Стивен Бут: Black Dog

The cows turned their heads to watch them pass in astonishment, their jaws working slowly, their eyes growing huge between twitching ears. Earlier in the afternoon, the search party had had to wait for the farmer to move the cows to the milking shed before the line could work its way across the field. The air had been filled with crude jokes about cow pats.

Cooper passed a stretch of collapsed wall, where a length of electric fence had been erected to keep the cattle away until someone skilled in dry-stone walling could be found to repair it. Before the cows’ curiosity could lead them to follow him, Cooper had already reached the next gate. He skirted another field and ran up a farm track paved with stones and broken rubble.

The steepness of the slope was increasing steadily now on the last few hundred yards, until Cooper began to feel as though he was back on the Cuillins again. Wragg was dropping further and further behind, slowing to a walk, using his arms against his knees to boost himself up the steeper sections.

He was carrying too much upper body weight, thought Cooper, and hadn’t developed the right muscles in his thighs and calves for hill climbing. Some of the old people who had lived in these hill villages all their lives would have passed the young PC with ease.

Finally, Cooper reached the high, dark wall at the corner of the graveyard at St Edwin’s Church. The church seemed to have been built on a mound, standing well above the village street at the front and presenting an elevation from the bottom of the valley like the rampart of a castle wall. The square Norman tower stood stark against the sky, tall and strangely out of proportion to the shortened nave, giving the church the appearance of a fallen letter ‘L’.

The surface of the churchyard was so high that Cooper thought the bodies buried there must be almost on his eye level, if only he could see through the stones of the wall and the thick, dark soil to where the oak caskets lay rotting.

The church was surrounded by mature trees, horse chestnuts and oaks, and two ancient yews. The damp smell of cut grass was in the air, and as Cooper passed the churchyard, climbing now towards the back of a row of stone cottages, a man in a red check shirt with his sleeves rolled up looked over the wall at him from the side gate. He was leaning on a big petrol lawn mower, pausing between a swathe of smoothly mown grass and a tussocky area he hadn’t yet reached. He gazed at the running man with a grimace of distaste, as if the evening had been disturbed by something particularly unpleasant.

At the first of the cottages, a woman was in her garden with a watering can, tending the flower beds on the side where they were in the shade of the cottage wall. She held the watering can upright in a gloved hand as she watched Cooper trying to catch his breath to ask directions. He found he was gasping in the heady smells of honeysuckle and scented roses freshly dampened with water. Behind him, the lawn mower started up again in the churchyard, and a small flock of jackdaws rose protesting from the chestnuts.

‘Dial Cottage?’

The woman stared at him, then shook her head almost imperceptibly, unwilling to spare him even that effort. She turned her back ostentatiously, her attention on a miniature rose with the palest of yellow flowers. On the wall in front of Cooper was a sign that said: ‘No parking. No turning. No hikers’.

Two cottages up, he found an old woman sitting in a garden chair with a Persian cat on her knee, and he repeated his question. She pointed up the hill.

‘Up to the road, turn left and go past the pub. It’s in the row of cottages on your left. Dial Cottage is one of those with the green doors.’

‘Thank you.’ With a glance at the PC still struggling up the track, Cooper ran on, glad to have tarmac under his feet at last as he approached the road.

Moorhay was off the main tourist routes and had little traffic most of the time, with no more than an occasional car coasting through towards Ladybower Reservoir or the show caverns in Castleton. A small pub called the Drover stood across the road, with two or three cars drawn up on the cobbles in front. According to the signs, it sold Robinson’s beer, one of Ben Cooper’s favourites. Right now, he would have died for a pint, but he couldn’t stop.

He passed a turning called Howe Lane, near a farm entrance with a wooden-roofed barn and a tractor shed. A sign at the bottom of the track said that the farmhouse itself provided bed and breakfast. Trees overhung the road as it wandered away from the village. In the distance, he glimpsed a shoulder of moor with a single tree on its summit.

Two hundred yards from the church was a long row of two-storey cottages built of the local millstone grit, with stone slate roofs and small mullioned windows. They had no front gardens, but some had stone troughs filled with marigolds and petunias against their front walls. One or two of the cottages had plain oak plank doors with no windows. The doors were painted a dark green, with lintels of whitewashed stone tilted at uneven angles.

By the time Cooper found which of them was Dial Cottage, the perspiration was running freely from his forehead and the back of his neck and soaking into his shirt. His face was red and he was breathing heavily when he knocked on the door. He could barely bring himself to speak when it was answered.

‘Detective Constable Cooper, Edendale Police.’

The woman who opened the door nodded, not even looking at the warrant card held in his sticky palm.

‘Come in.’

The old oak door thumped shut, shutting out the street, and Cooper blinked his eyes to readjust them to the gloom. The woman was about his own age, maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight. She was wearing a halter-necked sun top and shorts, and her pink limbs immediately struck him as totally out of place in the dark interior, like a chorus girl who had wandered into a funeral parlour. Her hair shone as if she had brought a bit of the sun into the cottage with her.

They stood in a narrow hallway, made even narrower by a heavy mahogany sideboard loaded with cut-glass vases and a fruit bowl, all standing on lace mats. In the middle was a colour photograph of a large family group, taken at the seaside somewhere. Recently applied magnolia woodchip wallpaper could not disguise the unevenness of the walls underneath. An estate agent would have called it a charming period look.

Cooper stood still for a moment, fighting to get back his breath, his chest heaving. He wiped the back of his hand across his brow to stop the trickles of sweat running into his eyes.

‘We had a report at the station,’ he gasped. ‘A phone call.’

‘It’s Ben Cooper, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right.’ He looked at the young woman again, recognition dawning only slowly, as he found it did when you saw someone out of their familiar surroundings.

‘Helen? Helen Milner?’

‘That’s it. I guess I’ve changed a bit since the sixth form at Edendale High.’

‘It was a few years ago.’

‘Nine years, I suppose,’ she said. ‘You’ve not changed much, Ben. Anyway, I saw your picture in the paper a while ago. You’d won a trophy of some sort.’

‘The Shooting Trophy, yes. Look, can we—?’

‘I’ll take you through.’

‘Do you live here then?’

‘No, it’s my grandparents’ house.’

They stepped through into a back room, hardly less gloomy than the hallway despite a window looking out on to the back garden. There was a 1950s tiled fireplace in the middle of one wall, scattered with more photographs and incongruous holiday mementoes — a straw donkey, a figure of a Spanish flamenco dancer, a postcard of Morocco with sneering camels and an impossibly blue sea. Above the fireplace, a large mirror in a gilt frame reflected a murky hunting print on the opposite wall, with red-coated figures on horseback galloping into a shadowy copse in pursuit of an unseen quarry. Cooper smelled furniture polish and the musty odour of old clothes or drawers lined with ancient newspapers.