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Cooper and Fry Crime Fiction Series Books 1-3: Black Dog, Dancing With the Virgins, Blood on the Tongue. Stephen Booth
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‘Ben?’ said Fry.
‘Yes?’ He jerked back to attention. He looked to Fry as if he had been asleep and dreaming. Or maybe going through a familiar nightmare.
‘Why did you ask about Harry Dickinson during the briefing this morning?’
She was curious why he had drawn attention to himself at the wrong time, when self-interest had clearly indicated that it was a time to keep quiet and keep his head down for a while. But she couldn’t ask him that outright.
‘The person who finds the body is always a possible suspect,’ he said.
‘Oh really? But I thought Dickinson only found the trainer. It was you who actually found the body.’
‘Yes, but you know what I mean.’
‘Anyway, Dickinson is seventy-eight years old. An awkward old sod, I’ll give you that. But a definite pipe-and-slippers man. He hardly looked strong enough to unzip his own fly, let alone commit a violent assault on a healthy fifteen-year-old girl.’
‘I’m not sure you’re right there, Diane.’
‘Oh? What are you basing your suspicion on?’
‘Nothing really. Just a feeling I had when I was there, in the cottage. A feeling about that family.’
‘A feeling? Oh yeah, right, Ben.’
‘I know what you’re going to say.’
‘You do? Is that another feeling? Tell you what, do me a favour – while we’re together as a team, don’t involve me in any of your feelings. I prefer the facts.’
They lapsed into silence again for the rest of the drive. Fry mentally dismissed Ben Cooper’s talk of feelings. She didn’t believe he could know the facts about relationships in families. He was what she thought of as the social worker type of police officer – the sort who thought there were no villains in the world, only victims, that people who did anything wrong must necessarily be sick and in need of help. Not only that, but he was obviously well-settled, popular, uncomplicated, with dozens of friends and relatives around him, smothering him with comfort and support until his view of the real world was distorted by affection.
She didn’t think he could possibly know what it was like to have evil in the family.
Wye Close was in the centre of the little council estate at the northern end of Moorhay. The houses were built of the same grey-white stone as the rest of the village, with slate roofs and unfenced grassed areas that were more roadside verge than garden. At one side stood a row of old people’s bungalows, separated from the family houses by a low fence that didn’t deter the children from playing on the grass under the windows of the old people.
There were no more than thirty houses on the estate, and in many other places, even in Edendale, it wouldn’t have been considered a street, let alone an estate. It had been built on the top field of one of Moorhay’s dairy farms. When the area had been allocated for housing on the council’s local plan, the increased value of the land had proved too much of a temptation for the farmer at a time when agriculture was in increasing financial difficulties. The result was that every house backed on to pastureland or had a view across rolling slopes to the farm itself. Some of the residents of the estate worked in the small factory units on the outskirts of Edendale, or in the dairy ten miles away. Many didn’t work at all. Rural housing might have been provided, but not rural employment.
Outside number 12, Wye Close stood an unmarked police Vauxhall. The car, or one like it, had been there since Monday evening, waiting for the return home of Lee Sherratt. The local children, at a loose end during the day because the schools were still on holiday, had invented a new game this morning. They were acting out the part of burglars, robbers and murderers, lurking suspiciously in the street, then pretending to see the police car suddenly and running away round the corner, screaming. The detective constable on surveillance duty was getting rapidly fed up of it. The baking heat inside the car was already enough to make him tired and irritable. The cheeky kids could be the last straw.
A green Ford entered the estate and pulled up at number twelve. When DCI Tailby got out and glowered across the road, the children seemed genuinely frightened for once, perhaps intimidated by his size and the grey suit he wore. They retreated behind the fence of the old people’s homes and watched to see what he would do. First he crossed to speak to the detective in the Vauxhall, who sat up straight and shook his head. Then he strode to the door of number twelve and banged on the knocker.
‘Oh, it’s you lot again,’ said the big woman who came to the door. She was wearing sandals and frayed blue jeans and a billowing pink garment that could only have come from a maternity-wear shop. Her hair had been pinned up but was falling back down across a chubby neck, and she smelled of cigarette smoke. Tailby put her age in the late thirties, forty at most.
‘Just a few questions, Mrs Sherratt,’ he said.
‘He’s not back.’
‘I know. Has he been in touch?’
‘No.’
‘There are some things I need to ask you.’
Molly Sherratt looked down the road at the children gawping and nudging each other.
‘For God’s sake, come in then,’ she said.
Tailby ducked to go through the door and picked his way through a hallway cluttered with bicycles and shoes and piles of clothes. Mrs Sherratt led him into a tiny kitchen with fitted teak-effect units and a brand-new automatic washer. The remains of somebody’s breakfast still stood on the counter – an open packet of cornflakes, half a carton of milk, a knife sticky with butter, and a toaster sitting amid a sea of blackened breadcrumbs.
‘I was just washing up,’ said Mrs Sherratt defensively, watching the detective’s instinctive survey of the room.
‘Carry on. Don’t let me interrupt.’
‘I don’t see that you could be doing anything else.’
‘I’ll try not to be long,’ said Tailby politely.
She turned on a tap and began to squirt washing-up liquid into a blue plastic bowl until the suds concealed anything that might have been in there. Tailby saw that the door of the washing machine stood slightly open, and the interior was packed tight with dirty clothes. Presumably Mrs Sherratt had been just about to do the weekly wash as well.
‘I’ve told your lot all I’ve got to say already,’ she said.
‘We need to know as much as we can about Lee so that we can find him. That’s the reason for all the questions, I’m afraid. It is important that we find him.’
‘To eliminate him from enquiries. That’s what the other ones said.’
‘That’s right, Mrs Sherratt.’
She clutched the washing-up liquid bottle to her bosom without closing the cap, so that a small squirt of sticky green liquid spurted on to her pink smock. She seemed not to notice.
‘Lee hasn’t done anything,’ she said.
‘He worked at the Mount,’ said Tailby, ‘so he knew Laura Vernon. And since his whereabouts are unknown …’
‘I know, I know, that’s what the others kept saying. But it means nothing. He often goes off for a day or two. He’s a devil for wandering off for a bit, is Lee. But that doesn’t mean he’s done anything wrong, does it?’
‘If you could help us find him, Mrs Sherratt, we’ll soon be able to establish that, won’t we?’
‘Anyway,