Blind to the Bones

by Stephen Booth

  ‘Neil was forever complaining about the traffic jams in Tintwistle,’ said Granger. ‘They’ve been talking about a Longdendale bypass for years and years. He even went to some of the meetings of the campaign committee, but he didn’t like the other folk who were on it. He said they were pretentious gits with too much time on their hands.’

  ‘We’re continuing to examine your brother’s house, Mr Granger,’ said Hitchens. ‘As next of kin, you have the right to be present, if you wish.’

  ‘Next of kin,’ repeated Granger.

  ‘Do you understand what I’m saying, sir?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. You’ve got Neil’s car, too, haven’t you? The Beetle.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Have you found anything yet?’

  Hitchens perked up with sudden interest. ‘In the car? Why do you ask?’

  ‘I thought there might be some clues in it. I mean, Neil might have given someone a lift that night, mightn’t he? He had a habit of doing that. I wouldn’t pick anybody up myself, because you never know who they might be these days. But Neil didn’t always see sense like that.’

  ‘I understand.’

  Granger looked at Cooper for the first time.

  ‘It was the vicar that phoned me, you know,’ he said. ‘Mr Alton.’

  ‘Yes, you mentioned it in your statement,’ said Cooper. ‘Mr Alton was expecting Neil to help him in the churchyard on Saturday morning.’

  ‘I went round to Neil’s house, but there was no sign of him.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘But I didn’t really think there was anything wrong. I didn’t think …’

  Granger stopped. He seemed to feel the need to go over again some of the things he’d said in his statement. But only some of the things – those that affected himself. Perhaps they were the only facts he was sure of, and the rest of it he couldn’t believe.

  ‘The next-door neighbours couldn’t give a toss,’ he said.

  ‘Did your brother not get on with them?’

  ‘I don’t think they liked the look of him any more than me. But they hated me coming to his house on my bike.’

  ‘You don’t live too far away yourself, do you?’

  ‘I share a place with some mates in Old Glossop.’

  Hitchens glanced at Cooper.

  ‘Five or six miles, something like that? So you’re only a few minutes away.’

  ‘It depends on the traffic.’

  ‘It must have been quite different for both of you, when you moved away from Withens,’ said Cooper. ‘You had plenty of family living nearby when you were there.’

  ‘We lived at Waterloo Terrace, near our uncle and aunt. Number 7.’

  ‘Number 7?’ said Cooper, surprised.

  ‘Yeah, why?’

  ‘For some reason, I thought it must have been number 8. It’s the empty one.’

  ‘That house has been empty a while,’ said Granger. ‘But we lived at number 7. My uncle fixed all that up with the landlords.’

  ‘So Mrs Wallwin has only been there a few months.’

  Granger looked puzzled. ‘Who?’

  ‘The lady who lives in number 7 now.’

  ‘Oh.’

  DI Hitchens coughed impatiently.

  ‘I’m sure you have a lot you need to do, Mr Granger. But one more thing I must ask you about before you go is this.’

  Hitchens produced the bronze bust in its evidence bag. Granger reached out a hand to straighten the clear plastic, but made no attempt to touch the bust itself.

  ‘Do you recognize it at all, sir?’

  ‘No. I’m sorry,’ said Granger.

  ‘Do you recall your brother possessing something like this?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘But you’re familiar with the interior of his house? Have you been inside recently? Before his death, I mean.’

  ‘A few days ago, yes.’

  ‘Did you see anything resembling this?’

  ‘No, I’d have noticed it. It would be out of place.’

  ‘Might your brother have bought it as a gift for someone, do you think? A girlfriend? Is there someone in his life who likes antiques?’

  ‘I’m sure there isn’t. It certainly doesn’t belong to Neil. It isn’t the sort of thing he would have in the house. I don’t remember seeing it when I was there yesterday –’

  ‘No, sir.’ Hitchens put the bag aside with a satisfied air. ‘It was in your brother’s car.’

  Granger shook his head. ‘Could Neil have found it? Or I suppose somebody could have given it to him.’

  ‘Unlikely, sir, don’t you think? We understand it could be rather valuable.’

  ‘I can’t help you, then.’

  Hitchens stood up and shook Philip Granger’s hand. ‘On the contrary, sir,’ he said. ‘You’ve been very helpful indeed.’

  Diane Fry looked at the photographs of the crime scene. In particular, she studied the pictures showing the body lying at the base of the air shaft.

  Neil Granger’s skull had been split open like a clay plant pot, according to Mrs Van Doon. Or maybe like one of those chocolate Easter eggs all the children had been eating a couple of weeks ago. Part of his scalp had peeled away, and the bone underneath had been shattered, ripping the membrane that covered the brain. His cerebrospinal fluid had leaked from the tear on to the stones – stones that were already covered in blood that was spreading from his scalp wound.

  In the photos, Fry could see that the blood had matted his hair and trickled in rivulets down his face and neck until it touched the stones and ran into the ground, his life seeping away into the peat.

  In a way, Neil had been lucky. He had never recovered consciousness after the first blow to his head. He would not have known what happened later. He would never have seen the crows landing and hopping closer to his face, or felt the stab of their beaks in his eyes. He would not have experienced the slow deterioration of his body as his tissues decomposed and gases forced out the contents of his stomach and bowels on to the peat.

  Fry wondered whether he would have been able to see the steam in the dark. The photographs taken at the scene showed the steam clearly. It looked almost as if the old trains were still running in the tunnels two hundred feet below Withens Moor. But the trains hadn’t run for more than twenty years.

  18

  Carl was in his twenties. He lived at home with his elderly mother, worked in the family business, and led a prosperous life. One morning he answered a phone call, told his mother he had to go to Newcastle – and failed to return. He took neither his car, money or credit cards. Fifteen months later, when police were notified, he was still missing.

  After enquiries drew a blank, the case was referred to the National Missing Persons Helpline, who distributed posters and checked their usual sources, but found no official records of Carl. So they appealed for news of him on their weekly page in the Big Issue magazine. Nearly twenty people called after seeing Carl’s photo, to say: ‘That’s the chap I buy the magazine from!’

  The NMPH faxed a letter for him to the Big Issue, and Carl called. He knew the photo was of himself, but didn’t recognize the name: he had invented one for himself. All he could remember, he said, was being chased through the streets of Newcastle and then getting a lift from a truck driver. When they stopped for coffee, the driver said: ‘You’d better wash your face.’ In the mirror, Carl saw blood from a head injury he hadn’t been aware of.

  The driver dropped him off in Manchester, where Carl wandered the streets for three weeks, still not knowing who he was. His sole possessions were a St Christopher medal and a keyring holding a snap of himself with a woman. Eventually he sought help from the Citizens Advice Bureau, who told him of a hostel in Stockport and gave him the bus fare. He lived there for a year, started selling the Big Issue under his alias, found a flat, began to build a life for himself – but was haunted by the fear that something terrible had happened in Newcastle. What had he done?

  The NMPH re
assured him that he wasn’t in trouble with the police. His brother said it sounded like Carl, and that he had had an accidental blow to the head three days before he vanished. The NMPH arranged a meeting. Carl recognized his brother, and it turned into a happy and emotional reunion. Finally, Carl went home to see his mother again.

  ‘You see?’ said Sarah Renshaw. ‘That could be Emma.’

  Diane Fry handed back the paper. Her eyes had automatically been drawn to the next case study below it, which was headed ‘We find long-lost sister’. She didn’t want to read that one. She suspected how easy it would be for her, too, to become convinced that her case would be the next success story for the National Missing Persons Helpline.

  ‘We’re in touch with all the agencies,’ said Sarah. ‘They send us news regularly. We have Child Find and Missing Kids in the USA. The NMPH, of course. UK Missing Persons. People Searchers. We’ve listed Emma with them all, and we check regularly. If she turns up somewhere, they’ll let us know.’

  ‘You shouldn’t put too much faith in the system, Mrs Renshaw.’

  ‘Oh, but they get results all the time. I’ve looked at their websites on the internet. They have wonderful successes every week for somebody. They find missing persons who have been suffering from amnesia and don’t know who they are, or people who have gone off for some reason and then haven’t been able to get up the courage to contact their families. Every week, they find people like that. One week, it could be Emma that they find.’

  ‘But there’s no way you can keep up with every single missing or homeless girl in the world, is there?’

  ‘We have to try.’

  Then Fry took out the photograph of Emma taken in Italy.

  ‘Who’s the other girl in this photograph?’ she asked.

  ‘One of the students on the same course,’ said Sarah. ‘I forget her name.’

  Fry turned the photo over. ‘Emma and Khadi, Milan’ was scrawled on the back, with the date.

  ‘Her name seems to be Khadi. Do you know anything about her?’

  ‘No. I think she’s a local girl – from Birmingham, I mean.’

  ‘Did Emma know her well?’

  ‘I don’t think so. She isn’t one of the friends she socializes with. I think that’s a problem when students are local – they don’t live in the halls of residence, or in student accommodation, so they don’t mix in as much socially.’

  ‘Also, it probably means they’re still living at home with their parents,’ said Fry. ‘That can hinder their social lives a bit, in some cases.’

  ‘Yes, especially –’ Sarah Renshaw stopped.

  ‘Especially what?’

  ‘Well, she’s an Asian girl, isn’t she? I understand some Asian families don’t give their daughters quite as much freedom as we do. It’s different for sons, of course.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  Fry had dealt with many Asian families during her time in the West Midlands. She had encountered young women with Asian backgrounds who had every bit as much freedom as Emma Renshaw had been given. Probably more, in fact. But it was true that if the girl called Khadi had lived with her parents, that could have been the reason she hadn’t socialized with Emma and her friends, whatever her background.

  ‘We never spoke to her, did we?’ said Howard. ‘I don’t think she can be a particular friend of Emma’s.’

  ‘I’m sure the local police would have spoken to her anyway, if she was,’ said Fry.

  ‘Well, I’m not sure of that at all.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  Khadi. It sounded like a shortened form of some other name. Fry racked her brain, trying to cast her mind back to Birmingham and the Black Country. She seemed to have lost most of her cultural awareness in just a few months spent in the Peak District. There were a few Asians in Edendale, but most of them were Chinese and ran restaurants and takeaways. Sometimes, there were parties of Japanese tourists. But seeing a person from the Indian subcontinent, or an Afro-Caribbean, was still quite a rarity.

  Khadija. Was that it? She made a note to get someone to contact the art school in Birmingham and track down a student with that name. The school would grumble, no doubt, but it was worth following up. It felt like a loose end.

  ‘I take it you’ve heard about what happened to Neil Granger?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, we heard yesterday.’

  ‘Yesterday? The day he was found?’

  ‘Gail Dearden told us. She’s a friend of ours.’

  ‘The Deardens live up the road a little way out of Withens,’ said Sarah. ‘They bought the former gamekeeper’s lodge.’

  ‘Is that Alex Dearden’s mother?’

  ‘That’s right. She said her husband Michael saw the body, and he thought he recognized Neil Granger.’

  Fry frowned. She remembered that Dearden’s car had been intercepted by officers at the scene where Granger was found. She hadn’t visited the air shaft herself, but she was surprised that Dearden could have been allowed close enough to identify the body.

  ‘What was Mr Dearden doing there?’ she said.

  ‘We’ve no idea.’

  ‘Alex doesn’t live with his parents now, does he? He has a house in Edendale.’

  ‘He never really went back home after he graduated,’ said Sarah. ‘He got a job with a computer company in Edendale, and he moved to live there. I don’t think Michael and Gail see as much of him as they’d like. But he has a girlfriend, and it seems serious, so he has other things to think about than his mum and dad.’

  ‘Unfortunately, I never did get the chance to speak to Neil Granger about Emma.’

  ‘That’s a shame. Do you think he might have known where she is? We’ve never asked him, not since we went down to Bearwood two years ago.’

  ‘You’ve asked Alex Dearden often, he says.’

  ‘Yes, but that’s different. The Granger boys weren’t people we talked to very much.’

  Fry sighed. It didn’t make sense to her. It seemed the fact that Sarah Renshaw had pestered Alex Dearden for news of Emma, but not Neil Granger, didn’t actually mean she thought Alex was more likely to know something.

  ‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to go over that last day again with you,’ she said.

  ‘Last day?’

  ‘The day Emma went missing.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘As I understand it, she was planning to get a taxi from the house at 360B Darlaston Road, Bearwood, to New Street railway station in Birmingham.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you certain she was getting a taxi? It’s only a few miles. Might she have caught a bus, as she did when she went in to college?’

  ‘I don’t think so, do you?’ said Sarah.

  ‘Well, I don’t know, Mrs Renshaw. Emma was a student – she might have decided she couldn’t afford a taxi. If she was a fit girl, she might have preferred to walk to the bus stop, even with her bags.’

  ‘But the others said she was getting a taxi.’

  ‘But did Emma tell you that herself?’

  Sarah looked at her husband for guidance, but he shook his head. ‘Well, I don’t think so. Not in so many words.’

  ‘OK, thank you. Now, we believe Emma was due to catch a train from New Street station a few minutes before eleven o’clock that morning, and she would have to change at Manchester Piccadilly to get to Glossop, where you were supposed to collect her at twenty past one.’

  ‘That’s right. We tried to call her mobile phone, but we only got the message service.’

  ‘Mrs Renshaw, would you have expected Emma to have phoned you at some stage?’

  ‘Well, if her train was late, or she missed one …’

  ‘But before that? Wouldn’t you have expected her to phone to tell you she was setting off? Or to call you from the train? Or to let you know she’d arrived at Manchester?’

  ‘Well, perhaps. But she might not have been able to reach us,’ said Sarah. ‘I think I was in and out of the house all morning. I had some shopping to do,
because we were having a dinner party to celebrate Emma coming home, and there were a few things I had to get.’

  ‘No messages? You have an answering machine?’

  ‘Call Minder. But there were no messages. Anyway, I think Emma would have been more likely to ring Howard’s mobile, since she knew he was driving to collect her at Glossop. But Howard was out on business all morning. You had some meetings, didn’t you, dear?’

  ‘Yes. I was trying to pack everything into the morning, so I was very busy.’

  ‘No voice mails?’

  Howard shook his head.

  ‘In fact, it was a bit of a rush for Howard to get back here and pick up me up before he drove to Glossop,’ said Sarah, with a smile. ‘He arrived a bit stressed, poor man, because he’d been battling through the traffic in Sheffield and he thought he was going to be late. He said it would have been easier for him to have gone to Glossop on his own, but I wanted so much to be there to meet Emma.’

  Fry wanted to stare at Howard Renshaw to see what she could read in his face, but she resisted the temptation.

  ‘So you both went to Glossop to meet your daughter. You hadn’t heard from her, so you assumed she was arriving on the twenty past one train. And when she didn’t get off the train, you waited for the next one.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Fry had a painful image of Sarah standing on the station platform at Glossop, getting excited as the diesel units pulled in from Manchester, her hand already half-raised, ready to wave the moment she set eyes on her daughter. And when Emma didn’t arrive? Had Howard reassured his wife, checked the time of the next train, and taken her across the road for a coffee while they waited? How had he coped as the hours dragged on, and Emma still hadn’t appeared? How had Sarah herself coped?

  But Fry didn’t need to wonder about that. Sarah had remained hopeful. Her hope had never died – it still shone from her face now, as she was obliged to go over the story for the umpteenth time.

  Every time she spoke to the Renshaws, Fry found their air of belief palpable, even contagious. A few minutes later, as she was sitting in their lounge talking about Emma, someone rang the doorbell. Both the Renshaws gave a sharp intake of breath, and Sarah looked immediately at the clock. While Howard jumped up and went to the door, his wife fussed with the cushions and smoothed her dress, as if an important visitor were about to walk in.