Black dog bcadf-1

by Stephen Booth

  ‘Where? There’s only one place round here, lass. The Drover. As for Sunday morning, well, I’m always here. All this lot to see to, you know. It takes a while.’

  ‘Feeding the animals.’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Do you live here alone, Mr Cutts?’

  ‘Alone? Well, you’d hardly call it that, would you?’ he said, turning to look across the jumble of buildings, where any sort of animal could have been lurking for all Fry knew.

  She turned at the sound of an engine, and saw a battered blue Transit van struggling up the track. As it reached the gateway, a bent little man in a tweed jacket and a cloth cap got out of the driver’s seat to wrestle with the gate. He, too, took no notice of the geese.

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  ‘I’ll have to leave you to it for a bit,’ said Wilford. ‘I’ve got a customer.’

  He walked off, waving to the driver of the van until they had manoeuvred the vehicle against the end of one of the wooden

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  hen huts. Both men went into the hut with bundles of sacks from the van.

  ‘Stop and have a chat, lass,’ said Sam. ‘It’ll make a change.

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  Wilford can get to be a bit of a boring old bugger after a while.’

  ‘Have you known Mr Cutts for long?’ she asked.

  ‘As long as I can remember. Mind you, my memory’s not what it was, so he could be a complete stranger.’

  Sam began to laugh, his chest wheezing painfully and his false teeth clicking. Fry winced as he raised a thin hand to straighten his cap and the blade of the knife came dangerously close to his eyes.

  ‘My family came down from Yorkshire when I was very small,’ he said, when a fit of coughing had passed. ‘We went to live at

  Evam. My old dad went to work in the lead mines, and I followed

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  him down there, as lads did in those days. Wilford was the son of one of my dad’s mates. We worked on the picking table together with a few other lads, then moved on to be jig operators. That’s the way it went in those days, you knowr. You moved in small circles, just a few families and people that you knew. None of this wandering about that everyone seems to do now.’

  Fry’s attention strayed around the smallholding, her eves wide in amazement at the ramshackle constructions and makeshift fencing. She was wondering whether the way the animals were kept was strictly legal. She made a mental note to look up the appropriate regulations when she got back to the station.

  ‘You’ve been friends an awfully long time then,’ she said vaguelv.

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  ‘Sixty years, or a bit more. It was before the war, when we met.’

  ‘That’d be the Second World War, I suppose.’

  Sam peered at her to see if she was making fun of him, but seemed to realize that she was not even born until nearly thirty years after the war was over.

  ‘Aye, I suppose there have been a few other wars since then,’ he conceded. ‘We joined up together as well, for a bit. Royal Engineers, of course. They were right glad to get miners. They welcomed us with open arms. We went over to France on D-Day and stayed there till the end.’ He chuckled. ‘It brings back a few memories still, does that.’

  ‘Really?’

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  ‘French tarts,’ said Sam.

  ‘What?’

  The old man chortled. ‘That’s what 1 remember mostly now. All the rest of it has pretty well gone, all the bad bits. But I remember the tarts in France. We were a long way behind the

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  Front, of course. Rebuilding bridges, that sort of thing. Those French towns and villages were full of girls. And they were right

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  glad to sec a few Tommies, I can tell you. We had a high old time. Me and Harry, that was. Wilford didn’t approve, of course.’

  ‘Harry?’

  ‘Harry Dickinson,’ said Sam. ‘You might have heard of him. Here’s your mate.’

  Fry turned and saw Cooper’s Toyota coming back down the track, turning in by the Nissen hut. He parked behind the Transit and leaned out of the window.

  ‘There was no one at home up the lane,’ he said.

  ‘You’re Sergeant Cooper’s lad, aren’t you?’ said Sam.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Fry.

  T’m sorry, I don’t think 1 know you, sir.’

  ‘Sam Beeley.’

  The goat’s bellow was suddenly deafeningly near.

  ‘She’s out again,’ said Sam. ‘I’ll have to tell Wilford.’

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  ‘What’s the matter with it?’ asked Fry. Ts it ill?’

  ‘In season,’ said Sam, as if they were talking about a vegetable that was sometimes unavailable.

  ‘Will she be going to the billy, then?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘She’s off tonight. A bloke up Bamford way is taking her. He has a billy of his own.’

  There was a clattering of hooves and a brown and white

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  head topped by a pair of horns appeared briefly over the roof of the outhouse before the goat dropped nimbly into the paddock and skittered off into the deep grass at the far end.

  ‘Bugger,’ said Sam. ‘She’ll eat all the cabbages before we can cut them.’

  ‘Do you want a hand to catch her?’ suggested Cooper, getting out of the Toyota.

  ‘No, no. We’d never get near her. Wilford will fetch her

  ‘O

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  back — she comes to him. She’s only a goatling, and she’s a hit wild. He calls her Jenny.’

  ‘Mr Beelev was telling me about when he first met Mr Cutts,’ said shee, anxious that the interview was drifting far awav from

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  her. ‘ 1 heir fathers knew each other and they worked together,

  is iliat riiTht-”

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  ‘Of course, we all had jobs to go into then,’ said Sam. ‘Local jobs. There were always jobs in the mines then, or the quarries. It’s different for the young ones round here now, I suppose. The lad here will tell you that.’

  Fry noticed that Sam didn’t doubt for a moment that she was from out of the area and knew nothing about it, while Ben Cooper would understand. Since she had been in Moorhay, she felt as though her lack of local origins had been pushed into her face, quite unconsciously and without malice, but very effectively. She had been treated politely by people at every property they had visited, but none of them had looked at her with the unspoken

  recognition and sense of mutual understanding with which they

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  had looked at Ben Cooper when they realized who he was. ‘It’s been different round here for a long time now, Mr

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  Beeley,’ said Cooper.

  ‘I suppose it has, lad. I suppose it has. But, like I told you, my memory’s not that good. I remember the war, but not much since, if you know what I mean.’

  From the hut where Wilford and his visitor had disappeared, a great cacophony of cackling and screeching erupted, accompanied by the flapping of scores of wings.

  ‘What are they doing in there?’ asked shee.

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  ‘That bloke with the van is buying some of Wilford’s birds, see,’ said Sam, as if it was perfectly obvious. ‘Wilford left them inside today, those young Marans. But they’re a bit active. It’s better if you can move them at night — they don’t give you as

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  much trouble then.’

  ‘It sounds horrendous.’

  ‘They’re good layers, them Marans,’ said Sam.

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  ‘Mr Beelev, did you know Laura Vernon?’

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  ‘I know the family. Comcrs-in, aren’t they? Half the village

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  seem to be comers-in these davs. They’ve only been there a vear

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  or two, at the Mount. They walked in the pub one niaht, you

  know, when they first arrived. Eh. you shoul
d have seen their

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  faces. They never thought they’d be mixing with the hoi polloi like us. But they couldn’t walk straight out again, so they had to sit there and drink their gin and tonics like a right pair of southern pillocks.’

  ‘They’re from Nottingham, I believe.’

  ‘Aye.’

  Sam shifted his feet in the dry earth. One of them seemed to stick and move suddenly sideways, as if he had lost control of it through cramp. His shoe clanged against the side of an enamel bowl half full of water, left there for the geese, presumably.

  ‘Mr Beeley, we’re asking everybody what they might have seen in the area of the Baulk at about the time Laura Vernon was killed,’ said Fry.

  ‘Oh, you want my alibi, eh?’

  ‘No, that wasn’t what I asked for, sir.’

  Sam chuckled. ‘Only I don’t go in much for running after young girls these days. It’s my legs, you see. Got them both bust once, in the mine. They mended, but they were never right after that. Now that I’m getting older, they don’t work

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  too well at all.’

  ‘Were you in the area on Saturday night?’ asked Fry. ‘Or Sunday morning?’

  ‘What’s that accent?’ asked Sam, cocking his head and

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  scratching his ear with the knife. ‘You Welsh, or what?’

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  ‘I’m from the Black Country.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Birmingham,’ snapped Fry.

  ‘Ah. I’ve never been there. Wouldn’t want to, either.’

  ‘Saturday night, Mr Beeley?’

  ‘Saturday night? Well, I’d be in the Drover till about eleven o’clock, with Wilford. It was a bit busy that night. Tourists, you know, in the summer. B & B people. A lot of cars about too.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘I don’t live far from the pub. I can just about walk that far. And we do tend to have a few drinks on a Saturday. No driving to do, you know.’

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  There were tourists in the pub. Strangers to the village, then.’

  ‘Full of them,’ said Sam.

  Willord and the van driver emerged from the hut, tupping

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  at several bulging sacks, A cloud of dark feathers drifted out of the hut behind them, settling on their shoulders and sticking in

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  their hair. From the sacks came a steady complaint of trapped birds and an occasional rustle of feathers. The two men were sweating and dishevelled and breathing hard. Wilford was very red in the face and giving a series of faint, gasping laughs. The

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  little man from the van looked wild-eyed, even frightened by his experience in the hut.

  ‘Sunday morning,’ said Sam. ‘Well, I don’t get up too early these days. But I was dressed by about half past ten, when my son came to collect me. That’s Davey. Him and his wife always take me for Sunday dinner at their place in Edendale.’

  ‘Do you come up here much to help Mr Cutts?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘I’m not much use to him really. But I have to find something

  to fill my time.’

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  ‘Does he have any other help?’

  ‘A lad or two, that he pays a few bob for the heavy work. And Harry comes up here too, to help.’

  ‘Harry Dickinson again?’

  ‘Yes, that Harry. You’ll know him,’ he said to Cooper.

  The sacks thudded one after another into the back of the Transit, and the driver clambered in and began to coast back down the track. No money seemed to have changed hands between the two men.

  ‘Give us a hand here, Sam,’ called Wilford. ‘We’ve got one that’s badly. Broke its legs on the wire, I reckon.’

  ‘Goat’s out again, Wilford.’

  ‘She’ll wait.’

  Sam limped over towards the hut, and Wilford tossed him a hen that had been hanging upside down from his hand, its wings

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  outspread, its beak gaping and panting. Fry had never seen a hen so close before, and was startled to see the thin red sliver of flesh that protruded from its beak, like the darting tongue of a snake.

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  The bird had soiled itself, and the soft feathers round its anus were stained yellow. Fry swallowed, swearing never to eat an egg again.

  ‘Sam’s a dab hand at this,’ said Wilford cheerfully. ‘He doesn’t look to have much strength in his wrists, does he? But it’s all in

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  the technique, see.’

  ‘It’s just practice and a bit of a knack,’ said Sam, taking a firm grip on the bird. He tucked its body under his armpit, folding its wings closed and pressing it tight against his side. Then he closed the fingers of his right hand around the hen’s scrawny neck and pushed his thumb hard into its throat. He twisted and pulled suddenly. There was a faint crack and the bird’s eyes went dull. The wings beat desperately, their dying strength defeating Sam Beeley’s efforts to hold it still as they flapped wildly, releasing a spray of pinion feathers that drifted on to his trousers and boots. The bird’s legs kicked frantically and its tail lifted to eject another spurt of yellow. Then its claws relaxed and hung downwards, pointing limply at the ground with pitiful finality.

  ‘You’ve killed it,’ said Fry, astonished.

  The two old men laughed, and she was amazed to see Cooper smiling too.

  ‘It’s called putting them out of their misery,’ said Sam. ‘If you do it right, and do it quick, they feel no pain.’

  ‘It’s disgusting,’ said Fry. ‘It’s revolting.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Sam, holding out the limp bird towards her, ‘that you won’t want to take it home for your tea then.’

  Fry took a step back as a dribble of saliva ran out of the bird’s gaping beak and dripped into the dust. Its scaly legs looked cold and reptilian where they were gripped in Sam’s bony fingers.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Never mind. I’ll take it in for Connie,’ said Wilford.

  Cooper and Fry got back into the car. Fry wound up her window to keep out the musty smell of dried poultry droppings

  drifting from the door of the shed. The two old men stood Watch fe

  ing them turn round, and Sam gave them a small, cheerful wave. When they reached the bottom of the track, another van was turning in.

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  12

  A.nd now the good news,’ said DC1 Tailby.

  Tired heads perked up all around the incident room. Most of the officers were finishing the daytime shift, winding down from the hectic first full day of a murder enquiry. Others were taking over for the evening, beginning their stint by getting up to date at the evening briefing.

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  Ben Cooper and Diane Fry sat together, reluctant, despite themselves, to break the professional bond that had formed between them by being paired up as a team. Fry still looked alert, her eyes fixed on Tailby, her notebook open on her knee. Cooper was weary, almost dazed, as if things weren’t connecting for him properly. But he felt the tension within him increasing as the day came to a close. He couldn’t stop his mind drifting away from the job towards a clamouring swarm of formless anxieties about his mother — sudden, stabbing fears about the immediate future, mingled with piercingly clear little memories of how she had once been, before her illness, in the not so distant past. He knew he would have difficulty tonight in making the transition from work to home. Wasn’t the one supposed to be an escape from the other?

  As Tailby began to speak, Cooper looked down at Fry’s pen, which was already starting to move across her notebook. He was surprised to see the page half covered in drawings of spiders with black, hairy bodies and long legs, their shapes etched deep into the paper with heavily scrawled ballpoint pen.

  ‘Make sure you all read the reports,’ Tailby was saying. ‘But I’ll sum up the main points. Late this afternoon a witness came forward. A gentleman by the name of Gary Edwards. Mr Edwards is a bir
d-watcher. On Saturday evening, he was positioned on the top of Raven’s Side on the north of the valley at Moorhay. He was, it seems, watching for pied flycatchers, which are a rare species known to breed in this area. Mr Edwards had travelled from Leicester purely on the chance of seeing a pied flycatcher,

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  so that he could tick it off on a list of British species. I’m told this activity is called twitching.’

  Cooper saw some of the officers smiling, but he knew Tailby wasn’t joking. It was very rare that he did. The DCI looked up at them over his reading glasses, then back down again at the

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  report in his hands.

  ‘Mr Edwards thought the oak and birch woodland near the stream was a likely site. At one stage, though, he says he was watching a pair of merlins nesting on the cliff face below him. While he was doing this, his attention was taken by a bird flying towards the woodland, which he felt might be the said pied flycatcher. He followed the flight of this bird with his binoculars.’

  In Cooper’s hands was a summary of interviews conducted with Graham and Charlotte Vernon, and with Molly Sherratt, as well as with the bird-watcher. Some of the details were marked as new information, and would be followed up with actions the next dav. There were also reports of the attempts made by DI Hitchens’s team to trace Lee Sherratt, without success. From the tone of the summary, Cooper was left in no doubt that Sherratt was considered the obvious suspect. All they had to do, it was inferred, was to find Sherratt and let the forensic evidence establish his guilt. The rest was all for show.

  ‘It should be stated at this point,’ said Tailby, ‘that Mr Edwards was equipped with a pair of Zeiss roof-prism-type binoculars with a magnification of x 10 and a 45 mm diameter object lens. A powerful bit of kit. He says he trained these binoculars on the area of woodland into which the bird had disappeared, and he waited to see if there was any further movement. There was. But it wasn’t a bird.’

  Tailby paused, like an actor savouring the effect, trying to get his timing just right.

  ‘Mr Edwards further states that he followed a movement in the undergrowth of something black, only to find the head of a dog appearing in his view. Due to the small field of vision of binoculars of that power, he took them away from his face and with unaided vision saw a man with a dog. We believe from Mr Edwards’s statement that this was near the