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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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Tailby looked again at the naked limbs of the fifteen-year-old girl. Her body was shockingly white except for the areas on her flank and the left side of her chest, where lividity had set in, the blood settling to the lowest point of gravity during the time she had lain dead in the bracken on the Baulk.
The bite mark was situated high on the inside of her right thigh, where the living flesh had been at its softest and most vulnerable. The picture suggested by Juliana Van Doon of the position of the attacker’s head made Tailby feel more uneasy than anything else he had heard so far.
But the pathologist was fiddling with a table full of gleaming, sharp instruments, eager to get on with the next stage of the process of reducing Laura Vernon to her component parts. Tailby and his team had to do the same thing, in a way. That was the essence of victimology, the process of getting to know the intimate details of the victim as a means of establishing the connection to her killer.
‘If your scenario is correct,’ he said. ‘Laura’s attacker will be much easier for us to find – he must have been known to her.’
‘Presumably, Chief Inspector. Yes, it’s preferable to a random attack by someone from outside the area, isn’t it?’
‘From our point of view, certainly.’
‘I hope that I am able to help you then.’
In the clinical atmosphere of the mortuary, Tailby felt able to voice the fear that he would never talk about much, even to his own staff. ‘That’s what I’m always afraid of, you know – a case that drags on for months, unsolved, because we can’t even get a lead on a suspect. It’s a detective’s nightmare.’
‘You have in mind, of course, a recent case.’
‘The girl in Buxton, yes. There are similarities, aren’t there? B Division’s enquiry has been unsuccessful so far, after more than a month. The view is that the victim was chosen at random by her attacker. In those circumstances, it was only ever a matter of time before we had a second victim.’
‘It would be a tragic thing,’ said Mrs Van Doon, flourishing a scalpel over the chest of the corpse, ‘if the poor girl here were simply to be known as Victim Number Two.’
‘It would be even more tragic,’ said Tailby, ‘if we ended up with a Victim Number Three.’
‘OK, what have we got, anything?’
‘Cars, lots of cars. Most of them unknown. You have to expect it in an area like this.’
‘Tourists,’ said DI Hitchens. ‘They always complicate the issue.’
They were in the tiny beer garden at the back of the Drover, squashed round a table under a parasol that kept the sun off their plates of ham and cheese sandwiches and their slimline tonics. The only other customers outdoors were two workmen eating scampi and chips and drinking beer at a far table. Everyone else had chosen to sit inside the pub, in the cool rooms, or at the front, where there was a view of the road.
Cooper and Fry had met up with four sweating PCs who had been working their way down the village, and they were all now clinking ice cubes desperately as they exchanged the pitifully thin information from their clipboards. DI Hitchens had arrived late, brazenly downing a whisky and stealing their sandwiches. He looked like the squire visiting his workers, trying to appear interested in what they had to say but ready to move on to more important calls on his time at any moment. He pulled up a chair next to Fry, cool as only a man could be who had just got out of an air-conditioned Ford.
‘I’ve got plenty of hikers,’ said Ben Cooper. ‘Mostly ones and twos. But there was a bigger group through round about the right time. They were seen on the Eden Valley Trail early Saturday evening.’
‘God, how will we trace them?’ asked Hitchens.
‘They were young people. They may have been heading for the sleeping barn at Hathersage or one of the youth hostels.’
‘OK, we’ll check them out. There’s going to be an appeal in the papers and on the telly in the morning. We’ll try and get the hikers mentioned specifically. And the – what was it – Eden Valley Trail?’
‘It’s a popular footpath. It runs just under the slope where Laura Vernon was found. You can see the path quite clearly from there.’
‘OK, thanks, Ben. At least we’re in with a chance of finding a witness or two. Anything else?’
‘Only a lot of talk,’ said Cooper.
‘You’re lucky,’ said one of the PCs, an aggressive-looking bald-headed man whose name was Parkin. ‘Most of them just wanted me off the doorstep.’
‘Well, I can understand that,’ said PC Wragg. ‘They’ve probably heard your jokes.’
Wragg was the officer who had accompanied Cooper to Dial Cottage when Helen Milner had first rung in to report her grandfather’s find. He didn’t look any fitter now than he had the day before, and he was drinking orange juice as if he had a lot of fluid to replace. Like the other uniformed officers, he had loosened his clothing as much as he could, but was handicapped by the entire ironmonger’s shop of equipment he wore round his belt – kwik-cuffs, side-handle baton, CS spray, and God knew what else was considered necessary for the job of calling on members of the public in a quiet Peak District village.
‘I’ve got a new one,’ said Parkin. ‘There’s this prostitute –’
There were general groans. They had all heard Parkin’s awful jokes before.
‘Not now, Parkin,’ said Hitchens.
Fry was leafing through her notebook. ‘I got one woman. Mrs Davis, Chestnut Lodge. She says she’s met Laura Vernon several times. Apparently Mrs Davis’s daughter goes to the same stables as Laura did, and they got quite friendly. She describes Laura as a very nice girl.’
‘What does that mean exactly? Nice.’
‘The way she spoke about some of the other children she came across, I think it means that she approved of Laura’s background, sir.’
‘Mmm. Did you get her to expand on that?’
‘As far as I could. She said Laura was polite and knew how to behave. She said she was very good with the younger children, helping to show them what to do when they were learning to ride. Mrs Davis told me a story about Laura looking after a boy who had fallen off his horse. Apparently, she was the only one he would let comfort him when he had hurt himself. Mrs Davis said Laura’s mother was a nice woman too.’
Somebody snorted. DI Hitchens didn’t look impressed. ‘It doesn’t mean much.’
‘But they all seem to know of the Vernons, these people,’ said Fry. ‘Every one of them.’
‘Yes, and not too charmed by them either, on the whole,’ said Wragg.
‘It’s that sort of village, though.’
‘What do you mean, Diane?’ asked Hitchens.
‘They’re close, this lot. They don’t like newcomers, people who don’t fit in. I mean, they’re not exactly welcoming, are they?’
‘I don’t agree,’ said Cooper.
‘Well, you wouldn’t.’
‘It depends on how you approach them, that’s all. If you come to a village like this willing to fit in, they’ll accept you. But if you stay aloof, make it look as though you think you’re better than they are, then they’re bound to react against you.’
‘And the Vernons are like that, aloof, you reckon, Ben?’
‘Sure of it,