Black Dog

22

The three old men had met at Moorhay post office, where they had collected their pensions. The post office had been busy, not just with the regular Thursday pension queue, but with hikers emptying the cold drinks cabinet and the little freezer where the choc ices and the strawberry-flavoured iced lollies were kept. There was barely room inside the shop to manoeuvre round the displays of postcards of Ladybower Reservoir and Chatsworth House. Bulging rucksacks were piled outside while their owners flicked through the guidebooks and the sets of National Park place mats.

Soon the hikers would be moving on through the village to the tea rooms and craft centre at the Old Mill, or the picnic site at Quith Holes; then they would head for the Eden Valley Trail, aiming to reach the Limestone Way to the south or the Pennine Way to the north. Within half an hour, they would have forgotten Moorhay.

Harry Dickinson had picked a small frozen chicken out of the freezer for Gwen. It was solid and heavy in his hand, and the frost bit painfully into his palm, numbing his fingers. But queueing at the counter to pay for it, he found himself marooned in a sea of young people, who bumped against him and elbowed him carelessly in the ribs. They seemed regardless of his presence, as if he was just another obstacle that had come between their grasping hands and the next Diet Coke.

A small vein began to throb in Harry’s temple as a girl pushed in front of him in the queue. She was wearing a crop top that left her midriff bare and striped leggings that made her hips and backside look enormous. Her dyed blonde hair exploded from the top of her head like badly baled straw, and when she opened her mouth to call to her friends, he saw a silver stud thrust through her tongue.

Jostling for position, she trod hard on Harry’s toes with her Doc Marten’s, and when he looked down there were dirty scuff marks and indentations in the shiny leather of his boots. If she had apologized, he would never have said anything. But she turned away without even seeing him. She might as well have trodden on a piece of litter that she could wipe off later.

Harry tapped the girl on the shoulder, and she stared up at him incredulously. Her lip turned back in a sneer, revealing a grey wad of chewing gum squashed between her teeth. He noticed there was a stud through her bare navel that matched the one in her tongue.

‘Haven’t you been taught any manners?’ he said.

She looked at him as if he was speaking a different language.

‘What’s up with you, granddad?’

Her accent was local, and Harry thought he might actually have seen her around the village before. It made no difference.

‘If you shove in front of me and tread on my feet, you might at least apologize.’

‘I’ve as much right to be in here as you.’

‘As much. But not more. You’ll have to learn, lass.’

‘Oh, get lost,’ she said. She pushed her chewing gum forward through her teeth so that it smeared across her lips. Then she wriggled out her tongue and dragged it all back into her mouth again, staring insolently at Harry. But she quickly lost interest in him and turned away as the queue moved forward.

Harry hefted the solid weight of the frozen chicken in his left hand, staring at the back of the girl’s head. The tight breast of the chicken was smooth and hard, and coated in a thick layer of ice. He grasped the legs of the bird and let it begin to swing.

The girl screamed and cannoned forward into a youth in front of her in the queue. Everyone in the post office turned to look as she snarled and cursed at the old man. She was rubbing the place on her back where the biting cold of the chicken had touched her warm, naked flesh like a branding iron.

‘Sorry,’ said Harry.

Outside the shop, by the swinging Wall’s ice cream sign, Sam Beeley slipped on a discarded Coke can and hit the pavement with a painful thump, his ivory-headed stick clattering into the gutter. There was a flutter of consternation until two tall young men with Australian accents helped him to his feet and picked up his stick. Three girls who had leaned their hired mountain bikes against the shop window made a great fuss of asking the old man if he was all right and dusting him down, eyeing the Australians. They all circled round Sam in a kaleidoscope of colourful shirts and brown limbs, like butterflies momentarily attracted to a dry, leafless plant before passing on to seek new scents elsewhere.

Finally, they left him to Harry and Wilford, who assured them he only lived a few yards away. Though supported by his friends, Sam didn’t get very far before he had to stop and rest on a wall, gasping with the pain from his legs. He lit a cigarette and squinted at the churchyard across the road, where the gravestones gleamed white in the sunlight.

‘You’ll be carrying me over yonder soon,’ he said, without self-pity.

‘We’re all heading that way,’ said Wilford.

‘I’ll not race you. It’ll happen soon enough.’

‘You have to accept the fact,’ said Harry, ‘that when you get to our age, death is always just around the corner.’

‘Do you remember that time in the mine, when I nearly got killed,’ said Sam.

‘That was a good few years ago.’

Sam looked down at his legs. ‘Aye, but it left me a memento.’

The three men were silent, staring at the houses opposite, not seeing the cars that went past, or the young hikers who had to step off the pavement to get round them.

It had been over twenty years since the accident had happened at Glory Stone Mine. They had been in a six-foot-wide worked-out vein, nearly a hundred feet high. The face sloped upwards in a bank of calcite like scree, with a miner drilling at the top, fifty feet up, silhouetted against the speck of his light. The sloping face was dimly lit, and the air was smoky from the blasting, with the roof nothing but a dusky darkness way beyond the reach of the lights. It was a vast and misty cavern of greys and blacks, thick with the acrid stink of explosives and dust.

Sam had been the miner at the top of the face. He had been in his fifties then, an experienced man who had spent most of his working life in the mines. When his drill split the brittle rock and the face had opened under his feet, his body had been thrown instantly backwards, his arms and legs tumbling among their own thrashing shadows until he hit the foot of the slope and had been buried by an avalanche of calcite. Wilford had found Harry in the darkness, and together they had dug Sam out with their bare hands and dragged him to safety. They hadn’t realized his legs were broken until he started to scream.

‘If the pain got too much,’ said Wilford, to nobody in particular. ‘Would you think of doing away with yourself?’

Sam looked thoughtful. ‘Aye, I suppose so.’

Harry nodded. ‘If there was nothing left for you. No hope. I reckon you’d have to.’

‘Depends on what you believe in, though,’ said Wilford. ‘Doesn’t it?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Some folk don’t believe it’s right to do away with yourself.’

‘Ah, religion.’ Sam smiled.

‘Well, it’s a sin, suicide,’ said Wilford. ‘Isn’t it, Harry?’

Then Harry lit his pipe. The others waited, sensing an impending judgement or decision. They knew Harry did his best thinking when his pipe was lit.

‘It seems to me,’ he said. ‘There’s different sorts of sin. Sin isn’t the same as evil. God would forgive you a sin.’

They nodded. It sounded right and reasonable. None of them had got through almost eight decades without committing the odd sin.

‘It’d take a bit of courage, though. There aren’t any easy ways.’

‘There’s sleeping pills.’

Harry cleared his throat contemptuously. ‘That’s a woman’s way out, Sam.’

‘You could throw yourself off somewhere high. Raven’s Side cliff,’ suggested Wilford.

‘Messy. And you wouldn’t necessarily kill yourself.’

They shuddered. ‘You wouldn’t want that.’

‘I can’t stand heights anyway. They make me dizzy.’

‘That’s a point.’

‘There’s hanging,’ said Harry. ‘If you know how to tie a knot right.’

‘And you have to get the drop just right, else.’

Wilford pursed his lips, ran his fingers through his white hair. ‘Else what?’

‘You don’t die quick, you strangle yourself. Slowly.’

‘I’ve read somewhere that blokes pretend to hang themselves,’ said Sam. ‘They almost hang themselves, but not quite. For a bit of fun, like.’

‘Bloody hell, why would they do that?’

‘Sex,’ said Sam solemnly. ‘They say it gives you a bloody great hard-on.’

‘Ah. Well, that’d be a novelty, all right.’

‘You never know. It might be worth it, for once.’

‘There was a bloke in the paper,’ said Sam. ‘Seventy-four years old, he was. He had fastened his nipples and his testicles up to electrical terminals. They called it an autoerotic experiment.’

‘Aye? What happened?’

‘He had the charge too strong. It killed him. Blew his balls off, for all I know.’

‘Old age doesn’t stop you wanting it. It just stops you doing it properly,’ said Harry.

They nodded wisely, watching the three young girls from the post office cycle past, long legs whirling as their spinning spokes flickered in the sun.

‘That lass in the shop,’ said Sam. ‘The one with the big bum and the bolt through her tongue. That was Sheila Kelk’s girl, from Wye Close.’

‘Oh aye?’ said Harry, uninterested.

‘They live near the Sherratts.’

The council dustbin wagon rumbled and hissed somewhere on Howe Lane. The wheelie bins still stood on the pavement waiting for it, painted with white numbers or the names of houses. Inside the bins was the accumulated debris that could tell the whole story of people’s lives.

‘You could do it with a car,’ said Wilford. ‘They do that all the time round here. Blokes from Sheffield and that. They drive out somewhere on the hills where no one’ll find them and gas themselves with the exhaust.’

‘You’re right, Wilford. They do. Bloody nuisance, they are, littering the place.’

‘I haven’t had a car for years,’ said Sam. ‘So that’s a waste of time.’

He pushed himself to his feet, leaning painfully on his ivory-headed stick as Harry supported his elbow. They only had a few more yards to go to Sam’s house, but it might as well have been miles away.

‘But I’ve got a car,’ said Wilford.

Cooper waited until Rennie and the other DC were out of the office before he phoned Helen Milner. Despite the events of the day, his brother’s comments had been preying on his mind, and they had re-emerged as soon as he sat at his desk. He needed to know what Helen was holding back.

She sounded cautious when she answered, but surprised him by how readily she began to tell him about the parties at the Mount, as if she had already rehearsed what she would say.

‘They go to the Vernons for the food, plenty of alcohol and plenty of sex,’ she said. ‘A bit of soft drugs too, probably. There was no pretence about it. Everyone seemed to know what to expect when they went to the Mount. All except me, that is.’

‘Are we talking a bit of old-fashioned wife swapping?’

‘I guess so. Graham and Charlotte Vernon certainly seemed to swap with anyone who was available. It became their hobby, I think. Some people take up trainspotting or line dancing,’ she said sourly.

Her description of the sexual activities which the guests expected went a long way towards justifying Matt’s reference to orgies, as far as Cooper was concerned. There had been no old people at the Mount parties, only those of the Vernons’ age or younger. Graham, it seemed, chose most of the guests personally; some came by recommendation from friends. Listening to Helen’s account, though, it struck Cooper that the parties weren’t just a bit of fun for Graham Vernon. They also helped his business. All the guests were clients or potential clients, and attendance at the parties tied them together in what Vernon would no doubt have called a mutually beneficial relationship. It put a whole new slant on the idea of corporate entertainment.

‘Oh yes, it was business as well as pleasure,’ said Helen when he suggested it. ‘He probably claims back the VAT on the booze.’

‘Was Laura Vernon at these parties?’

‘Yes, but only at the beginning. They made sure they had her there on show when people arrived. But before the action started, they packed her off to the home of some pony-club friend in Edendale, where they let her stay the night. Out of sight, out of mind, as Grandma would say.’

‘We know she was sexually experienced. Do you think she might have got involved with any of her father’s friends?’

‘One of the perks for daddy’s best clients? Maybe. It sounds about right.’

Helen sounded very bitter, but it was more than just distaste at the casual treatment of a teenage girl. You didn’t have to be a police officer to know that far worse exploitation was an all too familiar story these days. Cooper thought about his nieces, Josie and Amy, and clenched his fists. He dreaded to think what he would do if anyone came near those two.

‘She enjoyed every minute of the attention while she was there,’ said Helen. ‘But my feeling was that it was mostly a performance for daddy. She was daddy’s girl, all right. Though Charlotte Vernon would tell you differently, I think. Charlotte thought Laura was as good as gold, and really believed that she had no idea what went on at those parties. I’m sure that provided an extra spice for Laura. The excitement of living dangerously, enjoying a big secret.’

Cooper wondered what she based this judgement on, but had too many other questions piling up in his mind to go down a side track.

‘Daddy’s girl?’

‘You can take that how you like. Imagine the worst, if you want. As far as I’m concerned, Graham Vernon is capable of anything.’

‘You really dislike him, don’t you?’

‘Dislike him? Hate him, you mean.’

He frowned. He thought that the word ‘hate’ didn’t sit too comfortably in Helen’s mouth.

‘And you, Helen?’ he asked cautiously. ‘How did you get involved in these parties?’

‘I was invited because I had met Graham Vernon at my parents’ house a few weeks before.’

‘I suppose he took a fancy to you.’

She sighed. ‘I can’t believe how naive I was. Dad really didn’t want me to go, but he wouldn’t say why. I thought it would be exciting, you see. A bit more glamorous than the staff room of a primary school, anyway. When I arrived it all seemed good fun at first. Everybody was very friendly. Attentive, even.’ There was a strange vibration of the phone, as if she were shuddering at the recollection. ‘I had a bit too much to drink, but everybody else was the same. I sobered up pretty quickly when Graham Vernon got me in one of the bedrooms.’

Ben Cooper thought at first he must have misheard her. Helen’s last words didn’t seem to conjure up a rational picture in his mind. The picture he had was completely wrong. Completely.

‘Hold on. Are you telling me—?’

But Helen wasn’t listening. She was absorbed in her own memories. ‘He’s a big man, you know. He was far too strong for me. Before I knew what was happening, he had pushed me down among the expensive coats on the bed, and his whole weight was on top of me so I could barely breathe. He was laughing all the time, as if it was some sort of joke that I was struggling. I can remember now the smell of the wine on his breath, the feel of his fingers digging into my arms, the sight of his face so close to mine that I had to shut my eyes...’

Cooper waited in silence. He wanted to ask her to stop now, to tell her that he had enough information, that there were times when you could know too much. But her words continued to spill down the phone line, cold and fast, like a stream loosened from its winter ice.

‘The worst thing was that somehow I couldn’t force myself to shout for help. It was because I was in his house, Ben. I was too embarrassed to cry out or scream. Too embarrassed! It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Totally pathetic. I didn’t want to make a fuss.’

Finally, there was a crack in Helen’s voice, a single, painful flaw that betrayed the truth behind the unemotional delivery. Cooper had never felt so helpless, never so lacking in the right things to say.

‘I think about all those women who have ever been raped,’ said Helen, ‘and who have then had to explain in court why they didn’t fight back or shout for help. I never understood it before that night, Ben. I understand it now.’

Cooper remembered reading a report of a court case, the trial of a notorious American serial killer who had been convicted of the brutal rape and murder of several women. Sentencing the killer to the electric chair, the judge had made a famous comment: ‘The male sexual urge has a strength out of all proportion to any useful purpose that it serves.’ But for some people, it did serve a purpose. The purpose of domination.

‘I was saved in the end, when somebody started knocking on the bedroom door. There seemed to be a group of them out there, and something was causing them great hilarity. Of course, I was convinced that it was me they were all laughing at. Stupid, isn’t it? And when Graham Vernon finally let me go, I had to walk past them downstairs as if nothing had happened. I couldn’t bear the thought of all those people looking at me, seeing the state I was in, all messed up, with my best dress crumpled and my hair all over the place. That was all I could think about at the time. But they wouldn’t have cared what I’d been doing, would they? Because they were all the same as him. Graham Vernon. Don’t ask me why I hate him, Ben.’

Cooper wished he could reach out and touch her, to reassure her that everything was OK. But maybe it wouldn’t have been the right thing to do, even if he had actually been there with her, instead of on the end of an impersonal phone line.

‘Thanks for telling me, Helen,’ he said, knowing it sounded totally inadequate.

‘As a matter of fact, it helps to tell somebody. And you’re not difficult to talk to, Ben.’

‘I’m glad.’

She paused. ‘Ben—’

‘Yes?’

‘Do you go off duty sometime?’

‘Of course. Tonight.’ He hesitated, a fateful hesitation. ‘But — well, I’ve got something that I have to do.’

‘I see.’

He hadn’t forgotten his promise to Diane Fry, and he hated to let people down. But there were times when, no matter what you did, no matter how you tried, there was always someone that you were letting down. And it was usually yourself.