‘Why not?’
He shrugged. ‘He just can’t, that’s all.’
‘You’re nuts, do you know that? You’re a sandwich short of a picnic.’
They didn’t speak to each other for a few minutes. They lay listening to the noises in the woods. A small flock of jackdaws
D J
appeared and circled the face of a neighbouring crag. Their harsh, metallic cries drowned out all other noises coming up from the valley until the birds gradually settled on to their roost.
The minutes passed without incident. The three old men were still gathered around the white pick-up in front of the house. In another half-hour the light would have gone completely. Fry passed the binoculars back to Cooper. Then she eased over on to her side and dug a hand into the pocket of her jacket. She pulled out a bag of coloured sweets.
The read somewhere you should have something with you when you’re on the hills. For the energy.’
Cooper took a sweet and sucked it thoughtfully. He looked at her with a faintly puzzled expression. She seemed to feel his eyes on her and turned away, pretending to study something in the woods. Beyond the valley, a jet airliner was leaving a faint trace across the sky towards Manchester.
‘Diane —’ he said tentatively.
‘Yeah?’
‘What happened to your family?’
Fry remained staring straight ahead. A tendon twitched in her neck as her jaw tightened. She showed no other sign that she had heard him.
He studied her profile, trying to tune in to what she was thinking, to get a glimpse of how she was feeling. But her face was stony and expressionless, her eyes fixed on something that might have been deep in the wood, or even beyond it.
A blackbird scratching in the old leaves beneath the trees whistled and chattered to itself. A partridge wound up its rusty spring somewhere down the hillside. They followed the sound of a car travelling up out of Moorhay towards Edendale.
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‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,’ he said gently.
She turned her head then. Her lips had narrowed to a hard line, but her eyes had returned from their invisible horizon to seek out his own.
‘I just can’t believe you sometimes, Ben.’
‘I’m that amazing, eh?’
o’
‘What sort of time is this to decide you want to discuss my private life?’
‘I thought you might like to talk while we wait.’
‘Would it surprise you to learn that all I’d like to do at this particular moment is punch you on the nose?’
‘Oh, I shouldn’t do that. My screaming would give our position away.’
‘Right.’
They stayed unmoving for five minutes more. The blackbird
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chattered amongst the old leaves on the woodland floor. A
o
squirrel rustled the branches as it leaped from one tree to the next. A large, pale moth appeared, fluttering in front of Fry’s nose until she waved it away. A tawny owl hooted from the slopes of the Baulk. Finally, she gave a deep sigh.
‘I was taken into care by Social Services when I was nine. They said my parents had been abusing my sister, who was eleven. They said it was both my parents. We were fostered after that, but we kept moving on to different places. So many different places that I can’t remember them. It was years before I realized that we didn’t stay anywhere long because of my sister. She was big trouble wherever we went. Nobody could keep her under control. But I worshipped her, and I refused to be split up from her.’
‘What about you?’
‘What about me? Do you mean was I abused too? I can’t remember.’
‘Was it ?’
7 can’t remember.’
The blackbird flapped away through the undergrowth, cackling its alarm call. The squirrel froze on an oak branch, its body upright, its head alert for danger. Cooper and Fry automatically
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ducked their heads and hugged the ground more closely. Gradually, the normal sounds oi the lullbide returned. J he squirrel relaxed and moved on.
‘So what happened to your parents?’
‘For God’s sake. I’ve no idea. And I don’t want to know. All right?’
‘And your sister?’
