Blind To The Bones By Stephen Booth
It’s nearly May Day and deep in the Dark Peak lies the village of Withens. Not a tranquil place but one troubled by theft, vandalism, strange disappearances and now murder. A young man is killed — battered to death and left high on the desolate moors for the crows to find.
Ben Cooper, part of the investigating team, meets an impenetrable wall of silence from the man’s relatives who form Withens’ oldest family. The Oxleys are descendants of the first workers who tunnelled beneath the Peak. They stick to their own area, pass on secret knowledge through the generations, and guard their traditions from ovitsidcrs.
Detective Diane Frv is in Withens on other business — looking into the disappearance of Emma Renshaw. The student vanished into thin air two years ago, but her parents are convinced she is still alive and act accordingly… which doesn’t help Fry in her efforts to re-open the case folio-wing an ominous discovery in remote countryside.
But there are other secrets in Withens and more violence to come… The past is stretching its shallow over the present, not just for the inhabitants of Withens but for Cooper antl Frv as well.
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Stephen Booth was born in the Lancashire mill town of Burnley, and has remained rooted to the Pennines during his career as a newspaper journalist. He is well known as a breeder of Toggenburg Goats and includes amontj his other interests
O
folklore, the Internet — and walking in the hills of the Peak District, in which his novels are set. Blintl to the Bones is the follow-up to the stunning psychological thrillers Blood on the Tongue, Dancing with the Virgins and Black Dog.
He lives with his wife LttsJuiJn a former Georgian dower llnHB^i^^^mBpghamshire.
Up-to-date news of Stephen’s latest ““TSiblications and appearances can be found is website: www.slephenbooth.com
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BLIND TO THE BONES
By the same author
Black Dog
Dancing with the Virgins Blood on the Tongue
I
STEPHEN BOOTH
Blind to the Bones
kiarperCollmsPublisbers
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The tjles characters
and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the^or’s imagination
Any resemblance to actual persons, living oijia(j events Or
localities is entirely coincident;
HarperCollinsPMMs/zOT
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Copyright S Stephen Booth 2gj
Stephen Booth asserts the moral |t ^o be identified as the author of th{1[)ri,
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I
For Tom Jefferson
I’m grateful to John and Von Morley, and members of Black Pig, for their help during the writing of this book. Although the Border Rats are fictional, the Border tradition exists in many parts of Britain. For a taste of the real thing visit: http://members.aol.com/BlackPigl/BLACKPIG.html
1
Friday
As soon as he opened the door, he could hear the screaming. It ripped through the damp air and shrieked in the yews. It echoed from the gravestones and died against the walls. It was like the sound of an animal, dying in pain. Yet this sound was human.
With every breath he took, Derek Alton seemed to draw the noise into his own lungs with the air, until something like an answering scream came from deep inside him. The asthmatic wheeze of his inflamed air passages was so high pitched that his ears couldn’t locate its direction, but identified it as a noise that came from the air around him. The pain in his upper chest told him where that noise came from.
And Alton knew where the screaming came from, too.
With shaking fingers, he brushed some of the dust from his sleeve. The exertion had made his collar stick to the back of his neck, and a few strands of hair had fallen over his forehead, where they lay like barbed wire on his skin. He rubbed at a fresh scratch on his knuckles, but managed only to smear a streak of blood across the back of his hand. He could taste dust in his mouth, too - old dust, the debris of years, stirred into the air by a random act of violence.
The screaming reminded Alton of the shriek of agony he had once heard from a rat, when a terrier had flushed it from its nest in a barn and its back had been broken under a farmer’s spade. The dying rat had squealed with its last strength, as its legs kicked and its pale claws clutched and uncoiled in the dry earth.
