Стивен Бут - Black Dog

There were two elderly people in the room — a woman wearing a floral-patterned dress and a blue cardigan sitting in one armchair, and an old man in a pair of corduroy trousers and a Harris wool sweater facing her in the other chair. They both sat upright, stiff and alert, their feet drawn under them as if to put as much distance between themselves as they could.

In front of the empty fireplace stood a two-bar electric fire. Despite the warmth of the day outside, it gave the impression of having been recently used. Cooper, though, was glad of the slight chill in the room, which had begun to dry the sweat on his face as the two old people turned towards him.

‘It’s Ben Cooper, Granddad,’ said Helen.

‘Aye, I can see that. Sergeant Cooper’s lad.’

Cooper was well used to this greeting, especially from the older residents around Edendale. For some of them, he was merely the shadow of his father, whose fame and popularity seemed eternal.

‘Hello, sir. I believe somebody phoned the station.’

Harry didn’t answer, and Cooper was starting to form the idea that the old boy might be deaf when his granddaughter stepped in.

‘It was me, actually,’ said Helen. ‘Granddad asked me to.’

Harry shrugged, as if to say he couldn’t really be bothered whether she had phoned or not.

‘I thought it’d be something you lot would want to know about, like as not.’

‘And your name, sir?’

‘Dickinson.’

Cooper waited patiently for the explanation. But it came from the granddaughter, not from the old man.

‘It’s in the kitchen,’ she said, leading the way through another door. An almost brand-new washing machine and a fridge-freezer stood among white-painted wooden cupboards, with an aluminium sink unit awkwardly fitted into place among them. Neither of the old people followed them, but watched from their chairs. The rooms were so small that they were well within earshot.

‘Granddad found this.’

The trainer lay on a pine kitchen table, lumpy and grotesque among the bundles of dried mint and the brown-glazed cooking pots. Someone had put a sheet from the Buxton Advertiser underneath it to stop the soil that clung to its rubber sole from getting on to the surface of the table. The trainer lay in the middle of an advertising feature for a new Cantonese restaurant, its laces trailing across a photograph of a smiling Chinese woman serving barbecued spare ribs and bean sprouts. On the opposite page were columns of birth and death notices, wedding announcements and twenty-first birthday greetings.

Cooper wiped his sweaty palms on his trousers and took out a pen. He gently prised open the tongue of the trainer to look inside, careful not to disturb the soil that was starting to dry and crumble away from the crevices in the sole.

‘Where did you find this, Mr Dickinson?’

‘Under Raven’s Side.’

Cooper knew Raven’s Side. It was a wilderness of rocks and holes and tangled vegetation. The search parties had been slowly making progress towards the cliff all afternoon, as if reluctant to have to face the task of searching it, with the expectation of twisted ankles and lacerated fingers.

‘Can you be more specific?’

The old man looked offended, as if he had been accused of lying. Cooper began to wonder why he had thought it was cooler inside the cottage. Despite the open windows, there was no breath of air in the kitchen. The atmosphere felt stifling, claustrophobic. The only bit of light seemed to go out of the room when Helen went to answer a knock at the door.

‘There’s a big patch of brambles and bracken down there, above the stream,’ said the old man. ‘It’s where I walk Jess, see.’

Cooper was surprised by a faint scrabbling of claws near his feet. A black Labrador gazed up at him from under the table, responding hopefully to the sound of its name. The dog’s paws were grubby, and it was lying on the Eden Valley Times. The sports section, by the look of it. Edendale FC had lost the opening match of the season.

‘Was there just the trainer? Nothing else?’

‘Not that I saw. It was Jess that found it really. She goes after rabbits and such when she gets down by there.’

‘OK,’ said Cooper. ‘We’ll take a look in a minute. You can show me the exact spot.’

Helen returned, accompanied by an exhausted PC Wragg.

‘Is it... any use?’ she asked.

‘We’ll see.’ Cooper took a polythene bag from his back pocket and carefully slid the trainer into it. ‘Would you wait here for a while, please? A senior officer will probably want to speak to you.’

Helen nodded and looked at her grandfather, but his expression didn’t alter. His face was stony, like a man resigned to a period of necessary suffering.

Cooper went back into the road and pulled out his personal radio to contact Edendale Divisional HQ, where he knew DI Hitchens would be waiting for a report. He held the polythene bag up to the light, staring at its contents while he waited for the message to be relayed.

The trainer was a Reebok, size-five, slim-fit. And the brown stains on the toe looked very much like blood.

The E Division Police Headquarters in Edendale had been new once, in the 1950s, and had even earned their architect a civic award. But in the CID room, fifty years of mouldering paperwork and half-smoked cigarettes and bad food had left their mark on the walls and their smell in the carpets. The Derbyshire Constabulary budget had recently stretched sufficiently to decorate the walls, replace the window frames, and install air conditioning in some of the offices. They had also replaced the old wooden desks with modern equivalents more in keeping with the computer equipment they carried.

DC Diane Fry was reading the bulletins. She had started off by catching up with the fresh ones for the day, then had continued casting back over recent weeks. Her intention was to make herself familiar with all the current enquiries in the division. Although she had been in Edendale nearly two weeks, she still felt as new as the white glosswork that for some reason was refusing to dry properly on the outside wall near the window. All the windows on this side of the building looked down on Gate C and the back of the East Stand at Edendale Football Club, a team struggling in the lower reaches of one of the pyramid leagues.

The priority problem of the moment was car crime at local tourist spots. From the weary tone of some of the memos Fry came across, it sounded as though it always was the priority problem in E Division at this time of year. Many thousands of visitors were drawn into the Peak District National Park during the summer, bringing with them what appeared to be their own crime wave, like the wake trailing behind a huge cruise liner. These visitors left their cars at remote spots, in makeshift car parks on rough ground, in abandoned quarries and on roadside verges. The cars were invariably full of cameras and binoculars and purses stuffed with cash and credit cards, and God knows what else. At the same time, travelling criminals from the big conurbations around Sheffield in the east and Manchester in the west were touring the Peak District looking for just such victims. A few minutes with an unattended vehicle and they were away back to their cities, leaving a trail of distraught visitors and ruined holidays.

It presented an apparently insoluble problem. It was impossible to get the message across to the car owners, since they were a constantly changing flood — here one day, then moving on the next, to be replaced by another group of visitors. It was impossible for the police to keep surveillance on vulnerable sites with the resources available; it was feasible only to identify possible perpetrators and ask neighbouring forces to keep them under observation. It was called living in hope.