‘It’s one of those modern expressions, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Something to do with the internet? Or mountain bikes. Or those skateboarding things. They have their own languages, the young people. I can’t understand a word they’re saying sometimes.’
‘The fact is, Mr Elder, couples park up in some of these out-of-the-way places at night for the purpose of having sex in their cars.’
‘Oh, is that all?’ said Elder.
‘Not quite. Sometimes there are people there who watch them doing it.’
‘Those are peeping toms,’ said Elder. ‘Voyeurs, you might call them. Well, that’s not new. We’ve always had them. We had sex in my day, too, you know — just not so much of it, and more discreet. In those days, peeping toms had a hard job of it, so to speak.’
Elder smiled. Fry felt that familiar frustration of trying to get through to people who seemed to talk a different language from her own. Most of all, she hated those secret little smiles and nods of understanding that sometimes passed between Ben Cooper and people like this Elder. It was as if the fact they were born within a few miles of each other gave them some hidden means of communication that no one else could ever learn. She was glad she’d let Cooper go.
‘You don’t understand, Mr Elder,’ she said. ‘This is watching by arrangement. It’s part of the thrill, apparently.’
Elder’s eyes popped. ‘They want folk watching them while they’re doing it?’ He considered the prospect, didn’t find it appealing, and shook his head. ‘No, I can’t see it. I’d call it perverted. But I suppose things are different now. Is that really what they get up to at night?’
‘And not just at night either. Lunchtimes, even. During their breaks from work. Sometimes it’s at a date and time fixed up in advance. Sometimes they just go along to a well-known dogging spot like Godfrey’s Rough and see what turns up. The people who do the watching are the ones called doggers.’
Elder was quiet, trying to imagine the scene in the woods.
‘I suppose this is shocking you, Mr Elder?’
‘It’s a new idea, that’s all. And it’s a bit too late for me to learn, maybe?’
‘I think not, sir.’
‘Happen they’re not doing any harm, anyway,’ said Elder. ‘Have you thought of that?’
‘The point is,’ said Fry, ‘things can sometimes go wrong. Doggers have been known to fall out with each other. People try to join in when they’re not wanted … Well, you can imagine. It’s fraught with dangers.’
Elder nodded slowly. ‘That’s bound to happen,’ he said. ‘Folks are always the same. But these’ll be city folks, no doubt. Students and such.’
‘Some of the keenest doggers,’ said Fry, ‘are lorry drivers.’
‘Eh?’
‘Lorry drivers. Truckers. They have favourite places where they like to park up for the night. I suppose they get bored just watching the telly in the back of the cab and eating microwaved chips. So they get together sometimes, have a few cans of beer, and go dogging. A bunch of big, hairy truckers can be a bit intimidating, and not quite what people are expecting. Things can get out of hand.’
‘Those will be long-distance drivers,’ said Elder. ‘Blokes doing a haul up to Scotland or somewhere. They’re miles away from home, you see. They have to stop where they can. Most of them are from the Continent these days — Germans and French and Italians. I saw one the other day from a place called Azerbaijan. I don’t even know where that is. I couldn’t find it on the map. A damn great Mercedes he was driving, too. Just think of it. Miles away from home. Miles and miles and miles.’
‘Not all of them are from the Continent, Mr Elder,’ said Fry. ‘Some of them aren’t far away from home at all.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘See this make and registration?’ said Fry, showing the note. ‘This DAF was recorded by one of our patrols as being parked at Godfrey’s Rough. It’s a local registration, Mr Elder. This lorry doesn’t belong to any Frenchman or Azerbaijani. It belongs to you.’
Fry paused the interview tapes again. Jack Elder was developing the classic breathless, bewildered look of the guilty person suddenly finding himself smothered under the weight of evidence that he’d either overlooked or had never imagined could exist.
‘We’ll take a break, shall we, Mr Elder? You can settle into your cell while we wait for the duty solicitor to arrive. It will probably be tomorrow when we can talk again. I hope you didn’t have plans for Christmas.’
Tom Farnham was only thirty-eight years old. He jogged a couple of miles through the woods whenever he had time, and he visited the gym about once a month. He was as fit as he wanted to be, for his age. Though he was struggling financially right now, he had lots of plans for future enterprises, when the time was right. Tom Farnham liked money.
When Farnham went out to his workshop that night, the wind had risen. He could hear a continuous rustling in the woods, as if the trees were whispering to each other, whispering secrets that ought to be kept quiet. It was still raining, and the trees were sodden. In these woods, the sound of dripping water could be mistaken for footsteps after a while.
As usual, he’d left the door of the garage open to disperse the petrol fumes. The lawnmower was pretty much finished, and he just wanted to see how the newly sprayed paint was drying. Those detectives had interrupted him, and he wasn’t sure whether he’d made as good a job of it as he’d have liked.
In a way, it was a relief to have rid of that skull from his property. He’d never liked the thing, and anything that couldn’t make him money was a waste of space, in the end. All the stuff about it bringing luck and protecting you was nonsense, of course. Ridiculous superstition that only the likes of Derek Sutton believed in.
While he was bending over the lawnmower, Farnham sensed that the quality of the light had changed, and realized that his security light had come on outside. That wasn’t unusual. Wild animals strayed out of the woods sometimes and got into his garden. Foxes, badgers, even a small deer occasionally. It was surprising what lurked in Pity Wood.
It was only when he heard the crash of his garage door thrown back and the thump of boots on concrete that Farnham began to rise. He had barely straightened up when the first of the dark figures burst into the light, meeting the turn of his shoulder with the impact of a baseball bat.
Fry was a good driver, trained in the West Midlands force driving school to handle pursuit cars. But she spent most of the drive home distracted from the road. She was trying to avoid Christmas songs on the radio, flicking from station to station until she found something unseasonal. She ended up listening to ‘Crosstown Traffic’ from Jimi Hendrix’s
For the past few hours, Fry had been trying to keep the conversation with DI Hitchens out of her mind. But that was only possible during the day, when she was working. The Pity Wood Farm enquiry provided enough to occupy her mind and take her full concentration. It wasn’t the case when she left the station in West Street and headed out towards her flat in Grosvenor Avenue. The concentration started to slip, despite her best efforts.
Fry knew that she ought to have gone south, to London. They always needed officers in the Met, and it would have suited her much better in a big city where nobody cared who you were or what you did with your life. By now, she would have been well established, fast-tracking to promotion, instead of dickering about in this rural force.
Turning her Peugeot into Castleton Road, Fry stopped at the little corner shop run by an Asian family. The young couple had always been pleasant to her, even when she hadn’t been in a mood to reciprocate. A friendly greeting could be welcome at times.
She wasn’t really hungry, but she bought enough supplies to keep body and soul together for another twenty-four hours. Cheese and toast would satisfy her. Anything else would sit uncomfortably on that tight, anxious knot in her stomach. She passed over the cakes and chocolate displays, and instead picked up a yogurt. And not just any yogurt, but an organic bio-live luscious low-fat fruit yogurt, raspberry and cranberry flavour. She felt strangely virtuous.
Groups of young men and women tottered or staggered around the pubs on the corner of Grosvenor Avenue, some of them with tinsel in their hair or reindeer antlers on their heads. It was Saturday night, of course. She’d forgotten that. At weekends, some of her fellow flat-dwellers lived dangerous and unpredictable private lives. Not her concern when she was off duty, though.
