Blind to the Bones

32

DC Gavin Murfin looked mournfully at the remains of a vanilla slice on his desk. Its enticing yellow smile had disintegrated into a few dusty flakes of pastry before his eyes.

‘No signs of a previous diary,’ he said. ‘No likely looking randy art lecturers. That Stark girl laughed at me when I tried her with some names. She has a colourful turn of phrase, for a lass.’

‘It doesn’t matter, Gavin,’ said Diane Fry.

‘Doesn’t matter?’

‘Not now.’

‘I spent hours on that.’

‘If Emma Renshaw arrived back in Withens, the person we’re looking for is a lot closer to home than Birmingham Art School.’

‘Right,’ said Murfin. ‘You’re right.’

He considered it for a moment. ‘Tell you what,’ he said, ‘the day Emma went missing... Do we know Howard Renshaw’s exact movements that day?’

Ben Cooper was remembering the man from the Sunday-morning crowd at Somerfield’s supermarket. Last Sunday, he had been trying to tell some story about distraction burglaries in the Southwoods area, and Cooper hadn’t been taking much notice. It had sounded pretty small-scale stuff, which someone else would be dealing with, thank goodness. But perhaps he should have listened more carefully. Hadn’t the old man mentioned an incident involving genuine antiques? ‘They must have driven right past my window to get to Southwoods Grange.’

And what else had he been saying? Cooper thought about Golden Delicious apples and pineapple chunks for a few seconds before he got it. Car registration numbers.

On Friday afternoon there was a totally different crowd in the supermarket. And many of the staff were different, too. Cooper introduced himself at the duty manager’s office and got permission to speak to the checkout assistants and the bag packers, the trolley collectors and the woman at the cigarette counter. One of the older staff on the checkouts thought she remembered the man with the walking stick, but had no idea of his name. She said he was a customer who always paid cash.

‘And he always comes in on Sunday, I think,’ she said.

‘Yes, he does.’

‘Like you, in fact.’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘You’re the frozen meals for one and the Boddington’s six-packs, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I never knew you were police.’

Cooper moved on. All he had achieved was to let the checkout assistant know more about him than she did about the man with the walking stick.

This afternoon, the supermarket’s frozen meat section looked unnervingly like the postmortem room at a giant morgue, with frozen body parts stacked in freezers, neatly packaged and labelled. Fortunately, these weren’t human parts, but bits hacked off cows and sheep and pigs. He could understand why people became vegetarians. Perhaps the trick was not to look closely — to see only the price label on the plastic packages and the ‘best before’ date, not the reality of the meat and bones underneath.

Outside, he tried to remember which way the man went when he left the supermarket. Often, he walked with Cooper to his car and talked to him while he loaded up his shopping. Then Cooper would say goodbye, get in his car and drive towards the exit. Had he ever noticed which way the man with the stick went?

He had a brief recollection of being held up at the lights by traffic one morning and seeing the man waiting at the pedestrian crossing with his shopping bag on wheels to cross to the corner of Eyre Street. From there, he would have only a short walk to the bus stops in front of the town hall, where there were services running to all the areas on the eastern and northern sides of Edendale. It was no help at all.

Back in the office at West Street, Cooper found the rest of the DCs already busy on the phones. He sat down at his desk opposite Gavin Murfin, whose head was bent over some notes in his pocket book that he was trying to transcribe on to a pile of forms. Murfin looked up, shook his head at Cooper in an exaggerated way and sucked his breath through his teeth.

‘Late, Mr Cooper? You’ll be in trouble. It’s a good job Miss is in a meeting.’

‘There was just something I had to do.’

‘There’s plenty to do here,’ said Murfin.

Cooper kept quiet. Friday afternoon wasn’t a time when he should have been in Somerfield’s looking for old men with walking sticks.

But hold on. He shouldn’t even be thinking about Friday afternoon. He should be thinking about Sunday morning — that was when the old man did his shopping. In Edendale, the bus companies ran limited services on Sunday. In fact, some routes didn’t operate at all. The man with the walking stick left Somerfield’s at the same time every Sunday morning, about 10.30 a.m. He walked slowly, too. So, allowing him fifteen minutes to get to the town hall, he couldn’t be expecting to get a bus home before 10.45.

Cooper looked around the office. There must be a bus timetable somewhere.

He went to the shelves that contained their reference library. They also contained a lot of other stuff that nobody knew what to do with, including a stack of urgent memos from county headquarters that was about a foot high and threatening to topple over. But Cooper eventually found what he was looking for.

‘Route 19. The 10.53 bus to Southwoods,’ he said aloud.

Gavin Murfin paused in his transcribing. ‘A bus to where?’

‘Southwoods.’

‘Southwoods? Ah.’

‘Do you know it?’

‘Of course I know it. There’s a decent chippy up there, near the community centre.’

As usual, Cooper found his attention turned off when Murfin got on to the subject of food.

‘Would the 10.53 on Sunday morning be a busy route, I wonder?’ he said. ‘And would it usually be the same driver on duty?’

‘Sunday morning? No, that’s no good at all,’ said Murfin.

‘Why not?’

‘The chippy isn’t open on a Sunday.’

‘Gavin, will you get on with your notes and leave me be?’

Cooper got up and crossed the room to get his coat. Murfin watched him until he was nearly out of the door.

‘What I can’t understand, Ben,’ he said, ‘is why you’re going to Southwoods on the bus, anyway.’

It took only a couple of phone calls to the bus depot in Baslow to establish that the driver he wanted was currently operating the Route 19 service between Edendale Town Hall and Southwoods Estate. Cooper managed to obtain the times when the bus stopped for a few minutes at the terminus outside the town hall, and he was waiting there when the vehicle pulled in and discharged its passengers.

The bus driver looked at his warrant card. ‘You’re looking for an old chap with a walking stick and shopping bag? Yes, I know him. I have to help him on board sometimes. He has some days that are better than others, if you know what I mean.’

‘That’s wonderful. And where does he get off?’

‘Corner of Wembley Avenue, near the Unitarian church.’

‘Does he live on Wembley Avenue?’

‘Well, I couldn’t be sure of that. But he heads in that direction. He might be visiting somebody, for all I know.’

‘Visiting?’

‘Well, a girlfriend or something. Or his mother. I don’t know.’

Cooper stared at him. ‘His mother. Yes.’

‘I didn’t mean his mother,’ said the driver. ‘He’s getting on a bit. His mother will most likely have passed on.’

‘Have you ever noticed how far up Wembley Avenue he goes?’

‘No. He’s not too nippy on his pins, so he’s hardly got up the street when I pull away. There are two more stops between there and the terminus.’

Passengers were starting to squeeze past Cooper to get on the bus as he stood talking to the driver. He became aware that a couple of old ladies had sat down near the front of the bus and were listening to his conversation, with their hands folded on their laps and their eyes bright with interest.

‘Can you drop me off there?’ he said.

‘Where?’

‘Wembley Avenue.’

‘’Course. But you’ll have to wait while I finish getting passengers on.’

Cooper sat down opposite the old ladies, who nudged each other and eyed him eagerly. He looked out of the window at the town hall, desperate not to meet their gaze. He had a horrible premonition of what they were going to say to him, given a minimum of encouragement.

The façade of the town hall boasted four decorative pillars. They stood on ornate bases, which had been partially obscured by the disabled ramps and handrails installed a few years ago to make the place accessible. The building had been edged with decorative stones that had been carved with a wavy pattern. There were so many of them that they were distinctive, and local people had nicknamed their town hall ‘The Wavy House’.

He found he was looking at the noticeboard on the wall of the town hall. The building hosted far more than just council meetings. There were notices announcing line-dancing classes, a slimming club, the WI market, Darby and Joan sessions, bridge nights, a book fair, and t’ai chi lessons. He tried to imagine the old ladies doing t’ai chi, just to keep himself amused.

Finally, the bus set off and wound its way through the streets of Edendale town centre before emerging on to Greaves Road and going north. Cooper tried to appear interested in every single thing that they passed. The old ladies gathered their belongings and got off, casting reluctant glances back.

‘Next stop Wembley Avenue,’ said the driver.

Cooper stood up and waited by the doors. ‘Thanks a lot. You’ve been very helpful.’

‘No trouble. Are you sure you don’t want his name?’

Cooper paused on the step of the bus as the doors folded open. ‘Whose name?’

‘The chap with the walking stick, of course. The one you’ve been asking about.’

‘You know his name?’

‘’Course I do. He’s an OAP. He has to show me his bus pass every time he gets on. His name’s Jim Revill.’

‘I was going to walk up and down Wembley Avenue knocking on people’s doors asking for a man with a stick,’ said Cooper.

‘Well,’ said the driver, ‘that would have been a bit daft, wouldn’t it?’

Jim Revill was totally baffled to find Ben Cooper standing on his doorstep. It was obvious that at first he didn’t recognize him at all. Cooper was used to that feeling himself. He had often seen someone walking down the street and felt sure that he knew them, but from an entirely different context. The woman who served him in the petrol station twice a week was very familiar, but she was unrecognizable when she had come out from behind the counter and was dressed up to the nines, having a drink with her boyfriend in Yates’s Wine Bar. It was a bit unsettling. People should stay in their contexts, safe and familiar.

‘Detective Constable Cooper, Edendale Police,’ he said.

‘Eh?’

‘Sunday mornings at Somerfield’s supermarket.’

‘Ah! Chinese meals for one.’

‘Yes,’ said Cooper, with a sigh. ‘That’s me.’

‘But what are you doing here? This is where I live.’

‘Yes, I know, Mr Revill.’

‘Did you follow me?’

‘In a manner of speaking.’

Mr Revill’s face took on a stubborn look. ‘I don’t let people in without seeing their identification and checking up on them.’

‘Quite right.’

Cooper showed his warrant card again, and had to wait while Mr Revill phoned the station. But while the old man made the call, he left the front door open, so that Cooper could easily have walked into his house and pulled the phone right out of the wall, if he had wanted to commit a robbery.

But, to be honest, there was very little that looked worth stealing. The shopping bag on wheels stood against the wall near the door. Its handle had worn a bare patch in the wallpaper and its wheels had scuffed the skirting board. There were some cardboard boxes stacked against the wall further along the passage. According to the printing on them, they had once contained tins of cat food and baked beans, though presumably not any more — not unless Mr Revill was stocking up to survive an emergency. If those were the extent of his supplies, Cooper thought the cat would be all right, if it didn’t mind a permanent diet of Whiskas beef and lamb. But Mr Revill would be in danger of spontaneous combustion.

‘They say you’re all right.’

‘Thank goodness for that.’

‘So is it about the burglaries that you’ve come?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘I didn’t see anybody. But I’ve got some registration numbers.’

‘You have? Suspicious vehicles? Have you passed them on to the station?’

‘They weren’t interested,’ said Mr Revill. ‘Like I told you, nobody bothers coming out for us.’

‘Can I have a look?’

‘In the front room.’

Cooper followed him through a doorway and into a room full of furniture. A dining table and four chairs dominated the space, and there was hardly enough room to walk around them, because of the sideboard and display cabinets against the walls. And there were more boxes in the far corner. Fairy Liquid and Utterly Butterly.

‘Here. I keep a notebook by the window, so that I can write them down straight away. Otherwise, I would forget them, and that would be no use to anybody.’

Cooper looked at the notebook he was offered. He saw a page of car registration numbers, written in large letters in a shaky hand. He turned over a page. There were more numbers. He flicked through the rest of the notebook. Every page was covered in registration numbers. There were hundreds of them.

‘These are suspicious vehicles?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘What makes them suspicious?’

‘They’re strangers. I know the cars that come down here regular. There’s nothing wrong with my memory. Is it any use to you?’

‘Not unless I had a registration number I wanted to compare them to. They aren’t even dated. You haven’t written down what day you saw them.’

‘Well, there’s a page for each day.’

‘For which days, though?’

‘Every day. I start a new page each morning,’ said Mr Revill, as if forced to explain it to an idiot. ‘Like a diary. You know what a diary is.’

‘Right. So I could work my way backwards to say, the sixteenth of last month?’

‘Today’s the second. So you just turn back sixteen pages, see?’

Cooper flipped back. There were ten numbers on the page he was looking at. ‘I don’t suppose you can remember what make or model any of these were? Or the colour? Or how many people were in them?’

‘No. It never occurred to me to write those things down. I thought the police went off registration numbers. Can’t you do a check on the computer, and see if one of them is stolen?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘I didn’t expect to have to tell you your job, lad. But I suppose you’re young yet. Still learning, are you?’

Cooper copied down the numbers. At least there were only ten of them. It would be easier to make a match.

‘You’ve been very helpful, sir,’ he said.

‘Are we going to catch some burglars? Send a gang of them to prison? Can I tell Mrs Smith at number 16? She says she won’t come out again until they’ve all been locked up.’

‘It’s a bit early to say that, I’m afraid. But we’ll be working on it.’

‘Aye. We’ll not hold our breath, then.’

Ben Cooper had all the registration numbers through the PNC by the communications room. He was aware that he was spending a lot of time on this hunch, especially as he’d had to wait for a bus back into town. He wouldn’t have been able to justify it very easily, if he was asked. So the best thing to do was just keep quiet about it, unless it produced results.

As he anticipated, several of the vehicles turned out to belong to local residents, or were registered to companies which might be expected to have a legitimate reason for visiting homes on the Southwoods estate. One was actually in the name of the council housing department. So Mr Revill wasn’t too choosy about where his suspicions were directed. Or perhaps he was.

Cooper managed to sift the vehicles down to four that were from out of the area. Two of them were vans, which were of particular interest where burglaries were involved. But he remembered the nature of the items that were being stolen — all small and easily concealed.

Almost the last vehicle he did a PNC check on was an Audi. He was starting to lose interest by now, wondering whether he should leave the rest until later, perhaps tomorrow. There were more productive things to be doing. But then he finally hit a name he recognized.

‘No, that isn’t possible. Can you check again?’

‘That’s the name and address of the last registered owner.’

‘It just isn’t possible,’ said Cooper. ‘Emma Renshaw has been missing for two years.’

When Ben Cooper got into the CID room he found Diane Fry alone. She had her elbows on her desk, and she was staring out of the window, as if she were wondering where the rest of the world had gone. Cooper was tired, too, but Fry looked exhausted. He glanced at her cautiously as he went through his messages. There was lots of stuff he didn’t want to know about. But no invitations from the Oxleys to call for tea. What a surprise.

‘Diane, something strange happened this morning. I did a check on some vehicles that were seen at the time of the Southwoods Grange break-in.’

Fry turned her head towards the sound of his voice, but seemed to be looking straight through him.

‘One of the cars turned out to be registered to Emma Renshaw. The break-in was two weeks ago. I wondered what happened there.’

‘I don’t know.’

Cooper watched her for a few minutes. She didn’t seem to have been listening to anything he said. Something was definitely wrong.

‘Had a bad time with the Renshaws?’ he said finally.

‘What?’

Fry seemed to wake from her dream and stared at him. He thought she genuinely hadn’t even noticed him until then.

‘Oh, the Renshaws. Yeah.’

‘In a way, you know, it must be a relief to them,’ said Cooper. ‘After all this time, it ought to help them a bit to know for certain that Emma’s dead, instead of wondering about it for ever. At least now they can get on with their lives.’

‘Mmm. Yeah.’

Cooper realized that she was avoiding his eye. There was more to her manner than just a harrowing session with bereaved parents.

‘What is it, Diane? What’s wrong?’

She looked at him properly for the first time since he had come into the room. Her eyes really did look weary. Weary, and baffled. Like someone who had thought the end was in sight, but now had to start all over again rolling the boulder back up the hill.

‘We got the preliminary report from the pathologist,’ she said. ‘On the remains Alton found in the churchyard.’

‘It’s going to take time to get a definite identification on the remains, I suppose.’

‘Yes, but we have some information.’

‘Cause of death?’

‘No.’

‘No — that was too much to hope for, I suppose. Maybe later, then. They can probably do some tests—’

Fry pushed the report towards him impatiently. ‘You don’t need to read that far. Just take a look at the first section.’

Cooper started to read. There was some introductory stuff, then the initial assessment of the state of the remains — skeletalized, obviously. And a mention of a missing finger joint on the left hand, which made Cooper frown. Then there was a whole list of measurements — the cephalic index of the skull, its width and length, the dimensions of the nasal aperture. From the growing ends of bones and the gaps between the bones of the cranium, age had been estimated at twenty-four. Then the report moved on to a lot of stuff about pelvic width and something called the ischium-pubis index. It said the jawbone was pointed, the nasal aperture long and narrow, with rectangular eye orbits and a pronounced brow ridge.

He stopped reading.

‘Diane—’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It isn’t Emma Renshaw. The corpse from the vicar’s churchyard is male.’

‘But the Renshaws...’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘The bloody Renshaws. Howard Renshaw held the skull in his own hands. He recognized the shape of it, he said. He knew the skull of his own daughter instantly. Oh yes, and all the stuff about drying her hair. I actually believed him.’

‘I’m sure he was sincere, Diane.’

‘Sincere? He’s certifiable. They both are.’

Cooper looked down at the report again. According to the pathologist, the remains were those of a male aged in his mid twenties, about five feet ten inches tall, give or take half an inch or so. Impossible to establish cause of death. There was minor postmortem damage to the skeleton — caused, no doubt, by the Reverend Derek Alton and Howard Renshaw. Not to mention anyone else who might have taken the chance of poking around in the poor bugger’s shallow grave before the first police officers arrived to secure the scene. The entire population of Withens might have been picking over the bones, for all anybody knew. In fact, Cooper could easily picture the Oxleys squatting in a circle around the grave, like a set of cannibals.

‘The Renshaws are going to be devastated all over again,’ he said.

‘Sod the bloody Renshaws,’ said Fry.

Cooper looked up then, but she’d already turned away. She got to her feet, with her back turned towards him. She paused only to flick a hand across her face, and strode out of the room.

Cooper hesitated a moment too long over what he should do. Then he hurried into the corridor after Fry, but was in time only to see the door of the ladies toilet swinging shut.

‘Damn.’

‘Problem, Ben?’

Liz Petty had been passing along the corridor towards the scenes of crime department. She had stopped, with her camera bag over her shoulder, and was looking at him curiously. No doubt she was wondering why he was staring at the door of the ladies as if he desperately wanted to go in. Petty looked closely at the sign on the door, to be sure.

‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘Everything’s fine.’

But it wasn’t fine. If he didn’t know Diane Fry better, Cooper would have sworn that Howard Renshaw had come closer to reducing her to tears than Fry was ever going to admit.