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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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‘Helen, what’s up, love?’
‘It’s the police, Granddad. They’ve been asking questions about Dad.’
‘Have they now? That pillock with the big words, or the nasty piece of work that was with him?’
‘Neither.’
‘Was it –?’
‘No, it was the woman. Detective Constable Fry.’
‘Her? She’s nothing but a bit of a lass.’
‘Even so …’
Harry paused, considering. ‘Aye, you’re right. Best to know.’
Diane Fry found Helen Milner’s cottage to be one of four tiny homes created out of a barn conversion.
The barn had a wavy roof and there was a clutter of old farm buildings at the back that no one had yet found a way of using. Inside, the walls were of undressed stone, with casement windows and pitch-covered beams. Most of the furniture was second-hand stripped pine, with wicker chairs and a rush mat on the kitchen floor.
Helen greeted her without any indication of surprise, and Fry guessed that the phone lines had been busy during her journey across Edendale. She expected this third member of the Milner family to be as unforthcoming as the others, to tell the same story of shock and ignorance, to use the same, familiar words of outraged innocence.
But she was amazed how long the visit lasted. And she was fascinated and enlightened by the story that Helen Milner had to tell her over the instant coffee in the hand-thrown pottery mugs. By the second coffee, Fry had almost forgotten what she had come for.
The three old men had met at Moorhay post office, where they had collected their pensions. The post office had been busy, not just with the regular Thursday pension queue, but with hikers emptying the cold drinks cabinet and the little freezer where the choc ices and the strawberry-flavoured iced lollies were kept. There was barely room inside the shop to manoeuvre round the displays of postcards of Ladybower Reservoir and Chatsworth House. Bulging rucksacks were piled outside while their owners flicked through the guidebooks and the sets of National Park place mats.
Soon the hikers would be moving on through the village to the tea rooms and craft centre at the Old Mill, or the picnic site at Quith Holes; then they would head for the Eden Valley Trail, aiming to reach the Limestone Way to the south or the Pennine Way to the north. Within half an hour, they would have forgotten Moorhay.
Harry Dickinson had picked a small frozen chicken out of the freezer for Gwen. It was solid and heavy in his hand, and the frost bit painfully into his palm, numbing his fingers. But queueing at the counter to pay for it, he found himself marooned in a sea of young people, who bumped against him and elbowed him carelessly in the ribs. They seemed regardless of his presence, as if he was just another obstacle that had come between their grasping hands and the next Diet Coke.
A small vein began to throb in Harry’s temple as a girl pushed in front of him in the queue. She was wearing a crop top that left her midriff bare and striped leggings that made her hips and backside look enormous. Her dyed blonde hair exploded from the top of her head like badly baled straw, and when she opened her mouth to call to her friends, he saw a silver stud thrust through her tongue.
Jostling for position, she trod hard on Harry’s toes with her Doc Marten’s, and when he looked down there were dirty scuff marks and indentations in the shiny leather of his boots. If she had apologized, he would never have said anything. But she turned away without even seeing him. She might as well have trodden on a piece of litter that she could wipe off later.
Harry tapped the girl on the shoulder, and she stared up at him incredulously. Her lip turned back in a sneer, revealing a grey wad of chewing gum squashed between her teeth. He noticed there was a stud through her bare navel that matched the one in her tongue.
‘Haven’t you been taught any manners?’ he said.
She looked at him as if he was speaking a different language.
‘What’s up with you, granddad?’
Her accent was local, and Harry thought he might actually have seen her around the village before. It made no difference.
‘If you shove in front of me and tread on my feet, you might at least apologize.’
‘I’ve as much right to be in here as you.’
‘As much. But not more. You’ll have to learn, lass.’
‘Oh, get lost,’ she said. She pushed her chewing gum forward through her teeth so that it smeared across her lips. Then she wriggled out her tongue and dragged it all back into her mouth again, staring insolently at Harry. But she quickly lost interest in him and turned away as the queue moved forward.
Harry hefted the solid weight of the frozen chicken in his left hand, staring at the back of the girl’s head. The tight breast of the chicken was smooth and hard, and coated in a thick layer of ice. He grasped the legs of the bird and let it begin to swing.
The girl screamed and cannoned forward into a youth in front of her in the queue. Everyone in the post office turned to look as she snarled and cursed at the old man. She was rubbing the place on her back where the biting cold of the chicken had touched her warm, naked flesh like a branding iron.
‘Sorry,’ said Harry.
Outside the shop, by the swinging Wall’s ice cream sign, Sam Beeley slipped on a discarded Coke can and hit the pavement with a painful thump, his ivory-headed stick clattering into the gutter. There was a flutter of consternation until two tall young men with Australian accents helped him to his feet and picked up his stick. Three girls who had leaned their hired mountain bikes against the shop window made a great fuss of asking the old man if he was all right and dusting him down, eyeing the Australians. They all circled round Sam in a kaleidoscope of colourful shirts and brown limbs, like butterflies momentarily attracted to a dry, leafless plant before passing on to seek new scents elsewhere.
Finally, they left him to Harry and Wilford, who assured them he only lived a few yards away. Though supported by his friends, Sam didn’t get very far before he had to stop and rest on a wall, gasping with the pain from his legs. He lit a cigarette and squinted at the churchyard across the road, where the gravestones gleamed white in the sunlight.
‘You’ll be carrying me over yonder soon,’ he said, without self-pity.
‘We’re all heading that way,’ said Wilford.
‘I’ll not race you. It’ll happen soon enough.’
‘You have to accept the fact,’ said Harry, ‘that when you get to our age, death is always just around the corner.’
‘Do you remember that time in the mine, when I nearly got killed,’ said Sam.
‘That was a good few years ago.’
Sam looked down at his legs. ‘Aye, but it left me a memento.’
The three men were silent, staring at the houses opposite, not seeing the cars that went past, or the young hikers who had to step off the pavement to get round them.
It had been over twenty years since the accident had happened at Glory Stone Mine. They had been in a six-foot-wide worked-out vein, nearly a hundred feet high. The face sloped upwards in a bank of calcite like scree, with a miner drilling at the top, fifty feet up, silhouetted against the speck of his light. The sloping face was dimly lit, and the air was smoky from the blasting, with the roof nothing but a dusky darkness way beyond the reach of the lights. It was a vast and misty cavern of greys and blacks, thick with the acrid stink of explosives and dust.
Sam had been the miner at the top of the face.