Black dog bcadf-1

by Stephen Booth

  ‘Anyway, sir, I’m not as bothered as all that. I don’t really resent it or anything.’

  ‘Bollocks. If I were you, Cooper, I’d be totally pissed off. You’re just trying to be nice about it. There’s your trouble, you see,’ he said with an air of triumph.

  ‘I don’t suppose I’ll ever learn, sir.’

  ‘My advice is, go and shoot a few of those pigeons or whatever it is you do, get it out of your system. Have a few drinks. You’ll soon forget about it.’

  Cooper dipped his head in acknowledgement as Jepson pursed his lips seriously for his final comment. ‘But no emotional outbursts, eh?’

  He stared past the superintendent’s head. There was a large framed photograph on the wall, with dozens of solemn men sitting or standing in long rows. They were the entire uniformed strength of Edendale section, pictured during a visit to the station by some member of the royal family in the 1980s. Cooper remembered the occasion and the photograph well. On the second row, among the other sergeants, was his father.

  ‘I understand, sir. It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter at all.’

  The doctor had explained that Isabel Cooper was on a powerful anti-psychotic drug. He had spelled out the name of the drug, and Cooper had written it down carefully. Chlorpromazine. It blocked the activity of dopamine and caused changes in the nervous system. These could mean side-effects, said the doctor.

  As Cooper sat by her bedside, it seemed to him that his mother couldn’t stop moving her lips and tongue or the muscles of her

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  face She was permanently grimacing, rolling her tongue in her cheeks like someone frantically trying to remove stray bits oi food from her gums. Underneath the bedclothes, her legs were in constant movement, flexing and convulsing endlessly like the limbs of a long-distance cyclist.

  The doctor had been eager to point out to Ben and Matt th.it the drugs they were using were not curative. They could not cure schi/ophrenia, they could only relieve the most distressing symptoms. And those symptoms seemed unending in the mouth of the doctor — thought disturbance, paranoia, hallucinations, delusions, loss of self-care, social withdrawal, severe anxiety, agitation. The condition could only get worse. But occasionally, just occasionally, they could expect remissions, when Mrs Cooper would almost be her normal self. The doctor seemed to think they would find this reassuring.

  ‘I’m being a terrible nuisance to everyone,’ said Isabel, gazing with old eyes from the bed.

  ‘No, Mum. Of course you’re not. Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘Is that Ben?’

  ‘Yes, Mum. I’m here.’

  He had been sitting there for nearly forty minutes already talking to his mother. Matt had been with him for the first half-hour, but had gone outside for a while. He needed some fresh air, he said.

  ‘You’re a good boy. I’m not well, am I?’

  ‘You’ll be fine, Mum.’

  She turned her head, grinning and winking helplessly as she reached a hand towards him. There was a dribble of saliva on the neck of her nightdress. A small vase of white gypsophila stood on the bedside cabinet, the same colour as the sheets; the same colour as her skin. Cooper was sweating in the heat of the hospital room, but his mother’s hand felt cold and clammy.

  ‘You’re just like your dad,’ she said. ‘Such a good-looking young man.’

  He smiled at her and pressed her hand, guessing what was coming, dreading the need for an answer, not knowing what he could possibly say.

  ‘Are you married yet, Ben?’

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  ‘No, Mum. You know I’m not.’

  You’ll find a nice giri soon. I’d like to see you married and have children.’ ‘Don’t worry.’ He knew the words were meaningless. But in all his vocabulary

  there didn’t seem to he any words that would carrv a meaning

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  they could both understand and draw comfort from.

  Isabel’s shoulders twitched and her legs jerked and squirmed, rustling under the hospital sheet like restless animals. Her tongue

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  protruded over her lips as she blinked around the room with a puzzled expression. Then she focused on her son. She sought his face eagerly, her eyes desperate and pleading. She was sending out a mute appeal, begging him for some small drop of consolation.

  ‘Just like your dad,’ she said.

  He waited. His muscles were frozen and his brain empty of thoughts. He was a mesmerized rabbit waiting for the fatal bite. His lungs hurt from holding his breath. He knew he would not be able to refuse the plea in her eyes.

  ‘Have they made you a sergeant yet, Ben?’

  ‘Yes, Mum,’ he said, though it broke his heart to lie.

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  21

  It was the first time Diane Fry had visited the Mount. She was not impressed by the mock porticos and the triple garage and the wrought-iron gates. She found the whole thing tasteless, a white box that was out of place set against the scenery of the valley behind it and the rows of stone cottages a few yards down the road. It could have been plonked down here from a suburb of Birmingham. Edgbaston or Bournville, perhaps. It gave no impression of being part of the landscape.

  She had been allocated the task of talking to Charlotte Vernon, following DCI Tailby’s interview with her husband and son. Charlotte had been saying little so far, and attention

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  had not been concentrated on her. But now there were other questions that needed to be asked, particularly questions about Lee Sherratt. The boy was still Mr Tailby’s favoured option, though Fry could see he had always kept in mind a second line of enquiry centred on the family. It was possible Charlotte

  Vernon might hold the key, one way or the other.

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  Fry was shown in by Daniel. He seemed subdued and sullen, rather than the angry young man she had read about in the reports. But when she told him what she wanted, he took her through the house without a word or a backwards glance, finding no necessity for politeness. It was a pity his alibi had checked out so thoroughly.

  Charlotte Vernon had been described by the officers who had seen her as an attractive woman; some had said very attractive. Fry had expected to find a rich man’s spoilt wife, with nothing to do all day but look after her appearance, keeping her body in perfect condition, her hair expensively styled, her cosmetics flawless. But she found a woman in her late thirties, tired and resigned. The cosmetics were certainly there, and might have fooled a man. But Fry recognized that they had been applied without conviction.

  Charlotte was wearing cream slacks and a silk shirt. She looked

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  elegant — but then any woman wearing so many hundreds of pounds worth of clothes on her back ought to look stylish. Fry had come prepared to feel sympathy for the woman, who had just lost her daughter. She was willing to put the son’s story to the hack of her mind, to listen to Charlotte’s version of events. But there was something in the tilt of the woman’s head as she

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  lit a cigarette and settled herself into an armchair: something in

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  the curl of her lips as she looked her up and down critically. In the end, Fry did not get a chance to show sympathy, as Charlotte Vernon opened the interview aggressively.

  ‘Don’t bother to treat me with kid gloves. I’m all right now.’

  ‘There are a few questions, Mrs Vernon.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve been expecting you. Dan’s been to see you, of course. I couldn’t stop him. The poor boy — he gets so mixed up about sex. Some men take a long time to mature, don’t they? I think Clan has got a bad case of delayed puberty.’

  ‘Your son has made a statement about your relationship with Lee Sherratt, Mrs Vernon.’

  ‘You mean he found out I was having it off with the gardener, don’t you, dear?’

  Fry stared at her without expression. They were in a room full of beautiful old furniture with clear, tidy surfaces. There
were three or four large watercolours on the wall, and an expanse of woodblock floor led towards French windows and a flagged

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  terrace with stone balustrades. Fry would have liked to explore

  the bathroom and the kitchen, to examine the whirlpool bath,

  the automatic oven, the fitted wardrobes, the self-defrosting

  fridge and the digital microwave.

  ‘Is that the way it was, Mrs Vernon?’

  ‘Certainly. Oh, only a couple of times, but we both enjoyed

  it. He was unsubtle, but enthusiastic. And an excellent body. It’s so good for morale at my age when you can still make the

  young men come running.’

  ‘Did you initiate the relationship?’

  The suppose I seduced him, yes. It didn’t take much doing.’ ‘When did your husband find out what was going on?’ Charlotte shrugged. ‘I don’t really know. Does it matter?’

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  ‘I would have thought so.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Presumably he objected.’

  ‘You presume wrong, dear. He gets a turn-on from it, old Graham. That’s convenient for both of us, really. It means I’m free to take what lovers 1 like without any complications. Graham, of course, is quite free to do the same as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘But he did object, didn’t he? He sacked Sherratt from his job.’

  ‘True.’ Charlotte blew a slow smoke ring which hovered in the air between them. ‘But didn’t Graham tell you that was because of Laura.’

  ‘And was it?’

  ‘If that’s what Graham says, it must have been, mustn’t it?’

  ‘Were you aware yourself of Lee Sherratt’s attitude to your daughter? In view of your own relationship with him?’

  ‘Do I call you Detective Constable?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Detective Constable, I don’t know what you imagine I did with Sherratt in the summerhouse, but we certainly didn’t indulge in conversation about my daughter.’

  ‘But do you think —?’

  ‘He was more than occupied with me, dear. I can be demanding when I’m aroused.’

  ‘And why bother with the lamb when you can have the old ewe, eh?’

  Charlotte bared her perfect teeth in a snarl, then changed her

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  mind and turned the snarl into a mirthless laugh.

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  ‘Very good, dear. I wouldn’t have thought you were so good

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  with the farming metaphors.’

  Fry was disappointed that she could not crack the woman’s

  facade. If only she could get through the provocative, brittle

  exterior, she might expose a soft, vulnerable core that would

  yield something to the probing.

  ‘Did you know about Laura’s boyfriend, Simeon Holmes?’ ‘No, I didn’t.’ Charlotte sighed. ‘Until your people managed

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  to track him down. I suppose there’s no doubt they had a thing together?

  ‘None at all.’

  ‘She was obviously a bit of a chip off the old block, wasn’t she? She kept her bit on the side quiet, though. Laura usually told me her secrets, but not that one.’

  ‘Perhaps she thought you would consider him unsuitable. He’s from one of the council estates in Edendale, rides a motorbike.’

  ‘Unsuitable? Not me.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, I was shagging the gardener, dear.’

  Fry gritted her teeth. Charlotte stubbed out her cigarette and

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  began to stir restlessly. The ashtray was already full of stubs, and the air was pungent with stale smoke that mingled with an expensive scent.

  ‘I hope I’m not shocking you,’ said Charlotte. ‘I know some of you people can be very puritanical. But Graham and I have always had that sort of marriage. It is rather an accepted thing among our circle of friends.’

  ‘You mentioned other lovers, Mrs Vernon. I need to ask you for some names.’

  ‘Really? How many years would you like me to go back?’

  ‘Just the last few months, shall we say?’

  ‘Are our police looking at jealousy as a motive then? How original.’

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  ‘Names?’

  ‘All right. There have been one or two of my husband’s business colleagues. Just the odd occasion, you know. Nothing heavy.’

  She gave Fry three names, only one of which meant anything.

  ‘Andrew Milner?’

  ‘He works for Graham.’

  ‘I know who he is.’

  Fry stared at the woman, wondering if she was really the distraught mother who had appeared in previous reports. Perhaps she was on some drug that the doctor had given her. But she

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  cmild think of nothing that would completely change a woman’s

  personality to this. Charlotte studied her expression and laughed

  her cold laugh again.

  ‘Oh yes, I’m not too fussy when I’m in the mood.’

  ‘And have you been in the mood much since Laura was killed?

  Does the thought of your daughter being attacked and murdered

  make you feel randy?’

  Charlotte’s iace seemed to blur and quiver, and her eves

  swelled alarmingly. Her limbs trembled and her shoulders

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  slumped into an unnatural position. It was as if the woman had disintegrated suddenly into a broken doll.

  ‘I go to that place every night, you know,’ she said.

  ‘What place?’ asked Fry, startled at the unexpected change.

  ‘I go at night, when no one’s around. Graham hates it. I take flowers for her.’

  ‘You go where?’

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  ‘That place down there. The place where Laura died.’ She looked up pleadingly. ‘I take her roses and carnations from the garden. Are they the right things to take?’

  Back at E Division, Ben Cooper made his way wearily up to the incident room, where just two computer operators were at their terminals and the office manager, DI Baxter, was stacking away some files. Cooper checked through the action sheets, but could find nothing allocated to him.

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  ‘I’m back on duty now, sir.’

  ‘Nothing for you, Cooper,’ said Baxter. ‘Some of the teams are being reallocated. Your DI wants you back in the CID room. You’ve to report to DS Rennie.’

  ‘Oh, shit.’

  ‘Sorry, son.’

  Baxter seemed about to reprimand Cooper for his outburst, conscious of the computer operator’s eyes on him. But he looked at Cooper’s face and changed his mind, not being one to kick a man when he was obviously down.

  ‘Mr Tailby thinks forensics —’

  ‘Yeah, I know. Thanks.’

  Cooper stamped back downstairs. A DC was on the phone in

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  the CID room and Rennie was holding a report in the air, staring at it with an expression of admiration. He noticed Cooper come in and waved a hand casually.

  ‘Ben. Welcome back to the real world.’

  Cooper kicked the chair away from his desk and thumped the pile of paper that had been sitting there since Monday.

  ‘What’s all this stuff?’

  ‘Hey, calm down. We don’t want any prima donna tantrums just because you’re not with the big boys on the murder enquiries any more.’

  ‘Yeah, right. Car crime. They want something doing about car crime, yeah? So what’s new?’

  ‘This is,’ said Rennie, waving the report. ‘Here, take a look.’

  The report landed on Cooper’s desk. It bore the heading of die National Criminal Intelligence Service. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘New ideas on detecting car crime. It’s good stuff. The super is very impressed. It was the new lass’s idea.’

  ‘Not Diane Fry?’

  ‘That’s her. Not bad for a l
ass, I reckon.’

  ‘And where is she? Is she already out working on this?”

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  ‘Not her,’ said Rennie. ‘She’s still on the Vernon enquiry.’

  Fry phoned Vernon Finance, but was put through to a particularly unhelpful and protective secretary who told her that Andrew Milner was out of the office all afternoon. She eventually persuaded the secretary to give her his mobile number, and ate a tuna sandwich while she dialled. When he answered, Milner was clearly on the road somewhere. There was heavy traffic noise in die background, and he was shouting, as people did when they were using the hands-free adaptor in a car.

  ‘Who did you say you were? Hold on, I’m just turning on to the AS7.’ When she got it through to him who she was, he went very quiet for a moment. Perhaps it was just the signal being broken up by the high ridges of Stanage Edge and the Hallam Moors.

  ‘Give me a second, and I’ll pull into a layby,’ he said.

  Fry talked to Andrew Milner for several minutes, trying to

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  catch the tone of the man’s replies against the thundering slipstream of passing lorries and the intermittent fading of his cellphone signal. She thought he sounded nervous and defensive, but he stuck to a firm line on the suggestion of any relationship with his employer’s wife. It was ridiculous, it was nonsense. Charlotte Vernon obviously wasn’t well.

  Eventually, Fry let him go when he pleaded that he was late for an important meeting. She felt sure that he was hiding something, but couldn’t pin down what it was. She needed some more information before she could know the right questions to ask. Time to talk to Andrew Milner’s wife.

  The Milners lived in a brick pre-war semi on one of the hills overlooking the centre of Edendalc. The front door was set

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  into an arched porch, with a round opaque window made up of shaped pieces of coloured glass.

  All the cars parked in the street had pink stickers taped to their windscreens, and notices on the lampposts warned that parking was by resident’s permit only. But Fry found room for her Peugeot on a small drive in front of a car port. By the corner of the house she noticed an old brick chimney pot that had been planted with red geraniums.