‘Somehow, that makes it even worse/ said Granger.
‘Yes, it always does. Are you older than your brother?’
‘Yes, by three years. It isn’t much, but it always seemed a lot between us. He was always my little brother. I felt quite responsible for him after our mum died. She had cancer of the stomach, you know.’
‘What about your father?’
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‘He was sent down for burglary when we were teenagers, and we never saw him again. He was let out a lew years ago, but he didn’t bother coming home. Mum wasn’t too upset about that.’
‘Did he come to her funeral?’
‘No. We’ve never heard anything from him, and we haven’t tried to find him either.’
‘So you don’t even know whether he’s still alive?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘He ought to be told about Neil, if we can trace him.’
‘Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t help there.’
Cooper caught sight of himself in a mirror on the wall near the front door. He looked more at home here than Philip Granger did. Briefly, the thought crossed his mind that the house would be coming on the market. He pushed it away guiltily.
‘When did you last speak to your brother, Mr Granger?’
‘A few days ago. I’m not sure exactly when.’
‘During the last week?’
‘Yes.’
‘The beginning of the week?’
‘I’m not sure.’
Granger was starting to flag a bit. He probably wouldn’t be able to provide any more useful information at the moment.
‘But you said earlier that Neil was in Withens on Friday evening, is that right?’
‘Yes/ said Philip. ‘He was at a rehearsal.’
‘You weren’t there yourself?’
‘Oh. Yes.’
‘And you didn’t speak to your brother at the rehearsal?’ said Cooper.
‘Not really. It was kind of busy. And, you know - noisy.’
‘This was a rehearsal for …?’
The Border Rats.’
Philip looked around the room with a puzzled frown, cocking his head as if listening for a voice that wasn’t there.
‘They’ll have a vacancy now/ he said.
Ben Cooper was glad to get back to his flat in Welbeck Street that night. Withens and all the people connected with it had started to depress him, and he wasn’t quite sure why. Maybe it was the air of distrust he had met from everyone he had spoken to. They had been suspicious either of the police, or of each other, or even
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of the world in general. A police officer lived with suspicion, of course. But when it was unjustified, it was peculiarly depressing.
Cooper knew he was due to get a new neighbour in the upstairs flat. The previous tenant had been there for years, but had started to get a bit frail and had taken the chance of sheltered housing when she received an offer. Cooper expected his landlady, Mrs Shelley, to advertise the vacancy, as she had done with the ground floor flat. ‘Reliable and trustworthy professional people only’. That’s what the advert had said in the bookshop that day, when he had seen it by sheer chance.
But Mrs Shelley showed no signs of advertising the flat, or even getting any maintenance work or decorating done when the old tenant’s belongings had been moved out. Cooper was curious to know what was going on. He had heard almost no noise from the old lady, but if someone less quiet moved in upstairs, it could have an impact on his life.
Funnily enough, Mrs Shelley had taken to him in a big way. He had thought she might have blamed him for the death of her nephew, who had died during the course of a murder enquiry three months earlier, with Cooper the only person present. But when everything had been explained to her, Mrs Shelley had decided that Cooper was a hero. In a way, he had actually taken the place of her nephew, and now she took a special interest in him. He thought he could probably have asked for anything and she would have said ‘yes’. But it was unfair to take advantage of her.
Mostly, he wanted to establish the flat as his own private territory and he was nervous of encouraging her too much, in case she decided to pop in every few minutes to see how he was. The bolts helped there, of course. Though she had keys for the locks, there was no way she could just walk into the flat when he was there. That privacy felt very precious to him at the moment. It was a privacy he had never enjoyed before, since he had lived at Bridge End Farm with his family all his life. Finally, approaching his thirtieth birthday, he felt free for the first time. He could create his own world in this little flat. And he was surprised at how territorial he had immediately become.
He forked some duck-and-turkey Whiskas into a bowl for Randy, who rubbed himself briefly against Cooper’s legs. Though they had met each other only a few months before, the cat was very much part of the scenery in Cooper’s new life - which went
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to prove that you didn’t need to work at a relationship for years and years, didn’t it?
