really want to go home to her flat in Grosvenor Avenue. But she couldn’t think of anywhere she did want to go. It wasn’t as if there was anything to look forward to, except more bad days.
Half an hour later, Cooper drove down the track to Bridge End Farm. At one time, his nieces would have run out to meet him when they heard his car coming down the lane. Now, there was no sign of them. Busy doing their homework? Well, perhaps. More likely, they couldn’t even hear his engine above the music playing on their iPods.
He pulled up in the farm yard, and got out of the car. Then he stood for a moment, doing nothing. Just listening to the familiar sounds, and smelling the familiar smells. And he realized Claire was right — he’d stayed away from home far too long.
24
Journal of 1968
Well, it was quite a year, 1968. It was all Dr Strangelove and the Prague Spring — Soviet tanks crushing Czechoslovakia, the USA getting a kick up the arse by the Viet Cong, and Enoch Powell making his Rivers of Blood speech. In Londonderry, it was the start of The Troubles. In Paris, students thought they were starting a revolution. That summer, the two best-known people in the world were Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray. Famous because they’d killed the right people.
But most of the time, we were too busy listening to the Beatles’ White Album, and watching Hawaii Five-O on TV. Trying to shut out reality, some might say. And that wasn’t the same after 1968, either.
Some people talk about the sixties as if it was nothing but sex and drugs, and love and peace, the decade of liberation. Well, that’s a pretty bad joke. It might have been all free love and Carnaby Street down there in London, but things take a bit longer to change in these parts. Here, we still had narrow minds and twitching curtains. There was no Technicolor in Birchlow back then, just the same old black-and-white grimness, the dyed-in-the-wool, stuck-in-a-rut, holier-than-thou hypocrites whose disapproval ruined people’s lives. If you took one wrong step, then everyone knew it. The Swinging Sixties? Here, it was still the fifties. In some ways, it was still the Dark Ages.
But if you were young in 1968, you could sense the world changing. Every day, you felt things shifting under your feet, as if the whole of existence could tip in one direction or the other at any moment. We might shake off the old ways, or we might all be destroyed. It was hard to tell. We didn’t know what the future looked like, but we knew it would be different.
It’s strange how the mind works. For me, bits of music used to pop into my head all the time, as if every thought and feeling I had was connected to a tune playing somewhere, like a soundtrack of my life. In 1968, you never knew where you stood with pop music. One week it was the Rolling Stones at the top of the charts, the next week it was bloody Des O’Connor.
Just thinking about threes reminded me of the Three Degrees, even though I never really liked them. They would have been one of Jimmy’s favourite groups, if he’d lived a bit longer. He was mad on the Supremes and the Four Tops, all that Tamla stuff. I thought of him often in the months after it happened, the fact that he never heard the Supremes sing ‘Love Child’, and completely missed ‘I Heard it through the Grapevine’. He died too young. We heard that a lot, in those days.
No, me and Jimmy saw eye to eye on a lot of things, but I never got into Motown myself. Give me the Stones any day of the week. ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ had come out just about then. Now, that was music. With half a chance, I’d like to have turned it up loud in that hole, let it bounce off those bloody concrete walls until my ears ached. It’s a gas, gas, gas.
But not down there, not while the mad people ran the world. And Les would never have let me do it, anyway. Because Les was number one.
For hours on end, it seemed my world revolved around the pee pot and the pump. Bloody strange way to save the world, I always thought. The stink of Elsan and Glitto, the bad air you had to breathe until you got back up into the daylight. Why some blokes put up with it, I couldn’t tell you.
Me, I just reckoned I was doing something for my family, and for my village. But, you know what? I was never too sure what I would have done, if the call had ever come for real.
And I was never sure — not really sure — whether I was capable of killing a man.
25
Friday
When she arrived at West Street next morning, Fry found Murfin motionless at his desk, staring into space.
‘Watch it, Gavin. If you’re not careful, they’ll replace you with one of those cardboard policemen.’
‘Sorry.’
‘And it might even be an improvement.’
Fry knew she didn’t need to explain what she meant. A few months ago, life-size cardboard police officers had been placed at businesses across the division in a bid to deter shoplifters. Ten cardboard cut-outs of a beat officer. According to the subsequent press releases, the cut-outs had reduced the number of reported thefts from stores, thieves thinking at first glance that the image was a real officer. It had become part of office lore that it was so easy to be confused.
Cooper laughed. ‘I think you’re safe, Gavin. You know the Chief Super said cardboard cut-outs can never replace real officers.’
‘Well, that’s what he told the press.’
Fry recalled that the senior management team were in a meeting again this morning. She imagined them talking about optimizing performance outcomes at the point of delivery. There must be something about becoming a senior manager that destroyed your sense of irony. That was the only reason Gavin Murfin got away with what he did.
She turned to the files on her desk. Still no news of Michael Clay’s whereabouts. He certainly hadn’t returned her calls, but that would have been too much to hope for. It was probably time to step up the efforts to find him. Her elusive witness was starting to look downright suspicious.
So what else was there? Horse Watch had sent a list of the latest horse thefts in their area. The thefts went back a few weeks, but there weren’t too many of them. Lucky, because all the owners would have to be spoken to.
Fry surveyed her team. Come to think of it, Murfin had some of the characteristics of a horse, like falling asleep standing up.
And then there was the envelope full of enhanced photographs from the lab. These should be the shots of the depressed fracture to Patrick Rawson’s head.
Fry took the photographs out of their envelope and glanced at the first one. Patrick Rawson’s skull, shaved and cleaned under bright laboratory lighting. The flash had cast just the right amount of shadow and perspective on the head injury, outlining the depression in the bone as if it had been a crater on the Moon.
Apart from one obliterated and smashed end, the bloodied sides of the depression formed a distinct pattern, an almost perfectly preserved shape. There was no medical knowledge necessary. Fry recognized it immediately.
‘It’s a horseshoe,’ she said. ‘His skull was crushed by a horseshoe.’
Fry called Dermot Walsh at Trading Standards, and was struck by how different he sounded on the phone. She would never have pictured him the way he actually looked.
‘Thank you for the briefing yesterday,’ she said.
‘I was glad to share what we have. I hope it was useful. There are a lot of upset victims out there who never
