‘Are we going to talk to him?’ she said.
‘The negotiator will talk to Dearden when he arrives. Perhaps he’ll see sense, but it depends what his state of mind is. I’m not putting any of our officers at risk.’
‘I suspect Michael Dearden didn’t even know who he was shooting at,’ said Fry. ‘But what I’d really like to know is what the hell the vicar came up here for.’
Fry looked at the outbuildings and the back door of Shepley Head Lodge. Probably it was perfectly normal in this area to call at the back door of a house when you were visiting someone you knew. But in the dark?
‘Did Mr Alton have a torch?’ she said to the officers nearby. ‘Anybody seen one?’
They shook their heads and shrugged. Fry turned back to the inspector.
‘There are some people called Renshaw down in Withens, they’re friends of the Deardens. Perhaps we should give them a call and ask them to talk to Michael Dearden.’
Time enough for that later,’ said the inspector. ‘Where is the negotiator?’
‘On his way, sir.’
Ben Cooper reached the Withens car park and got back into his Toyota. He sat for a few minutes listening to the messages going
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backwards and forwards to the control room on the radio, but there seemed to be nothing immediately pressing in his part of Derbyshire.
He had parked where he could see both Waterloo Terrace and the rest of the village. But he found that, if he looked straight ahead, he was facing the slopes of Withens Moor, where the air shafts were trailing a few wisps of steam as the cool morning air met the heat produced by the high-voltage cables.
It was strange to think that there were three abandoned railway tunnels two hundred feet below the shafts, and not far away their entrances, protected by steel gates and warning notices. Cooper found himself thinking about the navvies who had built the original tunnels back in the nineteenth century. Most of them had not been Irish immigrants, as he had always thought navvies were. Maybe he had just been prejudiced by the stereotyped image of the Irish labourer in big boots, with a handkerchief tied round his head and his backside protruding from his trousers.
But surely it was more than that. Irish migrant workers had played a major part in building England’s canal and railway systems, and had later moved into other areas of the construction industry. Wasn’t there one little island off the west coast of Ireland where almost all the men of working age went into tunnel building? They were all related and might even have had the same surname, too, though Cooper couldn’t remember what it was.
So why were the Woodhead navvies almost exclusively English? They were from Yorkshire, a lot of them. And Cheshire, too. But Woodhead had been in Cheshire back then. The whole of Longdendale had been in Cheshire. So really it was the Yorkshire men who had been the foreigners in these parts.
Cooper was wondering whether he ought to call in and check there was nothing he was missing when he jerked upright, startled by a loud rap on the passenger’s side window. He bumped his head on the grab handle, and rubbed at it guiltily as he peered through the window, expecting to see Diane Fry or a senior officer catching him out. He hadn’t been dozing, not really. Just thinking.
But it wasn’t Diane Fry, or anybody more senior. It wasn’t even Gavin Murfin grinning at him through the window, pleased at having made him jump. The face he saw was Lucas Oxley’s.
Cooper was so surprised that he was a bit slow to respond. He saw Oxley try the door handle, but of course the locks were on. He noticed the brim of Oxley’s hat resting against the glass, turning
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over at the edge so that Cooper could see the man’s eyes more j
clearly, despite the distracting reflections of his wan, startled face. y
Oxley rapped again, getting irritated, and gestured at him to wind w
the window down.
At last, Cooper pressed the button for the electric window. Well,
it was pretty unbelievable. But it seemed that Lucas Oxley finally | wanted to talk to him.
‘It’s not me that wants to talk to you,’ said Lucas Oxley. ‘I hope you understand that.’
Ben Cooper had turned the radio down and invited him to sit in the car, but Oxley hadn’t even condescended to acknowledge that foolish idea, and Cooper had immediately regretted it. He was on new ground here, and he had to tread carefully, take it step by step.
‘Fair enough, sir.’
‘It’s our Ryan,’ said Oxley. ‘He says he wants to tell you something.’
‘Sensible lad.’
‘But I’ve got to be there when he does.’
‘Certainly, sir. I would have insisted on it anyway. Ryan is a juvenile.’
‘He’s fifteen.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve tried to talk him out of it, of course/ said Oxley. ‘I don’t even know what it is he wants to tell you - he won’t say. And God knows we’ve got enough on just now. But the lad’s stubborn. Stubborn like ‘
‘His dad?’
Cooper was rewarded with something that was almost a smile. Oxley’s mouth slipped out of shape, but he sniffed and managed to correct himself.
‘Our Ryan’s not a bad lad/ he said. ‘But he’s not like the others. He does have this stubborn streak.’
‘I understand.’
