Black Dog

23

The Way of the Eagle Martial Arts Centre was tucked away in the basement of a former textile warehouse in Stone Bottom, at the end of Bargate. The ground floor of the warehouse was occupied by a computer software company, and above it, on three more floors, were craft workshops, creative designers, a small-scale publisher of countryside books and an employment agency. The steps down to the dojo were always bathed in the smell of freshly baked bread from the ventilators in the back wall of the baker’s in Hollowgate.

Diane Fry followed Ben Cooper’s Toyota as it turned off Bargate and bounced down the carefully relaid stone setts between a corner pub and three-storey terraced houses whose front doors were reached by short flights of steps lined with iron railings. On the left, a steep alley ran back up towards the Market Square and Edendale’s main shopping streets.

The daytime car park for the craftspeople and office workers was closed by a barrier, but a small patch of derelict land had been partially cleared next to the old warehouse. They parked their cars in the middle of an area of mud-filled potholes fringed by broken bricks and shoulder-high thistles. There were several other vehicles there already, and the sound of dull thumps and hoarse screams filtered through the steel grilles of windows set near ground level.

The buildings were clustered so close together in Stone Bottom that they seemed grotesquely out of proportion from the ground as they leaned towards each other, dark and shadowy against the sky, set with long, blank rows of tiny windows. The slamming of their car doors echoed loudly against the walls and reverberated down the stone setts to the narrow bridge over the River Eden.

Fry collected her sports bag from her boot and joined Cooper at the door. Though the baker’s had stopped work for the evening, they could still smell the warm, yeasty scent of the bread lingering around the basement steps and in the dark corners between the buildings.

‘That’s making me feel hungry. I haven’t had anything since lunchtime, and I only managed to grab a sandwich between interviews.’

Cooper shrugged. He had been at the hospital at lunchtime and he hadn’t eaten any lunch at all. In fact, he hadn’t even thought about food. The hunger that was gnawing at his belly now wasn’t caused by the smell of baking, but by the need to prove that there was something he could do right. Something he could do better than Diane Fry.

‘What have you been doing today then, Diane?’

‘I interviewed Charlotte Vernon this morning. You wouldn’t believe that woman, Ben. She tried to put on an act for me. Wanted me to believe that she was some sort of hard-faced, sex-mad bitch who didn’t care about anything, let alone her daughter. Anybody could have seen through it. The woman is broken up inside. But why would someone put on an act like that?’

He paused, regarding Fry curiously. ‘I could think of several reasons.’

‘Such as?’

‘She may feel she has to play the part that’s expected of her. People do that all the time. They try to live up to an image they’ve created for themselves, or meet the expectations that other people have of them, as if they have no real personality of their own. Or she may have been diverting your attention from something else. On the other hand, it could have been a double-bluff. She may have been hiding the truth by pushing it in your face so hard that you would refuse to accept it.’

‘Amazing, Ben. You make people sound really complicated. In my experience, their motivations are usually very simple and boring.’

‘Motivations like ambition and greed? The old favourites? They can certainly make people ruthless and selfish, can’t they?’

Fry bridled at his tone of voice, though she didn’t know what he was getting at. ‘And sex, of course,’ she said.

‘Oh yes, let’s not forget sex.’ Cooper collected two locker keys and signed Fry into the visitors’ book, stabbing the page with the point of the pen. ‘But sex isn’t so simple either, is it?’

‘For some of us it’s very simple, I can assure you. But not for the Vernons and Milners, apparently.’

Cooper paused to greet another dojo member passing through towards the changing rooms. He was a tall young man, a fellow brown-belt student. All the students and instructors here knew Ben Cooper — he often thought of them as a second family, united by a common attitude and purpose. The chief instructor, the sensei, was the closest thing he had to a father now.

‘Why do you include the Milners?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes. Charlotte Vernon named Andrew Milner as one of her many lovers. He and his wife have denied it. But his daughter had some very interesting things to say. Did you know Simeon Holmes is her cousin?’

‘You’ve talked to Helen Milner today?’

‘That’s right. What’s the matter?’

Cooper had his mobile phone in his bag, since it wasn’t safe to leave it in the car. And his memory was quite good enough to remember Helen’s phone number.

‘You go ahead, Diane,’ he said. ‘I’ve told Sensei Hughes you’re coming. You go and get warmed up. I’ve got a phone call to make first. I may be a few minutes.’

Fry looked surprised. ‘Well, OK. Whatever.’

The atmosphere in the changing room was the familiar one of sweat and soap. At one side were three rows of metal lockers for members’ valuables. A thick makiwara practice punching board had been left against the wall by the door.

Cooper started to get undressed while he listened to the phone ringing. With one hand he unbuttoned his shirt and began to unroll his gi, the loose white suit that was obligatory in the training hall. It was tied up in his brown cloth belt, the mark of a successful fourth-grade student, just one level below the various tiers of dans, the black-belt masters. The ringing went on for so long that he nearly pressed the button to stop the call.

‘Hello?’

‘Helen?’

‘Ben? What a surprise — twice in one day. You only just caught me, I was about to go out.’

‘Oh. Anywhere interesting?’

She laughed. ‘Parent-Teacher Association darts night, would you believe? We take a team round local pubs and clubs to raise money for the school.’

‘I never knew you could play darts.’

‘I can’t. I think I’m supposed to be the comic turn.’

‘I won’t keep you. There’s something else I wanted to ask you. About the Vernons.’

‘Yes?’

‘These parties you described at the Mount. You said your father knew about them?’

‘Oh yes, he’d been there himself. Vernon thought it was a huge joke, inviting him and Mum along. Dad was totally shocked. He really freaked out over it when he got home. He said it was the most embarrassing night of his life, the biggest insult he could imagine, all that sort of stuff. Yes, I thought you might ask about that. It was the cause of what happened afterwards, really.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, I’m sure that was the reason Graham Vernon invited me later. It was aimed at Dad, of course. To annoy him even more. I think that was the worst thing of all. He was taunting Dad through me.’

‘But your father let you go?’

‘He didn’t dare say anything. Vernon invited me in front of him, don’t forget. Poor Dad. He was always such a coward. It may have been the biggest insult he could imagine, but still he couldn’t make a stand over it.’

‘Did you tell your father what happened when you went to the Mount?’

‘Oh yes. I told them both. I was angry, you see. So it all came out.’

‘What did he do?’

‘Do? He protested to Graham Vernon.’

‘Protested? Is that all?’

‘A mild protest, no doubt. He’s never been allowed to forget that. Not by my mother, or by my grandparents. Certainly not by Granddad, who despises him for it. He thinks Dad’s a complete wimp. So the poor man has been taunted with it ever since. I feel very sorry for him.’

‘Are you saying that he simply didn’t want to jeopardize his job by falling out with Vernon — even over something like that?’

‘Of course. You obviously don’t realize, Ben, but it’s terrible what the fear of losing a job can do to a man of that age. Dad thinks if Vernon sacks him, he’ll never work again. And that’s all he lives for, his job. None of us would want him to become another suicide statistic. It happens to so many men now. When they lose their jobs, they lose their self-respect, and there’s nothing left.’

‘And your grandfather? What did he say?’ asked Cooper. ‘He doesn’t seem to me to be the sort of man who would be content with a mild protest.’

‘No, not Granddad. He was furious. He said that he would have killed Graham Vernon, if he’d been there.’

Her voice faded then, and he could picture the sudden concern in her eyes as she remembered who she was talking to and what he was. For a few minutes, she had forgotten he was a policeman and had thought of him only as Ben Cooper, as a friend. A warm flood of gratitude ran through him.

‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘It’s just an expression. Just something that people say. It doesn’t mean they really will kill anybody.’

‘Oh no,’ said Helen faintly. ‘I think he would have done it.’

Cooper listened to Helen’s breathing at the other end of the line. The sound reminded him of the afternoon at Moorhay, when he had stood so near her in the narrow hallway of Dial Cottage. He remembered being able to feel the heat from her body, and being aware of the way her breasts lifted and moved beneath her halter top as she had turned to close the front door.

‘Apparently Cousin Simeon had been seeing Laura Vernon,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘It meant he was bound to come into the enquiry.’

‘Of course. We don’t see a lot of his parents, you know.’ Helen paused, and her tone softened and became more hesitant. ‘It was kind of you to visit Grandma yesterday, Ben. I didn’t really think you would do it. But I remember now that you were always very thoughtful. You were never quite like the other boys I knew.’

Cooper felt himself blushing. ‘To be honest, I was there looking for your grandfather.’

‘Oh. You were on duty then. She didn’t say that.’

‘Yes.’

‘Does that mean you’ve been questioning Grandma?’

‘Not... exactly.’

Helen sounded desperately disappointed in him. He cast around for something to say that would make things better. He needed to know exactly where he stood with Helen. What Matt had said had left him confused. Could there possibly be a bit of light at the end of the dark tunnel, a light that Helen could provide? He needed that gleam of hope, and he needed it now. But in his present state of mind, the subtleties of the situation were beyond his grasp. He had only two options — ring off now, or take the bull by the horns.

Before he could make the decision, the door of the changing room banged open and the tall brown-belt student came in from the hall, sweating and grinning.

‘Hey, Ben, I thought that friend of yours was just a novice. You never said she was so good.’

‘What?’

‘Sensei Hughes is very impressed.’

‘Ben — are you still there?’

‘Yeah — sorry, Helen, I’m on a mobile. Just a second.’

Cooper eased the door open and peered through the big windows into the training hall. There was some kind of distorting effect of the glass that magnified the scene in the hall, exaggerating the size of the figures moving around there. He could see Diane Fry in her gi, going through her kata sequences, the formal exercises used to limber the body up for action. She performed a downward block, the cat stance, straddle stance and rising block. Every movement was poised and perfectly balanced, the result of well-trained muscles flowing with precision and power, like an animal’s. Around her waist, she was wearing the black belt of the top-grade karatekas.

‘A fourth dan too,’ said the student over his shoulder. ‘She’s terrific, Ben. Where did you find her?’

‘Helen—’

‘Was there something else, Ben? Only I’m on my way out, remember?’

‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘if you’d like to meet up sometime, perhaps go for a drink or a meal. What do you think?’

Helen seemed to consider the suggestion, but answered with another question.

‘You think Granddad was involved in Laura Vernon’s death, don’t you?’

Cooper felt a flush of embarrassment creeping up his neck, and was glad that she couldn’t see him.

‘We have to follow up all the possibilities.’

The katas were beautiful when performed correctly. A work of art in themselves. And Fry was performing them perfectly. Knife hand, hook punch, elbow strike, finger jab. Front kick, side kick, back kick, crescent kick. Getting faster and more fluid as the body loosened up. Every turn of the wrist was tightly controlled, every jab of a sharp heel executed with flawless technique and timing. Not an animal at all. A machine.

‘But most of the other policemen would leave him alone, Ben,’ said Helen. ‘They don’t think he’s worth bothering with. The pressure to keep questioning him comes from you.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘The woman detective — she told me it was you.’

Roundhouse, spearhand, hammer strike and stamping kick. A twisting hand to the groin, a chop to the throat. Diane Fry executed practice strikes at all the vulnerable points of the body — face, neck, solar plexus, spinal column and kidneys. Every blow was fast and hard, and perfectly focused. And every one of them lethal.

‘She had no right to say that.’ No right? That was a ludicrous understatement. It was against all codes of behaviour. And she couldn’t have ruined his chances with Helen more effectively if she had been trying. But then a hard knot of anger twisted in his stomach as it occurred to him that perhaps she had been trying.

‘It’s true, though, isn’t it, Ben? I can tell it is from your voice.’

‘Helen, I just know that there’s something wrong. Something that involves your grandfather.’

‘Is there? How can you know?’

But Cooper shook his head, unable to answer. He was watching Fry, and he was flushing an even deeper red, though now the embarrassment was giving way to an intense rage.

‘Let me know when it is that you stop being a policeman, Ben,’ said Helen. ‘In the meantime, I think it would be better if I said “no” to your suggestion, don’t you? In the circumstances.’

Circumstances. What a word, he thought. So often used in a pretentious and meaningless way. Yet all of life could be reduced to that one word. Difficult circumstances. The wrong circumstances. Killed by circumstances.

Around Diane Fry an admiring half-circle of dojo members had gathered, Cooper’s fellow students, his second family. Sensei Hughes stood watching her, applauding when she had finished her kata. She bowed at the waist, stretched on her toes, breathing deeply, invigorating her muscles, letting the power spread throughout her body. She was ready for the next thing, ready for her kumite, her sparring bout. Ready to humiliate Ben Cooper in front of his friends.

The tall student looked on in amazement as Ben Cooper tossed down the phone, spun on his heel and lashed out with a clenched fist at the practice punching board, denting the soft wood. His scream was not the one taught at the Way of the Eagle dojo, but it came from the soul.

Helen had listened very carefully to Ben Cooper’s voice as he ended the call. She could tell he was trying to sound calm, like a man who hadn’t just been rejected and hurt. But he had never been able to conceal his feelings very well.

Sensing his suffering, she felt all the more sorry for having caused it. She felt sorry because of what he had said about Harry. And because she knew that Ben was right.

Fry had been chatting to Sensei Hughes for ten minutes before it occurred to her to wonder what had happened to Ben Cooper. The sensei sent one of the students to look in the changing room, but Cooper had already left.

Fry shrugged, baffled. ‘He was making a phone call, so perhaps he was called away.’

‘Something urgent. Life in the police force can be very unpredictable. We understand that,’ said Hughes.

She was getting on well with the instructors and the other students, who all wanted to know where she had been trained. The sensei offered to include her in the next grading night, when he felt she could rise to fifth dan grade. At the end of the session, she went with a group of students to the pub on the corner, the Millstone Inn, where they ate lasagne and chips and talked about competitive sport of all kinds.

Only when she had got outside in the street and paused to say goodbye on the corner of Bargate did the tall brown-belt student tap Fry on the shoulder and mention Ben Cooper’s behaviour. He was a serious-minded young man, and felt that what he had seen in the changing room demonstrated a lack of the self-discipline and the positive attitude taught by the dojo. He had known Ben for two years, and he was worried.

Suddenly Fry grew frightened. Through her mind ran a series of scenes from the last few days. There were a series of flickering images of Ben Cooper, first as the capable, self-possessed detective whose reputed success and popularity had been rammed down her throat until the sound of his name infuriated her.

But gradually the picture changed, and Cooper turned into the morose, nervous, unpredictable man who had walked out of the dojo in an angry and violent state of mind. She knew that she had played her part in his deterioration; indeed, she had to acknowledge that she had done it deliberately. She had seen him as a challenge.

‘Do you know where he might go? A pub somewhere?’

The student shrugged. ‘There are a lot of pubs he knows around Edendale. But his training’s too important to him, so he doesn’t drink a lot.’

After four or five pints, Cooper was beginning to feel that nothing mattered. After seven pints and a couple of whisky chasers, the black dogs appeared from every corner of the pub, prowling and snarling, waiting for him to turn his back on them, for the chance to pounce.

He had eaten nothing all day, and the beer sloshing in his stomach made his head dip and swell. His hands and neck were flushed with the effects of the alcohol, his hands trembled and his lips were turning numb. Now the whisky was burning its way through his system, stimulating his muscles and making him feel as though he could pull down walls.

The pub wasn’t one of his regular haunts. He couldn’t remember having been in it for years. As a result, though, he had not been recognized as he sat on his own, steadily deadening his thoughts and stupefying his feelings. Most people who saw his scowl and his unsteady hands would have left him alone with his personal black dog.

But nearby were a group of youths who were becoming rowdy and belligerent as the evening went on and they, too, became fuelled by alcohol. In one of those ways that Cooper had never understood, they had spotted him as a policeman. Their voices grew loud in derision when he failed to react to the mocking exchanges.

‘Pork on the menu tonight?’ they shouted to the bar staff. ‘Nice bit of bacon? Kill a pig for me, love.’

‘Oink, oink. I wondered what the smell was.’

‘Look at his snout in that beer.’

‘Oi, pig, got an old sow at home?’

‘Oink, oink.’

The youths thought they were hilarious. Ben Cooper had heard it all before, ever since he was a young bobby on the beat, walking round the Edendale housing estates or patrolling the town centre on a Saturday night. Never before, though, had he felt such a powerful, swelling anger that threatened to burst out of him at one more provocation. Charged up by the whisky, he felt that he would actually welcome an outburst of violence. It would be a blessed release.

The youths, getting no response to their pig jokes, had switched tactics.

‘Is that a truncheon in your pocket, or do you fancy me?’

‘Ooh, put the handcuffs on me. I’ve been a naughty boy.’

‘Nah, he’s not interested. The pigs are all too busy finding out who did for that tart at Moorhay. I don’t think.’

‘What, Laura Vernon? Her?’

One of the youths guffawed and made an obscene gesture.

‘Laura Vernon? She’d fuck with anything, that one. Young blokes, old blokes, her own dad.’

‘She’d even fuck with animals.’

They thought this was totally hilarious. ‘Yeah, even pigs. Get it? Pig?’

One youth pushed his face closer to Cooper, leaning provocatively across his glass-strewn table, leering in sweaty proximity. He had a ring through his left nostril and small, pitted scars round his mouth.

‘Don’t you get it, then? Pig?’

Then he made his mistake. His face creased and his eyes narrowed as he peered at Cooper again, recognition dawning slowly.

‘Hey, just a minute, aren’t you that Sergeant Cooper’s—’

The empty glass was in Cooper’s hand before he knew it, and he was on his feet, clutching at the youth’s shirt front with his other hand. A chair went over, and the swinging glass smashed on the edge of the table. The youth’s friends threw themselves forward, grabbing at Cooper’s arms, bringing up their knees, snarling and spitting with ferocity as they reacted like a pack to a sudden threat.

Ben Cooper faced them, boiling with rage, a lethal crown of broken glass grasped tightly in his fist.

Becky Kelk was fourteen. She lived on Wye Close, almost next door to Lee Sherratt. She went to the same school as Simeon Holmes. She had heard all about the girls that had been attacked, the one at Buxton and the one right here in Moorhay, that girl at the Mount. It had never occurred to her until now that she could be the next victim.

The policeman still guarding the murder scene found her by her screams. She was in a hollow behind a screen of brambles, not far from the path that led on to the Baulk. Her pants had been removed and her striped leggings were torn. Her crop top and bra were disturbed, and there were grass stains on her shoulders and the imprint of a tree root in the small of her back. ‘I’ve been raped,’ she said.

The PC pulled out his radio immediately, scanning the area for signs of the assailant.

‘How long since?’

‘Just now.’

‘Did you recognize him?’

‘It was the old man,’ she said.

‘What old man?’

Becky Kelk knew where the old man lived, though she didn’t know his name. She pointed unerringly up the hill towards the village, where Dial Cottage stood in the middle of its terraced row, its roof picked out by the last of the evening light.

They found Harry Dickinson waiting patiently in his front room. He was dressed in his best Sunday suit, his thin hair slicked back, a blue tie knotted carefully at his throat. The toecaps of his shoes were gleaming, and the Guardian was folded neatly on the table. He sat solemn and stiff in his hard-backed chair, his expression that of a man in a hospital waiting room, expecting the inevitable bad news.

When Gwen let the police into the front room, he showed no surprise, and no emotion. He merely knocked out his pipe and laid it on the rack on the mahogany cabinet. He picked up his cap, smoothed the knees of his trouser legs and stood up slowly.

‘You didn’t take long. I’ll give you that.’