Blood on the Tongue

13

Cooper banged on the door of number 8, then tried the next house, and the one beyond that. He got no answer at any of them. Even the man with the Doberman seemed to have disappeared, or was refusing to answer his door.

After he'd called in for assistance, Cooper went back into Marie Tennent's home and walked quickly through all the rooms again. He was sweating now from a surge of panic at the thought that there might be a baby lying somewhere in the house. How long could a baby survive if it was left on its own? He had no idea. He had a vague feeling that a baby's demands for food and attention were pretty constant, but it was only an impression gained at a safe distance from watching his sister-in-law Kate when his two nieces had been very young. Josie and Amy had cried when they were hungry, or when their nappies needed changing. If there had been a baby left alone in this house, it would surely be crying by now. Long before now. The neighbours would have heard it, wouldn't they? Of course they would. And they would have reported that, even if they hadn't bothered to report the fact that they hadn't seen the baby's mother for a while.

The thought made Cooper feel a little better as he opened cupboards and wardrobes. But then he looked at the walls of the house and realized how thick they were. These were stone cottages, a hundred and fifty years old, built for millworkers at a time when houses were intended to last several lifetimes. They had solid walls, not those timber and plasterboard things you could put your fist through. Without the door or a window open, he could hear nothing from outside the house. He knew it was possible that a baby could have cried and cried in here, and not have been heard. It was possible that it could have cried itself to death.

He pulled aside some clutter at the back of the cupboard under the stairs — a vacuum cleaner, a roll of carpet, cardboard boxes, an abandoned glass-topped coffee table. Each time he moved something out of the way, he expected to see a small bundle in a corner. But there was nothing.

'Ben?'

For once, he was glad to hear Diane Fry's voice. 'Through here,' he said. 'I'm glad you came.'

Fry paused in the doorway, gazing round the room, but without seeming to look at Cooper at all. She walked round the sofa, stopped at the window and rubbed her finger through the grime on one of the panes. 'Do people never clean their own windows round here?'

'It depends whether you want to see out,' said Cooper.

'You're being enigmatic again, Ben. It doesn't suit you. Where have you looked?'

'Everywhere, but not properly.'

'You take down here then, and I'll do upstairs. Take it steady, be thorough. There's no need to panic.'

'Yes, OK.'

Fry headed for the stairs. Cooper felt some of the weight lift from him.

'Diane?' he said.

'What?'

'Thanks for coming.'

'I had to — I'm paid to look after you now.'

Back in Marie Tennent's kitchen, Cooper decided to look in the automatic washer. Like everybody, he'd read newspaper stories of children getting trapped in washing machines. But this one was half-full of underwear. Nearby, several nappies were drying on a rack near a radiator.

Then there was the refrigerator. It contained fruit juice and yoghurt, grated carrot and frozen oven chips, some of them well past their best-before dates. A mouldy piece of cheese and a half-used tin of marrowfat peas occupied the top shelf. In the cupboards, there were lots of pans and cooking utensils, but little food. What there was seemed to consist mostly of pasta and lentils, baked beans and cheap white wine. There was no sign of any dog food, or of feeding bowls, so it looked as though the odds were against a dog. There were more notes stuck to a cork board — phone numbers and shopping reminders. No suicide note.

He opened the back door and found himself looking into a small garden, with a washing line draped across a paved area. The line was encased in frozen snow, like insulation round an electric cable. Cooper couldn't see what else there was in the garden, because of the unswept snow, but he imagined a few bare flower borders around a patch of grass. Birds had been scratching at the snow, and in one corner there was a little brown heap where a neighbourhood cat had thought it was burying its faeces, only to find the heat melting the snow around them. Similar gardens ran off to the left, separated by low walls and fences. None of the houses overlooked Marie's garden. The view straight ahead was of the rear wall of the mill, where the windows were few and tiny, dark squares in the snow plastered to the stone. There was a coal bunker against the wall of Marie's house. As Cooper lifted the lid, a layer of snow slid back and piled against the wall. Nothing inside.

That left only one place to hide something — the green wheelie bin pushed against the wall near a gate that must lead on to a tiny back alley under the shadow of the mill. To reach it, he had to cross the garden, unsure where the path might be under the snow. There was a padlock on the gate, and it was secure. From here, the mill wall seemed to tower above him like a fortress, blank and forbidding. Of course, this was the northern side. All the windows were on the southern wall, to provide light for the millworkers who'd overseen the looms. It was interesting to note that they would have had light for their work, but none on their homes — the shadow of the mill saw to that.

As soon as he touched the wheelie bin, Cooper could tell there was something inside. An empty bin was so light on its wheels and so tall that it could be tilted with one finger when it came time for it to be retrieved from wherever the binmen had left it. This one had weight in the bottom. It bumped against the sides a little as he pulled the bin away from the wall to allow room to open the lid. He pushed the snow aside from the lid, staring for a moment at the High Peak Borough Council label that had been stuck to the green plastic. It gave dates for refuse collection arrangements over the Christmas and New Year holidays.

When the lid came open, Cooper winced at the smell that rose towards him. Something wrapped in a Somerfield's supermarket carrier bag rolled around in the bottom as he tipped the bin. Half an inch of dark liquid moved with it, gathering into a corner and revealing all sorts of dried debris stuck to the bottom. Cooper looked back at the house, wondering whether to call Fry down from upstairs. But instead he removed his woollen gloves and put them in his right pocket. From the left, he took a packet which contained a different pair of gloves. Latex and sterile. With a stretch, he managed to reach down into the wheelie bin and hooked a couple of fingers through the handles of the carrier bag. The handles had been tied together to seal the bag, tightly enough for it to take him more than a few seconds to get them open.

Despite the smell, he was smiling by the time he could see what was inside the bag.

Cooper re-entered the house and went upstairs to find Diane Fry. There was only one bedroom and a bathroom on the first floor. Although Marie had a double bed, there were pillows on only one side.

'Anything?' said Fry.

'A few days ago, Marie Tennent roasted a leg of lamb, but never ate any of it,' he said. 'I'd say she left it in the fridge until it started going off, then chucked it in the bin. It could mean something.'

'Like what?' said Fry.

'You don't normally cook an entire leg of lamb for yourself when you live on your own. Or so I imagine.'

'Right. You think she might have been expecting a visitor who never came?'

'It seems the bins are emptied here on a Monday normally. The collections were out of routine at the New Year, but they should have been back to normal this week. The lamb was the only thing in the bin. That means she threw it out after the binmen came on Monday at the earliest.'

'How on earth have you found out when the binmen come?'

'They left a note.'

Cooper stood on the tiny landing, watching Fry move around the bedroom. He felt a slight draught, and looked up.

'There's a trap door over the landing,' he said. 'There must be a loft.'

'Can you reach it with this chair?'

Cooper managed to get the trap door open by standing on the chair. Fry handed him a small torch, and he was able to heave himself up on his elbows enough to see that the loft was tiny — barely more than a crawl space beneath the rafters, with a layer of ancient insulation nibbled into holes by burrowing mice. He shone the torch into all the corners. Nothing.

He climbed down and took the chair back into the bedroom. Fry had just pulled out a picture that had been stored under the bed. It was wrapped in an old sheet and covered in dust.

'There's no baby in this house anyway,' she said.

'Thank God for that. Now all we need to do is find out who she left it with.'

'Yeah.'

Cooper watched her unwrap the picture she'd found.

'It's a print of Chatsworth House,' he said, recognizing the distant view over parkland to a vast, white Palladian facade. It was the home of the Duke of Devonshire and one of the area's biggest tourist attractions.

'Very picturesque. But she obviously didn't like it.'

Cooper took it and turned it over. 'It was bought at the souvenir shop at Chatsworth itself,' he said.

'Not recently, though, by the looks of it.'

'No, but I wonder if she bought it herself, or whether it was a gift. Chatsworth is only a few miles away. She might have been there for a day out.'

'Ah. With the anonymous boyfriend, you mean.'

'It's the sort of thing you might buy someone as a gift, as a memento of a day together.'

'Is it?'

'If you were that way inclined.'

'How much would it cost, do you think?'

'A print this size? It could have been thirty or forty pounds, I suppose.'

'We can soon check.'

'Interesting,' said Cooper. 'Apart from the usual household items, that print must be one of her most valuable possessions.'

The wardrobe had mostly trousers and jeans, sweaters and long skirts. A pair of child's sandals was in the bottom, but they surely wouldn't have fit Marie's baby for a couple of years yet. A black evening dress was still on a hanger from the dry cleaners.

'Bathroom?' said Cooper.

The bathroom cabinet contained toothbrush and toothpaste, floss, mouthwash, a bottle of migraine tablets and a foil sheet of contraceptive pills, with half the blisters still full.

'The pills are an old prescription,' said Fry. 'Well past their use-by date.'

'More than nine months past?'

'Yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's her own baby she was looking after.'

'Might she have wanted to keep it secret?'

'Why? She was an adult — and it's not a sin any more. You don't get put away in a lunatic asylum for being an unmarried mother these days. Not even in Edendale. They tell me you even stopped burning witches last week.'

'Maybe there was one particular person she didn't want to know about the baby.'

'One particular person? Who?'

'The boyfriend,' said Cooper.

'Him again. Mr Nobody. We know nothing about him at all.'

Cooper placed a secondhand pair of baby shoes on the table. 'On the contrary,' he said. 'I think I'm starting to get a feeling for him.'

'You were always one for empathy. You can check with her GP, when we leave here. And the hospital and Social Services. We need any clues they can give us about where to look for the baby.'

Fry was staring at the bookshelves. She touched the spines of the books gingerly, as if they were some inexplicable religious icons. Cooper joined her and examined the mixture of modern novels, celebrity biographies, cookery books, diet books and self-improvement programmes.

'She was a great reader, by the looks of it,' he said.

'Too much imagination, I suppose. It never does anybody any good.'

Cooper picked up a copy of a Danielle Steel novel that was lying face-up on the shelf. It had a well-worn cover, and it looked as though it had been through more than one pair of hands. 'Why not?' he said.

'Well, look at this stuff. Half of it is about other people's miserable lives. Let's face it, life turns out shitty for everybody in the end, no matter who you are. What's the point of reading about how bad it is for somebody else?'

Cooper turned the book over in his hands and read the blurb on the back. 'Maybe it helped her to feel she could connect to other human beings in some way.'

Fry curled a glance at him from the corner of her eye. 'Oh, my God. Let's have less connecting and more detecting, please, Ben.'

Cooper smiled. 'Eden Valley Books,' he said.

'What?'

He held up an imitation leather bookmark that had been nestling between chapters 26 and 27 of Danielle Steel. 'I've detected where Marie bought her books from.'

'Is it here in town?'

'Just off the market square. Never noticed it?'

'If I had, I wouldn't have to ask.'

'The bloke who owns it is called Lawrence Daley. I've been in there a few times.'

'Oh? Get your Barbara Cartland fix there, do you?'

'He found me some old song books once. For the male voice choir, you know.'

'Lovely.'

'Also he had a couple of burglaries at the shop, not long after I transferred to CID. God knows why — there's nothing in the place worth nicking. We thought it was probably some heroin-fuelled dork who'd been watching Antiques Roadshow or heard about antiquarian books being sold for big money at Sotheby's, and thought he could lay his hands on some of the same stuff. I don't suppose a set of old Agatha Christie paperbacks fetched him much to feed his habit with.'

'And your point is?'

'I know Lawrence Daley slightly. He's a bit of a character, but he's OK.'

'Ben, I'm well aware that you know everybody round here.'

'I was thinking — if Marie Tennent bought so many books, Lawrence might know something about her. He's the sort who'd want to chat to his customers and find out a bit about them.'

Fry nodded. 'Yeah, it's worth a try. I can't see that we're going to turn up much else in here.'

'When I've finished with Social Services and the hospital, I'll call at the bookshop and have a word with Lawrence.'

'I've got a meeting this afternoon. Let me know how you get on.'

They cleared up the books and put Marie's junk mail back on the hall table.

'What about this box?' said Fry, pushing at the carton near the door with her foot.

'More books.'

'Have you had look at it?'

'Not yet.' Cooper pulled out a penknife and cut the tape. 'I think they call this Chick Lit, don't they?' he said, opening the box to reveal books with bright pink and yellow covers, the sort of book no man would ever willingly be seen reading. 'Looks like they're from a book club.'

'Is there a delivery date on the box?' said Fry.

Cooper inspected the delivery company's label. 'Monday.'

'The day she went walkabout.'

'She signed for the delivery herself. But she never opened the box.'

'No.'

'If it were me,' said Cooper, 'I would have opened it straight away, to see what I'd got.'

'But if she wasn't intending to read them, why should she bother?' said Fry.

'Good point. But she must have been intending to read them when she ordered them.'

'Right. So something happened between her placing the order for the books and getting the delivery. Something changed her view of things. Her books had suddenly become an irrelevance.'

Cooper flicked through the pages of one of the books and turned to the back cover. According to the blurb, it was a hilarious, sexy account of a thirty-something woman's search for Mr Right and her disastrous encounters with a series of Mr Wrongs. The cover showed discarded underwear among a scatter of wedding confetti and a bride's bouquet.

'There's always the possibility,' said Cooper, 'that they were all too relevant.'

When they'd finished, they locked Marie's front door on the way out.

'If only she'd made it a bit easier for us,' said Fry. 'If the binmen left a note, why couldn't she?'

Cooper looked at the boarded-up windows of the other houses, at the high wall to the side of Marie's garden, and finally at the dark expanse of stagnant water that shut off the end of the street like an icy wall.

'A note?' he said. 'Who to?'

After they'd spoken to the staff at the estate agent's, Fry called in and reported their failure to locate the missing baby. While she was using the radio, Cooper irritated her by standing outside the estate agent's office to look in their display windows. It was on the corner, with one window looking on to Fargate that was full of photographs of houses, with their prices and details alongside. Fry could never understand what it was about these windows that seemed to distract so many people. Maybe it was the fascination of seeing the price of properties that other people lived in, of weighing up the unattainable and working out the mortgage that would be involved if they were ever to achieve their dream. It was another form of living out a fantasy, much like reading Danielle Steel novels.

She watched Cooper become absorbed in something towards the bottom corner of the display.

'What are you looking at?' she said, when she finished her call.

'Mm? Oh, they've got some properties to rent, look.'

'So? Why are you interested?'

'I told you a while ago, didn't I? I'm going to move out of Bridge End Farm. It's just a matter of finding somewhere to live that I can afford.'

'You're really going to do it, then?'

'Of course.'

'I never thought you would, Ben.'

'Why not?'

Fry shrugged. 'You're too much of the home boy. Too much of a man for having his family round him, all cosy and smug at night.'

'You mean "snug".'

'Do I?'

Cooper bent to peer at the properties lower down, at the cheaper end of the display. It was funny how estate agents' windows were designed so that rich people didn't have to bother bending to look at suitable houses.

'No, I didn't think you would ever move out,' said Fry. 'Not until you had a wife of your own to settle down with and have kids. Then you'd be looking for one of those little executive semis over there. Something like that one — ' She pointed to the other side of the window. The houses displayed there were made of stone, but were newly built. The one she was indicating was a rectangular box with a garage door that seemed to dominate its frontage. It had a bare patch of soil at the front, and no doubt a barbecue patio at the back. The house to the left of it looked identical. And the one to the right did, too. And so, she was sure, would the one behind it, and the one across the road, and all the others that spread across the hillsides in the new residential developments south of the town. She'd seen those developments, and they had a comforting anonymity. They were a bit of the city dropped into the uneasy quirkiness of Edendale, like the advance paratroopers of an urban invasion.

'It's conveniently close to schools, shops and other amenities,' she said. 'And only a few minutes' drive from the A6 for those wishing to commute to the cities of Manchester or Derby.'

'And nobody knows the name of their next-door neighbour, I expect,' said Cooper.

'Maybe. Is that necessary in your world?'

'I suppose it is.'

'All right. So what's special about this flat, then?'

'Nothing special really. But it's right here in town. It isn't too big. And the rent's reasonable.'

'You haven't got any money put aside to buy something, then?'

'No way. It's what I can afford on a police salary or nothing.'

Fry thought of her own flat in Grosvenor Avenue, in the land of student bedsits and laundrettes, Asian greengrocers and Irish theme pubs. 'A cheap rent just means something really grotty that nobody else wants,' she said.

Cooper sighed. 'I suppose so,' he said. 'The perfect place to live seems very hard to find.'

'Impossible. Most people have the sense to give up trying.'

'Yes, you're right.'

Fry walked to the car. She'd wasted enough time humouring Ben Cooper. Her efforts to understand the members of her team were over for the day, as far as Cooper was concerned. But when she opened the driver's door, he still hadn't moved away from the estate agent's window.

'For heaven's sake, are you coming?'

'Diane?' he said.

'What now?'

'If it's so hard to find the perfect place to live — how difficult do you think it is to find the perfect place to die?'