to Fry in between houses. ‘Even those who were in the area two years ago look at me as though I'm round the twist.'

‘I know.'

Fry looked at the fifty yards of pavement between 360B Darlaston Road and the bus stop, as if it might tell her something. She found it as difficult picturing Emma here as she had in the area where the mobile phone was discovered.

‘I think Emma was picked up by someone,' she said. ‘But it had to be someone she knew. So why didn't she tell any of the others that's what she was doing, Gavin?'

Murfin shrugged. ‘Maybe the person picking her up was somebody she didn't want them to know about.'

As Fry watched, a cream-and-blue double-decker bus slowed down and stopped, blocking her view of the house completely.

‘But who?' she said.

B
en Cooper had to steer the car carefully to avoid scraping his paintwork on the boulders as he drove into the entrance of the Quiet Shepherd's car park. He was already in a bad mood.

For a start, he was convinced the antiques dealer in Crookes had simply wanted a bit of attention, and that the leads he'd offered would turn out to be useless when they were checked out. After he had finally escaped from the dealer, Cooper had realized how hungry he was. He had no idea whether the pub in Withens served food, so he had grabbed a cheese sandwich from a corner shop on his way out of Sheffield. The cheese had been greasy and unidentifiable, and it lay uncomfortably on his stomach by the time he arrived at the Quiet Shepherd.

Inside, the pub was gloomy. The lower parts of the walls were dark wood panelling, with even darker wallpaper above it in a deep, sombre blue. Black-and-white photographs hung in frames on the walls, some of them showing views of an old railway station with steam trains standing at the platforms and dark tunnel mouths visible behind them. Either Woodhead or Dunford Bridge, he supposed.

But the first thing Cooper noticed was that a lot of noise was coming from the room above the bar. An awful lot of noise. In fact, it sounded as though several people were kicking their way through the floorboards, screaming at each other while they did it. There were other noises, too, like someone smashing up wooden furniture. The lights in the middle of the bar were swinging under the vibration.

Cooper looked at the landlord behind the counter. He was polishing glasses, apparently unconcerned that his pub was being demolished over his head. Cooper thought he could detect some kind of music behind the noise, too, so perhaps he had just happened to walk in while the local thrash metal band was practising. It might explain why there was no one else in the bar.

‘We don't get much custom on a Wednesday night,' said the landlord, as if reading his mind. He put his towel down and smiled at Cooper. He had a couple of amalgam fillings on either side of his lower jaw that had gone black with age.

‘So what's going on upstairs?' said Cooper.

‘Old folk's bingo evening. They can get a bit rowdy. Some of them are terrors on those zimmer frames, you know.'

‘Right.'

‘They don't usually injure each other too much. But I'll give you a shout if I need any help chucking them out.'

The landlord began to edge away, snuffling a bit, as if to suggest that he really needed to find a man-sized tissue or he was going to do something disagreeable. Cooper listened to the noise for a while as he sipped his drink. There wasn't a great deal else to do, expect to study his own distorted reflection in the bottles hanging upside down in the optics behind the bar. There wasn't even a jukebox in here. He could see one through the other side, in the public bar. But judging by the colour of the walls in there, he knew the room would stink like a smoker's armpit.

‘Did you know a young man called Neil Granger?' said Cooper.

‘Yes, I heard about him. He used to come in here with the others.'

‘The others?'

‘His family. Friends. You know.'

‘You heard he was killed?'