Cooper was consciously trying to readjust his mind to such mundane things. But his thoughts were lingering on the Laura Vernon case. It was going to be an enquiry that he would not find easy to forget. He was baffled by the old man, Harry Dickinson. He had seen many reactions among people who became accidentally involved in incidents of major crime, but he could not recall such a puzzling mixture of indifference and secret enjoyment.
Unable to find a ready explanation for the old man’s attitude, he considered the leading suspect, the missing Lee Sherratt. He did not know Lee, and had never had any dealings with him. But he did recall his father, Jackie Sherratt, a local small-time villain. He was currently serving two years in Derby for receiving, but was better known in the Edendale area as an experienced poacher.
Most of all, though, Cooper’s thoughts kept straying back to the moment he had found the body of the girl. The physical impressions had stamped themselves on his senses and would not go away. Even the evening air blowing through the open windows of the Toyota could not take away the smell of stale blood and urine that seemed to linger in the car. Even a Levellers tape on the stereo could not drown out the buzzing of the flies that had laid their eggs in Laura Vernon’s mouth, or silence the derisive cry of the ragged-winged crow that had flapped away from her face. Directly in his field of vision, as if imprinted on the inside of the windscreen, hung the images of a ravaged eye socket and the startling contrast between a strip of bleached white thigh and a thick coil of black pubic hair. Even at the moment that he had first seen the body, Cooper had registered the fact that Laura Vernon had dyed the hair on her head a rich, vermilion red.
It was not his first body by any means. But they didn’t get any better with experience. Certainly not when they were like this one. He knew that the sight would stay with him for weeks or months, until something worse came along. Maybe it would never go away at all.
Cooper also knew that he had sensed something wrong in the cottage at Moorhay where Harry and Gwen Dickinson lived. Something that the granddaughter, Helen Milner, was aware of too. It was not anything he could put his finger on; not a cold fact that he could have included in an interview report; not a logical conclusion that he could have justified in any way. There wasn’t even any firm impression in his mind that the atmosphere had anything to do with the finding of Laura Vernon’s body. But something wrong at Dial Cottage there had certainly been. He was sure he was not mistaken.
The Toyota rattled over a cattle grid and into the yard of Bridge End Farm. Its tyres splashed through trails of freshly dropped cow manure left by the herd coming down to the milking shed from their pasture and back again after afternoon milking. A group of calves destined for Bakewell Market bellowed at him from a pen in one of the buildings at the side of the yard. But he ignored them, slowing instead as he passed the tractor shed to look in at the big green John Deere and the old grey Fergie, and the row of implements lined up against the walls. There was no sign of his brother, although Matt would normally be found tinkering with a bit of machinery at this time of the evening.
When he reached the front of the house, Cooper’s heart began to sink. His two nieces, Amy and Josie, were sitting on the wall between the track and the tiny front garden. They were not playing and not talking to each other, but sat kicking their heels against the stones and stirring the dust with the toes of their trainers. They looked up as he parked the Toyota, and neither smiled a greeting. He could see that Josie, who was only six, had been crying. Her eyes were red and her nose had been running, leaving grimy tracks on her brown cheeks. A comic lay discarded on the wall, and an ice cream had melted into a raspberry-coloured puddle on the ground.
‘Hello, girls,’ he said.
‘Hi, Uncle Ben.’
Amy looked at him sadly, with big eyes that showed hurt but no real comprehension of what was hurting. She glanced apprehensively over her shoulder at the farmhouse. The front door stood open, but there was silence from within. A black and white cat emerged from the garden, walked to the doorstep and paused, sniffing the air of the hallway. Then it seemed to change its mind and trotted quickly away towards the Dutch barn.
‘Mum’s in the kitchen,’ said Amy, anticipating the question.
‘And where’s your dad?’
‘He had to go up to Burnt Wood straight after milking. To mend some gates.’
‘I see.’
Cooper smiled at the girls, but got no response. They were totally unlike the two children who would normally have come running to greet him. But he didn’t have to ask them any more questions to guess why they were so subdued.
In the big kitchen he found his sister-in-law, Kate. She was moving about from table to stove stiffly, like a woman with arthritis, or one whose limbs were badly bruised. Her short fair hair was dishevelled and the sheen of sweat on her forehead looked as though it was caused by something more than the heat of the day or the steam from a pan which was simmering on the hotplate with nothing in it. She, too, had been crying.
When she saw him, she let go of the carving knife she was carrying as if it was a relief to part with it. The kitchen normally smelled of herbs and freshly baked bread, and sometimes of garlic and olive oil. Tonight, though, it smelled of none of those. The smell was of disinfectant and several less pleasant odours that made Cooper’s stomach muscles tighten with apprehension.
‘What’s wrong, Kate?’
His sister-in-law shook her head, sagging against the pine table, weary with the effort of trying to keep up an appearance of normality for the girls. Cooper could have told her, even from his brief glimpse of them outside, that it had not worked.
‘See for yourself,’ she said. ‘I can’t bear it any more, Ben.’
He put his hand on her shoulder and saw the tears begin to squeeze from her eyes once more.
‘Leave it to me,’ he said. ‘You look after the girls.’
He went out into the passage that ran through the centre of the house and looked up the stairs. When he was a child, the passage and the stairs had been gloomy places. The walls and most of the woodwork had been covered in some sort of dark-brown varnish, and the floorboards had been painted black on either side of narrow strips of carpet. The carpet itself had long since lost its colour under a layer of dirt which no amount of cleaning could prevent from being tramped into the house by his father, his uncle, their children, three dogs, a number of cats of varying habits and even, at times, other animals that had been brought in from the fields for special attention. Now, though, things were different. There were deep-pile fitted carpets on the floor and the walls were painted white. The wood had been stripped to its original golden pine and there were mirrors and pictures to catch and emphasize what light there was from the small crescent-shaped windows in the doors at either end of the passage.
Yet he found that the stairs, light and airy and comfortable as they were, held more terrors for him now than they ever had as a child. The immediate cause of his fear lay on a step halfway up. It was a pink, furry carpet slipper, smeared with excrement.
The slipper lay on its side, shocking and obscene in its ordinariness, its gaudy colour clashing with the carpet. It turned his stomach as effectively as if it had been a freshly extracted internal organ left dripping on the stairs.
Slowly, he climbed the steps, pausing to pick up the slipper gingerly between finger and thumb as he would have done a vital piece of evidence. On the first landing, he paused outside a door, cocking his head for a moment to listen to the desperate, high-pitched whimper that came from inside. It was an inhuman noise, a mumbled keening like an animal in pain, forming no words.
Then Cooper opened the door, pushing it hard as it stuck on some obstruction on the floor. When he walked into the room, he entered a scene of devastation worse than any crime scene he had ever encountered.
‘Found by a man walking a dog.’