Стивен Бут - Black Dog

‘I chucked it in the garden of the Mount on Wednesday night. It was supposed to make you think it might have been Vernon who did it himself.’ He sighed. ‘It doesn’t always work like it does on the telly, though. It took you a long time to find it. And that other lass had stuck her oar in by then.’ He laughed sardonically. ‘That was a right turn-up for the books.’

‘You mean Becky Kelk. The girl who claimed you’d attacked her.’

‘Nasty bit of work, she is. Never been taught how to behave, if you ask me. Still — I suppose I ought to look on it as a compliment.’

‘Mr Dickinson,’ said Cooper, ‘the officers who came to your house said you seemed to be expecting them.’

‘I was,’ said Harry. ‘But not about that, you understand. It had come to my mind about fingerprints. The ones on that shoe would be mine. I knew you’d be coming for me again as soon as you found it. But I didn’t expect all that other business. I thought you’d be asking about the shoe.’

‘Instead, Becky Kelk made a false allegation against you, and you were treated as a rape suspect.’

‘It was a bit of an education, all right.’

‘And you went through all that for Wilford Cutts?’ asked Fry. ‘Even though you knew he’d killed Laura Vernon?’

Harry nodded. ‘Aye, because he was a mate.’ Then he turned to stare directly at Fry. ‘Besides, the girl was evil.’

Cooper heard Harry’s voice stumble into anger when he mentioned Laura Vernon. It happened every time, in every case he had ever seen. Every time that the life of a victim was turned over, they were revealed as a person of many facets in the eyes of those who had known them. Like Charlotte Vernon, some saw glittering diamond surfaces, precious and unflawed. Others, like Harry Dickinson, saw only base lead.

Cooper became aware of Gwen in the background, a faded shape against the dark wall. Her eyes were fixed and unblinking, and her expression made him flinch with its intensity.

‘How did it happen?’ he asked Harry.

‘Wilford used to work at the Mount, you know. He created that garden up there. It was his skill. Not like young Lee Sherratt. He was never a gardener. He can hump a wheelbarrow, but he knows nothing about gardening. But Wilford found out what was going on up there, you see. Those orgies and things. He said it was wickedness, and he gave ’em a piece of his mind. So Vernon sacked him.’

‘Was this before your granddaughter went to a party there?’

‘Yes, it was,’ said Harry. He looked at Cooper closely. ‘If you know about that, lad, you’ll understand why I didn’t disagree with him about those Vernons. Did Helen tell you about that?’

‘Yes.’

‘She likes you. Will you be seeing each other? When this lot is over? You’d suit each other, I reckon.’

Fry shifted impatiently and gave Cooper a signal with her eyes. Keep quiet, it said. Don’t encourage him to wander off the subject. Obey instructions.

‘Stick to the subject of Laura Vernon, Mr Dickinson,’ she said.

‘Aye well, Wilford kept his worst words for the lass. He called her all sorts. But she was as hard-faced as they come. It only provoked her to worse. You wouldn’t believe a young lass could be as foul-mouthed as that. She mocked Wilford. She saw him as a challenge, that’s what it was. She told him he was the only man who had been to the Mount that she hadn’t had sex with. Can you believe that? A lass of fifteen?’ His eyes hardened to black buttons. ‘But that was the way she was brought up.’

They waited while he sucked violently on his pipe, watching the cloud of smoke rise and drift towards the yellowed ceiling.

‘Then she met Wilford on the Baulk that day. And she mocked him again, worse than ever. She offered herself to him there and then, pulling down her clothes, taunting him like the little whore she was. And then she reached out and touched him...’ Harry seemed to have trouble swallowing, shifting the stem of his pipe in his mouth with a faint crunch. ‘Wilford had these bursts of temper, you see. It was because of a thing that happened to him in the war. Did you know he was shot in the head? It did something to part of his brain, and now and then he got these rages. It was the right thing, you see. Wilford always did the right thing.’

‘The right thing?’ Gwen had been keeping quiet, but now she turned on her husband.

‘That’s what I said.’

‘But he killed that little girl, didn’t he? Murdered her. Beat her to death down there in the woods. How can you talk about the right thing?’

Harry was silent for several moments, staring out of the window into the darkness, as if he was seeing the hills, as if he was listening for the skylark and the distant rumble of blasting in the quarry. Perhaps he was tasting in his imagination the air and the earth, rolling on his tongue the lingering memories of an underground world, stifling and dark, where the only things you could ever trust were your own two hands and the man standing at your back.

‘It’s no good. You won’t ever understand,’ he said.

Gwen’s face crumpled into tears, and the detectives stood in the middle of the room, embarrassed.

‘What happened during the war?’ asked Cooper.

‘Was it something to do with the French tarts?’ suggested Fry, and Cooper raised his eyebrows.

‘Aye, those French girls,’ said Harry. ‘Did Sam tell you? It’s not something I’ve ever told Gwen. I never told her much about the war. Women only worry — they get everything out of proportion.’

He nodded wisely at them. ‘We were lucky, me and Sam. But Wilford wasn’t so lucky. He was always a bit too upright. Didn’t approve, you know. But there was this lad he thought the world of — he was looking after him, like. And one day they came across this French lass standing in an alley. She wasn’t very old, and she gave them the come-on, hot and hard. Wilford didn’t want to know, of course, but the lad was excited. He went into this dark little house, and Wilford had to tag along, trying to talk him out of it all the way. The lad almost changed his mind, but the lass grabbed him and stuck his hand down her drawers. Well—’

Harry sucked his pipe, remembering.

‘There were two Jerry soldiers hiding in that house, waiting for the girl to tempt a Tommy in. They bayoneted the lad. When Wilford walked through the door, the lad’s guts were already spilled on the floor. Wilford had his bren gun ready, and he shot the Jerries. Then he shot the girl. But he got a Jerry bullet lodged in his skull, and they sent him home. He was never quite right after that, the old lad. His brain never healed somehow. You could never quite tell when he’d have these rages. He had one at the Mount, by all accounts. No wonder Vernon sacked him. And sometimes he’d get them with the animals, though it broke his heart to hurt them.’

Fry drew her breath in sharply. Cooper looked at her, sharing the memory. He saw a cloud of dark feathers drifting out of a hut, settling on Wilford Cutts’s shoulders and sticking in his hair. He remembered the van driver looking wild-eyed and frightened by whatever had happened inside the hut. And he remembered the hen dangling from Wilford’s hand, its wings broken, its eyes glazed with pain, waiting to be put out of its suffering.

Harry continued, unaware of their exchange of glances. ‘When the Vernon child tormented him, he couldn’t put up with it. It reminded him of France and the lad who left his guts on the floor of that house. She was like that French tart all over again. Evil. So he picked up a stone...’ Harry’s eyes focused on Fry, as if seeing her for the first time and wondering why she was there. ‘It was just a moment’s mistake, you see. You can’t forget sixty years of friendship for that.’