Стивен Бут: Dead in the Dark

‘That’s what told me something was wrong,’ said Pollitt, still craning his neck to admire the stain.

Fry stared with distaste at the view she was getting of his double chin, covered in a patchy stubble.

‘Well, you did the right thing, sir,’ she said.

‘How long had he been dead?’ asked Pollitt. ‘Do you know?’

He was asking too many questions now. Fry’s instinct told her that his interest was prurient. People she met were often like this, peripheral witnesses to a violent crime who felt they’d earned an entitlement to all the gory details.

‘We’re not sure,’ she said.

‘Oh.’

‘What time did you notice the blood on your ceiling?’

‘About seven-thirty, when I opened the shop.’

‘You were here early, sir.’

‘You have to open up early to get the customers,’ said Pollitt. ‘Passing trade, like.’

‘Passing trade?’

‘People call in for odds and ends.’

Fry knew she mustn’t push it. There was a fine line between not asking enough questions and seeming to know too much. Best to stay focussed on the main issue for now.

‘Mr Pollitt,’ she said, ‘did you ever see anyone visiting Krystian Zalewski?’

He shook his head. ‘No. But then, I wouldn’t. You’ve seen it — you get into the flat from the backyard. And the lad was out most of the day. If he had visitors, maybe they came in the evening after I locked up the shop. The only day I even knew he was here was on a Saturday now and then. He reckoned to work about every other weekend. If he was at home I could hear his radio sometimes. That was it, really.’

‘You never had to go up to the flat to speak to him?’

‘Only once or twice,’ said Pollitt. ‘He didn’t know how to use the wheelie bins — what rubbish to put in which one, you know what I mean? I had to explain it to him. They won’t take your bin if you’ve put the wrong stuff in.’

‘What about collecting the rent?’

‘I didn’t have to bother. He put it through the door of the shop once a week without fail. Cash in an envelope. He always paid in full and never fell behind. Like I said, he were a good tenant.’

‘So you’ll be sorry to lose him,’ said Fry.

Pollitt shrugged. ‘There’ll be another along in a day or two. There’re plenty of migrants. It’s one thing we’re not short of around here. Not until Brexit, anyway.’

Ben Cooper was getting his new home straight, after a fashion. The cat, Hope, had settled in, which was the most important thing. She came and went through her cat flap as if she’d been doing it all her life. She’d developed a knack of catching the flap with the tip of her tail as she went through, and letting it bang with a noise that she seemed to find satisfying, and which alerted her owner to the fact that she’d gone out, or had just come in and was ready for food.

She’d also made friends with a ginger-and-white tom that belonged to the old lady next door. Hopes had been spayed and the tom was neutered, so there was no chance of any unexpected kittens.

The cat’s satisfaction with her new home made Cooper himself feel more relaxed. A couple of the neighbours had called by to say hello. He’d popped into the local pub, the Bull’s Head, and no one had stared at him too much.

In fact, Cooper had begun to meet a few people in Foolow. He’d learned from some of the older residents to call it ‘Fooler’, though if he used that name anywhere else no one would know where he was talking about. That was normal in the Peak District. Eyam was ‘Eem’, Edensor was ‘Enser’, Tideswell was ‘Tidza’. It was a sign of ownership of the landscape, adopting a version in the local accent that outsiders wouldn’t recognise.

The village nestled in a cluster of trees, barely a stone’s throw from where he’d grown up. Its name meant ‘Bird Hill’, bestowed by some ancient Scandinavian settler. One of his English teachers at school had been an enthusiast for the study of local place names and their origins. He’d made an analysis of etymology and the mixing of elements from different languages an unofficial part of the syllabus. So Cooper knew it was a peculiarity of Peak District names that one of the words for a hill was ‘low’. It looked odd when you came across a place called High Low. And it was all due to the pesky Scandinavians.

On the village green at Foolow stood an ornate cross and a former bullring. St Hugh’s Church looked old but had been built in the nineteenth century, which was practically yesterday in the history of this area. Lead mining had been one of the major occupations here since the fifteenth century. Mounds and hillocks around the parish marked the sites of former lead mines, and sinkholes caused by the mine workings were a problem. The most recent had appeared about four years ago, he’d been told.

Tollhouse Cottage was nearly three hundred years old, built for farm labourers or estate workers at a time when houses were intended to last several lifetimes. The walls were solid, not those timber and plasterboard things you could put your fist through. Without the door or a window open, he could hear nothing from outside. Its limestone walls oozed with history and the steps to its front door were worn smooth by generations of previous occupants. It was squeezed into its village setting as if it had always been there, as if it had grown organically over the centuries, jostling with its neighbours for the available space and light, as much a natural part of its environment as the trees and the grass and the heather on the hills.

On summer evenings he was able to sit on the patio in the backyard, open a bottle of beer, and take in the view and the evening air. The view from here was the attraction that had swung his purchase of the house. When he looked out over the patchwork of fields, the sun broke through the clouds sporadically, highlighting one field and then another, changing the colours in the landscape as it went, catching a white-painted farmhouse here, casting shadows from a copse of trees over there.

The tracery of white limestone walls was like a map laid over the landscape, so painstakingly constructed that it seemed to hold the countryside together. He sometimes thought that if you followed the right lines on that map you could discover any story, find the clues to any mystery. All the answers might lie caught in this gleaming web.

Over a low wall, he occasionally saw his neighbours from up the row going to and from their houses. And Gavin Murfin had been right when he called at the cottage that first week. The ‘old biddy’ next door was no trouble once he’d made a fuss of her cat. She’d even made him an apple pie not long after he’d moved in. Two doors down, the teacher and her husband were a bit more distant, but they nodded and smiled whenever they saw him.

The wood-burning stove would be able to keep the cottage warm when the weather turned cold — it was a smaller version of the one at Bridge End Farm and he knew it would be cosy in here during the winter. Although the cottage was small, there was still a lot of empty space. He’d meant to get more stuff when he’d finished the decorating, but he seemed to have forgotten.

Tonight Cooper was on his way to a different pub a couple of villages away — the Barrel Inn at Bretton, up on the top of the ridge. Laying claim to being the highest pub in Derbyshire, it was also where he’d first talked to Dr Chloe Young, apart from a conversation over a post-mortem table in the mortuary.

Dr Young was the newly appointed Eden Valley pathologist, currently assisting Dr Juliana van Doon so that she could work part-time as she coasted towards retirement. Cooper’s relationship with Chloe Young had been progressing slowly but steadily. But that was fine with him. There was no rush.