Стивен Бут - Black Dog

‘We have no case against Andrew Milner,’ said Hitchens.

‘I know that, damn it.’

‘Of the other names on the list, Simeon Holmes is in the clear. He was nearly twenty miles away at the time, and his story is well supported.’

‘Bikers,’ said Tailby.

‘This lot weren’t exactly Hell’s Angels, sir. You’d be surprised at the types who gather at Matlock Bath in their best leathers on a weekend. Some of them that we talked to were married couples with kids. Some were in their fifties.’

Tailby decided he disliked Paul Hitchens. It was his youth and his condescending smile. He would probably go far. In fact, he would probably be DCI very soon. What did Process Development mean exactly? He recalled that the three other CIs in Corporate had sections called Strategic Planning, Policy Development and Quality Assurance. Not much help.

Hitchens was counting on his fingers, like a primary school teacher. ‘We know Lee Sherratt could have been there. He could have been the youth seen talking to Laura, but he’s sensibly keeping mum. Without forensics, we’ll not pin that one down. Nobody saw him who can identify him.’

‘OK. Take the father, Graham Vernon.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Hitchens held up another finger. It looked dangerously like an insulting gesture to a senior officer. ‘Graham Vernon was seen and identified. By Harry Dickinson. But, of course, Mr Vernon went out to look for Laura when she didn’t come back to the house for dinner. Perfectly natural. An innocent explanation. He looked around for a while, perhaps called her name a few times, then got worried when he couldn’t find her, went back to the house and phoned us. Just what we would expect from a concerned father.’

Tailby’s expression must have betrayed his feelings about Graham Vernon. ‘I know you didn’t like him, sir. But we can’t act on feelings, can we? We need evidence.’

Hitchens was really warming up now. ‘Teaching your grandmother to suck eggs’ was an expression that sprang to the DCI’s mind. He wanted to stop Hitchens, to take back control of the conversation, but he felt powerless to halt the flow. His words had an air of inevitability.

‘Harry Dickinson.’

‘Yes, Harry Dickinson. He was definitely there.’ Hitchens looked at his fingers. He seemed to have lost count. He was already holding up five fingers and was trying to find a sixth. ‘But was he there at the right time? Nobody can tell us so for definite. There’s no firm identification of him, not even from the bird-watcher.’

‘He did find the body, Paul.’

‘Well, strictly speaking—’

‘Yes, I know!’

Tailby knew he was losing his grip on the situation. He shouldn’t lose his temper. But how could he stand this waiting? What were the fingerprint people doing down there? Of course, he knew the difficulties of lifting latent prints from a leather surface, and it could take hours. They were praying that the suspect had handled the leather upper of the trainer, and that his hands had been sweaty. They were praying that he hadn’t handled the trainer by its laces, or by the cloth interior. They were praying he was someone they knew.

If they lifted a suspect print, the enquiry was back on track and they could start making comparisons for identification. If they lifted no prints, they had hit another brick wall.

‘We may have to start pulling in every youth in the Eden Valley for elimination,’ said Hitchens, with an air of too much satisfaction.

‘We might as well pull in all the foxes in those woods and identify the one that took a bite out of Laura Vernon’s leg. That’s about as useful as forensics have been to us so far.’

‘It could have been a fox,’ said Hitchens. ‘Or it could have been a dog.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Tailby. ‘That’s about the best we can do. It could have been a bloody dog.’

But did the Vernons have a dog? Jesus, had nobody found that out? As Diane Fry punched the buttons of her phone again, she wondered how something so obvious could have been missed. Had everybody been fixated on Harry Dickinson? She banged the dashboard of the car irritably. No answer from the Vernons.

What was she going to do now? She could, of course, try to get hold of Mr Tailby or DI Hitchens and ask them what to do. But what would Ben have suggested? The answer came to her as if he had been there next to her: Sheila Kelk, the Vernons’ cleaner. Her address was on file back at the office. It only took a call to the duty operator in the incident room to get the phone number of the house at Wye Close.

Mrs Kelk sounded terrified when Fry told her who she was, as if the council house she was speaking from might be full of guilty secrets.

‘I just want to ask you something, Mrs Kelk. Do the Vernons have a dog?’

‘Oh, no. Mrs Vernon doesn’t like them.’

‘But there’s a photograph in the sitting room at the Mount showing Laura with a black and white collie. So they must have had one when that picture was taken?’

‘No, I think that was the gardener’s. Laura always loved animals. Dogs and horses and that. I think she did mention that dog to me once, when I was dusting round the knick-knacks on the cabinet. She told me its name too, but I can’t remember what it was.’

‘It belonged to the gardener? So that’s Lee Sherratt’s dog in the photograph?’

‘No, no, not him. What, Lee Sherratt? He was never really what you’d call a gardener anyway. Or one for keeping animals either, I should think. He’d rather shoot ’em than look after ’em. No, it was the one before him. That photo must have been taken a year ago, I’d say.’

‘Who was that, Mrs Kelk? Who did the dog belong to?’

‘The old gardener. I’m sorry, it was before my time at the Mount, you see. I don’t know his name. But Laura said it was an old man that used to come. A strange old man from the village.’

Diane Fry drove up to the smallholding, this time having no trouble with the gates or the geese, which seemed to be notable by their absence. The stream of rusty water from the broken pipe had dried up, and an air of unnatural silence hung about the buildings.

Her headlights caught the white pick-up, which had been parked near a small wooden shed. She parked in front of it and got out. Its doors were unlocked and the keys were in the ignition. Then she saw Sam Beeley. He was alone, leaning against a wall by the vehicle, almost invisible in the gloom. His expression was vague and sad and full of suffering, and his eyes were fixed somewhere in the distance. He seemed so preoccupied that he hardly noticed Fry’s arrival until she was standing right in front of him.

‘On your own, Mr Beeley? Where are your friends?’

He looked at her vaguely. ‘Harry and Wilford? They’ve left me to it.’

Sam looked shockingly pale, despite the strong sun that had been baking the area for weeks. The veins showed through in his neck and along the line of his jaw amongst sparse grey stubble. His skin hung in loose folds from his cheeks and there were dark-blue shadows under his eyes.

‘Are you all right, Mr Beeley?’

‘Right as I’ll ever be.’

Fry turned and looked up towards the crags of Raven’s Side, where she had lain with Ben Cooper half an hour before, looking down on Thorpe Farm. There had been no sign of him there when she had returned from the car park up the steep path. No indication of where he had gone, no attempt to leave a message. It was typically infuriating behaviour — just what she had come to expect from him.

‘Have you seen Detective Constable Cooper tonight? You remember Ben Cooper?’

‘Eh? Sergeant Cooper’s lad? I remember him.’ A ghost of a smile touched Sam’s pale lips at the memory of the compost heap fiasco.