‘What’s this one?’
‘That’s the phone connection.’
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‘I can’t see a modem here.’ ‘It’s an internal.’
‘He’s got access to the Internet?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said the detective. ‘I can’t wait to see what Santa’s got on his hard drive.’
Cooper went upstairs to look at the bedrooms. The rooms smelled musty, and it was obvious Owen didn’t do much cleaning, or even open the windows very often. One room contained a double bed. Cooper remembered that Owen had looked after his mother until she died, aged ninety. Her room was still as it must have been just after her death - the sympathy cards still on the window ledge, the tea tray next to the bed, even the bed itself unmade, as if the old lady had only just got up. The smells of this room were familiar to Cooper. They were redolent of the worst periods of his own mother’s illness, the schizophrenia that had thrown the Coopers’ lives into chaos in the past two years.
He drew the curtain back a few inches, loosening a shower of dust. He was startled by a small explosion and a burst of coloured light above the neighbouring houses. Then he remembered it was the weekend for official village bonfires. He had passed the site of the Cargreave bonfire on his way into the village. The mere sight of the enormous heap of branches and old doors had brought back to him all the familiar smells of the Guy Fawkes nights of his youth - the black stink of the gunpowder and scorched fireworks cases, the stab of woodsmoke on the back of the throat, the scent of
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trampled grass, the hotdog stands and baked potato stalls. His mouth had begun to water at imaginary wafts of fried onions and melted cheese mingling with the sharpness of a November frost. Presumably there would be plenty more fireworks later on. But there would be no stuffed Guy Fawkes on the bonfire this year. No one considered it acceptable to burn Catholics in effigy these days, not even in Derbyshire. Cooper looked in the smaller bedroom, but found it was jammed full with old furniture and boxes of books. The frame of a single bed was hidden under there somewhere, but there was no way of getting to it. He looked along the landing. There was only a bathroom and a small airing cupboard left. He went back to the first bedroom again. It was dark and stuffy, like a sick room. Cooper wanted to yank back the curtains and let the light in, but he imagined the whole thing would wither and crumble to dust when the sunlight touched it. He had just realized why the bed was unmade. Owen had been sleeping in it himself. Though the detective was still downstairs and a constable was on the door, the forensic team had already moved on from the cottage in Cargreave. They had left to search the Ranger centre at Partridge Cross, where Owen Fox spent so much of his time. Later, they would carry away papers from his desk, along with a spare pair of boots, a rucksack, and a wastepaper bin.
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‘What sort of cigarettes do you smoke?’ DCI Tailby asked the Ranger in the interview room. ‘I don’t,’ said Owen. ‘Just a crafty one now and then, is it? Maybe you’re not supposed to smoke in the briefing centre?’ ‘I don’t smoke.’ ‘Really? Do you know your jacket smells of smoke?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, it does.’ Owen looked pained. ‘I don’t smoke.’ ‘We know about your record, Owen,’ said Tailby. ‘You’ve got a bit of a temper, haven’t you? You take it out on women sometimes. No doubt cigarettes help you to keep calm.’ ‘I don’t smoke.’ ‘We’ll see.’ ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ ‘Which of your colleagues smoke? The other Rangers?’ ‘None that I know of. They like to stay fit. It’s no good being short of breath if you have to walk up hills.’ ‘What about visitors? Do you let them smoke in the centre?’ ‘No, it’s a no-smoking zone.’ Tailby let the tapes run for a few seconds and glanced at Diane Fry across the table. ‘So how do you explain the cigarette ash in the bin in your office?’ she said. Owen looked baffled. ‘I’ve no idea.’ ‘I mean the wastepaper bin.’ ‘I’ve still no idea.’
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‘Do you recognize this rucksack?’ Tailby produced the item in a sealed plastic bag. It was a blue Berghaus with green webbing shoulder straps. ‘Yes, it’s one of mine,’ said Owen. ‘This rucksack was recovered from the briefing centre. Can you explain the ash and the cigarette end we found at the bottom of it?’ Tailby saw the Ranger hesitate. The DCI kept his face composed, careful not to make the Ranger aware of the importance of the question. He set the reaction aside to come back to later. ‘No, I can’t,’ said Owen. ‘As well as the wastepaper bin, and the rucksack, our forensics people found cigarette ends at the scene of Jenny Weston’s murder. All the same make of cigarettes. That’s a lot of evidence of smoking, Mr Fox. For someone who doesn’t smoke.’ Owen shook his head. ‘I can’t help you.’ ‘I suppose,’ said Tailby, after a pause, ‘there must be a lot of stress in your job now and then.’ ‘Oh yes.’ ‘Is there anything that’s stressed you out particularly that you can think of ?’ Owen seemed to turn inwards, his eyes becoming distant. ‘You mean like Cargreave Festival Day,’ he said. ‘Do you know about that? I think about Festival Day all the time.’ ‘Tell us,’ said Tailby. ‘It was in all the papers. Pages and pages of it.’ ‘Tell us anyway.’ Owen stroked his beard nervously. He looked like a
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man who ought to be pale and afraid of the light. And perhaps he would have been, too, if it weren’t for the job; it kept him out of doors, up on the hills, exposed to the weather. For most of the time. ‘I think one of the worst things was the crowd. All these people just stood there watching as the bodies fell and broke on the rocks. Three of them, one after another.’ Tailby glanced at the triple tape decks as the Ranger’s voice faded, wondering whether they would pick up the words that had become almost a whisper. But Fox rallied again as he looked at the detectives. ‘There was counselling by then, of course. But it depends what kind of person you are, how you deal with that sort of thing. Sometimes, you can’t deal with it at all.’
Tailby leaned forward. ‘All right. I understand. And the woman you were convicted of attacking, Owen? Was that something else you just couldn’t deal with?’ Owen gazed at Tailby directly for the first time in the past ten minutes. ‘That was different; he said. ‘That was about sex.’ Back in Cargreave, the detective from DI Armstrong’s team had accessed the temporary internet files downloaded on to Owen’s PC to track the sites that he had visited. It had never occurred to Owen to delete any of the files. So it didn’t take the detective long to find the child porn.
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Mark Roper wasn’t under arrest. But he had heard that Owen was, and the thought was making him nervous. He assumed that Ben Cooper had acted on what he had told him about the dogfighting. But gradually he was realizing that the questions were about something else. And when he got nervous, he got angry. He had never learned to keep a cool head, like Owen.
‘It’s the women who are the worst,’ said Mark. ‘Who told you that?’ asked DI Hitchens. ‘Owen did.’
Mark glanced at the tapes, as if feeling guilty at mentioning Owen’s name.
‘They’re so absorbed in themselves that they don’t notice what they’re doing. They don’t notice what’s going on around them,’ he said.
‘It upsets you when people litter the countryside, doesn’t it, Mark?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They’re destroying the environment. They don’t understand the damage they’re doing with their
