Cold Blood

by Jane Heafield

  ‘Shaun keeps winding me up. He says his granddad was better than you because he didn’t have the fingerprints and phone tapping and DNA and stuff.’

  ‘True, they didn’t have those things. But the criminals are just as smart as us with the new technology. Shaun’s granddad didn’t have to deal with cybercrime. What rank was his granddad?’

  ‘Don’t know. I’ll ask him.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. Anyway, you don’t want the coach to go without you.’

  Joe fist-pumped his dad, and was gone a moment later. Sitting alone, watching teachers try to subdue frantic kids and herd them on the coach, Bennet found his mind wandering to Lorraine. Where was she right now? With her new daughter? Did her new family even know about Joe? Had she told them he was living a drive away, or in another country and out of reach, or dead? He felt the itching muscle tautness again. That urge to… do something. He pulled his phone, determined this time to contact Lorraine.

  Last night he had gotten as far as loading her Facebook profile before backing out. This time he managed to start a message to her before wilting. He couldn’t go through with it because it felt too much like begging. Lorraine had to want to see Joe, not be convinced or cajoled into it. He drove home.

  Usually a quiet house was enjoyable, but not this morning. Usually he kicked off his shoes a second in the door. Not today. He stood in the living room, coat and shoes on, and cracked his fingers. The itchy call to action felt worse now that Joe wasn’t around. A few members of his team had sent updates about Buttery Park tasks they’d completed, but none of the information progressed the investigation or gave him something to do. But he needed some kind of action. Mr Unflappable was getting worked up by simple inactivity. No, impotency. A feeling of uselessness. He hated it. He felt like a hyper kid being forced to sit still.

  So he drove to a crime scene.

  8

  Buttery Park was a place he’d never visited before a teenager got stabbed there. Almost three weeks ago, he’d arrived with his team, and ambulances, and there had been a host of onlookers, and a centimetre of snow, the darkness, and an ambience as chilly as the January air. Now, the place was tranquil, warmer, brighter, and devoid of any indication that a terrible crime had been committed here.

  Except for the flowers on a bench on the hill by the lake. The car park offered a view of the water and café and tennis court and children’s play area, but the vital area hid in a blind spot. Bennet had to stroll halfway down the hill before the crime scene revealed itself, a patch of land between two small woods that provided the sides of a makeshift football pitch. Anyone sitting on the bench had a perfect view of the spot where a bad sportsman had pulled a blade. On that fateful evening two weeks ago, nobody had been sitting here.

  The backrest had a bronze plaque dedicated to the memory of a ninety-year-old woman who’d died eighteen months ago, but a second had been added. The stabbed boy’s parents had been unable to afford the £1500 it cost to make and apply a plaque, and had written to Barnsley’s District Commander to provide the funds. Bennet could see that their plea had either failed or was ongoing: the current dedication was a computer-printed piece of A5 paper, laminated and stapled to the wood, probably without permission.

  He had visited today in order to shift his thoughts from Lorraine and Joe, on to solving a crime. But seeing that plaque only fed his guilt. Hundreds of hours put in by people trained to catch killers, myriad doors knocked and statements taken and CCTV tapes collected, and what did he, as overall leader, have to show for it? Two parents resigned to hearing bad news every day, and one lethal thug taunting his hunters. If Bennet couldn’t help his own son have a chat with his mother, what chance did he have of providing justice for any other family?

  9

  At seven that evening, their prearranged time, Bennet called Joe. After giddily talking non-stop about his great first day in York, son asked father for a favour. None of his friends believed he still had his first birthday card, and could his dad take and send a photo of it? The card was in his middle desk drawer, under a small blue notepad. But there was a warning:

  ‘Don’t touch the blue notebook, Dad. You can’t.’

  Bennet found the birthday card, which he’d laminated wide open to keep it in prime condition. He hadn’t seen this card for a few years and it brought a smile to his face. At first. A bunch of his then police colleagues had signed the card, some of them long gone from the team and some from the service itself. But Lorraine’s name was absent, like a buzzing neon reminder that she had walked out on him months before the card existed.

  He sent the photo. Joe said, ‘Cheers, Dad. I asked Shaun and his granddad was a sergeant. But not a detective like you. Now he’s saying all policemen today are fat because they don’t do anything.’

  Bennet would have laughed, but he was still emotional about Joe’s birthday card. ‘Your dad’s not fat, is he?’

  ‘His granddad says in the old days it was all about good old-fashioned coppering. They had to go out and work hard to catch serial killers. Knocking on doors and talking to people and searching dirty places. He says these days computers and internet do all the work and all the police do is sit on their bums and wait for the villains to come to them, and that’s why they’re all fat. Are detectives better than normal police?’

  ‘It’s basically all the same, but I’m trained in detection. There’s aspects they do I have no clue about and vice versa. In terms of rank, though, DCI trumps sergeant.’

  ‘I’ll tell him that. Cheers. Gotta go. Remember, don’t look in the blue notebook.’

  After sending the photo and finishing the call, Bennet’s eyes went where he’d promised they wouldn’t. But what father wouldn’t nosey into a notebook he’d been warned away from? It had a padlock, but it was a cheap thing easily popped open by the tip of a pencil.

  The pages contained written details of special or memorable events in Joe’s life. But these weren’t diary-like notations for reminiscing. They were letters written to his mum. Together they created a mini-biography, informing her of everything important that had happened in his life. The later letters showed advancement in his English skills, suggesting he’d been keeping this record for a long time. Perhaps a few years.

  Bennet was shocked. Joe had mentioned his mother periodically, but this book proved she’d been in his thoughts far more often than Bennet had realised. In one letter Joe mentioned that a friend had suggested his mother had left the family home in order to pursue a career of greatness, something Joe was keen to believe. He wrote of how ‘amazed’ he was by her commitment to ‘saving the world’ and his eagerness to welcome her back once her ‘mission’ was completed. It tugged at Bennet’s heart to be reminded of how innocent and naïve and fanciful a ten-year-old could be. A major source of his constant tension the last two days had been his inability to come down on one side of the fence, but no more. All anxiety dumped out of him as if a trapdoor had opened. He’d chosen a side, finally.

  Sitting at Joe’s sticker-covered desk, he called a detective constable named Hooper. The young man had stalled his career with a number of errors during a double murder investigation a month ago, but since then had redeemed himself with long hours and dedication. The kid had promised Bennet he would be available for anything, anytime, and had since never failed to accept an out-of-hours task.

  ‘Hooper, I need a favour. There was a missing person’s case in March 2010, at a village called Lampton, up in the Peak District. A young girl. Get onto Derbyshire Constabulary and see what they can give us from the files. All of it, if you can. See if there’s anyone connected to the investigation who will agree to be interviewed. For a TV documentary.’

  ‘TV? Is this about the Buttery case?’

  ‘No. Don’t ask. But make sure you stress that this is a personal query. I’ll explain later. Email me whatever you get. Don’t tell any of our team about this until I say it’s time. Thanks.’

  Hooper didn’t need to know any more. After t
he call, Bennet opened Messenger, ticked Lorraine’s name, and this time there were no nerves when he wrote his message.

  You win. I’ll do it. I can get you the police files you need, and there’s a chance I can get you an interview with one of the detectives who ran the investigation. I’ll help your documentary. But you have to do something for me. No, not for me. For Joe. He’s your son and I want you to meet with him, even if you don’t care for it. He misses you and he deserves better than this.

  10

  If he’d been relegated to house clothes and a day indoors, Bennet might not have made the decision. But his boss decided things with a strange phone call that Tuesday morning, although Bennet didn’t know it at first.

  Superintendent Hunter launched with, ‘The Buttery Park victim’s parents just called the station. They’ve heard that we had a suspect and released him, and they’re not happy. They’ve threatened to turn up at the station this morning, with a reporter. I know it’s your day off, but any chance you could come in? Andrea’s at the hospital.’

  Andrea, the family liaison officer assigned to the Turtons, had blood tests scheduled for today, Bennet remembered. ‘To talk to them? Did they give a time?’

  ‘Well, no, it’s just a threat. But it would be great to have you here just in case. Just hang around the station. That pool table is still in the rec room, right?’

  ‘No. That got bust months ago.’ Actually, Hunter had donated it to a charity shop after banging footsteps and laughter – the rec room was above his office – had interrupted a meeting between him and a caseworker from the commissioner’s office. ‘You want me to hang around the station all day on the off-chance that the parents will come in?’

  ‘It’s just to appease them. I don’t think they’d like being fobbed off with someone who doesn’t have all the answers. Free food at the canteen. Watch TV. I’d take that deal. And we’ll call it overtime. I need this, Liam. Help out a friend.’

  Bennet was the Buttery Park stabbing’s senior investigating officer, but he didn’t have all the answers, either. But, Andrea aside, his was the face the parents knew best, even though on the three occasions he’d met them, it had been as the bearer of inert news.

  So, there he was, dressed, in his car, with the world available to him, and that was when he made the decision. That morning he’d woken to find that the message he’d sent Lorraine still didn’t display the telltale tick indicating it had been read. Sometimes Facebook hid messages from a user if their algorithms figured the recipient didn’t know the sender, so Lorraine might not even know Bennet had contacted her. Or she’d blocked him. Or she simply hadn’t opened Messenger. Whatever the reason, her lack of reply gave him that itchy craving to act, to work, to… do something.

  With the bitter taste of Joe’s letters to his mother still forefront in his mind, he didn’t make a right turn out of his driveway, for the station. Instead, he spun the wheel left, for the motorway, and hoped he wasn’t about to make a big mistake.

  11

  10 must-visit Peak District villages.

  4: Lampton in the Peak District is a postcard-worthy tiny community, once a milling epicentre, with maze-like streets of stone-wall cottages and an enclosed village centre. In 1924, some forty years after the first freedom to roam bill was presented to Parliament and vetoed, moorland around Lampton was the scene of a mass protest by ramblers determined not to be denied by landowners. You can find Lampton, where a nomad planted a lamp and built a town, by turning north onto Benders Road off the A6 just west of Bakewell and following the signs (page 84).

  The closest major road to Lampton was the A6 near its south border, but there was no entry from the south for vehicles, so Benders Road hooked around the village on the east side and speared it from the north. Unmentioned in official guidebooks was a much shorter route: a private farm track beginning a few hundred metres along Benders Road that ran towards Lampton’s eastern flank, where there was a secret parking area for residents only. The farm track was barred by a gate secured by a heavy-duty combination padlock. To dissuade those on foot who could scale the gate, the landowner – a hulking bear of a man called Crabtree, if Liam remembered correctly – had posted a WARNING sign with a picture of a snarling dog.

  Because the secret car park and the track had been created for those living in Lampton, they all knew there was no guard dog, and they all had the combination for the padlock. Bennet hadn’t been a resident but had visited Lorraine a number of times. After a decade, Liam didn’t expect the code number in his head to be correct or that Crabtree wouldn’t have changed it. He got a pleasant surprise.

  A few minutes down this hedge-lined track, another led off it on the right, with a sign saying PRIVATE. OUT. YOU. KEEP. This would be the track to the Crabtrees’ farm. He drove past.

  The secret car park was behind the Red Lion public house. It was enclosed by buildings on three sides, with a small alleyway between the close sides of the pub and the Yorkshire Bank – too thin for vehicles, thus making it off-limits to tourists. A concrete ramp up to the raised tarmac had been painted with STOP CLEAN WHEELS, which he disobeyed. The car park was only a third full, so he cut a few turns and circles to dislodge most of the mud from his wheels before parking far from the majority of his mess. Stepping in the car to stepping back out: fifty-one minutes.

  The eternally gloomy alleyway between the pub and the bank delivered him into the south-western end of the rugby-ball-shaped village centre. The area was known as the Well and it struck him, again, how apt that was. Dead centre was a pond enclosed by a green area for picnicking, itself encircled by the road and then a ring of old buildings with modern frontages. An aerial view might give the impression of a shallow well perhaps two hundred metres wide that had mostly emptied to expose items cast to the bottom.

  Ahead of him, past the green, the main road left the Well between the old grey library, with its nice rear garden that Liam still remembered fondly, and the Anderson’s supermarket, with its classy glass front and bright letters set against aged grey stone, like a young woman’s face transplanted onto an old lady’s head. Beyond these two buildings, Bennet remembered, the road curved out of sight, to run past an array of cheesy trinket shops, and reappeared above the edge of the Well as it climbed upwards towards the Porsche showroom, a Tesco, a church and a tiny school and the hotel. The place had hardly changed in the decade or so since he’d last seen it.

  He crossed the road and dumped himself on one of the benches circling the pond to watch the village breathing. There was a black siren-style speaker atop the lamp post next to him, and he saw others dotted around the area. A civil defence system, given that the Well was effectively a sunken bowl and perhaps liable to flooding? It was a little strange that this area was covered by five or six small sirens instead of one large device. The system hadn’t been in place a decade ago.

  It was a cold January, so the tourists were spread thin. Duos and threesomes and a scattering of families moved here and there, mixed with Lampton’s human furniture. He could instantly tell the two species apart, because the locals walked with a purpose, knowing where they were going and doing so on a timetable. The tourists ambled along with a constant look of awe on their faces, like lost children, as if city folk regarded quaint old England as another world. And they drew suspicious glances, like trespassers.

  Amongst the locals, Bennet recognised a face here and there. He saw folks he’d been on low-level speaking terms with, and some he’d heard gossip about, but nobody he would have called a friend. Would anyone remember him from the – what, ten? – times he’d visited? Would he get the backslaps and handshakes of a returned kindred spirit, or the same sceptical glare accorded every other stranger? It was a long time ago.

  So far, the latter appeared to be the order of the day. Eyes had run across him, then quickly moved on. Not even a double-take. It was a tourist spot, after all.

  There was a fat man in a donkey jacket on a nearby bench. With shock, Bennet realised he recognised
the guy. Crabtree, owner of a large portion of land to the east and one of the village chiefs, who became so by virtue of wealth, influence, or length of residence. The Crabtree in his memory had been a big ball of solid muscle from fifteen-hour days hauling weight on his farm; a lively, brash soul of the party who was rumoured to kill defective cattle with his bare hands. But the years had transformed the guy into a wreck. The former Hercules was vastly overweight, greatly aged, and stared at the pond with dead, zombie eyes. He didn’t look much like a Champion or Credit, or whatever term they’d used to denote the important clique amongst the clan. He also looked like a man who’d suffered a great loss.

  Bennet stood up. Reminiscing about Lampton not only wasted time, it also felt awkward. He’d sometimes wondered if things might have progressed differently had he moved here instead of dragging Lorraine to Barnsley. But he hadn’t and his only connection to the village, Lorraine, was out of his life. He wasn’t here to catch-up or to remember the good times or imagine what might have been, but to find Lorraine and convince her to agree to see her son. So he’d go do the find and convince, and get out of here.

  12

  The sandwich shop was a new version of itself, with a new name – Jenny’s – and a new proprietor. The fresh look was just an update of the original, still designed to appeal to a city slicker’s sense of rural England. Tied-back flowery curtains and a red carpet and wooden tables draped with gingham cloths and paintings on the walls showing craggy peaks and valleys. Soft music oozed from a speaker in a high corner. The menus were in chalk. Every table had a brochure displaying things to do in the local area and a little saucer bearing slices of Lampton rock. Meat and pasties and cheeses were arranged behind the glass counter, with their names in archaic script on little flags. One cheese was so grey Liam thought it should have a little toy astronaut on it. Signs everywhere promoted a local jam that was apparently ‘world-renowned’, probably meaning that a tourist from overseas once bought a jar and said it didn’t taste like shit. He’d eaten here one time only, if memory served.