Blind to the Bones

by Stephen Booth

  ‘I wouldn’t forget my friends so quickly.’

  ‘I don’t know. Old schoolfriends, old college friends – we soon lose touch with them, because it doesn’t take long before we have nothing in common any more.’

  ‘I didn’t go to college,’ said Murfin.

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose so. But I’ve missed my tea because of her, that’s all.’

  Fry knew that, whatever Gavin Murfin’s drawbacks, he had served in CID for years and had a lot of experience of interviews and had come across all kinds of suspects.

  ‘Gavin, what do you make of Howard Renshaw?’ she said.

  ‘Our Howard? He’s one of those people whose brain is way ahead of his mouth.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He never uses a single word that he hasn’t thought about before he says it,’ said Murfin. ‘I hate that kind. Give me somebody whose mouth keeps working when their brain’s stopped completely. That’s the kind of person I like to interview. It gives me a chance for a kip between questions. It can be a bit wasteful of tape though, like.’

  ‘Ben Cooper said that he got the impression Howard was trying to sell us something all the time.’

  ‘You took Ben to see the Renshaws?’

  ‘Yes. Is that a problem, Gavin?’

  ‘Nope. I just thought he would have had his hands full with the Oxleys and rats, and stuff.’

  ‘Rats?’

  ‘It was nothing important. We had a look at the old railway tunnels the other day when we were down that way.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Ben asked the bloke there to check out the tunnel under the air shaft where Granger’s body was found.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘He seems to have a thing about air shafts. Maybe they’re phallic symbols. I reckon I’d see phallic symbols everywhere if my sex life was as bad as Ben’s.’

  Fry looked at Murfin. It had been a good idea to make him drive. The trip to the Black Country had been the longest uninterrupted period she had ever seen him go without eating. What’s more, the withdrawal symptoms were making him unusually talkative.

  ‘Does Ben Cooper talk to you about his sex life?’ she said.

  ‘Nah. But I can tell. Trouble is, he always picks the wrong ones, and then he gets let down. I mean, there was that Canadian bird –’

  ‘Yes, I remember that, Gavin.’

  Murfin glanced at her. ‘’Course you do, that’s right. But I don’t think he blamed you for that, Diane. Not entirely.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You see, when something like that happens, it takes him time to get over it. He goes all funny and starts talking to himself.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Haven’t you noticed?’

  ‘I can’t say I have.’

  ‘Ben’s a mite over-sensitive, if you ask me. But I suppose it takes all sorts.’

  ‘You’re getting to be a proper little psychologist, Gavin.’

  ‘That’s me. Clement Freud.’

  Fry looked at Murfin again to correct him, and noticed that he was chewing something.

  ‘What are you eating?’

  ‘Just some chocolate I had stashed away for emergencies, Diane. Do you want some?’

  ‘How long has it been in your pocket?’

  ‘A day or two.’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘I need the energy for all this brain work.’

  ‘Particularly your psychological insights.’

  ‘I know about phallic symbols, anyway. The more sexually frustrated you are, the bigger the symbols you see everywhere.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it.’

  They drove on for a while, heading towards the A6, which ran right through the heart of Derbyshire and the Peak District.

  ‘Those air shafts,’ said Murfin. ‘How deep do they go?’

  ‘Two hundred feet,’ said Fry.

  ‘Right.’

  Diane Fry had brought Emma Renshaw’s diary with her, and found she couldn’t leave it alone.

  ‘What do you think these initials mean, Gavin?’ she said. ‘LDBAT.’

  ‘I’ve no idea. The Renshaws said they didn’t know. Debbie Stark didn’t know. And Khadi Whatsit didn’t know.’

  ‘So they said.’

  ‘You don’t believe anything that anybody says, do you?’ said Murfin.

  Fry turned over a page, then turned over some more. ‘She’s repeated the same initials day after day.’

  ‘Perhaps they were something to do with the lectures she had to go to. Like a reminder.’

  ‘But why the same every day?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And another thing,’ said Fry. ‘Emma wrote in her diary all the time. So how come her parents found it in her room at Bearwood? Why didn’t Emma take it with her when she went home for the Easter holiday? Surely she didn’t just forget it?’

  ‘Well, from what I’ve seen of Withens,’ said Murfin, ‘it was probably because she knew nothing could happen there that would be worth writing down.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Fry stopped turning pages. A memory was coming back to her of another diary, one not unlike this. It had been a teenage girl’s diary, though the girl had been a few years younger than Emma Renshaw. That girl had been living with foster parents in a semi-detached house in Warley. She had been an unhappy girl.

  Suddenly, the letters made sense. It was almost as if Emma had spoken the words to her. There was no room for doubt in Fry’s mind.

  ‘Life Didn’t Begin Again Today,’ she said.

  Murfin stared at her. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘LDBAT. It means Life Didn’t Begin Again Today.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I just do, OK?’

  ‘But –’

  ‘Gavin, trust me for once, will you? She’s written it in her diary day after day. She didn’t need to spell it out, because she knew exactly what the letters stood for. It’s on page after page. It becomes a kind of mantra. Life Didn’t Begin Again Today. Life Didn’t Begin Again Today.’

  ‘OK, OK. I hear what you’re saying. I suppose it’s as likely as anything.’

  ‘Yes, it is. A bit immature, perhaps. But that’s the impression I have of Emma – too immature to be safe when she was away from home for the first time. She was brought up in Withens. Living in the Black Country must have come as a shock.’

  ‘OK, so what did she mean by it?’

  ‘Something didn’t happen that she wanted to. A man, I’d guess.’

  ‘It usually is,’ said Murfin. ‘One of the boys? Neil Granger? Not Alex Dearden?’

  ‘Somebody she got a bit obsessed with, but who wasn’t interested in her. It could have been one of her lecturers at the art school.’

  ‘You could be on to something there, Diane. They’re a funny lot, artists.’

  ‘Emma might have found one of them rather more interesting than the people she knew back in Withens anyway.’

  ‘I’ll grant you that.’

  ‘Job for you tomorrow morning then, Gavin. Phone the art school again and get a list of all the staff who would have had contact with Emma. Some of them were spoken to at the time, but we’ll need a complete list. Their ages would be useful, too. Then you can contact Debbie Stark again and go through the list with her. She was on the same course.’

  ‘Waste of time, she is,’ said Murfin.

  ‘See if you can’t jog her memory a bit.’

  ‘I just hope there aren’t too many. It could take weeks.’

  ‘That’s the way it goes, Gavin. But a couple of weeks won’t make any difference now.’

  ‘It will to my ulcers.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had ulcers, Gavin.’

  ‘I haven’t. But I’m expecting them any day, like.’

  They were on the A6, and only a few minutes from Edendale now. Fry gazed at the White Peak scenery going past the windows with mixed fe
elings. She didn’t know where home was any more. But maybe she never had.

  She turned the pages of Emma’s diary again.

  ‘She ought to have used his initials,’ she said. ‘If she liked initials, she should have referred to him that way. Or at least the initial of his first name. That’s what I would have done.’

  ‘I never kept a diary,’ said Murfin. ‘It seems a bit sad to me.’

  ‘It would have helped a lot,’ said Fry. ‘But I can’t see anywhere she’s done that.’

  ‘Maybe she didn’t feel she had to. She knew who she was talking about, so why should she bother with initials?’

  ‘But when she first met him –’

  Murfin made the final turn into the Eden Valley and began the long descent towards Edendale.

  ‘That diary,’ he said. ‘When does it start?’

  ‘January, of course.’

  ‘I just wondered. My lad has a diary for school, but it starts in September. They call it an academic year diary.’

  Fry stared at him. ‘Gavin – you’re a genius.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘If this is a member of staff we’re looking for, Emma would have met him in her first term at the art school – the previous October. Even if it was a student, the same applies.’ She slapped the diary. ‘We’ve only got the last four months here. We need the diary before this one.’

  ‘If she had one.’

  ‘Oh, she’ll have had one all right.’

  LDBAT. Life Didn’t Begin Again Today. The more she looked at it, the more Fry was sure. Emma Renshaw had written it day after day, a sure sign of an obsession.

  But on a Thursday two years ago, Emma’s diary entries had stopped completely. Life didn’t begin again that day, either. But had life ended, instead?

  ‘That’s another thing you can do, Gavin. Get on to the Renshaws and ask for a previous diary.’

  ‘Great. The rewards of genius, eh?’

  Fry opened her file and looked at the photographs of Emma Renshaw for a long time. In particular, she studied the ones in which Emma was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt or shorts, displaying bare limbs and healthy skin. In one picture, she was posing in a bikini top against a background of sand and sunlit water, with her arms and shoulders an uncomfortable shade of pink. In every photograph, Emma was smiling and happy, a healthy teenager with the rest of her life before her.

  Fry found a sentence running through her head. It was something really stupid that she’d heard on a BBC Radio 4 programme a few months ago. It might even have been You and Yours. The discussion had been about direct marketing, the posh expression for junk mail, and how it could be stopped – or ‘suppressed’, as one of the studio guests had insisted on putting it. The presenter had expressed astonishment that every year hundreds of thousands of people who’d died were still being targeted by firms sending them junk mail. The guest had made a statement that had given Fry a little shudder of apprehension. She had said ominously: ‘There are ways of suppressing people who’ve died.’

  Fry wondered whether there was a direct-marketing technique she could use in the case of the Renshaws. Was there really a way of suppressing someone who’d died? Was there a way of putting away the ghost of Emma Renshaw?

  Now, when she looked at the photographs, Fry began to see something different. Something that the photographer hadn’t captured on film. She had seen the blood in the poppies and the mould in the grass. Now she saw the bones under the skin of the girl.

  The figures were moving. They swayed a little, and nodded their dark heads. They did it in unison and in unnatural silence. Ben Cooper wasn’t sure whether they had seen him. If he stood quite still, they might not notice him.

  He tried to remember what was behind him, whether his outline would be visible. Of course, he was standing against the black bricks of Waterloo Terrace. But then he remembered the uncurtained windows and the light spilling out of two of the kitchens. And he knew that he might as well have advertised his presence.

  The four figures suddenly jerked and leaped into the air. When they landed, they hit the ground with a thud of boots and clash of bells. Then they disappeared from Cooper’s view below the level of the pallets, and there was a tremendous clattering noise, wood pounding on wood, rhythmic blows coming steadily closer towards him.

  Cooper began to back away, trying to make out what was in front of him while feeling for the opening in the fence behind him. The noise was deafening, surely enough to disturb the residents of Waterloo Terrace. The pounding came slowly nearer, mingled with bells and heavy breathing. But the figures were squatting now, and were no longer recognizable as human. They might just as easily be some kind of shaggy apes, all legs and arms, scuttling towards his feet. Cooper could smell the sweet scent of fresh wood as the edges of the pallets were splintered and bruised by whatever was hitting them.

  Suddenly, Cooper came up hard against something metal. Had he misjudged the gap in the fence? Was it a foot or two to the left? But with his hand behind him, he could feel the hard, unforgiving edges of steel scaffolding pipes. A solid barrier, and the pipes were far too big for him to use to defend himself.

  The noise changed and the earth vibrated as the weapons began to strike the ground near to his feet. Cooper caught the occasional glimpse of a reflection from a pair of mirrored sunglasses, or a dark, ragged silhouette as the figures came closer, still moving in rhythm, as if to some music only they could hear.

  Then the screaming began. It was one voice, but unnaturally high-pitched for a human voice, more like the sound of a pig being slaughtered. Cooper froze at the noise, feeling for the first time that he was seriously in danger. He felt something heavy whistle past his left leg and hit the ground, then the same on the right. A double thud like a jackhammer sent a quiver through his legs. Two more blows followed quickly, an inch or two nearer to his boots.

  Cooper moved his feet, realizing he was going to have to fight back. This was the moment when he regretted not attending training sessions at his martial arts dojo, even though it was so conveniently close to his flat. The sessions had started to seem like a meaningless ritual. But now he felt clumsy and unfit, and wished he could summon some of the energy and suppleness that might get him out of trouble.

  Because of the screaming, he felt, rather than heard, the next blow land almost on his toes. Desperately, knowing he was close to getting hurt, he kicked out at where he thought an arm might be and was rewarded with an impact and a startled grunt. Feeling the rhythm and knowing that two more blows would quickly follow, he swivelled sideways, waited for the thud on the ground and kicked out again. This time, his boot landed on something hard that jarred the sole of his foot.

  There was a brief pause, and the screaming stopped abruptly. Cooper decided to take the chance to dodge to the side, but was too slow. A blow swished past his face and landed with a terrific clang on the scaffolding pipes.

  Then, all at once, there was light. Two arc lights popped and burst into life, illuminating the yard as if it were daylight. Lucas Oxley stood in the gateway, frowning angrily at the four figures that crouching sweating and gasping around Cooper.

  ‘That’s enough,’ said Lucas. ‘If anybody takes one more step, I’ll break his stick over his stupid head.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you arrived,’ said Fran Oxley. ‘But we were a bit busy at the café tonight, and I missed the bloody bus.’

  ‘That’s OK.’

  ‘But I see you met some of the lads. They’ve been having a practice tonight.’

  With the lights on in Fran Oxley’s house, Ben Cooper found the four young men looked no less bizarre, and only slightly less threatening. They were all dressed entirely in black, with heavy work boots and coats that seemed to be made out of rags dyed jet black. One of them had a thick cartridge belt around his waist, and another wore black leather wristlets covered in iron studs. They had taken off their black top hats and rested their sticks against the wall. When they removed their m
irrored sunglasses, their eyes stared out at him from white patches of skin. The rest of their faces were covered in some kind of black paint that had streaked with their sweat.

  ‘Does the paint come off?’ said Cooper, knowing he sounded stupid.

  ‘It’s a water-based theatrical make-up,’ said Scott Oxley. ‘It washes off easy.’

  ‘It doesn’t half give you blackheads, though,’ said Ryan.

  Ryan Oxley was the only one that Cooper recognized. He was one of the teenagers he had seen on the road near the bus shelter, but it was only his hair really that made him recognizable. His older brother, Scott, was a tall young man in his twenties with broad shoulders and fair hair cut very short. Nobody introduced the other two, but Cooper heard one of them addressed as Glen.

  Somehow, all the young men looked bigger and bulkier in their strange outfits than they would have been if he had found them dressed in Tshirts and jeans.

  ‘They used burnt cork, traditionally,’ said Fran. ‘But apparently it causes cancer. This stuff you just put on with a brush or a sponge. It’s a bit like wearing a face mask. It feels sort of dry and powdery, not greasy at all, like you might imagine.’

  ‘You do this, too?’ said Cooper.

  ‘I play the concertina.’

  ‘Right. And this is the Border Rats?’

  ‘These are the Border Rats. It’s a group, not a thing.’

  ‘We’re only some of them,’ said Scott. ‘Everybody’s in the side. There are a few blokes come over from Hey Bridge, too.’

  Cooper noticed that their sweat had brought out their individual smells – leather and rags, feathers and flowers, beer and cigarettes.

  ‘Can I have a look at the sticks?’ he said.

  ‘These are blackthorn,’ said Ryan. ‘That or hazel is best, because it doesn’t split as much, you know.’

  ‘I think I saw your little brother Jake with some sticks earlier on.’

  ‘He’s the Stick Rat. It’s his job.’

  ‘What does your father do?’

  ‘Dad is the Squire – that’s the leader. But he’s the Beast as well. Granddad used to be the Beast, until he got too old. You have to be a bit nimble on your feet.’