Black Dog

28

Diane Fry drove up to the smallholding, this time having no trouble with the gates or the geese, which seemed to be notable by their absence. The stream of rusty water from the broken pipe had dried up, and an air of unnatural silence hung about the buildings.

Her headlights caught the white pick-up, which had been parked near a small wooden shed. She parked in front of it and got out. Its doors were unlocked and the keys were in the ignition. Then she saw Sam Beeley. He was alone, leaning against a wall by the vehicle, almost invisible in the gloom. His expression was vague and sad and full of suffering, and his eyes were fixed somewhere in the distance. He seemed so preoccupied that he hardly noticed Fry’s arrival until she was standing right in front of him.

‘On your own, Mr Beeley? Where are your friends?’

He looked at her vaguely. ‘Harry and Wilford? They’ve left me to it.’

Sam looked shockingly pale, despite the strong sun that had been baking the area for weeks. The veins showed through in his neck and along the line of his jaw amongst sparse grey stubble. His skin hung in loose folds from his cheeks and there were dark-blue shadows under his eyes.

‘Are you all right, Mr Beeley?’

‘Right as I’ll ever be.’

Fry turned and looked up towards the crags of Raven’s Side, where she had lain with Ben Cooper half an hour before, looking down on Thorpe Farm. There had been no sign of him there when she had returned from the car park up the steep path. No indication of where he had gone, no attempt to leave a message. It was typically infuriating behaviour — just what she had come to expect from him.

‘Have you seen Detective Constable Cooper tonight? You remember Ben Cooper?’

‘Eh? Sergeant Cooper’s lad? I remember him.’ A ghost of a smile touched Sam’s pale lips at the memory of the compost heap fiasco.

‘Have you seen him? Has he been here?’

Sam looked at her blankly, shaking his head in incomprehension.

‘And where have Mr Dickinson and Mr Cutts gone?’

He looked as though answering her would be too much effort. She wanted to get hold of his jacket and shake him until he responded, but thought he looked so frail that he would fall apart in her hands.

‘Mr Beeley, I need to know. Where have they gone?’

Sam rallied momentarily, as if the tone of her voice had pierced his lethargy. He moved a hand feebly, not quite completing the gesture. ‘Out on the Baulk.’

The old man sagged again. He was clutching his ivory-headed stick as if his life depended on it, and his bony hands were tense and white at the knuckles where they gripped the Alsatian’s head.

Fry thought of her first visit to the smallholding. ‘He doesn’t look like he’s got strong wrists, but it’s all in the technique,’ Wilford Cutts had said. She had seen those same hands break the neck of a large bird with one twist. She thought of the three old men, and she thought of Harry Dickinson covering up for someone involved in the death of Laura Vernon. Did it have to be family? She looked again at Sam, seeing him afresh. He looked like a defeated man; a man who had been in pain for years and was in agony right now, suffering in front of her eyes. But was his pain entirely physical?

‘Can I have a look at your stick, Mr Beeley?’

‘My stick? I’ve had it a long time.’

‘May I?’

She held out her hand, and Sam hesitantly gave her the stick. It felt heavy and solid and was well-made, so that it balanced properly and swung easily in the hand. The handle shaped like the head of an Alsatian was worn smooth and shiny by Sam Beeley’s hands. The back of the dog’s head formed a hard, rounded ball of ivory, easily capable of crushing a skull if wielded with enough force. Or, of course, with the right technique.

She examined the handle closely. There were no traces she could see. But then it could have been cleaned. And in six days of use, any visible traces of blood or tissue could easily have been rubbed off on to the parchment-thin palms of its owner’s hands. The forensics lab, though, would soon settle it one way or another.

‘I have to ask you to come with me to the station to answer some questions,’ said Fry.

Sam nodded wearily. ‘I’ll need to use my stick.’

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to manage without it for a while.’

‘I can’t walk without my stick,’ he insisted.

Sam was trembling even more than usual. He looked as though he needed an ambulance rather than a trip to the station. Fry hesitated, conscious of the mistakes that had dogged the enquiry so far. The last thing she needed was a sick old man suffering a collapse in police custody.

As her brain ticked over, she found herself looking past Sam into the doorway of the shed. The interior was pitch black, but her eye was attracted by a quiet movement in the darkness. There was something in there that was blacker than the surrounding shadows, something with eyes that turned to watch her as she brought her mobile phone from the Peugeot. She needed advice on this one. Someone else could make the decision on whether to pull an apparently helpless old man in for questioning.

She got through to the duty officer in the incident room again, giving details of her location and asking for the whereabouts of Tailby and Hitchens. But the officer had news. And what he had to tell her made her forget about Sam Beeley for now.

Fry asked a few questions and requested whatever back-up was available at this time of night. Then she ended the call and dialled again, this time trying Ben Cooper’s number. She needed to tell him this bit of news. It was something he had to know before he encountered Harry Dickinson again.

According to the duty officer, a second search had been ordered that afternoon in the area of scrubland at the back of the Vernons’ garden, this time seeking evidence of Andrew Milner’s presence in the vicinity. The search had spread, almost by accident, into the garden itself. And there, at the bottom of a well-trimmed privet hedge, Laura Vernon’s second trainer had been found late in the afternoon.

The man in the incident room was eager to talk. It was a lonely job in the evening, and nobody ever took the trouble to discuss the enquiry with him.

‘It caused a bit of excitement round here, I can tell you,’ he said with relish. ‘It went straight to the lab, and they found two clear sets of prints on the trainer. I thought Mr Tailby was going to hit the roof. Especially as the garden had been searched once already. But that’s the way it always goes, isn’t it?’

Fry held her breath, staring blindly at Sam Beeley and the shed behind him.

She heard that a fingerprint officer had worked late in the evening to lift the prints off the second trainer and compare them to those on the matching half of the pair. On the first trainer, they had found only Laura’s own prints — identified by taking fingerprints from the body — and those of Harry Dickinson, who had carried the trainer back to Dial Cottage. Now the new fingerprint report had come through, and it showed that the two sets of prints were identical. It meant that Harry Dickinson had handled both trainers. But only one of them had been found with the body. Who else could possibly have touched the other one, except Laura Vernon’s killer?

Ben Cooper’s phone rang and rang unanswered. Fry knew, of course, that he had left his phone in his car. But still she let it ring. Echoing in her mind was that one sentence he had used that had trapped her into being here tonight, in this crazy situation. ‘Are you going to let me down?’ he had said.

While she waited, biting her lip, she found her eyes growing accustomed to the darkness in the doorway behind Sam. And now she could see, all too clearly, what was in the shed.

For a while, Ben Cooper was able to keep the two figures in sight from a safe vantage point among the rocks on Raven’s Side. Gradually, he worked his way down the steep hillside, using the cover of the rocky outcrops and the first of the trees on the lower slopes. The two old men weren’t moving quickly. They looked as though they were out for a Sunday stroll, ambling along the path close together, almost shoulder to shoulder, apparently deep in conversation.

Cooper was glad of their absorption in each other as he scrambled down a stretch of open ground, stumbling on invisible rabbit holes and stubbing his toe on half-buried stones. Before he had reached ground level, Harry and Wilford had vanished around a bend in the path. He remembered a second path which ran at a diagonal across the face of the cliff and emerged on to the main path heading towards the Baulk. He found it quickly and broke into a run, lifting his feet high off the ground and letting them fall as softly as he could, afraid of unseen hazards that might trip him, but desperate to gain distance on the two old men. The surrounding trees grew tall and dense, and a thick, muffled silence gradually descended around him, cutting him off from the world that had existed higher up on the tors.

As he ran, Cooper thought of Diane Fry’s interview with Charlotte Vernon. If she really did visit the Baulk every night to contemplate the place of her daughter’s death, then Harry Dickinson would surely know it. There seemed to be very little that went on in this area that Harry wasn’t aware of. No doubt he had seen Charlotte picking her way along the path with her bunches of flowers, just as he had spotted her husband out on the Baulk. Cooper wondered what Harry’s real intention had been when he set off to try to meet Graham Vernon the night that Laura had died. And he wondered whether Harry now meant to follow up that intention with Vernon’s wife instead. There was no doubt in Cooper’s mind that danger lurked in the woods tonight.

For once, Harry was without his dog, Jess. But he was accompanied by Wilford Cutts instead. Probably there was little to choose between them for loyalty.

Cooper reached the main path, breathing hard, and turned westwards towards the Baulk. Down below him now, on his right, was the stream and the Eden Valley Trail that ran alongside it. Faintly, through the covering of trees, he could hear the whispering of the water. A barn owl called — an eerie, long-drawn-out hunting cry that echoed across the valley and was enough to make him shiver, even though he knew what it was.

He wondered what luck Diane Fry might have had with the bird-watcher, and wished that he had her alongside him now. A fox barked somewhere ahead. Perhaps even the same fox that had sunk its teeth into the cooling flesh of Laura Vernon’s thigh.

A couple of minutes passed as Cooper walked as fast as he dared, squinting ahead into the gloom, hoping he hadn’t lost the two men. But eventually, as he rounded a bend by the disintegrated remains of a stone building, he came to a sudden halt at a glimpse of movement up ahead. He stood into the side of the path, under an overhanging elder bough, and watched the old men. They were standing at a point where the path diverged. Again they were very close together, merging into one dark, indistinct figure, as if they were holding each other, embracing like lovers. Then they turned, striding down the right-hand path without looking back. The path dipped in a gentle slope into a patch of denser trees and then towards ground that grew rocky and steep and was broken into deep ravines.

Cooper had to go more slowly as he found himself walking over the rocks. By the time he reached the first ravine, the old men had vanished into the night as if they had been erased out of existence.

He stood back off the path in the trees and waited. There was nothing else he could do. He wondered what Diane Fry would have done when she found him gone. Surely she would have the sense this time to call in and get some support. She wouldn’t make the same mistake again. No way. She wouldn’t make the mistake of following him into trouble.

As soon as she entered the woods, Fry knew that it would happen again. Though she had brought a torch this time, the narrow pool of light it cast at her feet seemed only to emphasize the blackness outside its reach, to make her isolation total and threatening. From among the trees, the eager darkness had begun to sidle in towards her, oozing round her body in swift, oily movements, and pressing in close with its nauseous and suffocating familiarity.

The night was full of tiny, whispering movements. They were like the soft seething on the surface of a bowl of maggots. They made her want to scratch her skin, where the small hairs were tense and moving. Then the invisible ants began to swarm across her body, nipping and biting as they went, their thousands of tiny insect feet scuttling over her arms and legs, itching her skin and burrowing under her breasts and into the moist warmth between her thighs, until she wanted to scream with revulsion.

She needed desperately to reach out and touch something solid for reassurance, yet could not move her hand for fear of what her fingers might encounter. Somehow she managed to keep putting one foot in front of the other, automatically, like a robot programmed for a single action. Every step she took made her afraid. Every movement was like a leap into a void, a step into the midst of unseen horrors.

She knew that she wouldn’t be able to stop the shadows bringing back the memories that she had pushed deep into the recesses of her mind. They were memories that were too powerful and greedy to be buried completely, too vivid to be erased, too deeply etched into her soul to be forgotten. They merely wallowed and writhed in the depths, waiting for the chance to re-emerge.

As she walked, she turned her head from side to side, watching the dimly seen trees for movement. They were like rows of solid bodies standing threateningly around, surrounding her and closing in. She was alone among a dozen of them, two dozen, maybe more. Other bodies could be sensed, further back in the darkness, watching, laughing, waiting eagerly for what they knew would happen next. Voices murmured and coughed. ‘It’s a copper,’ the voices said. ‘She’s a copper.’

The memories churned and bubbled. There were movements that crept and rustled closer; there were brief, fragmented glimpses of figures carved into severed segments by the streetlights; the sickly reek of booze and violence. And then she seemed to hear that one particular voice — that rough, slurring Brummie voice that slithered out of the darkness. ‘How do you like this, copper?’ The same taunting laughter moving in the shadows. The same dark, menacing shapes all around, whichever way she turned. A hand in the small of her back, and a leg outstretched to trip. Then she was falling, flailing forward into the darkness. Hands grabbing her, pinching and pulling and slapping. Her arms trapped by unseen fingers that gripped her tightly, painful and shocking in their violence. Her own voice, unnaturally high-pitched and stained with terror, was trying to cry out, but failing.

Nothing could stop the flood of remembered sensations now. The smell of a sweat-soaked palm over her mouth, her head banging on the ground as she thrashed helplessly from side to side. Her clothes pulled and torn, the shock of feeling parts of her body exposed to the cruel air. ‘How do you like this, copper?’ And then came the groping and the prodding and the squeezing, and the hot, intruding fingers. And, perfectly clear on the night air, the sound of a zip. Another laugh, a mumble, an excited gasp. And finally the penetration. The ripping agony, and the scream that was smothered by the hand over her face, and the desperate fighting to force breath into her lungs. ‘How do you like this, copper? How do you like this, copper?’ Animal noises and more laughter, and a warm wetness spurting and trickling inside her before the final withdrawal. The relief of the lifting of a weight from her body, as one dark shape moved away and she thought it was over.

But then it happened again.

And again.

Blindly, she continued walking, insensible to her surroundings, all her efforts directed towards controlling the reactions of her body. She tried to focus her thoughts on Ben Cooper, somewhere ahead in the woods, unaware of the danger he was in. ‘Are you going to let me down?’ he’d said.

Finally, she found herself stepping out into a clearing, immediately feeling the difference in the ground underfoot. She became aware of a sound — a real sound, belonging to here and now, a sound that needed explanation.

Her memory was still forcing unwanted pictures in front of her eyes as she turned to identify the noise, seeking its source among the menacing shadows. She found that a large tree stood near her shoulder, tall and thickly shrouded in foliage, its crown dimly visible against the pale sky. Its leaves whispered and rustled like a vast colony of small creatures roosting directly above her head. She thought of thousands of tiny bats, scraping their thin, papery wings against their bodies as they prepared to drop in fluttering swarms on to her shoulders. There was nothing worse than something you could only hear, but not see.

There was a sudden loud creaking as the wind caught the weight of a branch, and a louder crackling among the leaves. She caught the unmistakable smell of urine and faeces, drifting closer. And then there was a heavier movement among the branches as something swung towards her, lumbering out of the dark.

Three hundred yards away, Ben Cooper had picked up the trail again as one of the old men re-appeared on the path. He heard the man coming before he saw him, could sense his breathing and hear a barely audible muttering.

After switching to the left-hand fork, the figure walked on for several hundred yards before suddenly striking off the path into the depths of the trees. Cooper found it difficult even to locate the exact spot where he had disappeared. Once in among the trees, he was lost. There was no hope of seeing anyone who might be lurking among the straggling clumps of brambles and the trunks of the old oaks and beeches that grew thickly here. Faintly, on the air, he caught a familiar tang of pipe smoke. But he finally had to admit that he had lost the old man he had been following.

Then Cooper lifted his head in despair as a high-pitched scream shattered the silence of the woods.