Cooper looked down the list, until he arrived at the right line. Owen was right to be amazed, if that was what he was thinking. He was looking at number seven: ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’
‘I had to do everything for her, in the later stages,’ said Owen. ‘I had to get her up, wash her and dress her, take her to the toilet, wipe her, feed her, clean her
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teeth, then undress her and put her to bed again. What marriage involves that kind of intimacy between a man and a woman?’
Owen had begun to cry; the tears crawled over his skin like tiny slugs, slow and painful. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m just glad she isn’t here now.’
Cooper looked away. He looked at the headstones in the graveyard, the yew trees and leaf-covered paths; he studied the village street, where a delivery van was parked outside the butcher’s shop, and he looked at the shadowed windows of the white house on the corner.
‘Owen?’ he said. ‘Shall I fetch that key for you?’
The interior of the church smelled of stone flagged floors that had recently been mopped clean. The light came from high in the walls, fragmented by the stained glass windows in a way that reminded Cooper of the cattle market at Edendale. The wooden pews were lined up just like narrow holding pens for worshippers waiting to be herded into the afterlife. He half-expected to see Abel Pilkington up there in the pulpit in his black suit, shouting out the prices, knocking down lost souls to the highest bidder.
‘You have to appreciate they’re treating this child pornography enquiry very seriously,’ said Cooper. ‘There was a little girl who ended up dead at the hands of two of these men. There may have been more we don’t know about.’
Owen nodded. ‘Of course, I regret what I’ve done. Somehow, I didn’t think of it as involving anyone else. I was still in my own private world, where it had always
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been just me and Mum, but now it was just me. And somehow - it was strange…’ Owen screwed his face up in an effort to explain the inexplicable. ‘But sometimes those little girls, Ben … I thought of them as if they were my mother. My own mother, as a child.’
Cooper lowered his eyes. There was nothing he could say, no platitudes that slipped into his mouth to meet the situation. His mind balked at being drawn into the dangerous, aberrant ideas that had appeared suddenly in front of him, like treacherous bogs across his path.
He felt guilty for stopping Owen. Being able to talk to someone would help him. But Cooper shouldn’t be talking to him about it at all. At any moment, Owen might make some damaging admission, and they would both be in an impossible position.
‘The cigarette stubs,’ said Cooper.
‘They’ve already asked me about those. Why do they matter?’
‘They matter because one was found under the body of Ros Daniels, as well as near where Jenny Weston was killed. You know that. We think the killer smoked those cigarettes and dropped them - the one careless thing he did. And the one they found in the bin at Partridge Cross was identical.’
Cooper paused. He wished he could still see the Commandments for inspiration. His lips moved silently. He had been about to ask Owen if he had noticed the cigarette stub in the bin before the police search. If nobody smoked at the Ranger centre, it was something he ought to have noticed.
‘Where did the cigarette in the bin come from, Owen?
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The bin had been emptied, but the ash was stuck to the bottom. Who uses that bin for their rubbish?’ ‘Anybody could.’
‘And the rucksack. I know it’s yours, Owen. But could anybody else have used that rucksack?’
Owen said nothing. He stared at the high windows, as if wondering why the birds perched in the branches of the yew were silent, why the stained glass saints said nothing, why the whole world was waiting for his reply. A realization had come over him like the passing of a cloud.
‘Could anybody else use it?’ repeated Cooper. And then Owen said: ‘Yes. Mark uses it.’
Owen Fox sat alone in one of the pews when Ben Cooper had gone. His head was down, his hands clenched together until the knuckles whitened. He had his eyes closed, like a man praying. But he wasn’t praying - he was remembering. Remembering the little girl.
She had been about six years old, and she had been alive at first. He had pulled her out of the back seat of the wrecked car, with his lungs full of fumes from the petrol pouring out of the ruptured fuel tank, and his eyes averted from the bloody and shattered bodies of the little girl’s parents, particularly the sight of her mother, with the branch of a tree skewering her cheek to the seat.
Owen had seen the car go out of control and hit the tree, and a second later he had heard screams that had died suddenly in the noise of the impact, lost in the crumpling thud of metal and the splintering of glass.
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He used his radio as he ran. But by the time he got to the road, he had no doubt the man and woman were dead.
The stench of the petrol panicked him when he saw the child still alive in the back seat. He barely knew what he was doing as he pulled her out, clumsily dragging her by her leg and a fistful of her blue dress, a thin summer dress that tore in his hand.
Then he had backed away to a safe distance and held the child in his arms while he waited for the ambulance to arrive. He seemed to be holding the girl for a long time, and he realized straight away that she was badly injured. He could feel the bones of her pelvis shift and bulge under his hand, and an unnatural swelling in her abdomen that seemed to grow and tighten under his fingers as he waited, not knowing what else to do. The child’s body felt like a flimsy plastic bag that was no longer able to support the weight of its contents. At any moment it was in danger of splitting open and leaking its liquids, spilling soft, glistening objects on the ground.
Owen had held the child gently, willing her to survive, trying to pour his own life into her through his hands to help her fight the shock of her injuries. He found his fingers becoming extraordinarily sensitive, as all his attention concentrated on his sense of touch, on the close physical contact with another human being. He held a small, fragile life in his hands, and the sensations were like nothing he had ever known. He was aware of the faint beating of her heart, the pulsing of her blood, the slow lift and fall of her chest and the living warmth of her skin against his own.
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Then Owen had become conscious of other feelings as he held the girl. He had noticed the soft flesh of her upper thighs where her dress was torn and pulled up to her waist. He noticed the white smoothness of her belly; and he saw the shape of her genitals, tiny and clear through
