Стивен Бут - Blind to the Bones

Cooper shrugged. ‘If you look at the map, you’ll see that we can approach Trafalgar Terrace without going past the Oxleys’ houses. If we park down on this farm road here, there’ll be a couple of fields to cross, and then we might have to climb over a fence or a wall. But we should be out of sight all the way, because there’s a thick screen of trees.’

‘OK.’

‘Besides, it’s such an ideal time. All of the Oxley men are still here in Edendale, being interviewed for the affray outside the Wheatsheaf. They won’t be back in Withens for hours yet. We’ll never have a better opportunity to take a look round without being interrupted.’

‘Sounds good. But, Ben...’

‘Yeah?’

‘The least sign of anything interesting, and we pull out and organize a proper search by the specialists.’

‘Procedure,’ said Cooper.

‘It’s not a dirty word, you know.’

Now it was raining properly. It was bound to, since it was bank holiday weekend and the area was full of tourists. The morris dancers would be getting wet in Edendale. Their hankies would be going limp and their bells would be rusting up. But nothing would stop them dancing.

In Withens, the dark clouds lay right on top of the village, flattening it into the valley bottom and squeezing the moors closer together, so that the rain ran out of them on to the road and down into the gardens of the brick terraces. For once, it was the black brick that seemed to blend into the landscape, while the stone houses above glinted a little too brightly as they soaked up the moisture.

‘Trafalgar Terrace is up the hill there, behind the trees,’ said Ben Cooper. ‘Waterloo Terrace is beyond that.’

‘You were right — two fields to cross.’

‘Maybe we should walk around this first field, though,’ said Cooper. ‘We should avoid the livestock.’

‘They’re only cows,’ said Fry. ‘I do recognize the difference between bulls and cows, Ben. I’m not quite the ignorant city girl you think I am.’

‘Diane—’

‘Bulls have bollocks and cows have tits. See? I know all the agricultural expressions. If I wanted to, I reckon I could convince people I was a farmer and get subsidies for not growing anything. Besides, I’m not wearing anything red.’

‘They’re colour blind,’ said Cooper.

‘All the better.’

‘May’s a bad time to be near cows, Diane. We had an incident of a woman being savaged by a cow only the other day.’

‘Come off it.’

‘People get this wrong. They think cows are docile and bulls are aggressive. Young bullocks are just mischievous, and older bulls are usually too lazy even to get up. But cows in May... if they have calves with them, they’ll do anything to protect them. And they’re a herd, so if you fall out with one, you fall out with the whole lot.’

To his surprise, Fry was actually listening to him. He’d had visions of her getting trampled before she was halfway across the field.

‘So what do we do?’

‘Walk around the outside. Avoid eye contact and walk past naturally. We’ll be fine then.’

‘OK.’

It worked, of course. All the cows wanted was to be left in peace in their field. Leave them alone, and they’d leave you alone. It was one of the laws of nature.

In the second field, Cooper stopped at the sound of wings fluttering against metal. He walked over to an object partly hidden in the wet grass near a wall.

‘What have you found?’ said Fry.

‘It’s a Larsen trap.’

‘A what?’

‘Some of the old farmers put them out to catch crows in the spring. You don’t see them so much these days. They’re frowned on a bit, on the grounds of cruelty to crows.’

Fry walked over to see what he’d found. ‘Well, it looks as though this farmer’s caught one,’ she said.

‘No, that’s the lure bird.’

The trap consisted of a cage with two compartments. One side was hinged open, and there were three hen’s eggs inside it. The other compartment contained an unhappy-looking crow, which stood among some bloody scraps of meat, splatters of its own droppings, and pools of water splashed from a small bowl. When it saw them, the bird panicked and flapped at the bars, and Cooper drew back a few steps.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Fry.

‘This bird acts as a lure. What the farmer hopes is that a passing crow will be inquisitive and think this one has found a source of food. It comes down and lands on that convenient perch there on the baited side, with its eye on a few tasty-looking eggs. Then the perch collapses under its weight, and the lid slams shut on it.’

‘Which means the farmer has a cage with two crows in it.’

‘Larsens are supposed to be checked every day. The lure bird has to be given food and water. And any trapped crow has to be destroyed.’

Fry shuddered. ‘It does look cruel to me. I’m surprised it’s allowed at all.’

‘It won’t be allowed for much longer, I suppose,’ said Cooper. ‘But some people would point out that the crows are destroyed a bit more humanely than the way they kill their own victims. They don’t call them carrion crows for nothing, you know.’

‘I don’t want to know any more, thanks.’

They left the crow in the trap and reached a wall, where they could see the black outline of Trafalgar Terrace through the screen of chestnuts and sycamores. Water was dripping steadily from the dense canopies of leaves.

‘So far, so good,’ said Fry. ‘Give me a hand over the wall.’

Inside the first house of Trafalgar Terrace, the air smelled fungal and sour, like old cider. These houses were slightly lower down the hill than the other terrace, and the damp had crept into them over the stone steps and risen up through the floors from the black peat, which soaked up water like a sponge. But beyond the dampness and the stale odour of long-abandoned carpets and ancient wallpaper, there was a more acrid smell.

The broken back door had opened on a loose hinge to let them in easily. Fry stepped over some cardboard boxes that had collapsed and begun to disintegrate in the middle of the floor. She reached the facing doorway.

‘There’s been a fire here,’ she said.

Cooper joined her and shone a torch into the derelict kitchen. There was scorching around the sink and the window frame, and a blackened area on the wall where an electric cooker might once have stood.

‘Do you think someone’s been living here?’ said Fry.

‘It was probably just kids playing around. By all accounts, one or two of them like setting fires. Jake, for a start.’

‘You think so?’ She poked a pile of debris with her foot. ‘Take a look at this.’

‘What is it?’

‘Silver paper. And half a Coke can. It looks as though some of the kids have set up a drugs den down here.’

‘It’s nothing, Diane. Want to try upstairs?’

She hesitated a moment. ‘OK. Where are the stairs?’

Cooper could remember the layout of the houses from his visit to Fran Oxley’s. Thanks to that night, he could practically find his way round in the dark. Fortunately, he had a torch this time. There would be two torches — if only Fry’s didn’t keep shooting up into the corners of the ceiling, lighting up hanging cobwebs.

‘Not frightened of the spiders, are you, Diane?’ said Cooper from the stairs.

She didn’t answer, but gazed overhead like a surveyor looking for cracks in the plaster.

‘Diane?’

‘Oh. Carry on. I’m coming.’

Upstairs, there were some floorboards missing and ancient electric wiring exposed in the gaps. Cooper shone his torch downwards to guide his steps.

‘Watch where you’re walking, Diane. And don’t shine your torch at the back windows, in case anybody sees the light.’