The pub wasn’t one of his regular haunts. He couldn’t remember having been in it for years. As a result, though,
O J o ‘
he had not been recognized as he sat on his own, steadily deadening his thoughts and stupefying his feelings. Most people who saw his scowl and his unsteady hands would have left him alone with his personal black dog.
But nearby were a group of youths who were becoming rowdy and belligerent as the evening went on and they, too, became fuelled by alcohol. In one of those ways that Cooper had never understood, they had spotted him as a policeman. Their voices grew loud in derision when he failed to react to the mocking exchanges.
‘Pork on the menu tonight?’ they shouted to the bar staff.
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‘Nice bit of bacon? Kill a pig for me, love.’
‘Oink, oink. I wondered what the smell was.’
‘Look at his snout in that beer.’
‘Oi, pig, got an old sow at home?’
‘Oink, oink.’
The youths thought they were hilarious. Ben Cooper had heard it all before, ever since he was a young bobby on the beat, walking round the Edendale housing estates or patrolling the town centre on a Saturday night. Never before, though, had he felt such a powerful, swelling anger that threatened to burst out of him at one more provocation. Charged up by the whisky, he felt that he would actually welcome an outburst of violence. It would be a blessed release.
The youths, getting no response to their pig jokes, had switched tactics.
‘Is that a truncheon in your pocket, or do you fancy me?’
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‘Ooh, put the handcuffs on me. I’ve been a naughty how.’
‘Nah, he’s not interested. The pigs are all too busy finding out who did for that tart at Moorhay. I don’t think.’
‘What, Laura Vernon? Her?’
One of the youths guffawed and made an obscene gesture.
‘Laura Vernon? She’d fuck with anything, that one. Young blokes, old blokes, her own dad.’
‘She’d even fuck with animals.’
They thought this was totally hilarious. ‘Yeah, even pigs. Get it? Pig?’
One youth pushed his face closer to Cooper, leaning provocatively across his glass-strewn table, leering in sweaty proximity. He had a ring through his left nostril and small, pitted scars round his mouth.
‘Don’t you get it, then? Pig?’
Then he made his mistake. His face creased and his eyes narrowed as he peered at Cooper again, recognition dawning slowly.
‘Hey, just a minute, aren’t you that Sergeant Cooper’s —’
The empty glass was in Cooper’s hand before he knew it, and he was on his feet, clutching at the youth’s shirt front with his other hand. A chair went over, and the swinging glass smashed on the edge of the table. The youth’s friends threw themselves
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forward, grabbing at Cooper’s arms, bringing up their knees, snarling and spitting with ferocity as they reacted like a pack to a sudden threat.
Ben Cooper faced them, boiling with rage, a lethal crown of broken glass grasped tightly in his fist.
Becky Kclk was fourteen. She lived on Wye Close, almost next door to Lee Sherratt. She went to the same school as Simeon Holmes. She had heard all about the girls that had been attacked, the one at Buxton and the one right here in Moorhay, that girl at the Mount. It had never occurred to her until now that she could be the next victim.
The policeman still guarding the murder scene found her by her screams. She was in a hollow behind a screen of brambles, not far from the path that led on to the Baulk. Her pants had
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been removed and her striped leggings were torn. Her crop top and bra were disturbed, and there were grass stains on her shoulders and the imprint of a tree root in the small of her back. ‘I’ve been raped,’ she said.
The PC pulled out his radio immediately, scanning the area lor signs of the assailant.
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‘How long since?’
o
‘Just nov.’
‘Did you recognize him?’
‘It was the old man,’ she said.
‘What old man?’
Becky Kelk knew where the old man lived, though she didn’t know his name. She pointed unerringly up the hill towards the village, where Dial Cottage stood in the middle of its terraced row, its roof picked out by the last of the
