stop in the car park and began to walk across the road towards Waterloo Terrace. Till catch you up, Tracy,’ said Cooper. ‘I won’t be a minute.’ The woman was wearing jeans and a dark coat and carrying a shoulder bag. Cooper watched her approach the terrace. She went straight up the path of number 5 and used a key to enter the house.
‘Fran Oxley,’ Cooper said to himself. ‘So you’re home, then. And you can’t pretend that you’re not.’
By the time he got to the house, Fran Oxley had already gone inside and shut the door. Cooper waited a couple of minutes to let her see his card and read it, then he walked up the path and knocked.
She must have been standing right behind the door, because she opened it with his card still in her hand. She looked at him blankly, then at the card, and he could see her putting two and two together without any trouble. The Oxleys had no trouble recognizing a police officer when they saw one. He might as well be carrying a neon sign around on his head.
‘Is this you?’ she said, tapping the card.
‘Yes. Are you Frances Oxley?’
‘I don’t have anything to say.’
‘If I could just ask you a few questions.’
‘I don’t have to answer any questions.’
‘I was talking to your father earlier on -‘
‘You’ve been talking to Dad?’ she said incredulously.
‘Yes, Mr Lucas Oxley.’
Then you’ll have found out everything you’re going to hear from this family.’
Cooper tried to look past her into the house. He had been concentrating on his body language as much as his words. He was hoping Fran would be the one member of the Oxley family to recognize that he wasn’t a threat. He was hoping that she might even invite him into the house. But she hadn’t quite gone for it yet.
‘It’s about Neil Granger,’ said Cooper. ‘Your cousin Neil.’
247
Fran Oxley hesitated, looked at his card as if to give it back to him, but hung on to it instead. She looked up the terrace along the row of doors.
‘I’d like you to leave now,’ she said.
Ben Cooper had rarely felt so impotent as he stood in the track watching the houses. He could hear children running up the passage behind the terrace, whispering to each other and brushing against the fencing. Smoke began to rise from one of the chimneys, and the smell of cooking was coming from somewhere, maybe from the open window at number 1. If he wasn’t mistaken, the children were going to be served microwaved pizza for tea. He couldn’t quite name the flavour, but it was something with onions, and the smell was making him salivate. Even worse was the feeling of isolation when Cooper heard a back door slam and the voices of the children were cut off as they entered one of the houses. That eerie Withens silence fell again, broken only by a clap of wings from pigeons taking off from the roof.
He began to feel foolish and lonely standing there trying to picture the scene indoors. He was frustrated not to know for sure which of the houses the children had gone into, or which adult was in charge of the microwave. Or was it an adult? Any one of the older Oxley children would be perfectly capable of taking a couple of pizzas out of the freezer and opening a family-sized tin of baked beans. Or maybe even one of the younger kids. Some children learned to look after themselves from a very early age, out of sheer necessity. And the Oxleys were nothing if not independent.
‘Damn and blast.’
Cooper began to walk back to the car, feeling like the single person at Christmas, shut out of all the family fun just when everybody was supposed to be enjoying themselves most. He felt exposed, too, as if the whole population of Withens was watching him from behind its curtains, laughing at his powerlessness.
‘Diane, you don’t understand,’ he said. ‘It’s time you came down here and saw for yourself.’
But not all the Oxley children were home for their tea. There were three boys standing in the road in front of the bus shelter. They had been playing with a football, but now one of them was holding it under his arm. As Cooper watched, the youngest one, Jake, began to make his way across the road towards the other
248
two boys. He walked with a noticeable limp, as if one leg were shorter than the other. But it didn’t seem to hinder him too much. When one of the others threw the ball down again, he ran for it nimbly enough, and kicked it with his good leg towards the car park.
It was the stationary car standing in the middle of the road that drew Cooper’s attention from the boys. The vehicle was a Mitsubishi pick-up, with its engine still running as if it had come to a sudden halt. But it stood in the centre of the carriageway, where it would cause an obstruction if anyone wanted to get past.
Then Cooper recognized the driver. It was Michael Dearden, frozen behind his steering wheel, staring at the Oxley boys like a rabbit caught in headlights. Cooper had rarely seen a grown man look so frightened.
249
23
Wednesday
Randy had spilled soil out of a plant pot in the conservatory. Ben Cooper brushed it up, rearranged the pots more neatly on their shelves, pushed the cat’s basket back into its corner and straightened the plaid blanket it was using as a bed.
He looked for other things to tidy, decided that the back door needed painting some time soon, brushed some cobwebs off a pane of glass. He stared through the glass, where he could make out the shapes of the trees against the lights of the houses in Meadow Road. The branches were just starting to come into leaf, and their outlines against the light were fuzzier and less stark than they had been all winter. Growth was progressing here, too.
He went back into the kitchen and shut out the sight of the garden. In the porch, there were some letters behind the front door. One advantage of living in town was that his mail came early in the morning, before he left for work if he was on a day shift. At Bridge End Farm, out there beyond even the smell of the town, the mail was delivered about lunchtime.
‘What have we got today then, Randy? Would you like a new credit card? A loan to help you pay for a foreign holiday, perhaps? Want to join a book club?’
