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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СКАЧАТЬ it? She always kept them together.’

      ‘The police have been through them,’ said Charlotte uncertainly. ‘I suppose they might have taken one.’

      ‘What the hell for?’

      ‘I don’t know. It depends what was in it, doesn’t it?’

      ‘Are they allowed to do that?’

      ‘I suppose your father will have given them permission. You’ll have to ask him. I don’t know what they were looking for.’

      Daniel put the letters down. He tied them together again with the ribbon, securing it carefully and neatly despite the trembling in his hands.

      ‘It’s bloody obvious what they were looking for.’

      As he headed for the door, Charlotte caught his arm. She could tell he hadn’t washed today, perhaps for more than one day. The back of his neck was grubby and the collar of his T-shirt was stained. She longed to propel him physically to the bathroom and demand his filthy clothes for the wash, as she would once have done when he was a year or two younger.

      But Charlotte knew her son had passed well beyond her control. What he did in Exeter was a mystery to her. He no longer told her about his course, about his friends or where he lived. She could no longer understand the angry, disapproving young man he had become.

      ‘Danny,’ she said. ‘Don’t condemn us so much. There’s no need to stir up old arguments that aren’t relevant to all this. Let the police find out what happened to Laura. The rest of us have to go on living together without her.’ She watched his sullen expression and saw his face was closed against her. She felt his muscles tense to pull away from her, to shake off the last physical link between them. ‘Your father –’

      But it was the wrong thing to say. Daniel knocked her hand from his arm. ‘How can I not condemn you? You and my father are responsible for what happened to Laura. You’re responsible for what she became.’

      He paused in the doorway of Laura’s room, his face suffused with rage and contempt as he looked back at Charlotte. ‘And you, Mum, you couldn’t even see what it was that she’d turned into.’

      

      The three old men were crammed into the front of Wilford’s white pick-up as it wound its way down from Eyam Moor towards the Hope Valley. They had avoided the main routes, leaving them to the tourists. But when they reached the A625 they would meet the evening traffic coming back from Castleton.

      They huddled among empty feed sacks and neglected tools. The floor of the cab was littered with crumpled newspapers, an old bone, a plastic bucket and a small sack containing a dead rabbit. Sam was squeezed uncomfortably between the other two, shifting his bony knees to find room for his stick under the dashboard and wincing at every bump they hit. Wilford was driving, his cap pulled low on his head to stop his hair blowing about in the breeze from the open window. He drove with sudden twists of the steering wheel and sharp stabs on the brake as they approached each bend. Harry, on the outside, looked as though he was sitting in a limousine. His hands were spread on his knees, and his head moved slowly from side to side as he studied the passing scenery.

      In the back of the pick-up, riding in the open on a bed of hessian sacks, was the brown and white goat. It was tethered securely to the backboard of the cab with a short length of chain so that it could not reach the sides. Every now and then it turned its head and bellowed at a startled cyclist.

      The snaking twists of the road slowed a lumbering quarry lorry ahead of the pick-up. All around them were the familiar tucks and folds of the hills and the strange, unpredictable rolls of the landscape that concealed the history of the ancient lead mining industry. There were overgrown hollows and mounds running across one field, indicating the line of a rake vein. Here and there stood an isolated shaft, walled off for safety. Many years ago, two bodies had been pulled out of one of these shafts in a notorious murder case.

      ‘Even with all their scientific tests,’ said Harry, ‘the coppers still go round asking a lot of questions.’

      ‘’Course they do,’ said Wilford.

      ‘But it’s like in the song,’ said Sam.

      ‘What’s that?’

      Sam began to sing quietly in a cracked, off-key voice. The tune was just recognizable as one familiar to them all – ‘Ol’ Man River’ from the musical Showboat. After a moment, the other two joined in with the song, tuneless and punctuating their singing with laughter.

      ‘Don’t say nothing,’ said Sam firmly, when they had finished.

      Just outside Bamford, Wilford drove the pick-up into an untidy farmyard and sounded his horn. Two half-bred Alsatians ran out of a kennel until they hit the end of their chains and barked and snarled at the wheels of the vehicle. A man of about forty with wild hair and a vast bushy beard came out of the house and wandered towards them.

      Wilford greeted him as ‘Scrubby’.

      ‘You brought the young nanny then?’ he said.

      The goat screamed hysterically from the back of the pick-up. The noise was so loud in the yard that the dogs stopped barking, stunned into silence.

      ‘Aye, happen that’ll be her now,’ said Wilford.

      ‘Bugger’s been giving directions all the way here,’ said Harry. ‘It’s worse than having the wife in the car.’

      ‘You’ve not brought any dogs, have you?’ said Scrubby. ‘Only it upsets them two over there.’

      ‘Not in here,’ said Wilford.

      The three old men climbed carefully out of the cab, creaking as they straightened their legs. Harry put his arm round Sam and helped him down the step until he could support himself with his stick.

      ‘Bloody hell, what’s that?’ asked Sam as a ripe, musky stench slithered across the yard and grabbed the back of his nostrils. ‘It smells like someone’s been sick and set fire to it.’

      ‘Ah, that’s the billy,’ said Scrubby. ‘He’s in breeding condition a bit early this year. I reckon the young ‘un can smell him all right.’

      A rapid smacking sound was coming from the back of the pick-up. The goat was wagging her tail so fast it was beating a tune on the metal sides. She was straining at her tether until the collar bit into her neck deep enough to choke her. She yelled again when she saw Wilford.

      ‘Are you going to mate her now? Can we watch?’ asked Sam.

      ‘’Course you can. I don’t even charge for tickets.’

      The goat tugged them over to a low stone building, not much bigger than a pig sty, with an enclosed yard on two sides. The building seemed to be the source of the smell. The three old men bent to peer through a small opening into the gloom of the shed. They could make out something large and hairy moving restlessly inside, pawing at the gate with its hooves and rubbing its head on the walls.

      ‘Bloody hell,’ said Sam. ‘He’s got a pair of bollocks on him as big as your prize turnips, Wilford.’

      The goat looked suddenly as though she might change her mind and СКАЧАТЬ