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Cooper hesitated for a moment. ‘Yes, you should.’ She straightened herself up and scrambled over the rocks towards the car park that lay a few hundred yards below them at the Old Mill. ‘See you in a few minutes, then.’ ‘Yeah/
Damn, thought Cooper. And just as he was getting round to asking her about Hitchens.
He swung up the binoculars again. He had to peer hard now to make out the figures by the white pick-up. They seemed to have been gathered over a piece of paper, consulting together, nodding their heads, as if they were doing a crossword or something.
A few minutes after Diane Fry had left, he saw two of the dim
J
shapes begin to move away from the house. He realized they were heading back down the track leading from the smallholding. The tiiird stayed behind, leaning against the pickup.
Cooper followed the two figures as they passed dirough the first gate on foot and continued along the track towards the road. When they turned and crossed the road towards the squeeze stile that led to the path on to the Baulk, he knew he would have to follow them.
He looked at his watch. Nearly eight o’clock. Who else had mentioned eight o’clock? He flicked through his mental notes,
o o ‘
and remembered Fry’s account of her interview with Charlotte Vernon. It was this time, every night, that Charlotte visited the spot on the Baulk where her daughter’s body was found.
‘So let’s just go back over it again, Mr Edwards, shall we?’ said Fry. ‘You were standing near the cairn on Raven’s Side when you saw an old man with a black dog walk past the end of the footpath below.’
‘No.’
‘What do you mean “no”? That’s what you said in your statement.’
‘No, I didn’t. Where’ve you got that from?’
Fry stared through the windscreen at the car park and the lighted windows on the front of the Old Mill. She was still
o
unsure what it was she hoped to establish by speaking to the
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bird-watcher. Gary Edwards had already insisted that he would stick by his estimate of the time he had seen the old man. His watch was accurate, and he was sure of the time. He always recorded the exact time of a sighting, he said.
o o’
Now, though, she did seem to have touched on something. She consulted her notes, taken from his earlier statement.
‘I’ve got it right here, Mr Edwards — the statement that you signed. Let me read part of it to you. Your statement reads: “I saw the head of a dog through my binoculars. It appeared through some undergrowth. It was close to the ground, sniffing at a fallen branch. It was black.”’
‘Right.’
‘You go on: “Then I saw there was a man with the dog. He
o o
was an old man, wearing a cap. He passed out of my vision to the left, walking, not running. I took the binoculars away from my eyes and I saw the man and the dog move away into the trees. This was near the stream that runs by the footpath called the Eden Valley Trail.”’
‘Well ‘
‘So the dog was a black dog.’
‘No, that’s not what I said.’
‘It’s here. You’ve signed it. “It was black”, you said.’
‘You’re not listening. Like the other bloke — he didn’t listen either.’
‘Detective Sergeant Rennie?’
‘Yes, him. He just wrote what he wanted to, didn’t he? But listen. I only saw the dog’s head through the binoculars. The head was black.’ ‘So?’
‘So maybe the rest of the dog wasn’t. Get it? I couldn’t tell when I took the binoculars away, see? I could only make out the rest of the thing then, when it came out into the open. But the light was funny by that time. It was late on, and the sun was so low. You lose the definition of the colours.’
‘OK, I know what you mean. But as far as you could tell, the dog was black, yes?’
‘No. Well … I reckon it was probably black and white.’
‘Why? You’ve just said —’
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‘Well, they usually are, that type of dog. When you see them on the telly — they’re mostly black, with some white. They reckon it’s good camouflage, so the sheep can’t see them on the hillside.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘One Man and His r>fg. It was a sheepdog type of thing, with a shaggy coat. A Border collie, they call it.’
‘A Labrador, surelv. A black Labrador you saw.’
