too important to her now. Besides, she relished the renewed feeling of confidence and power that karate had brought her. And it required total concentration. With shotokan and her job, she might never have to think about anything else.
Fry didn’t spend too much time considering the Laura Vernon killing. At present, her mind was a blank, awaiting data on which to base deductions, to make connections. She was looking forward to the morning, when she expected to be able to take in a barrage of facts that would be presented at the briefing, to see lines of enquiry open up like so many doors of opportunity.
For one brief moment, a small niggle entered her mind, a
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passing irritation that might have to be dealt with at some stage. It concerned DC Ben Cooper. The detective everyone loved; the man most likely to stand in her way. The picture that entered her mind was of a six-foot male with broad shoulders and perfect teeth, smiling complacently. She considered him fleetingly, then pushed him off the stage with an imaginary hand in the face. There were no obstacles that couldn’t be overcome. There were no problems, only challenges.
Finally, she switched on the television in the corner to watch a late-night film before bedtime. It was some sort of old horror
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film, in black and white. From her place in the old armchair, she was able to feel under the bed with one hand, her eyes on the TV. She pulled out a two-pound box of Thornton’s Continental and fed a Viennese truffle into her mouth. On the screen, a woman walking alone at night turned at the sound of following footsteps. As a dark shadow fell across her face, she began to scream and scream.
Five miles away from Grosvenor Avenue, Ben Cooper bumped his Toyota down the rough track to Bridge End Farm, twisting the wheel at the familiar points along the way to avoid the
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worst of the potholes. In places, the track had been repaired with compacted earth and the odd halt-brick. The first heavy rain of the winter would wash it all away again when the water came rushing down from the hillside and turned the narrow track into a river.
In passing, he noticed a stretch of wall where the topping stones had fallen away and the wall was beginning to bulge outwards towards the field. He made a mental note to mention it as a job he could do for Matt on his next day off.
Cooper was consciously trying to readjust his mind to such mundane things. But his thoughts were lingering on the Laura Vernon case. It was going to be an enquiry that he would not find easy to forget. He was baffled by the old man, Harry Dickinson. He had seen many reactions among people who became accidentally involved in incidents of major crime, but he could not recall such a puzzling mixture of indifference and secret enjoyment.
Unable to find a ready explanation for the old man’s attitude, he considered the leading suspect, the missing Lee Sherratt. He did not know Lee, and had never had any dealings with him. But he did recall his father, Jackie Sherratt, a local smalltime villain. He was currently serving two wears in Derbv for receiving,
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but was better known in the Edendale area as an experienced poacher.
Most of all, though, Cooper’s thoughts kept straying back to the moment he had found the body of the girl. The physical impressions had stamped themselves on his senses and would not go away. Even the evening air blowing through the open | windows of the Toyota could not take away the smell of stale blood and urine that seemed to linger in the car. Even a Levellers tape on the stereo could not drown out the buzzing of the flies that had laid their eggs in Laura Vernon’s mouth, or silence the derisive cry of the ragged-winged crow that had flapped away from her face. Directly in his field of vision, as if imprinted on the inside of the windscreen, hung the images of a ravaged eve
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socket and the startling contrast between a strip of bleached white thigh and a thick coil of black pubic hair. Even at the moment that he had first seen the body, Cooper had registered
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ft
the fact that Laura Vernon had dyed the hair on her head a rich, vermilion red.
It was not his first body by any means. But they didn’t get
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any better with experience. Certainly not when they were like this one. He knew that the sight would stay with him for weeks or months, until something worse came along. Maybe it would never go awav at all.
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Cooper also knew that he had sensed something wrong in the cottage at Moorhay where Harry and Gwen Dickinson lived. Something that the granddaughter, Helen Milner, was aware of too. It was not anything he could put his finger on; not a cold fact that he could have included in an interview report; not a logical conclusion that he could have justified in any way. There wasn’t even any firm impression in his mind that the atmosphere had anything to do with the finding of Laura Vernon’s body. But something wrong at Dial Cottage there had certainly been. He was sure he was not mistaken.
The Toyota rattled over a cattle grid and into the yard of Bridge End Farm. Its tyres splashed through trails of freshly dropped cow manure left by the herd coming down to the milking shed from
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their pasture and back again after afternoon milking. A group of calves destined for Bakewell Market bellowed at him from a pen in one of the buildings at the side of the yard. But he ignored them, slowing instead as he passed the tractor shed to look in at the big green John Deere and the old grey Fergie, and the row of implements lined up against the walls. There was no sign of his brother, although Matt would normally be found tinkering with a bit of machinery at this time of the evening.
When he reached the front of the house, Cooper’s heart began to sink. His two nieces, Amy and Josie, were sitting on the wall between the track and the tiny front garden. They were not playing and not talking to each other, but sat kicking their heels against the stones and stirring the dust with the toes of their trainers. They looked up as he parked the Toyota, and neither smiled a greeting. He could see that Josie, who was only six, had been crying. Her eyes were red and her nose had been running, leaving grimy tracks on her brown cheeks. A comic lay discarded
