evening light.
They found Harry Dickinson waiting patiently in his front room. He was dressed in his best Sunday suit, his thin hair slicked back, a blue tie knotted carefully at his throat. The toecaps of his shoes were gleaming, and the Guardian was folded neatly on the table. He sat solemn and stiff in his hard- backed chair, his expression that of a man in a hospital waiting room, expecting the inevitable bad news.
When Gwen let the police into the front room, he showed no surprise, and no emotion. He merely knocked out his pipe and laid it on the rack on the mahogany cabinet. He picked up his cap, smoothed the knees of his trouser legs and stood up slowly.
‘You didn’t take long. I’ll give you that.’
298
24
Hey, hev, that’s enough of that!’
J J ‘ O
The burly landlord was wading his way in between them, a shaggy-haired Alsatian snarling at his heels and snapping at any available leg. Cooper pushed the youth roughly away and put the glass back on the table. They stood around in a panting group, shaking and trembling as the adrenaline continued to pump through their veins.
‘You lot — out!’ said the landlord. ‘You’re banned.’
‘Bloody hell. We were just messing. It wasn’t anything serious,’ said the leading youth.
‘I don’t care what it was. I won’t have it in here. This is a respectable pub.’
‘What about him, then? PC Plod here.’
‘I’ve told you — out. Now!’
The three of them trooped out sullenly, grumbling loudly and slamming the door behind them. The landlord and his dog watched them with similar glowers on their faces until they had gone. The normal noises of the bar gradually resumed, couples leaning towards each other in open-mouthed excitement. The juke box had been playing an old Rolling Stones hit for the past few minutes. ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’. A barmaid came out with a pan and brush to sweep up the broken glass.
‘Sorry,’ said Cooper.
‘I don’t know you, lad, but I take it you’re with the police.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You ought to know better, then.’
O ‘
Cooper slumped back into his chair, feeling suddenly weak in the legs. The landlord looked down at him, assessing him with a professional eye, weighing up exactly how drunk he was.
‘I’ll get someone to fetch you a coffee. Then you’d better go home.’
‘No, thanks. One more whisky, then I’ll go.’
‘Have sense.’
299
‘I’ll he all right.’
‘You’re not driving, are you?’
O J
‘Of course not.’
‘I suppose that’ll be all right then. But that’s it. No more.’
Diane Fry had done things in the right order. She had phoned Ben Cooper’s home first. She’d spoken to his brother, Matt, who sounded equally worried when she told him she was trying to find Ben. Then she dialled his mobile, but got no reply. That meant a tour of two dozen pubs. It was one way of getting to know the town better.
It was lucky that Cooper’s red Toyota was distinctive. She spotted it eventually in a pub car park behind the bus station, where the stink of diesel fumes from the green TransPeak buses mingled with the smell of new plastic and burnt oil from the factory units on the Edenside Industrial Estate.
The Unicorn was near the corner of two streets of terraced houses, some of which had their ground floors converted into shops — motor spares, insurance, a Chinese takeaway. The corner property had been demolished at some time, and the site had become a car park for the pub. There was no lighting at the end of the street or on the brick walls of the pub, and the glare from the bus station two hundred yards away only made the darkness blacker. But Fry saw the Toyota gleam suddenly in her headlights as she turned into the street and pulled up outside the takeaway.
j
It was one of those bars where everyone turned to look at you when you walked in. At least, they did if you were a woman on your own. Even the landlord gave Fry a hard stare as she scanned the room to find Cooper at his table in the corner. His face looked bloated and his eyes were half closed as he nursed the remains of a single whisky. She could see straightaway that he was hopelessly drunk.
‘Ben?’
He looked up blearily as she stood over him. ‘What the hell do you want?’
She ignored the aggressive tone in his voice. ‘What do you think you’re doing, Ben?’
300
‘Getting pissed. What has it got to do with you?’
‘Are you mad? Are you intending to make a complete idiot of yourself?’
‘Probably. So what?’
There were too many people close enough to overhear. She ,^at down, leaning across the table to deliver her message eye to eye. ‘You’re a police officer. Don’t you realize, if this gets back to Division, you’ll get your arse kicked all the ay back to the beat. Bang goes the promotion, Ben.’
