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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the line was equipped with a wooden pole to sift through the long grass and push aside the dense swathes of bracken and brambles. The bruised foliage released a damp, green smell and Cooper’s brown fell boots were stained dark to an inch above the soles. His pole came out of the undergrowth thick with burrs, and with small caterpillars and insects clinging to its length. Every few minutes he had to stop to knock them off against the ground or on the bole of a tree. All along the line were the sounds of men doing the same, the thumps and taps punctuating their muttered complaints and sporadic bursts of conversation.
Cooper found that walking with his head down made his neck ache after a while. So when the line stopped for a minute to allow someone in the centre the time to search a patch of dense bramble, he took the chance to raise his head and look up, above the line of the trees. He found himself gazing at the side of Win Low across the valley. Up there, on the bare, rocky outcrops they called the Witches, it would be so much cooler. There would be a fresh wind easing its way from the west, a wind that always seemed to come all the way from the Welsh mountains and across the Cheshire plain.
For the last two hours he had been wishing that he had used his common sense and brought a hat to keep the sun off his head. For once, he was jealous of his uniformed colleagues down the line, with their dark peaked caps pulled over their eyes and their starburst badges glittering in the sunlight. Being in CID had its disadvantages sometimes.
‘Bloody hell, what a waste of effort.’
The PC next to Ben Cooper was from Matlock section, a middle-aged rural beat manager who had once had aspirations to join the Operational Support Task Force in Chesterfield. But the Task Force were deployed further along the hillside, below the Mount itself, while PC Garnett found himself alongside an Edendale detective in a makeshift search group which included a couple of National Park Rangers. Garnett wore his blue overalls with more comfort than style, and he had been swinging his pole with such ferocity as he walked that his colleagues had gradually moved further away to protect their shins.
‘You reckon so?’
‘Aye, certain,’ said Garnett. ‘They say the lass has run off with some boyfriend.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Cooper. ‘I’ve not heard that. It wasn’t in the briefing. Just that she was missing.’
‘Huh. Missing my arse. Mark my words, she’ll be off shagging some spotty youth somewhere. Fifteen years old, what do you expect these days?’
‘Maybe you’re right. We have to go through the motions all the same.’
‘Mind you, if one of my two did it, I’d murder ’em all right.’
Garnett thrashed at a small elder sapling so hard that the stem snapped in two, the tender young branches collapsing to the ground and leaking a tiny trickle of sticky sap. Then he trod on the broken stem and crushed it into the grass with his police-issue boot. Cooper hoped that, if there were any fragile evidence to be found in the woods, he would see it before Garnett reached it.
Then he looked at the PC and smiled suddenly, recognizing that the man had no harm in him. He might be a middle-aged dad whose ambitions were withering as his waistline expanded, but he had no harm in him at all. Cooper could almost sense the ordinary little niggles that teemed in Garnett’s mind, from his disappearing hairline to the recurring ache at the base of his spine and the size of his telephone bill.
‘Just be thankful for the overtime,’ he said. ‘We could all do with a bit of that.’
‘Ah yes, you’re right there, lad. Too right. It takes something like this to get the fingers of those tight-fisted bastards off the purse strings these days, doesn’t it?’
‘It’s the budget cuts.’
‘Budgets!’ Garnett said the word like a curse, and they both paused for a moment to listen to its sound, shaking their heads as if it symbolized the end of everything they had known.
‘Accountants, you can keep ’em,’ said Garnett. ‘We’re not coppers to them any more, just a load of figures on a sheet of paper. It’s all flashy operations and clear-up rates. There’s no room for old-style coppers these days.’
He threw a bitter glance along the hillside towards where the Task Force squad was beating its way through the scrubland beyond a row of Lombardy poplars like a set of dark spikes dropped into the landscape.
‘Of course, you’ll know all about that, lad. You’re different. A chip off the old block, they reckon. Good for you. Wish you luck, though.’
‘Yeah, thanks.’
Cooper had only just returned from a fortnight’s summer leave. On his first day back on duty he had been thrown straight into the search for Laura Vernon, fifteen years old and missing from home since Saturday night. They were looking for a girl with short dark hair dyed red, wearing a silver nose stud, five foot six inches tall, mature for her age. Failing that, they were looking for her clothes – black denims, a red short-sleeved cotton T-shirt, a white sports bra, blue bikini pants, blue ankle socks, a pair of Reeboks, size-five, slim-fit. Nobody thought it necessary to point out that if they found her clothes, they were also looking for a body.
‘This lass, though. She’s miles away, if you ask me,’ said Garnett. ‘Run off with the boyfriend. Some yob on a motorbike from Manchester, maybe. That’s what teenage girls get up to these days. The schools teach them about contraceptives before they’re twelve, so what can you expect? ’Course, the parents never have a clue. Not parents like this lot, anyway. They don’t know the kids exist half the time.’
Cooper’s legs were still aching from the rock climbing he had done on the sheer, terrifying faces of the Cuillin Hills of Skye. His friends Oscar and Rakesh were members of the Edendale Mountain Rescue Team and could never get enough of the mountains. Just now, though, he could really have done with a quiet day behind his desk at Division, making a few phone calls maybe, catching up on what had been happening during the last fortnight, getting up to date with the gossip. Anything but clambering up and down another hillside.
But he knew this area well – he was himself from a village a few miles down the valley. Most of the men recruited for the search parties were from the section stations, or even from out of the division. A few of them were city boys. On the hills around here they would be falling down old mine shafts in their dozens without someone to tell them which way was up and which was down.
And, of course, PC Garnett could well be right. It had happened so often – youngsters bored with life in the villages of the Peak District, attracted by the glamour and excitement of the big cities. And very likely there was a boyfriend, too – no doubt someone the parents found unsuitable. According to the initial reports, the Vernons claimed there had been no trouble at home, no family rows, no reason at all for Laura to walk out. But didn’t parents always say that? So much could remain misunderstood among families, or never even suspected. Especially if they were a family who didn’t have the time or the inclination to talk to each other much.
But there were other factors in this case. Laura had taken no clothes with her, very little money, no possessions of any kind. And initial enquiries had brought a sighting of her talking to a young man on Saturday night, at the edge of the expanse of hillside scrub and woodland known as the Baulk.
Once he got out on the hill below the village of Moorhay, Cooper had remembered that he had even been to Laura Vernon’s home once. It was the big white house they called the Mount, which stood somewhere above the search party, hidden behind the trees on its own spur of land. It was a former mine owner’s house, big and pretentious, with formally laid out grounds full of rhododendrons and azaleas, and with a stunning view over the valley from the terrace. Cooper had been invited to the Mount for the eighteenth birthday party of a classmate, a lad everyone at the old Edendale High School knew had well-off parents even before they were given the tour of the big house. That hadn’t been the Vernons, but the people before them – they had been local people, the family of a man who had inherited a string of small petrol stations scattered throughout the Peak. The business had expanded from Edendale and its surrounding villages, beyond the borders of Derbyshire, in fact,