Walking towards the first bridge, he couldn’t shake the feeling off. His own footsteps on the trail sounded wrong. It was as if the whole of the valley was holding its breath, waiting for him to do something, to speak, shout, make some kind of noise to break the spell.
Then he came round the bend and looked over the parapet of the bridge, and saw the reason for it. The absence of noise should have warned him earlier. It wasn’t exactly a silence, but a sound that had been missing from the background for the past few minutes. And now it was absent from the foreground too. Without the sound of rushing water, the call of the blackbird sounded more piercing, the whirr of the pheasant so much louder. It was unnatural.
In Wetton, Mrs Challinor had talked about the River Manifold running through here. But Cooper could see there was a problem. He was looking at an empty river bed. It was bone dry, littered with desiccated branches and dried-out boulders. Its stones were as dry as if they’d never seen water.
The muddy edges told a different story, of course. There had been water here once. But right now, the fact was inescapable. The river had gone.
26
Diane Fry sat on the bed in her hotel room, trying to work out how she felt. Somehow, she’d slept through the bad hours. As a result, she’d woken this morning feeling disorientated, and strangely deprived. It was as if something was missing from her regular routine, that jolt of fear that she usually woke to, the dry mouth and tangle of bed clothes. She opened her eyes and saw not only a strange room, but a different psychological landscape.
And now, after a shower, she felt much better. Her muscles ached, and the skin was scraped off the knuckles of one hand. But she felt positive, energetic, and ready for more action. The world out there was waiting for her to make decisions.
Having got hold of William Leeson’s address, she wasn’t sure what she intended to do with it. She was reluctant to confront anyone on their doorstep. She was too far out of her patch, and too exposed. But she’d already taken plenty of risks. She’d reached that point of no return. There was no turning back from the truth now.
One decision had to be made quickly. A message was waiting for her on her phone. An officer from the Major Incident Unit would like her to come in again to help them with their enquiries into Mr Kewley’s death. They had some more questions to ask her. Would this morning suit? Well, actually, no.
The address that Eddie Doyle had given her was way out in the leafier suburbs near Solihull, where the trees grew denser and street signs were few and far between.
Fry pulled her car on to the grass verge near a field gate and looked at the sweeping drive beyond the wrought-iron gates. She could see a CCTV camera and an entry phone. This was a man who took his security seriously, then. It suggested a past that might be expected to catch up with him one day. An uneasiness about who might come calling.
Well, she could sit right here in her car until Leeson decided to emerge from his house, which might be hours or days. Or she could try the field, and see what security was like at the back.
There were cows in the field, a black-and-white herd, lurching ponderously about and munching the grass. But Fry had seen plenty of cows before, thanks to her time in Derbyshire. She knew all about cow pats and dung flies, midges and thistles. She knew to be wary of mad-eyed bovines whose rear ends gushed like fountains. These things held no mystery for her any more.
The animals watched her with lethargic movements of their huge heads, jaws rotating slowly, ears and tails twitching to keep off the flies. Fry reached a small copse of trees fenced off with barbed wire to keep the cows out. She could see that the far side of the copse overlooked the back garden of William Leeson’s house. Another fence there, of course. But the undergrowth was dense enough to give her a concealed vantage point.
When she reached the back fence, she realized that one of the trees was close enough to provide a handy overhanging branch. That was remiss of someone. Whoever was responsible for maintenance should have been doing some trimming back to maintain the security of the premises. If she was the local crime prevention officer following up reports of a burglary, she’d have words of advice to give. Now, she considered their oversight from a different angle.
A few minutes later, Fry felt gravel crunch under her feet as she reached the edge of the drive. Ornamental shrubs had provided cover most of the way across the sloping lawn, closemown grass muffling the sound of her feet. She hoped Leeson didn’t possess a guard dog. She didn’t like dogs, especially those big ones with teeth like tombstones.
From here, the drive swept around the back of the house towards a row of garages. The doors of one garage stood open, revealing a soft-topped sports car of some kind. Fry’s mind was completely blank on models of sports car, but this one looked old. A classic car, she supposed. Something with leather seats and a noisy exhaust. Not the sort of car you’d leave parked on a street in Handsworth.
She found a set of French windows looking on to a patio. They stood open, too. The warm weather was working to her advantage, the way it did for burglars.
Fry slid through and surveyed the room. It had a desk and bookshelves, a laptop standing temptingly open. Then she heard the creak of a handle as a door swung slowly open.
When she turned, she was staring into the barrel of a handgun. William Leeson was pointing it directly at her head. He held the weapon professionally, in two hands, his body braced to achieve a steady aim. Someone had given him training.
‘So you’re going to shoot me, Mr Leeson?’ she said. ‘Seriously? That will look good.’
‘I have special protection measures in place at this property,’ he said. ‘There’s an alarm which links directly to the police station.’
‘And have you activated it?’
He hesitated. ‘Not yet.’
‘Which means you’re not going to. Put the gun down, Mr Leeson.’
He lowered the weapon.
‘It was perhaps a bit melodramatic,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t expecting the intruder to be you. Not our Detective Sergeant Fry. You’re not known for breaking and entering. You’re supposed to be the one who goes by the book.’
‘I think that was the old me.’
Leeson put the gun in a drawer, and sat down at his desk.
‘How did you get in here?’ he said.
‘Perhaps your gates are open. Have you checked them recently?’
She watched his skeletal hands. When she looked a bit more closely, Fry could see that his face was even greyer than his hair. The skin looked fragile — brittle, as if it might flake away at any moment and expose the bone. She wondered what was wrong with him, what pernicious illness was sapping his energy and draining the colour from his skin.
But then she realized that she didn’t actually care.
‘I suppose I should have talked to you at the prison yesterday,’ he said. ‘It was inevitable, really, that we would end up having this conversation. But you took me by surprise. I don’t like that.’
‘And what do you think our conversation is going to be about?’ asked Fry.
Leeson gave her a small smile.
‘Blood,’ he said. ‘That’s what we have to talk about, you and I. It’s all about blood.’
She looked at his grey skin and skeletal hands, and remembered Darren Barnes calling Leeson a coke head. She pictured him snorting cocaine through a rolled-up twenty-pound note, absorbing it through his mucous membranes. A more direct hit than smoking it, the way Vincent Bowskill did.
‘What blood?’ she said.
‘Mine. It was my blood at the scene of your assault in Digbeth.’
‘So, what? You got a nose bleed from snorting too much cocaine?’
‘The first thing you don’t know, Diane, is this — I was trying to help you.’
‘Don’t lie to me.’
