LITMIR.BIZ

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good day for a drive to Withens.’

      Ben Cooper had his hand on the gate, and had been about to lift the latch. But he stopped at the sound of the voice. A man stood near the end house of Waterloo Terrace, watching Cooper carefully. He had been standing quite still, so that Cooper, who had been more interested in the state of the gardens, hadn’t even noticed him. The man was wearing a dark suit and a white shirt, but no tie, and his suit trousers were tucked into black wellington boots. Cooper guessed him to be in his fifties. He had a balding head and some strands of sandy hair that stood up at his temples and moved in the breeze. But his hair was the only thing about him that moved. Even his eyes were quite still, fixed firmly on Cooper. His hands were hanging by his sides, and he carried no weapon of any kind, yet still managed to convey a clear threat.

      Cooper felt slightly nervous as he reached for his warrant card, worried that the movement might be taken the wrong way. Maybe he was becoming paranoid, but he had begun to feel that there were other pairs of eyes watching him, too, from somewhere.

      ‘Detective Constable Cooper, Edendale Police,’ he said. ‘Who am I speaking to?’

      The man didn’t reply. His expression shifted subtly from suspicion to contempt, as if a detective ought to know whose house he was visiting.

      ‘Are you Mr Oxley?’ said Cooper.

      ‘What do you want?’

      Cooper realized that he would have to read the answers in the man’s eyes. This was almost certainly Mr Oxley. Lucas, presumably. The father of Scott, Ryan, Jake and maybe of Sean.

      ‘If you’re Mr Lucas Oxley, I’d like to talk to you.’

      ‘Don’t come any further, I said.’

      Cooper had automatically begun to lift the latch of the gate again, assuming that once he had made verbal contact, he would be allowed to enter. But he was wrong.

      ‘What I have to ask you, sir, might not be something you want everyone to hear. Not something you’d want to shout out to your neighbours.’

      ‘That’s perfectly all right. I’ve no intention of shouting.’

      ‘I need to ask you –’

      ‘You don’t need anything. Not from me.’

      Cooper was sure he could see movement through one of the downstairs windows of the second house, number two. The curtains were open, but the interior was too dark to be sure if there was anyone there, without staring too hard.

      ‘You are Mr Oxley, aren’t you?’ said Cooper.

      ‘Happen I am.’

      ‘I’ve just been to the church, where there’s been a break-in.’

      To Cooper’s surprise, Oxley simply turned on his heel and walked away down the passage between the two end houses. The strands of hair bounced around his ears for a moment until he had disappeared into the shadows.

      Cooper opened the gate and took a few steps after him.

      ‘Mr Oxley!’ he called.

      Then he stopped. Something had made the back of his neck prickle uneasily. He stood where he was, a couple of yards along the path from the gate, and he looked at the house. There were certainly faces peering through the windows. Two, three or four of them. He could see their eyes watching his movements. They were like a family glued to a television screen, waiting for the next exciting moment, another car chase or a fight scene. They didn’t look worried, or frightened. They looked expectant.

      Yet now that Lucas Oxley had disappeared, there was almost complete silence in the front gardens of Waterloo Terrace. Almost, but not quite. Cooper’s ears caught a faint click, then a strange skittering noise approaching from the far end of the ginnel.

      At the last moment, Cooper turned and ran for the gate. He knew he didn’t have time to open it, so he dived at the wall and vaulted it just as a huge, shaggy-haired Alsatian burst from the arched entrance of the ginnel and hurtled down the path towards him.

      Cooper stood gasping in the roadway on the other side of the wall, ready to run for his car. But nothing happened. The dog was utterly silent. It hadn’t barked once, or even let out a snarl. It had made no sound as it went for him, except for the skittering of its claws on the concrete of the ginnel. But it seemed to have halted the moment Cooper was on the other side of the gate, and therefore out of its territory.

      Cooper looked up at the house, expecting to see satisfied expressions on the faces behind the window. But they weren’t satisfied yet. They were still expectant.

      Then a dark shape flashed across Cooper’s field of vision, and a set of sharp white teeth clashed together a few inches from his face. He caught a brief glimpse of a wildly rolling eye as the Alsatian threw itself into the air and lunged its head above the gate in its desperation to sink its fangs into him. He stepped back, sweating. If he had leaned over the gate to see where the dog was, several inches of skin would have been missing from his face by now.

      But it was the silence of the dog that was the most terrifying. It was the silence of an animal trained to attack and injure, rather than simply to frighten.

      ‘Mr Oxley!’ he called. ‘I’m a police officer. This isn’t an acceptable way to behave, you know.’

      Silence. And now even the faces had disappeared, satisfied at last. Perhaps this was the favourite form of entertainment in Waterloo Terrace.

      Cooper took a few deep breaths and moved several paces back from the gate. He wondered what his next move should be. He had a strong feeling that he’d made a stupid tactical mistake. He hadn’t been thinking about what he was doing, or why. As a result, he’d put his own safety at risk.

      It wasn’t something he should admit to, if he could avoid it. He was aware that there had been incidents in the recent past that had already put that question mark over his actions, in some people’s minds. DS Diane Fry would take pleasure in marking it down in his personnel record, he was sure.

      Follow procedure, he had been told. But sometimes it was hard. One day, he was going to fail to follow procedure, and that would be the end.

      ‘Are you OK, Ben?’ PC Udall was looking at him from the road, a slightly puzzled expression on her face. Cooper became aware that he probably didn’t look too good. He had been up since well before dawn, and had dressed in his most casual clothes for the raid, which was already a couple of hours ago. He probably hadn’t looked too good to Lucas Oxley, either. It was his own fault that he had nearly lost some skin to Mr Oxley’s dog.

      ‘Yes, I’m fine.’

      ‘I thought we’d lost you.’

      ‘You nearly did just then. Are we ready to go?’

      ‘Ready when you are.’

      As he waved Tracy Udall off from the car park, Ben Cooper poked around for a CD to play on the way back to Edendale in his Toyota. He found a recent Levellers album and was pleased by the title, Green Blade Rising.

      On the way out of the village, he noticed two men with a tractor and a length of rope near the pool in the river. Another man was standing in the water in PVC waders. He was already pretty well covered in duckweed as he struggled to attach the rope to one of the boards that floated on the surface of the pool.

      ‘Strange,’ said Cooper to himself. And he tapped his fingers to the Levellers as he drove out of Withens.

       8

      Instead of going back into the wrecked vestry before he left the church that night, Derek Alton turned across the front of the altar and stood for a moment on the patch of stone flags that was always cold. The sunlight from the windows never reached this spot during the day. This was where Alton believed he could feel the presence of the Spirit in the

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