Blind to the Bones (44 page)

He had no need to let his eyes get accustomed to the darkness, as it was actually less dark out in the passageway than it had been indoors. He checked the passage was clear to the left, then walked carefully towards the back garden. He could no longer hear anyone running, which meant either that they had been too quick for him and had got well away from the scene already, or that they were hiding nearby in the darkness.

In the Oxleys' yard, the fusty smell of old timber was overpowering. There were a couple of old outhouses built of the same black brick as the terrace itself. They must have been outside toilets once. Privies. These things were tourist attractions in some places. There was even a book about them. But Cooper was sure that the Oxleys' outhouses wouldn't feature in any book. If a writer had ever dared to venture into the yard behind Waterloo Terrace to get a glimpse of them, he was probably even now lying dead and mouldering behind the sagging wooden door with a broken hinge on the end privy.

A ragged black-and-white cat was patrolling the stacks of pallets. As Cooper watched, it slithered slowly into the darkness in the middle of one of the stacks, vanishing bit by bit until only the white tip of its tail could be seen, twitching slowly. Then even the tail disappeared. There must be at least mice living under there, maybe rats. But if there were rats, what the Oxleys needed was a good terrier.

The thought made Cooper remember the dog. The one he had encountered four days previously had been a long-haired Alsatian, and it had been as silent a killer as the cat.

He stopped at the corner of the pallets and listened, trying to orientate himself. He wasn't sure how big the yard was, or even whether it ran parallel to the terrace, or at an angle. The dog had come down the passage between numbers 1 and 2, which must be towards the far end. But if he walked along the back wall of the yard, would he be getting further away from the houses, or nearer?

At the moment, there was no sound that would suggest the presence of the dog – no click of claws on concrete or of a chain rattling. The fusty smell of wood and rusted iron was too strong for him to pick up a canine scent. But he would have to watch out for a kennel or a pen of some kind when he got closer to number 2. The dog had been taught not to bark or growl before it attacked, and that had two results. It would give him no warning of an attack, but it also meant the dog could listen more acutely without the noise of its own barking to hinder it. Cooper knew that it would hear him much sooner than he heard it. There would be no contest. If the dog came for him, his only hope might be to climb the pallets and hope the stacks were more stable than they looked.

His foot nudged something heavy that made a metallic scraping sound as it moved. Cooper leaned down and felt what was on the ground. Something round and heavy, and made of steel. He moved his hand along, but had the sense of something that stretched several yards ahead of him. There were more lying next to it, too. Scaffolding pipes.

It was becoming more difficult to move around here. The ground was littered with unidentifiable objects, and the path between them wasn't clear. But up ahead, Cooper could see the outline of the flat-bed lorry the Oxleys used.

He looked towards the houses. Apart from number 7, where Mrs Wallwin lived, none of them had their curtains drawn closed on their downstairs windows. Numbers 2 and 4 had lights showing, and Cooper could see into their kitchens. Presumably, the Oxleys weren't concerned about people peering into their windows from the back. Who would be in the yard behind Waterloo Terrace at night, anyway? Nobody with any sense, thought Cooper.

Mrs Wallwin, though, had different habits. Either she had good reason to expect someone to be peering in, or she had something to hide. Wendy Tagg would say the latter. But Cooper thought he'd be surprised if Mrs Wallwin didn't get some level of harassment from the Oxley children, even if it was only banging on her windows and shouting insults. Even the youngest children would soon have picked up on the atmosphere of hostility towards her, and weren't so restrained in expressing it.

Cooper made the decision not to venture any further, but to go back down the passage or through the house to his car, where he could call in and fetch a torch. But before he could turn round, he became aware that he was seeing a movement just beyond the garden – the movement of a dark shape against the stacks of pallets in the yard and the slightly lighter tree cover on the hillside behind Withens. He watched the shape move along the fence, then stop and turn towards him.

Cautiously, Cooper felt his way towards the fence and found he could see a gap where a gate must be open. He edged sideways, manoeuvring for a better angle from where he could see the figure against the sky.

It was a person, certainly, but it seemed unnaturally tall. Scott Oxley was tall – but not that tall. There were other things wrong, too – the silhouette didn't quite gel with what a human outline should look like. Cooper was squinting to try to make out details of the odd shape, when he realized there was another standing within a couple of feet of it. Then a third and a fourth became visible. There was a line of them along the inside of the fence, standing among the pallets and scaffolding pipes and piles of old tyres.

There was a scratching sound and a spark of flame from a match as one of the figures lit a cigarette. Cooper saw the heads and shoulders of four people. He saw four black faces, but no eyes. Where their eyes should have been, there were only a series of metallic flashes reflecting the flame of the match before it died.

But it wasn't the sight of the reflected flames that stirred the hairs on the back of Cooper's neck. It wasn't the whiff of sulphur from the match, or the acrid taste of the cigarette smoke on the air. His overwhelming memory of the moment would be the bittersweet mingling of sweat, leather and beer. And the faint jingling of tiny bells.

A
s soon as they turned off the motorway and headed back into Derbyshire, Diane Fry and Gavin Murfin began passing through fields of oilseed rape that Fry had noticed on their way to the West Midlands. She had the window open, and the ammonia reek of the crop filled the car. She had surprised herself earlier by knowing that the yellow flowers were oilseed rape. Ben Cooper's world must be rubbing off on her.

‘Well, that was a bit of a waste of time,' said Murfin.

‘Not entirely.'

‘Eh? That Stark girl was a dead loss. She has a short-term memory problem, if you ask me.'

‘She certainly couldn't remember anything that wasn't in the West Midlands reports at the time.'

‘She remembered the Renshaws.'

‘Yes. In fact, you'd almost think she wanted to forget all about it.'

‘But Emma Renshaw was supposed to be her friend,' protested Murfin.

‘Mmm. But people deal with these things in different ways, Gavin. Maybe Debbie Stark had it right. She said she was upset for a while, but then she managed to put it behind her. Like she said, she had to move on, and get on with her life.'

‘I wouldn't forget my friends so quickly.'

‘I don't know. Old schoolfriends, old college friends – we soon lose touch with them, because it doesn't take long before we have nothing in common any more.'

‘I didn't go to college,' said Murfin.

‘You know what I mean.'

‘Yeah, I suppose so. But I've missed my tea because of her, that's all.'

Fry knew that, whatever Gavin Murfin's drawbacks, he had served in CID for years and had a lot of experience of interviews and had come across all kinds of suspects.

‘Gavin, what do
you
make of Howard Renshaw?' she said.

‘Our Howard? He's one of those people whose brain is way ahead of his mouth.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘He never uses a single word that he hasn't thought about before he says it,' said Murfin. ‘I hate that kind. Give me somebody whose mouth keeps working when their brain's stopped completely. That's the kind of person I like to interview. It gives me a chance for a kip between questions. It can be a bit wasteful of tape though, like.'

‘Ben Cooper said that he got the impression Howard was trying to sell us something all the time.'

‘You took Ben to see the Renshaws?'

‘Yes. Is that a problem, Gavin?'

‘Nope. I just thought he would have had his hands full with the Oxleys and rats, and stuff.'

‘Rats?'

‘It was nothing important. We had a look at the old railway tunnels the other day when we were down that way.'

‘Oh.'

‘Ben asked the bloke there to check out the tunnel under the air shaft where Granger's body was found.'

‘Why would he do that?'

‘He seems to have a thing about air shafts. Maybe they're phallic symbols. I reckon I'd see phallic symbols everywhere if my sex life was as bad as Ben's.'

Fry looked at Murfin. It had been a good idea to make him drive. The trip to the Black Country had been the longest uninterrupted period she had ever seen him go without eating. What's more, the withdrawal symptoms were making him unusually talkative.

‘Does Ben Cooper talk to you about his sex life?' she said.

‘Nah. But I can tell. Trouble is, he always picks the wrong ones, and then he gets let down. I mean, there was that Canadian bird –'

‘Yes, I remember that, Gavin.'

Murfin glanced at her. ‘'Course you do, that's right. But I don't think he blamed you for that, Diane. Not entirely.'

‘Thanks.'

‘You see, when something like that happens, it takes him time to get over it. He goes all funny and starts talking to himself.'

‘You're kidding.'

‘Haven't you noticed?'

‘I can't say I have.'

‘Ben's a mite over-sensitive, if you ask me. But I suppose it takes all sorts.'

‘You're getting to be a proper little psychologist, Gavin.'

‘That's me. Clement Freud.'

Fry looked at Murfin again to correct him, and noticed that he was chewing something.

‘What are you eating?'

‘Just some chocolate I had stashed away for emergencies, Diane. Do you want some?'

‘How long has it been in your pocket?'

‘A day or two.'

‘No, thanks.'

‘I need the energy for all this brain work.'

‘Particularly your psychological insights.'

‘I know about phallic symbols, anyway. The more sexually frustrated you are, the bigger the symbols you see everywhere.'

‘I'll take your word for it.'

They drove on for a while, heading towards the A6, which ran right through the heart of Derbyshire and the Peak District.

‘Those air shafts,' said Murfin. ‘How deep do they go?'

‘Two hundred feet,' said Fry.

‘Right.'

D
iane Fry had brought Emma Renshaw's diary with her, and found she couldn't leave it alone.

‘What do you think these initials mean, Gavin?' she said. ‘LDBAT.'

‘I've no idea. The Renshaws said they didn't know. Debbie Stark didn't know. And Khadi Whatsit didn't know.'

‘So they said.'

‘You don't believe anything that anybody says, do you?' said Murfin.

Fry turned over a page, then turned over some more. ‘She's repeated the same initials day after day.'

‘Perhaps they were something to do with the lectures she had to go to. Like a reminder.'

‘But why the same every day?'

‘
I
don't know.'

‘And another thing,' said Fry. ‘Emma wrote in her diary all the time. So how come her parents found it in her room at Bearwood? Why didn't Emma take it with her when she went home for the Easter holiday? Surely she didn't just forget it?'

‘Well, from what I've seen of Withens,' said Murfin, ‘it was probably because she knew nothing could happen there that would be worth writing down.'

‘Maybe.'

Fry stopped turning pages. A memory was coming back to her of another diary, one not unlike this. It had been a teenage girl's diary, though the girl had been a few years younger than Emma Renshaw. That girl had been living with foster parents in a semi-detached house in Warley. She had been an unhappy girl.

Suddenly, the letters made sense. It was almost as if Emma had spoken the words to her. There was no room for doubt in Fry's mind.

‘Life Didn't Begin Again Today,' she said.

Murfin stared at her. ‘What did you say?'

‘LDBAT. It means Life Didn't Begin Again Today.'

‘How do you know that?'

‘I just do, OK?'

‘But –'

‘Gavin, trust me for once, will you? She's written it in her diary day after day. She didn't need to spell it out, because she knew exactly what the letters stood for. It's on page after page. It becomes a kind of mantra. Life Didn't Begin Again Today. Life Didn't Begin Again Today.'