Black dog bcadf-1

by Stephen Booth

  ‘I’m telling you, I’m telling you. Will you write it down properly, for God’s sake? I know a Labrador from a collie, see? And this was a Border collie. A black and white collie. Definite.’

  Fry sighed. ‘We’d better see you and take another statement in the morning, hadn’t we, Mr Edwards?’

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  ‘Whatever you like. But we’ll have to make it quick. There’s been a pair of snipe sighted on Stanton Moor.’

  As she finished the call to Edwards, a memory came back to Diane Fry, and she almost dropped the phone. The memory was of a photograph of Laura Vernon. It was the original photograph, the one from which her face had been enlarged for use in the murder enquiry. Fry had seen it only once. She had sneaked a look in the file when the girl was still officially just a missing person. It had been a photo of Laura taken in the garden at the Mount, at a time when she was laughing and happy in the sunshine. And at her feet in the picture had been a dog. A black and white Border collie.

  Stewart Tailby called DI Hitchens into his office. It was late,

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  but they were both too senior to qualify for overtime payments.

  The two men were tired and tense. They were awaiting the

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  results of fingerprint examination on a find made earlier in the evening. They hardly dared to say it to each other, but they knew the results could be crucial. Tailby had openly pinned his hopes on forensics so often during this enquiry that it seemed like tempting fate even to voice the hope that a set of prints other than Laura Vernon’s would be found on the second trainer. That second trainer they had spent so many expensive man-hours looking

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  for. The trainer which had now been found hv searchers, where it lay in the roots of a hedge inside the back wall of the garden

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  at the Mount.

  Meanwhile, a tearful Andrew Milner had been sent home for the night, with the warning that they might want to talk to him again tomorrow — and the friendly advice that he should talk to his wife.

  ‘So Margaret Milner was right that he hadn’t been Charlotte Vernon’s lover,’ said Tailby.

  ‘But she didn’t know about the secretary.’

  ‘Mmm. Has it occurred to you, though, that Graham Vernon might well have known about the affair?’

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  Hitchens snapped his fingers. ‘Of course. The hold he had over Milner wasn’t just to do with his fear of losing his job. He knew Milner’s dirty secret.’

  ‘And he certainly made the most of it. The result was that Andrew Milner felt unable to act even when Vernon made a move on his own daughter.’

  ‘Are we discounting Milner, then?’

  ‘No. There’s enough hate there. Hate for Graham Vernon.

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  but self-disgust too. It has to be directed somewhere.’

  Tailby leaned wearily on his desk, his shoulders stooped. The air conditioning was still running, and his office was turning cold as the evening temperature dropped. ‘No, I’d like to eliminate Milner, but we can’t. Not without confirmation of his movements that night. Poor sod. He couldn’t even switch his story and claim he was with the mistress.’

  Tailby glowered at Hitchens’s raised eyebrow, realizing the DI was amused either at his use of the old-fashioned term or his sympathy for the suspect. Perhaps both. Maybe he was getting too old for the job if his junior officers were laughing at him, thought Tailby. Maybe he ought to take that job in the Corporate Development Department at County Headquarters in Ripley. They needed a chief inspector to take charge of Process Development. Whatever that was.

  ‘We have no case against Andrew Milner,’ said Hitchens.

  The know that, damn it.’

  ‘Of the other names on the list, Simeon Holmes is in the clear.

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  So

  He was nearly twenty miles away at the time, and his storv is well supported.’

  ‘Bikers,’ said Tailby.

  ‘This lot weren’t exactly Hell’s Angels, sir. You’d be surprised at the types who gather at Matlock Bath in their best leathers on a weekend. Some of them that we talked to were married couples with kids. Some were in their fifties.’

  Tailby decided he disliked Paul Hitchens. It was his youth and his condescending smile. He would probably go far. In fact, he would probably be DCI very soon. What did Process Development mean exactly? He recalled that the three other CIs in Corporate had sections called Strategic Planning, Policy Development and Quality Assurance. Not much help.

  Hitchens was counting on his fingers, like a primary school teacher. ‘We know Lee Sherratt could have been there. He couWhave been the youth seen talking to Laura, but he’s sensibly keeping mum. Without forensics, we’ll not pin that one down. Nobody saw him who can identify him.’

  ‘OK. Take the father, Graham Vernon.’

  ‘Yes. sir.’ Hitchens held up another finger. It looked danger

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  ously like an insulting gesture to a senior officer. ‘Graham Vernon was seen and identified. By Harry Dickinson. But, of course, Mr Vernon went out to look for Laura when she didn’t come back to the house for dinner. Perfectly natural. An innocent explanation. He looked around for a while, perhaps called her name a few times, then got worried when he couldn’t find her, went back

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  to die house and phoned us. Just what we would expect from a concerned father.’

  Tailby’s expression must have betrayed his feelings about Graham Vernon. ‘I know you didn’t like him, sir. But we can’t act on feelings, can we? We need evidence.’

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  Hitchens was reallv warmin? up now. ‘Teaching your grand

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  mother to suck eggs’ was an expression that sprang to the DCI’s mind. He wanted to stop Hitchens, to take back control of the conversation, but he felt powerless to halt the flow. His words had an air of inevitability.

  ‘Harry Dickinson.’

  ‘Yes, Harry Dickinson. He was definitely there.’ Hitchens

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  looked at his fingers. He seemed to have lost count. He vas already holding up five fingers and was trying to find a sixth. ‘But was he there at the right time? Nobody can tell us so for definite. There’s no firm identification of him, not even from the bird-watcher.’

  ‘He did find die body, Paul.’

  ‘Well, strictly speaking —’

  ‘Yes, I know!’

  Tailby knew he was losing his grip on the situation. He shouldn’t lose his temper. But how could he stand this waiting? What were the fingerprint people doing down there? Of course, he knew the difficulties of lifting latent prints from a leather surface, and it could take hours. They were praying that the suspect had handled the leather upper of the trainer, and that his hands had been sweaty. They were praying that he hadn’t handled the trainer by its laces, or by the cloth interior. They were praying he was someone they knew.

  If they lifted a suspect print, the enquiry was back on track and they could start making comparisons for identification. If they lifted no prints, they had hit another brick wall.

  ‘We may have to start pulling in every youth in the Eden Valley for elimination,’ said Hitchens, with an air of too much satisfaction.

  ‘We might as well pull in all the foxes in those woods and identify the one that took a bite out of Laura Vernon’s leg. That’s about as useful as forensics have been to us so far.’

  ‘It could have been a fox,’ said Hitchens. ‘Or it could have been a dog.’

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  ‘Oh yes,’ said Tailby. ‘That’s about the best we can do. It could have been a bloody dog.’

  But did the Vernons have a dog? Jesus, had nobody found thatA

  out? As Diane Fry punched the buttons of her phone again, she||

  wondered how something so obvious could have been missed.i|

  Had everybody been fixated on Harry Dickinson? She banged the!|!

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nbsp; dashboard of the car irritably. No answer from the Vernons.j|

  What was she going to do now? She could, of course, try toIf

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  get hold of Mr Tailby or DI Hitchens and ask them what to do.||

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  But what would Ben have suggested? The ansv, er came to her

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  as if he had been there next to her: Sheila Kelk, the Vernons’ cleaner. Her address was on file back at the office. It only took

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  a call to the duty operator in the incident room to get the phone number of the house at Wve Close.

  Mrs Kelk sounded terrified when Fry told her who she was, as if the council house she was speaking from might be full of guiltv secrets.

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  ‘I just want to ask you something, Mrs Kelk. Do the Vernons have a dog?’

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  ‘Oh, no. Mrs Vernon doesn’t like them.’

  ‘But there’s a photograph in the sitting room at the Mount showing Laura with a black and white collie. So they must have had one when that picture was taken?’

  ‘No, I think that was the gardener’s. Laura always loved animals. Dogs and horses and that. I think she did mention that dog to me once, when I was dusting round the knick-knacks on the cabinet. She told me its name too, but I can’t remember what it was.’

  ‘It belonged to the gardener? So that’s Lee Sherratt’s dog in

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  the photograph?’

  ‘No, no, not him. What, Lee Sherratt? He was never really

  what you’d call a gardener anyway. Or one for keeping animals

  either, I should think. He’d rather shoot ‘em than look after ‘em.

  No, it was the one before him. That photo must have been taken

  a year ago, I’d say.’

  ‘Who was that, Mrs Kelk? Who did the dog belong to?’ ‘The old gardener. I’m sorry, it was before my time at the

  Mount, you see. I don’t know his name. But Laura said it

  was an old man that used to come. A strange old man from

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  the village.’

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  L)iane Fry drove up to the smallholding, this time having no trouble with the gates or the geese, which seemed to be notable by their absence. The stream of rusty water From the broken pipe had dried up, and an air of unnatural silence hung about the buildings.

  Her headlights caught the white pick-up, which had been parked near a small wooden shed. She parked in front of it and got out. Its doors were unlocked and the keys were in the ignition. Then she saw Sam Beeley. He was alone, leaning against a wall by the vehicle, almost invisible in the gloom. His expression was vague and sad and full of suffering, and his eyes were fixed somewhere in the distance. He seemed so preoccupied that he hardly noticed Fry’s arrival until she was standing right in front of him.

  ‘On your own, Mr Beeley? Where are your friends?’

  He looked at her vaguely. ‘Harry and Wilford? They’ve left me to it.”

  Sam looked shockingly pale, despite the strong sun that had been baking the area for weeks. The veins showed through in his neck and along the line of his jaw amongst sparse grey stubble. His skin hung in loose folds from his cheeks and there were dark-blue shadows under his eyes.

  ‘Are you all right, Mr Beeley?’

  ‘Right as I’ll ever be.’

  Fry turned and looked up towards the crags of Raven’s Side, where she had lain with Ben Cooper half an hour before, looking down on Thorpe Farm. There had been no sign of him there when she had returned from the car park up the steep path. No indication of where he had gone, no attempt to leave a message. It was typically infuriating behaviour — just what she had come to expect from him.

  ‘Have you seen Detective Constable Cooper tonight? You remember Ben Cooper?’

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  ‘Eh? Sergeant Cooper’s lad? I remember him.’ A ghost of a smile touched Sam’s pale lips at the memory of the compost heap fiasco.

  ‘Have you seen him? Has he been here?’

  Sam looked at her blankly, shaking his head in incomprehension.

  ‘And where have Mr Dickinson and Mr Cutts gone?’

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  He looked as though answering her would be too much effort.

  She wanted to get hold oi his jacket and shake him until he

  responded, but thought he looked so frail that he would fall

  apart in her hands.

  ‘Mr Beeley, I need to know. Where have they gone?’

  Sam rallied momentarily, as if the tone of her voice had pierced

  his lethargy. He moved a hand feebly, not quite completing the

  gesture. ‘Out on the Baulk.’

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  The old man sagged again. He was clutching his ivory headed stick as if his life depended on it, and his bony hands were tense and white at the knuckles where they gripped the Alsatian’s head.

  Fry thought of her first visit to the smallholding. ‘He doesn’t look like he’s got strong wrists, but it’s all in the technique,’ Wilford Cutts had said. She had seen those same hands break the neck of a large bird with one twist. She thought of the three old men, and she thought of Harrv Dickinson covering up for someone

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  involved in the death of Laura Vernon. Did it have to be family?

  She looked again at Sam, seeing him afresh. He looked like a

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  defeated man; a man who had been in pain for years and was in agony right now, suffering in front of her eyes. But was his pain entirely physical?

  ‘Can I have a look at your stick, Mr Beeley?’

  ‘My stick? I’ve had it a long time.’

  ‘May I?’

  She held out her hand, and Sam hesitantly gave her the

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  stick. It felt heavy and solid and was well-made, so that it balanced properly and swung easily in the hand. The handle shaped like the head of an Alsatian was worn smooth and shiny by Sam Beeley’s hands. The back of the dog’s head formed a hard, rounded ball of ivory, easily capable of crushing a skull

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  if wielded with enough force. Or, of course, with (he right technique.

  She examined the handle closely. There were no traces she could see. But then it could have been cleaned. And in six days of use, any visible traces of blood or tissue could easily have been rubbed off on to the parchment-thin palms of its owner’s hands. The forensics lab, though, would soon settle it one way or another.

  ‘I have to ask you to come with me to the station to answer some questions,’ said Fry.

  Sam nodded wearily. ‘I’ll need to use my stick.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to manage without it for a while.’

  ‘I can’t walk without my stick,’ he insisted,

  Sam was trembling even more than usual. He looked as though he needed an ambulance rather than a trip to the station. Fry hesitated, conscious of the mistakes that had dogged the enquiry so far. The last thing she needed was a sick old man suffering a collapse in police custody.

  As her brain ticked over, she found herself looking past Sam into the doorway of the shed. The interior was pitch black, but her eye was attracted by a quiet movement in the darkness. There was something in there that was blacker than the surrounding shadows, something with eyes that turned to watch her as she

  brought her mobile phone from the Peugeot. She needed advice

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  on this one. Someone else could make the decision on whether to pull an apparently helpless old man in for questioning.

  She got through to the duty officer in the incident room again,

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  giving details of her location and asking for the whereabouts of Tailby and Hitchens. But the officer had news. And what he had to tell her made her forget about Sam Beelev for now.

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  Fry asked a few questions and requested whatever backup was available at this
time of night. Then she ended the call and dialled again, this time trying Ben Cooper’s number. She needed

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  to tell him this bit of news. It was something he had to know

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  before he encountered Harry Dickinson again.

  According to the duty officer, a second search had been ordered that afternoon in the area of scrubland at the back of the Vernons’ garden, this time seeking evidence of Andrew

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  Milner’s presence in the vicinity. The search had spread, almost by accident, into die garden itself. And there, at the bottom of a well-trimmed privet hedge, Laura Vernon’s second trainer had been found late in the afternoon.

  The man in the incident room was eager to talk. It was a lonely job in the evening, and nobodv ever took the trouble to

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  discuss the enquiry with him.

  ‘It caused a bit of excitement round here, I can tell you,’ he said with relish. ‘It went straight to the lab, and they found two clear sets of prints on the trainer. I thought Mr Tailby was going to hit the roof. Especially as the garden had been searched once already. But that’s the way it always goes, isn’t it?’

  Fry held her breath, staring blindly at Sam Beeley and the shed behind him.

  She heard that a fingerprint officer had worked late in the evening to lift the prints off the second trainer and compare them to those on the matching half of the pair. On the first trainer, they had found only Laura’s own prints — identified by taking fingerprints from the body — and those of Harry Dickinson, who had carried the trainer back to Dial Cottage. Now the new

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  fingerprint report had come through, and it showed that the two sets of prints were identical. It meant that Harry Dickinson had handled both trainers. But only one of them had been found with the body. Who else could possibly have touched the other one, except Laura Vernon’s killer?

  Ben Cooper’s phone rang and rang unanswered. Fry knew, of course, that he had left his phone in his car. But still she let it ring. Echoing in her mind was that one sentence he had used that had trapped her into being here tonight, in this crazy situation. ‘Are you going to let me down?’ he had said.