Blind to the Bones (6 page)

‘Do you remember the case?'

‘
Everyone
remembers it. What have they been doing now?'

‘Who?'

‘The Renshaws, of course.'

‘Why should they have been doing anything?'

‘Well, they're regulars. Ask Traffic.'

‘Gavin, I don't know what you're talking about.'

‘Then you ought to pull some of the files on the Renshaws before you talk to them. It might reduce the shock, like.'

Murfin answered the phone and pulled a face at Fry.

‘Too late. They're here already.'

‘Bring them up then, Gavin. No, hold on a minute. Come here.'

Murfin stopped at Fry's desk on his way out of the CID room. She opened a drawer and pulled a Kleenex tissue out of a box. She carefully wiped the tomato sauce off his chin, screwed up the tissue and threw it in the bin.

‘OK. Now you look a bit less like an overweight vampire. You won't scare the Renshaws so much.'

‘You're kidding. It's
me
you ought to be worrying about, Diane. Those two are scarier than any vampire. They're like something straight out of
Night of the Living Dead
.'

‘You're watching the wrong videos again, Gavin. Try something a bit more sensitive.'

‘I don't do sensitive,' said Murfin, as he went to meet the Renshaws.

Fry sat down, took another breath and looked across the room. Opposite Gavin Murfin's chaotic, paper-strewn desk was another that looked empty, almost abandoned. It had been cleared by its occupant before a secondment to the Rural Crime Team. The sight of the empty desk made Fry wonder if there would come a time when there was nowhere she could go for support when she needed it.

B
y full light, black-headed gulls had been drifting up from the reservoirs in the valley, scavenging for the previous night's roadkill.

Every day, on his way into Edendale from Bridge End Farm, Ben Cooper had got used to seeing the squashed and bloodied remains of the wildlife slaughtered by traffic during the hours of darkness. Dead foxes and badgers, rabbits and pheasants, hedgehogs and stoats littered the roadway and the verges. Some of the corpses looked quite fresh until they were flattened into the tarmac by the rush of vehicles. Then their skins burst and their intestines were spread on the road, and it was impossible to tell what species they had belonged to.

It was a pretty hard lesson for the wildlife to learn. The road was part of their territory at night, attracting them because the tarmacked surface retained heat longer than the surrounding landscape. By dawn, though, the road had become a different world entirely, when it was occupied by thundering juggernauts and hurtling cars. As a battle for territory, it was the most unequal of struggles, and the fate of the victims was inevitable and predictable.

Nature never accepted defeat, though. She might lose a battle, but never the war. The gulls and the crows, and a thousand smaller scavengers, made sure the corpses didn't go to waste. Cooper had always thought it would be a good idea to have nature on your side, rather than against you.

‘And there it is,' said PC Tracy Udall. ‘Way down there is Withens.'

She passed Cooper the binoculars.

‘Not very scenic, is it?' he said.

Udall shrugged. ‘It's just Withens,' she said.

The vantage point they had found was a lay-by on an unnamed minor road off the A628 – the only place, according to PC Udall, where Withens could be seen without actually being in it.

By 6.30 in the morning, the A628 was already busy with a constant stream of lorries and cars. But, apart from the traffic, there seemed to be no signs of human life for miles along the route through the Longdendale valley. Close to where they had turned off, there had been a pull-in on the left at the top of the hill, with an orange emergency phone provided for stranded motorists. But that was about it for civilization. As if to make the point, a sign by the roadside said: ‘Sheep for seven miles'.

To the north, above Withens, Cooper could see one of the stone air shafts for the old railway tunnels standing on a rise in a fold of the hills. Around the shaft, Withens Moor seemed to be suffering badly from erosion. Where the last layer of peat had been worn away, the bedrock was bare. Ice and rain might loosen the rock eventually, so that it slipped and crashed down on to the houses in the valley or closed the road, as had happened at Castleton.

‘You're right, it's not very scenic,' said Udall. ‘It's certainly not what the tourist brochures want. There doesn't seem to be any colour, for a start.'

Cooper sighed. Back home at Bridge End Farm, in the limestone country of the White Peak, the banks of dazzling yellow gorse were in flower now. Many of the fields were a mass of white daisies or golden dandelions, and the umbrellas of wild garlic plants were spreading along the roadside verges, with the pale blue stars of forget-me-nots underfoot.

The warm, damp weather conditions of early spring had caused an explosion of plant growth and animal activity, with the landscape changing by the day. The swallows were nesting, the first cuckoo calling. And just now, there were swathes of bluebells in the broadleaf woods of the Eden Valley. The bluebells had to flower and seed before the tree canopy cast shade over the woodland floor, so every year they had a race against time to reproduce and survive. In this weather, even their colour would be changing – blue when the sky was overcast, and purple in sunlight.

But here was Withens, where the only colour visible was provided by the red canisters of propane gas against the outside walls of some of the houses. So there was no mains gas supply here. Probably it had been one of the last places to get electricity, too, despite the fact that the National Grid power cables ran right through the hillside. As for solar power – in Withens it would have been a joke in poor taste. The lie of the land meant that the sun would rise behind one hill to the south east and disappear behind another to the south west, without touching Withens. No wonder the gardens he could glimpse through the trees had yet to show signs of colour.

‘So what's the situation here?' said Cooper.

‘Well, some of the homes have been suffering from the same problems we're getting elsewhere – recurrent burglaries, often with associated criminal damage. Particularly the more isolated homes, which are less overlooked. There's one just past the village itself, which has been a particular target. Also the church, I'm afraid.'

‘Oh yes. You said the vicar had reported a break-in.'

Cooper could see the tower of the church above the trees. It seemed to stand a little away from the village, on the near side of the river. It was a short, square tower, in the Norman style, but nothing like so old as that. There were genuine Saxon and Norman towers in Derbyshire, but this wasn't one of them. He estimated its date as the middle of the nineteenth century.

Cooper turned his attention back to Withens.

‘You said
some
of the homes have been targeted. So presumably others haven't. Is there any pattern there?'

Udall hesitated. ‘Possibly.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘There's a problem family in the village, by the name of Oxley. Dad is the type who makes his living in a way you can't quite pin down. There's an extended family and loads of kids, most of them known to us – not to mention Social Services. There's one little lad who got himself excluded from his primary school for anti-social behaviour. You might have seen something about him in the newspapers. They couldn't identify him, of course, but they started to call him the “Tiny Terror”.'

‘It does ring a bell,' said Cooper.

‘I'll show you when we can get down into the village,' she said. ‘That would be the best way.'

This bit of the county was hardly accessible from anywhere else in Derbyshire. It was much easier to get to it from Sheffield on the Yorkshire side, or even from Hyde on the Manchester side. But in the 1970s, someone in an office in London had ruled that it should be in Derbyshire, so that was the way it was. Which county you lived in could make a difference of several thousand pounds to the value of your house.

Cooper looked down at the village once more, feeling that there was something he hadn't paid proper attention to. Just below the bridge near the church, the river widened into a pool where a few willows were still bare now, but would surely add a bit of greenery later in the summer. Here, the bank was full of nettles and rosebay willowherb. But there was something strange about the pool.

He focused PC Udall's binoculars on the water. But in fact, he could barely see the water, because the pool was half-f of large, flat objects. They seemed to be rectangular wooden boards of various sizes, floating on the surface, but tied to trees on the edge of the water. He could make out some lengths of blue nylon rope dipping in and out of the water. The boards looked as though they might have been there for some time, because there was duckweed clinging to them, and green mould growing in patches on many of the panels. Cooper could see no purpose for the boards at all. They weren't the usual sort of fly-tipped rubbish, either.

‘That's strange,' he said.

But Udall just shrugged. ‘Well, this
is
Withens,' she said.

T
he first building they saw by the side of the road in Withens had long since collapsed. Its walls were tumbled and its timbers blackened, as if there had been a fire a long time ago. Maybe several fires. Now, grass was growing over the stones, and it looked well beyond conversion into a holiday home. Next to the ruins was a fallen oak tree covered in thick moss, which clung to the dead bark in pale green shrouds. Where the main bough of the tree had hit the ground, it had begun to rot back slowly into the earth.

Nearby, a burnt-out car stood on the grass verge. It was something about the size of a Ford Fiesta, with its tyres gone, its windows shattered, and its paintwork scorched down to the metal. But removal of abandoned cars was a problem for the local council.

The village itself was no more than a scatter of stone houses, a pub, a church, a phone box, and a few run-down farms. The farms still had yards that opened directly on to the main street, the way it had been in most Peak District villages at one time, until the demand for residential development drove up the price of land. Then the farmers had moved out of the villages that had originally grown up around them, and the old farmyards and dairies had been swept away, to be replaced by desirable residences in attractive rural settings.

It hadn't happened in Withens. Perhaps nobody had found the village desirable enough. If the farms went out of business here – as looked more than likely from their condition – then their barns and dairies would probably remain rotting for decades before the demand for new housing reached Withens. For now, the presence of the farmyards meant that the main street was well plastered with mud that had dropped from tractor tyres and been churned by the feet of passing cattle.

On the face of the opposite hill, the air shafts looked from a distance like those Second World War gun emplacements known as ‘pill boxes'. They were round and squat, built to survive – though in this case, they had been intended to survive the weather that a century of Dark Peak winters could throw at them, rather than bombardment from the German navy.

Just past the Quiet Shepherd pub, a car park and picnic area had been created. There was a bus stop in the entrance to the car park. As Cooper parked his Toyota next to Udall's liveried Vauxhall Astra, a little red, white and blue Yorkshire Traction bus turned in from the road. Along the side of the bus was an advert for a local firm of solicitors. After making a circuit of the car park, it drove out again. There were no passengers on board, and no one waiting at the stop.

‘No problem kids hanging around at the moment,' said Cooper.

‘You're joking,' said Udall. ‘On a Saturday? It's much too early. Come back in the evening, and it'll be different.'

‘You've got two children, haven't you, Tracy?'

‘A boy and a girl. But they'd damn well better be in their rooms with their PlayStations in the evening, not hanging around on the street.'

‘Or doing their homework?'

‘Well … I don't expect them to be Einsteins.'

Then Cooper noticed something he hadn't expected. From the centre of the village, looking towards the north east, he could see a wind farm. Three rows of tall, white turbines stood on a prominent summit, in a location where they would best catch the Pennine winds. Their vast arms turned slowly in the wind, and their blades glinted as they caught a bit of sun from a break in the clouds. They looked like the advance armies of the twenty-first century, marching over the hill towards Withens.

P
hilip Granger weaved his way between lines of vehicles that had slowed to a crawl on the A628 in Tintwistle. Cars were backed up from the turning to Hadfield, and motorists were getting frustrated. Three long back limousines parked half on the pavement outside the church while they waited for a wedding weren't helping very much, either.