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 was broken as DI Hitchens opened the door just in time to hear the last two sentences. His face contorted at the thought that he might go along to his local surgery and find this youth was his new GP. Then he nodded Diane Fry out of the room, leaving Simeon Holmes starting to grin again in the midst of his peculiar smell.

      ‘We can hand this one back to Morgan,’ said Hitchens. ‘They’ve found those hikers. We’re off to West Yorkshire, Diane.’

      

      Ben Cooper had not seen Daniel Vernon before. He wasn’t impressed at first sight, but had learned not to judge people younger than himself too quickly. It was a mistake to dismiss someone because they did not dress as you did or behave in quite the same way. Daniel Vernon was a student. That probably meant he went to all-night raves and took cannabis and Ecstasy. He probably took a different girl home every night and lay in bed all day. He probably thought nothing of stealing traffic signs from the roadside, beer glasses and ashtrays from pubs. But in a few years he would be a respectable, well-off member of the community demanding better protection from the police.

      Daniel looked as though he had drunk too much cheap beer in the Students’ Union. He was dressed in a grubby white T-shirt with the name of an American university written across the front. The T-shirt smelled of sweat.

      Cooper took Daniel up to an interview room, where Tailby was waiting. They hardly needed to ask any questions before Daniel had begun to talk. He was eager to get something off his chest, and it quickly became clear what it was.

      ‘I find it astonishing,’ said Tailby a few minutes later, ‘that you should be so eager to come in here and tell me such things about your parents.’

      ‘It’s true,’ said Daniel. ‘I couldn’t give a toss what they do among themselves or with their tacky friends. But they were blind to what it was doing to Laura. She thought it was OK, all that. She wanted to try things out for herself. She got a taste for sex when she was about thirteen. She told me all about it, though she would never listen to my advice. Mum, she never suspected, even now. Dad –’ He shrugged. ‘Who knows?’

      ‘You tried to talk some sense into her, didn’t you, Daniel?’

      ‘I tried. But it was a waste of time.’

      ‘We found your letters, you know.’

      ‘Yes, I know you did. You took the one I wrote to her after she’d told me about Simeon Holmes.’

      ‘Yes, Holmes,’ said Tailby. ‘Do you know him?’

      ‘No. But it was the way Laura talked about him that made me write to her like that. It sounded more serious this time. She wasn’t just playing any more. My big worry was that she would let someone like him get her pregnant. I wanted to be sure she was still taking the pills she got from the doctor. She told me she was.’

      Daniel looked up at Tailby with a question.

      ‘She wasn’t pregnant,’ said the DCI, though he refrained from explaining how they knew. Or rather, how the pathologist knew. There was such a thing as too much information. ‘But why have you decided to tell us all this now, Daniel?’

      ‘I don’t doubt that my father has been telling you things about Lee Sherratt and Laura. I won’t have you believing them. Laura wasn’t interested in Sherratt, or him in her.’

      ‘But your mother …’

      ‘My mother had the hots for him. She likes them young. And he was quite willing. My father knew, of course. He knew what was going on. He always knows.’

      ‘You’re saying that your mother was actually having an affair with her gardener?’

      ‘Sounds very D. H. Lawrence put like that, doesn’t it?’

      ‘Does it?’

      ‘But Lee Sherratt is just a youth from the village who saw the chance of getting his end away with an older woman. He isn’t exactly a Mellors.’

      Tailby wasn’t sure what he was talking about. ‘Your father believes Sherratt may have killed your sister.’

      ‘If he did,’ said Daniel. ‘If he did kill her – it was my father’s fault.’

      ‘Ah. How do you make that out?’

      ‘He let it go on,’ he said. ‘Until it had gone too far. He enjoyed it.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘Oh yes.’

      Daniel pulled at his T-shirt, which was sticking to his sides where the sweat was beginning to dry. He fidgeted in his chair, his jeans squeaking on the leather. He looked from Tailby to Cooper, the expression in his eyes shifting and changing. When he spoke again, his voice had altered. It was quiet, less aggressive, with an adolescent edge to it that spoke of an inner pain he could no longer conceal.

      ‘One day,’ he said, ‘I came across my father in his room. I wanted to speak to him about something I needed for university, just before I went away. I knocked on the door, but he must not have heard me. It turned out he was otherwise engaged.’

      Daniel gave him a small, ironic smile. Tailby didn’t react. His face was expressionless, but for one eyebrow lifted slightly – indicating a mild interest only. It spurred Daniel on more than a probing question would have done.

      ‘He was standing at the windows. He was using binoculars, looking at something in the garden. At first I thought he was watching birds. I was surprised, I didn’t know he had taken up a hobby. He was never a man for hobbies, except golf – and even that is a business tool.’

      ‘Go on.’

      ‘I was about to ask him what species he had seen. There have been woodpeckers in the garden sometimes. Then he heard me come in, and when he turned towards me I saw him. I mean … I saw his face. He was startled, and angry at being interrupted. But most of all, he looked guilty. He asked me what I wanted. I wanted to know what he was looking at, but he wouldn’t say. He started to bluster about trying out the binoculars before he loaned them to a friend. But as I stood there, looking out of the window, I saw my mother.’

      The young man was silent for several seconds, until Tailby thought he had finished. The DCI began to frown, frustrated at the seeming pointlessness of the story. But Daniel had more to tell.

      ‘She was with Lee Sherratt. In the summerhouse down there. He was naked from the waist up, as he often was, and he was grinning. My mother had been wearing a red silk shirt, with the ends tied at the front in a sort of loose bow. When I saw her, she was just putting it back on. It was the first time I had seen my mother’s breasts.’

      The silence grew in the interview room. Somewhere in the station someone started whistling. A telephone rang half a dozen times before it was answered. Tailby dared not move in his seat for fear of breaking the moment.

      ‘But that wasn’t the worst,’ said Daniel. ‘The most sickening thing of all was my father. When I came into the room and he turned away from the window, I noticed two things straightaway. The first was the binoculars round his neck. The second was his erection.’

      The young man was staring at the desk, as if interested in the ballpoint pens and a scatter of paperclips. Tailby remembered Graham Vernon’s desk СКАЧАТЬ