Ben? Because the way you’re heading, you’re risking everything. Do you know that?’ She didn’t wait for him to answer. ‘That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? You’re never going to forgive or forget that I got the promotion. You thought you had a divine right to it, just because you’ve been in the area for ever and your balls are made of limestone or something. And now you’re going to sacrifice yourself for some self-righteous
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idea that you’ll probably call justice, just to prove that ready to throw stones after all this, and it would be you don’t care about the job, that you never really had madness for Ben Cooper to put himself deliberately in any ambition after all. Well, go on, then - enjoy your the line of fire. Absolute madness.
martyrdom.’ After she had slammed the door behind her, Cooper read a few of the memos that were in his tray, but without taking in what they said. He made some notes on an assault case that was waiting to go to court. He looked through his drawers and found a half-eaten packet of Polo mints. He ate a mint. Then he ate another. And then he began to wonder what Owen Fox was doing now, back at Cargreave.
Owen was a man whose life and background had not stood up to close investigation. Whose life could? He had heard Owen described as a good man; but what did that mean? Was it a person who had never made a mistake? The papers would call Owen a sex beast, if they got the chance. But he wasn’t an animal, just a man whose circumstances had left him with a weakness. His fallibility had contributed to an evil in the world, it was true. But there were so many evils - too many to count, even in Edendale. And being weak didn’t make Owen Fox a monster; it only made him human.
Cooper knew that he had failed to help Cal and Stride, and he had failed to prevent the tragedy that had destroyed the Leach family. Maybe it wasn’t too late for him to help Owen Fox. But there would be a price to pay, if he tried. He was aware that he was walking a fine line already; his loyalties were under question, and not just by Diane Fry. It was vital that he stayed away from Owen Fox. There would be plenty of people
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There was no answer at the cottage in Cargreave. Ben Cooper stood on the bottom step, his feet crunching shards of broken clay pot and lumps of soil tangled with roots. All the plant pots on the steps had been smashed and the plants uprooted. Now they lay in a wet mess of soil. The bottom step had also been used as a toilet, almost as if the entire village had stood and urinated on to the doorstep. Urinated and worse. The smell was appalling. All the curtains were drawn on this side of the house. Cooper walked a few yards along the road until he found a ginnel that ran between the cottages, with steep steps at the bottom where gates led into adjacent gardens. He clambered over a wall into the field and walked along it until he reached the back garden of Owen Fox’s cottage and forced his way through an overgrown hawthorn hedge. A woman stared at him from a first-floor window next door, then turned away. Cooper peered through the windows, remembering the gloom of the little room at the front of the house where Owen’s computer had stood among the old newspapers and magazines. He banged on the back door, knocked on the windows, watching for a hint of movement inside. Nothing. Feeling foolish, he shouted Owen’s name. There was no reply. So where else could he be? They had taken the Land Rover off him when he was suspended, and Owen wasn’t the type to be drowning his sorrows in the pub. He would want to be somewhere quiet, where he could think about things. Cooper found himself looking up at the bedroom window. The line of bereavement cards still stood there, mostly white and silver, fading in the sun. They were decorated with all the symbols of religion - crosses and stained glass windows depicting the Virgin Mary. They were the usual things on bereavement cards, often meaning nothing. But, of course, Mrs Fox had believed in religion. Owen had said so himself. He had taken her to the village church until she became bedridden. And the old lady could see the tower of the church from her bedroom window. The graveyard at Cargreave parish church was full of local names - Gregory, Twigg and Woodward; Pidcock, Rowland and Marsden. There were lots of Shimwells and Bradleys here, and someone called Cornelius Roper - an ancestor of Mark’s, perhaps? One of the most recent headstones was down at the bottom of the graveyard, in one of the last available plots. Annie Fox, aged ninety, beloved mother of Owen. Even in the dusk and from the far side of the churchyard, Ben Cooper could see the red of the Ranger’s jacket in the porch. He walked up the path. Inside the porch, Owen Fox was dwarfed by a slate slab, eight feet
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tall, bearing the Ten Commandments. Cooper sat down next to him on a narrow stone seat.
‘It’s locked, Ben,’ said Owen. ‘The church is locked.’ ‘Too much trouble with thieves and vandals, I suppose.’
‘After she was gone, I didn’t think I needed the church any more,’ said Owen.
‘Your mother?’
‘We always used to come on a Sunday when she was well enough. After she died, I didn’t think I needed it any more. Then suddenly today I thought I did, after all. But it’s locked.’
Dozens of starlings were flocking in the churchyard, chattering to each other as they rustled from one yew tree to the next, deciding on a place to roost for the night.
‘Look, it might be a good idea if you stayed at home for a while, Owen,’ said Cooper. ‘Watch the telly, read a book, mow the lawn, feed the cats. Anything. Go home.’
‘I can’t.’ Owen scowled across the churchyard at the valley and the opposite hill. ‘Not knowing your lot have been through the house and pawed over my life. It doesn’t feel like my home any more. It’s a place where I’m a pervert, a sicko, the lowest of the low. But not outside the house. Outside, I’m someone else entirely.’
Cooper looked at the notices pinned to a board inside a glass case next to the slate slab.
‘According to this, you can get the key from the churchwarden at 2 Rectory Lane. The white house across the churchyard, it says.’
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‘Yes, I know,’ said Owen. ‘It’s just over there, look.’ ‘Yes, I know.’
Cooper looked at the house, studying its curtained windows and tall chimneys. There was smoke coming from one of the chimneys, and it looked as though there was somebody at home.
‘In this village, the churchwarden is also the chairman of the parish council,’ said Owen. ‘Councillor Salt. She knows me well enough.’
Then Owen changed the subject. It might have been the subject that had been running through his mind all along, whatever the words he had been speaking. It all spilled out as if Cooper had suddenly tuned in halfway through a conversation.
‘I looked after Mum for so many years, you know,’ said Owen. ‘We were more than mother and son. We were a team. Do you know what I mean? It was like a marriage, in a way. I looked after her, and she looked after me - or she liked to think she did. She used to drag herself out of bed to get a meal ready for me when I came home. I would find her sitting on the kitchen floor, with the cutlery tipped out of the drawer and a pile of unwashed potatoes. And she would be apologizing for dinner being late.’
