‘Yes, Mrs Sherratt, she was.’
‘Well then.’
Leaving the house, Tailby crossed the street to the Vauxhall again.
‘Give it a few minutes, then check that garden shed round the back again,’ he said. ‘But don’t make a fuss about it. You
o ‘
never know, the saintly Lee might just have appeared by some miracle.’
Helen Milner found her grandfather sitting on a boulder on the path leading up towards Raven’s Side. A small cloud of pipe smoke marked his position. His knees were spread, and his back was as straight as if he had been sitting on one of the old upright chairs at the cottage. At his feet was Jess, chewing at a stick. The dog had stripped the bark to shreds and was splintering the soft inner flesh of the wood with her teeth, dropping the fragments on the ground like a scattering of confetti. Jess looked up cautiously as Helen approached, gave her soulful look and went back to her stick. Her teeth gleamed white and sharp as they ripped into the wood.
This was not Harry’s usual route for his morning walk. But below the ridge the reason for the change in routine was obvious. A white caravan sat in the corner of a field, where it had been dragged by a Land Rover. It was the furthest spot the caravan could reach before the woods began and the ground grew steep and rocky as it plunged towards the valley bottom. Three more four-wheel-drive vehicles were parked behind it. Further down the slope, figures in white boiler suits and hoods were moving
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slowly around in the undergrowth, which had been cut down and removed in a idc circle. Other men and women could be glimpsed in the trees on either side. Some were on all fours, as if they were praying to some strange god for guidance in their bizarre task. Blue plastic tape had been wound round the trees, and it danced and flickered in the sun, signalling the spot where Laura Vernon’s body had lain.
‘If the ground wasn’t so dry, they’d never have got that caravan to that spot,’ said Harry, as his granddaughter crouched down beside him.
‘What do they use it for?’
‘Making a brew and having their snap in, as far as I can tell.’
Helen could see a constable in shirt sleeves standing by the field gate between the caravan and the woods. His face was turned up to the hill, and now and then he put a hand up to shade his eyes as he squinted into the sun. He was watching Harry.
‘They know you’re here,’ said Helen.
‘And they don’t like it either, but there’s bugger-all they can do about it. It’s a public footpath, and I’m not anywhere near their precious tape.’
‘Have they said anything?’
‘Oh aye, they sent some bugger up to talk to me half an hour ago. He wanted to know who I was and what I was doing here.
o o
Then he took my name and wrote it down in a little book. He knew who I was then, all right. I thought he was going to ask for my autograph. I’ve never been so famous. You’d think I was somebody off telly.’
‘Did the policeman ask you to move?’
‘He did.’
‘And what did you say?’
A gleam of amusement came to Harry’s eye. Helen sighed.
‘Oh, Granddad. You shouldn’t. It doesn’t do to upset them.’
‘Bugger that. Somebody has to keep them on their toes.’
Looking at her grandfather, Helen wondered whether she had been right to come. She had been into school for a pre-term staff meeting, but had been given permission by her head to leave early. She had made use of the time to make a mad rush across
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the countryside to check on her grandparents. She had found (jwen subdued but calm, and Harry missing. Now she had tracked him down, he did not seem like the Harrv she knew. Fven more than on the previous day, he gave the impression that in some way he was enjoying himself. But she knew her grandfather was not a cruel or callous man. He ould not revel in the death of a young girl. But somehow he saw the event as a challenge of his own he had to face. Perhaps it would have been bettor if she hadn’t come at all. She did not want to end up in an argument with him.
‘Have you seen the newspapers?’ asked Harry.
‘Some of them.’
‘A lot of rubbish, they print,’ he complained. ‘Two of them have spelled my name wrong.’
‘.I suppose there’ll be more in the local papers.’
‘They’re not out until later in the week. It might be over by then.’
‘Do you think so, Granddad?’
Harry had his pipe in his mouth, his jaw clamped into a habitual grimace. Helen couldn’t read his expression at all. She wondered what had happened to the rapport she had always had with him, the sense of knowing what he was thinking without him having to saw it out loud. Her understanding of him seemed to have
^ o
died. It was dead since yesterday.
‘Maybe it will,’ he said. He puffed at his pipe as if giving the question some thought. ‘If the coppers pull their fingers out. Or even if they don’t. Maybe it will be over all the same.’
