Stephen Booth - The Corpse Bridge

‘There are grandfathers and grandfathers, though.’

Cooper was remembering his Granddad Frank, his mother’s father. He’d been a tough old bird, who’d spent most of his life working on the roads as a foreman in the county council’s highways department. That was in the days before health and safety, when Frank and his colleagues worked on all kinds of jobs and in all conditions wearing their overalls and flat caps. As foreman, Granddad Frank had insisted on wearing a tie too. He could have walked twenty miles when he was aged nearly eighty, and he never seemed to get more than three or four hours’ sleep.

‘Whose grandfather, then?’ asked Irvine.

‘I have no idea.’

Irvine frowned. ‘That’s a shame, Ben. She was supposed to be meeting him tonight, whoever he is.’

‘Tonight?’ said Cooper. ‘Or last night?’

‘It’s an entry for today, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, but at one in the morning,’

‘Oh, I see what you mean.’

‘If you were going somewhere at one o’clock in the morning, would you enter it in your diary for that day or the day before?’

‘Where would I be going at 1 a.m.?’

‘I don’t know. I’m not familiar with your social life. An all-night party? A rave?’

‘Chance would be a fine thing.’ Irvine thought about it for a moment. ‘Probably the day before. Because that’s when I’d need to remember it. The next day would be no good. If I was the sort of person who might forget something like that.’

‘Speaking of which,’ said Cooper. ‘I haven’t seen any car keys yet. You?’

‘No. There’s a handbag here with the usual sort of stuff in. A purse, but no keys.’

Cooper looked round. They’d left the front door open when they entered the house, just in case someone passing by got worried about them being burglars.

‘Close the door for a minute, Luke,’ he said.

Irvine looked surprised, but he pushed the door shut. On the back of it was a row of coat hooks, which held two or three jackets, a waterproof and a scarf.

‘Try the pockets of the top jacket,’ said Cooper.

Irvine patted the pockets, dived in with a hand and pulled out a set of car keys on a fob with a logo.

‘Eureka,’ he said with a happy grin.

‘Let’s take a look in the car, then.’

It was while they were searching the car that a member of the public stopped to ask what they were doing. Irvine showed his warrant card and assured him there was nothing to worry about. Cooper watched the man as he left reluctantly. It would be all round the village in half an hour that something was going on at Pilsbury Cottage. But it couldn’t be helped.

‘Nothing in the boot,’ said Irvine, except some bags of old clothes. ‘It looks as though she was planning to take them to the charity shop.’

Cooper smiled. He opened the glove compartment, pushed aside some old car parking tickets and till receipts, and put his hand on an address book.

‘Excellent.’

They went back inside the house, away from prying eyes again.

‘Luke, did you find a sketch pad in any of the drawers?’ asked Cooper.

‘A what?’

‘A sketch pad. Blank pages that you can draw on.’

‘No, nothing like that.’

‘Let me know if you see one.’

‘By the way, we’ll need a formal identification, won’t we?’ said Irvine, peering into a broom cupboard.

‘Of course. But it’s more important to use these first few hours trying to pick up as much evidence as we can before the lines of inquiry start to go cold.’

‘Yes.’

‘Besides,’ said Cooper, ‘I think we can be fairly sure of who our victim is.’

He picked up a framed photograph from the dresser. Sandra Blair was pictured with a dark-haired man leaning against a stone wall. They were smiling broadly and had their arms round each other. ‘This must be her husband that she’s with. How long ago did he die?’

‘Around five years. His name was Gary.’

There were other photos on the dresser. One was apparently from the Blairs’ wedding day, with Sandra in an elaborate white dress and Gary looking embarrassed in his suit and tie, with a white buttonhole. Another was of an earlier family group, taken perhaps twenty years ago — mother and father, with two teenage girls. Sandra and her sister, he assumed, though Mrs Blair was un- recognisable as a fifteen-year-old.

‘Do we know the sister’s name?’ asked Cooper.

‘No, the Beresfords couldn’t remember. They think she might live in the Dundee area, and she’s married with three or four children. But that’s all we have at the moment.’

‘We must get on to that. Neighbours-’

‘I know. I’ll go now.’

‘Thanks, Luke. Then we’ll try her colleagues at the place Mrs Blair worked in Hartington. And the Women’s Institute too, if necessary.’

When Irvine had left to call at the houses on either side of Pilsbury Cottage, Cooper looked through the address book. Well, it said ‘Addresses’ on the cover, but it turned out to have very few addresses in it. Names and phone numbers, yes. But many were just first names. Only a few numbers such as the dentist’s and the doctor’s surgery were immediately identifiable. Someone would have to go through the book entry by entry and call all these people. First of all, it would help to identify a Dundee dialling code.

Cooper pulled out his iPhone. The easiest way was to do a quick Google search, provided there was a good signal here. It took a few seconds for him to find the code was 01382. He flicked through the pages of the address book, but found no matches.

It was frustrating that there were no addresses given. Of course, there must be an address list somewhere, even if it was only for sending out Christmas cards. Unless Sandra Blair was the kind of person who sent digital cards by email. He went to the kitchen table and switched on the laptop. As soon as it booted up, he saw that it was password protected, as he suspected. That would be a task for a computer forensics analyst who would be able to crack the password and extract files and emails.

Then Cooper went upstairs. Luke had already been up here, so he didn’t spend much time looking for evidence of a second person being present. The neighbours would know about that, if anyone did. It was impossible to miss much of what was going on in an area like this.

At the bottom of the bedside cabinet, he found what he was looking for. It was folded inside a copy of Woman’s Weekly Craft Special , among several other magazines. At first glance it looked like a pattern book. Sandra had covered it with a swatch of velvety material. Cooper ran his hand over its smoothness. She’d made a nice effort of it too. But it was the right size and feel.

When he opened the book, it fell directly to the last page. The page where Sandra Blair had made her sketch of the Corpse Bridge effigy.

Cooper parked the Toyota in Hartington Market Place, close to the duck pond. Legend said that it was actually a ‘ducking pond’, originally used for subjecting suspected witches to water torture to make them confess. But today half a dozen white ducks were on the pond anyway, doing their bit to wipe out the memory of its true purpose. They couldn’t have done a better job if they’d been paid by the tourist authority.

In fact, Hartington was an odd mixture of tourist and traditional, with tea rooms and an antiques shop rubbing shoulders with the village stores and a post office with its Victorian postbox still standing outside the door. Self-catering cottages stood opposite the Royal British Legion club, where a notice advertised grocery bingo on the third Sunday of every month.

‘So that’s all the neighbours knew,’ Luke Irvine was saying. ‘Sandra kept herself to herself pretty much. She was interested in crafts, joined the WI.’