Black Dog

29

Dial Cottage was almost in darkness. The only light behind the curtains of the sitting room was a flickering pattern of shifting colours, a light that died against the window before it reached the garden or the blackness beyond.

Two torches shone on to the flagged path, throwing the shadows of shrub roses across the flower beds like skeletal fingers reaching towards the house. In the background was the sound of another siren approaching Moorhay from the Edendale road. The flashing blue lights of an ambulance were reflected off the night sky.

Ben Cooper and Diane Fry knew the ambulance would not be needed. Fry still had a clear picture in her mind of the old man hanging from a branch ten feet above the ground, the toes of his black work boots pointing to the earth, his head lolling to one side in a last mocking gesture. When she had moved reluctantly closer to the swinging body, she had seen that his right hand was clenched tight around an old leather dog lead.

She was aware that she had screamed when the wind had swung the dark, rustling shape towards her head and the dangling feet had bumped in her face. Then Ben Cooper had been there, cannoning into her at full tilt in answer to her cry. And somehow she had recognized him instantly, an instinctive response to his scent or the sound of his breath, so that she reacted not by attacking him as she would a stranger rushing at her from the darkness, but by clinging to him desperately, finding at last the reassuring solidity that her body craved.

Then finally, together, they had cut the body down. Cooper had climbed up to the branch and sawed through the nylon rope with his penknife. The old man had clearly been dead long before they got him to the ground. It had been a neat, clean job, with the knot of the noose tied properly and positioned below the angle of the jaw, with plenty of height to the drop. His neck had been snapped cleanly.

Ben Cooper hesitated as they reached the old wooden gate at the bottom of the garden, wondering if the same thought was in both their minds. But he didn’t want to be the first to say it.

‘So Sam Beeley had the dog,’ he said instead.

‘The Border collie, yes. Kept well out of sight in a shed at Thorpe Farm.’

They had waited only while the machinery of an official response to a sudden death had swung into action. The first area patrol car had already arrived with two uniformed officers following Fry’s call to the incident room. An ambulance had been summoned, closely followed by the police surgeon to officially certify death. They had all been obliged to step carefully round the small heap of roses and carnations tied up with ribbons, slowly fading and shrivelling on the ground, marking the spot where Laura Vernon died.

Then Cooper and Fry had walked together up the path towards Moorhay. Cooper was following the route for the third time that week. But this time he was conscious of Diane Fry close at his side, her hand unsteady now as she pointed her torch towards the row of cottages.

Cooper knew that she had taken control at some point. It had been immediately after they had discovered the body, immediately after that spontaneous embrace, when her fear had seemed to empty itself into his arms like a dam bursting, relieving some unimaginable pressure. She had naturally taken command of the scene then, issuing instructions clearly and professionally, like someone born to the role.

And then he had discovered that she had already been to Thorpe Farm and spoken to Sam Beeley, and had already found the dog. She had already phoned in to the incident room, and she had organized the back-up. Everything done just right. The credit would be all hers.

But it was almost too perfect. Almost as if the reason she had agreed to come with him tonight was not to support him, but just to seek that moment when she typed her own name on the report that cleared up the Vernon enquiry.

‘Who’s going to do it?’ she asked.

Cooper nodded, relieved that she had said it first.

‘I will, if you like.’

They walked up the path. From inside the cottage came the dull, distorted sounds of artificial laughter. Cooper knocked. It was late, and the noise sounded too loud. When Gwen Dickinson answered the door, the sound from inside the cottage increased and it became clear that she had been watching television.

‘Mrs Dickinson, when did you last see Harry?’ asked Cooper.

‘You’d better come in,’ she said.

She took them through the sitting room, where a talk show was on the TV, into the front room of the cottage. Here, in the semi-darkness, the same smell of pipe smoke lingered that Cooper had noticed in the woods.

‘I knew there was something going on,’ said Gwen.

‘We’ve found a body,’ said Cooper. ‘Hanging from a tree on the Baulk.’

‘Oh my goodness.’ Gwen clutched at her bosom as if her heart would stop with the shock. She fumbled her way to an armchair behind her and sat down heavily. She stared across the room at the opposite chair.

‘You know who it is, of course,’ said Cooper. But he wasn’t speaking to Gwen.

‘Of course I do,’ said Harry. His pipe was in his mouth and his head was resting upright on the antimacassar of his chair. But in the half-light of a single lamp in the corner, his stare was derisive. ‘He always knew to do the right thing, did Wilford.’

Jess lay at Harry’s feet, her black coat gleaming, one eye turned apprehensively towards the visitors, sensing the atmosphere.

‘Are you saying he committed suicide?’

‘Obviously,’ said Harry.

‘And why would he do that, Mr Dickinson?’

‘Because he killed that girl. The Mount lass. It was the only way out. He couldn’t have faced prison, you see. Not being kept in a cell, out of the daylight. He couldn’t have stood that.’

‘He killed Laura Vernon. And you, Mr Dickinson — you helped him all along?’

‘It’s what you do, for a friend.’

Cooper perched on the edge of a hard chair. The Labrador stirred and lifted her head to study Fry as she moved restlessly across the room. A low growl began in the dog’s throat, but Harry silenced her with a sound that was barely a hiss of breath.

‘Do you want to tell us about it?’ asked Cooper.

Harry was silent for a moment, looking from one to the other. He seemed not to be considering his words, but weighing up what effect they would have.

‘I saw Wilford on the Baulk that night, that Saturday,’ he said. ‘He was upset, and he told me what had happened. I said I would help him, of course.’

‘So you delayed things.’

‘Aye, I left it for a bit before I found the body. And I hid the other shoe thing.’

Harry looked down to the side of his chair, where the small mahogany cabinet stood. The shoe polish, cloth and brush were no longer on the floor in front of it, but had been tidied away, presumably in the little cupboard. Cooper remembered that he had thought them incongruous and untidy in that well-ordered room when he had seen them there on Wednesday. He realized they had not been put away then because there was no room in the cupboard. The space had been taken up by a size-five Reebok trainer.

‘I chucked it in the garden of the Mount on Wednesday night. It was supposed to make you think it might have been Vernon who did it himself.’ He sighed. ‘It doesn’t always work like it does on the telly, though. It took you a long time to find it. And that other lass had stuck her oar in by then.’ He laughed sardonically. ‘That was a right turn-up for the books.’

‘You mean Becky Kelk. The girl who claimed you’d attacked her.’

‘Nasty bit of work, she is. Never been taught how to behave, if you ask me. Still — I suppose I ought to look on it as a compliment.’

‘Mr Dickinson,’ said Cooper, ‘the officers who came to your house said you seemed to be expecting them.’

‘I was,’ said Harry. ‘But not about that, you understand. It had come to my mind about fingerprints. The ones on that shoe would be mine. I knew you’d be coming for me again as soon as you found it. But I didn’t expect all that other business. I thought you’d be asking about the shoe.’

‘Instead, Becky Kelk made a false allegation against you, and you were treated as a rape suspect.’

‘It was a bit of an education, all right.’

‘And you went through all that for Wilford Cutts?’ asked Fry. ‘Even though you knew he’d killed Laura Vernon?’

Harry nodded. ‘Aye, because he was a mate.’ Then he turned to stare directly at Fry. ‘Besides, the girl was evil.’

Cooper heard Harry’s voice stumble into anger when he mentioned Laura Vernon. It happened every time, in every case he had ever seen. Every time that the life of a victim was turned over, they were revealed as a person of many facets in the eyes of those who had known them. Like Charlotte Vernon, some saw glittering diamond surfaces, precious and unflawed. Others, like Harry Dickinson, saw only base lead.

Cooper became aware of Gwen in the background, a faded shape against the dark wall. Her eyes were fixed and unblinking, and her expression made him flinch with its intensity.

‘How did it happen?’ he asked Harry.

‘Wilford used to work at the Mount, you know. He created that garden up there. It was his skill. Not like young Lee Sherratt. He was never a gardener. He can hump a wheelbarrow, but he knows nothing about gardening. But Wilford found out what was going on up there, you see. Those orgies and things. He said it was wickedness, and he gave ’em a piece of his mind. So Vernon sacked him.’

‘Was this before your granddaughter went to a party there?’

‘Yes, it was,’ said Harry. He looked at Cooper closely. ‘If you know about that, lad, you’ll understand why I didn’t disagree with him about those Vernons. Did Helen tell you about that?’

‘Yes.’

‘She likes you. Will you be seeing each other? When this lot is over? You’d suit each other, I reckon.’

Fry shifted impatiently and gave Cooper a signal with her eyes. Keep quiet, it said. Don’t encourage him to wander off the subject. Obey instructions.

‘Stick to the subject of Laura Vernon, Mr Dickinson,’ she said.

‘Aye well, Wilford kept his worst words for the lass. He called her all sorts. But she was as hard-faced as they come. It only provoked her to worse. You wouldn’t believe a young lass could be as foul-mouthed as that. She mocked Wilford. She saw him as a challenge, that’s what it was. She told him he was the only man who had been to the Mount that she hadn’t had sex with. Can you believe that? A lass of fifteen?’ His eyes hardened to black buttons. ‘But that was the way she was brought up.’

They waited while he sucked violently on his pipe, watching the cloud of smoke rise and drift towards the yellowed ceiling.

‘Then she met Wilford on the Baulk that day. And she mocked him again, worse than ever. She offered herself to him there and then, pulling down her clothes, taunting him like the little whore she was. And then she reached out and touched him...’ Harry seemed to have trouble swallowing, shifting the stem of his pipe in his mouth with a faint crunch. ‘Wilford had these bursts of temper, you see. It was because of a thing that happened to him in the war. Did you know he was shot in the head? It did something to part of his brain, and now and then he got these rages. It was the right thing, you see. Wilford always did the right thing.’

‘The right thing?’ Gwen had been keeping quiet, but now she turned on her husband.

‘That’s what I said.’

‘But he killed that little girl, didn’t he? Murdered her. Beat her to death down there in the woods. How can you talk about the right thing?’

Harry was silent for several moments, staring out of the window into the darkness, as if he was seeing the hills, as if he was listening for the skylark and the distant rumble of blasting in the quarry. Perhaps he was tasting in his imagination the air and the earth, rolling on his tongue the lingering memories of an underground world, stifling and dark, where the only things you could ever trust were your own two hands and the man standing at your back.

‘It’s no good. You won’t ever understand,’ he said.

Gwen’s face crumpled into tears, and the detectives stood in the middle of the room, embarrassed.

‘What happened during the war?’ asked Cooper.

‘Was it something to do with the French tarts?’ suggested Fry, and Cooper raised his eyebrows.

‘Aye, those French girls,’ said Harry. ‘Did Sam tell you? It’s not something I’ve ever told Gwen. I never told her much about the war. Women only worry — they get everything out of proportion.’

He nodded wisely at them. ‘We were lucky, me and Sam. But Wilford wasn’t so lucky. He was always a bit too upright. Didn’t approve, you know. But there was this lad he thought the world of — he was looking after him, like. And one day they came across this French lass standing in an alley. She wasn’t very old, and she gave them the come-on, hot and hard. Wilford didn’t want to know, of course, but the lad was excited. He went into this dark little house, and Wilford had to tag along, trying to talk him out of it all the way. The lad almost changed his mind, but the lass grabbed him and stuck his hand down her drawers. Well—’

Harry sucked his pipe, remembering.

‘There were two Jerry soldiers hiding in that house, waiting for the girl to tempt a Tommy in. They bayoneted the lad. When Wilford walked through the door, the lad’s guts were already spilled on the floor. Wilford had his bren gun ready, and he shot the Jerries. Then he shot the girl. But he got a Jerry bullet lodged in his skull, and they sent him home. He was never quite right after that, the old lad. His brain never healed somehow. You could never quite tell when he’d have these rages. He had one at the Mount, by all accounts. No wonder Vernon sacked him. And sometimes he’d get them with the animals, though it broke his heart to hurt them.’

Fry drew her breath in sharply. Cooper looked at her, sharing the memory. He saw a cloud of dark feathers drifting out of a hut, settling on Wilford Cutts’s shoulders and sticking in his hair. He remembered the van driver looking wild-eyed and frightened by whatever had happened inside the hut. And he remembered the hen dangling from Wilford’s hand, its wings broken, its eyes glazed with pain, waiting to be put out of its suffering.

Harry continued, unaware of their exchange of glances. ‘When the Vernon child tormented him, he couldn’t put up with it. It reminded him of France and the lad who left his guts on the floor of that house. She was like that French tart all over again. Evil. So he picked up a stone...’ Harry’s eyes focused on Fry, as if seeing her for the first time and wondering why she was there. ‘It was just a moment’s mistake, you see. You can’t forget sixty years of friendship for that.’

‘Friendship?’

‘Aye. Friendship.’

Harry studied Diane Fry. On her first visit to the cottage, he had ignored her as completely as he had during the interviews at the police station. Now, though, he was looking at her in a different way, as if he sensed a change in her. He looked from Fry to Ben Cooper, assessing them both curiously.

‘You knew, didn’t you, lad?’

Cooper nodded. ‘It was the pigs, of course.’

Fry looked at him in amazement. ‘The ones in the compost heap? Come on. The pigs were a joke.’

‘No. It was after I had that bit of bother in the pub, you remember—? Anyway, one of those youths in the pub said something about pigs. And it stuck in my brain. Like that music you were playing in the car. Tanita Tikaram? They’re about the only two things I can remember.’

The old man was nodding at Cooper like a proud father, encouraging him to do his stuff.

‘What the hell have the pigs got to do with it?’ asked Fry.

‘Well, it suddenly dawned on me what was going on at the smallholding. They were helping Wilford get rid of all the animals. He didn’t want to leave them behind. He couldn’t just abandon them, because he cared about them too much. They were his family, if you like. Apart from the pigs, every last one of them went during the course of a week.’

‘Honestly?’

‘You remember the hens, when we went to Thorpe Farm that first time? He sold all of them. When I went up a couple of days later, the goat had gone too. And there were no geese. I should have figured it out then, but I didn’t. It was the pigs that really clinched it. You can’t just sell swill-fed pigs, you see. You’ve got to get movement permits from the Ministry of Agriculture before they can leave the premises.’

‘Because of Swine Vesicular Disease,’ put in Harry.

‘But there wasn’t time to do that, was there? He had to get rid of them quickly, and there was only one way he could think of. That was to have them humanely killed and bury them in the compost heap.’

‘So everything went? All that menagerie.’

‘Everything. The place is deserted now. All that’s left of Wilford’s family is the dog.’

Harry nodded. ‘We kept her out of the way after we heard about the bird-watching bloke. You nearly saw her once, in the pub, but she was out the back with Jess. You see, Wilford needed time, that’s all. That’s what I was doing for him — buying him time. We couldn’t let him get arrested. He knew what he had to do, but he needed more time. We helped him do it, me and Sam. Like you say, there’s just the dog now.’

‘So he took all his family with him. As a matter of interest, Diane,’ said Cooper, ‘what gave you the idea that Wilford Cutts was married?’

‘I don’t know,’ she frowned. ‘Wasn’t he?’

‘His wife died years ago.’

‘Oh well, I don’t suppose it’s important. I just remember wondering how on earth Connie managed to put up with him and his friends. He spoke about her once, when I was there. Perhaps he’d just forgotten she was dead.’

‘His wife was called Doris,’ said Cooper.

Harry nodded. ‘Maybe you’re almost Inspector Morse, after all.’

‘You also did your best to throw suspicion on Graham Vernon. Did you really see him on the Baulk that night? Or was that a lie?’

‘No, lad, no lie. He was there, all right. He was out looking for the girl, I reckon. No doubt he had an idea in his mind of what she would be up to. The mother hadn’t a clue, of course. She always thought the lass was some sort of angel.’

The old man curled his lip contemptuously. ‘Aye, Vernon was there, all right. I would have had a few words to say to him too, if I’d got near him. You know what about, lad, if Helen’s told you. You don’t need to ask me what I would have said to the man. But he saw me coming, and he cleared off sharpish. I wasn’t complaining. It kept him out of the way. And it did no harm for you lot to be asking him your questions, did it?’

‘And then you even tried to attract suspicion to yourself.’

Harry shrugged. ‘It didn’t matter if you thought I had killed the girl anyway.’

‘Didn’t matter?’

‘Well, I was innocent, wasn’t I? I knew Wilford would prove it, in the end. He did the right thing, you see. He always said he would.’

‘But what you put yourself through,’ said Cooper. ‘It must have been appalling.’

Harry shrugged. ‘It’s what you do. For a friend.’

But Fry wasn’t satisfied. She was still angry. She stepped forward, and the old man looked up at her from his chair as they faced each other across a short stretch of carpet. ‘You’ve caused a lot of trouble for us, Mr Dickinson,’ she said. ‘Do you realize you’ve just admitted to committing several offences?’

‘If you say so.’

‘Mr Dickinson, you’ve deliberately misled the police. You’ve concealed evidence of a very serious crime. And that’s only for starters. At the moment, there’s no proof that Wilford Cutts’s death was suicide. There may be more serious allegations to follow, depending on the results of forensic examination.’

‘Sam has the suicide note,’ said Harry. ‘If that’s what you need. It was all done properly.’

‘I see.’

Concern clouded Harry’s impassive face. ‘Somebody ought to go and see Sam. He’s not well.’

‘Detective Constable Cooper is just about to do that,’ said Fry.

Cooper looked at her, and their eyes met for a long minute. There was everything in their stare, all the pent-up resentment and jealousy, all the disdain for each other’s views and methods, their lifestyles and backgrounds, all the memories of the things that had passed between them, all the pain of intimacy and betrayal. Cooper could sense that she was also asking him to trust her.

‘Ben, please.’

She said it as if it was a request. But now the words had a note of authority, naturally assumed, as of a right. She expected him to obey. This was her case, she seemed to say. And she was right, of course. Diane Fry had done everything properly; she had called in, she had sent for back-up, she had secured the scene. As for Ben Cooper, he was officially off the enquiry. He shouldn’t even be here. So how could he possibly expect to take any of the credit?

He nodded and went towards the front door, looking for a passing patrol car to flag down for a lift to Thorpe Farm. As he left the room, he heard Fry begin the litany.

‘Harold Dickinson, I am arresting you on a charge of attempting to pervert the course of justice. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence...’

Sam Beeley looked relieved when the police car came up the track to the smallholding. He was holding an envelope, sealed and addressed ‘To Whom It May Concern’. Cooper realized that he and Fry had actually watched the three old men composing the letter on the bonnet of the pick-up, but had thought they were doing a crossword puzzle.

He looked closely at Sam. ‘We’ll take you to a doctor, Mr Beeley. It’s all over.’

Sam waved his stick weakly. ‘Someone has to look after the dog.’

‘Oh yes.’

Cooper went to the shed and opened the lower door. A black and white Border collie emerged from the darkness, coming eagerly to sniff his legs and lick his hand, gazing up hopefully into his eyes. He guessed that she knew her master had gone. Dogs always did seem to know these things. The bonds of trust and affection they forged with people were so powerful that they could only be broken by death.

He reached down to stroke the animal’s head, an inadequate gesture of consolation.

‘We’ll look after you, Connie,’ he said.