recognize the moment when it came, and recognize the man. Despite the difference in age, he would know him. Like father, like son. Wasn’t that what they said?
Shortly after one o’clock in the morning, Ben Cooper decided he needed some fresh air. The party was still going strong, though only members of his family were left, his friends and Matt’s in-laws having sensibly set off for the drive home.
The serious drinkers had moved into the kitchen among the rows of empty bottles and stacks of washing up that would be left for the morning. The conversation had drifted into unlikely areas. Matt was trying to get everyone to recite their favourite funny lines from TV comedy shows, while Uncle John had startled a few people with his imaginative solutions to the country’s asylum problem.
Meanwhile, those who were up past their bedtime and were beginning to flag had propped themselves up in the sitting room with a jug of coffee and the remains of the birthday cake, and were watching an old Star Wars video. The girls had been watching it the day before, and they’d left it in the video player. It hadn’t occurred to anyone to change it for something quieter, and now the older members of the family were having difficulty nodding off because the sound effects were so loud. His mother had long since been helped to bed and was sleeping in her old room.
Nobody noticed when Cooper slipped away to stand in the back garden, where he could look up at the trees on the hill391
side and see the stars. It was a bit cooler out here. He’d started off the evening drinking beer - mostly Budweiser and Grolsch, and some obscure Continental brands that Matt had bought in. Later, he’d found himself switching to white wine, simply because it was there. That had probably been a mistake. He didn’t feel drunk, just sort of fuzzy and detached from reality.
Of course, someone had asked about Mansell Quinn. None of the family had lived in Castleton, but everyone seemed to have friends who did. It was Uncle John who couldn’t believe that Quinn had been let out of prison.
‘Life?’ he said. ‘Thirteen years isn’t life. I’ve had dogs that lived twice as long as that.’
And that had started Matt off. He had a regular grumble about prisons, which he said were subsidized competition for dairy farmers. Prison farms produced twenty million pints of milk each year, not to mention goal nets for most of the English league football clubs.
‘And taxpayers like me shell out twenty-five thousand pounds a year to keep a prisoner inside doing that work,’ he said. ‘I’m paying to put myself out of business. Make sense of that, if you can.’
When the rain began to fall again, Cooper was surprised how good it felt. For a while, the splashes dried on the ground as soon as they’d fallen. And then the rhythm increased, and soon the drops were hissing through the trees and into the grass. Cooper held out his hands and let the rain gather in his palms, the way he’d done as a child.
Somehow, he seemed to have taken a long time to get to the age of thirty. The years since he was eighteen had lasted forever. The death of his father had begun to feel as though it had happened in an entirely different existence, from which he was only now emerging, like a man staggering from the water after a cross-Channel swim. The trouble was, he wasn’t quite sure whether this was a good or bad thing, whether he wanted to leave the old life behind or needed to hang on to it for safety.
392
Cooper walked along the side wall of the yard, where he knew he’d be out of range of the movement sensors that set off the security lights. Matt had installed the lights a few years ago after a spate of thefts from equipment sheds in the area. He’d lost a generator one night, and that had been the last straw. But the sensors couldn’t cover every corner, so they were directed on the main approaches and weren’t designed to catch people slipping away between the jumble of buildings, as Cooper was now.
He passed the end of the tractor shed and found himself among the old byres and pig sties. They stood unused now, rotting away quietly until Matt decided he needed the space for a new milking parlour or silage clamp. Cooper liked the smells down here - the scent of moss-grown stone and ancient wooden beams, and the ingrained odours of the animals that had lived and breathed in these buildings for generations. They were the smells of his childhood; he’d spent much of his spare time here, trying to help out, or simply hanging about and getting in the way, observing everything.
Cooper wished that Mansell Quinn hadn’t been mentioned, not tonight. And not here at the farm. On the face of it, his fear made no more sense than Alistair Page’s nervousness earlier that day. But he thought that unlike Page he might have good reason to be afraid - the history that existed between Quinn and Sergeant Joe Cooper might have been enough to set Quinn on his trail.
But Joe Cooper had two sons. Of course, Matt ought to be told about the situation, but Cooper didn’t know how he could broach the subject. There was no way he could tell Matt there might be a risk without explaining the reason. His own memory of his father might be tarnished, but spreading the contagion to the rest of the family was a different matter. He owed his father something, at least. And all Joe Cooper had left now was his reputation.
Cooper’s head turned sharply. A security light on the garage
393
door had come on. It bathed the gate and the top end of the driveway in light. Cooper watched for a moment, expecting to see a cat that had set off the movement sensor. But nothing moved in the area picked out by the light. Beyond the light, the lower part of the drive now looked like a black hole into which anything could vanish, or from where anything could appear. The rain continued to hiss all around him. A tapping had started somewhere - a drip of water from a blocked gutter, or the overflow from a water butt falling on a metal drain cover. The steady tap-tap-tap sounded like someone drumming their fingers with increasing impatience.
He wailed a few minutes, and the light went off. He blinked to readjust his eyes to the darkness. Behind the stone buildings was the stream. Cooper could hear it rushing over the stones, more noisily than usual because of the amount of rain that had fallen. And beyond the stream, the trees climbed up the hillside in dense, black clumps.
A public footpath ran through the fields here, and the sheep were used to people. They didn’t move or bleat as walkers passed, especially in the dark. Most of them didn’t even stop cudding.
When he looked across the stream, Cooper felt disorientated by the utter darkness, and he swayed a little, reminded of how much he’d had to drink. He had felt fine when he first got out into the fresh air, but he certainly couldn’t describe himself as sober, and suddenly the effects of the beer and wine seemed to be catching up with him.
‘Oh dear, that doesn’t feel too good,’ he said, feeling his stomach lurch as if someone had punched him in the gut.
And then, across the stream, he thought he saw a movement. He realized straight away that he was imagining things. He shook his head, but that only made him feel worse. Peering into the trees, he found his eyes drifting out of focus and had to concentrate to get them back into position. Ahead, where a rock formed an elbow in the bank of the stream and the
394
water foamed as it flowed round it - was something there? In the blackness he thought he saw a darker glistening, the uncertain outline of a shape formed by water swirling in different directions. Droplets of rain gathered and trickled sideways, while others lay glittering in random patterns on horizontal surfaces before running downwards again. In the centre of the outline was a void,
