Стивен Бут - Blind to the Bones

Scott swore under the sound of the hammer. ‘We’ve got a fuckin’ tarpaulin,’ he said.

‘But you’ll be finished by Monday anyway?’

‘Yes!’

‘Where do you get the tiles from?’ said Cooper.

‘Eh?’

‘Well, they’re old tiles on that roof, aren’t they? It isn’t easy to get a good match. Do you have a local supplier?’

‘Are you thinking of going into the roofing business, or what?’ said Scott.

‘I’m interested. Local enterprises need our support. I might have some roof repairs I need doing myself one day.’

A mobile phone started ringing somewhere. Cooper knew it wasn’t his by the sound of the ring, but he took it out of his pocket and looked at it anyway, just in case. Then he saw that Scott Oxley had taken a phone off the leather belt he wore round his jeans. Scott listened for a few minutes, grunted a couple of times, then thrust the phone back. He glowered down at Cooper.

‘Bastard,’ he said.

‘Sorry? I was just enquiring about some work.’

‘You came here to make sure we kept out of the way.’

Cooper frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

But Scott was clambering down the scaffolding as fast as he could, his boots rattling on the ladder on the final descent. Ryan swung down after him, like a natural scaffolder.

Cooper took a step backwards, concerned about the change in Scott’s manner. ‘What’s the problem?’ he said. ‘Why are you stopping work?’

Scott paused only for a second before he got into the cab of the lorry.

‘The rain came early,’ he said.

Puzzled, Cooper stood watching the Oxleys as they drove off. He looked up at the sky, then at the hole in the roof of the house. A starling flew down and landed on the tiles before hopping into the hole and disappearing. Cooper shook his head.

‘I think I’ll be taking my business elsewhere, after all,’ he said.

As Cooper walked back towards the car park, he looked at his mobile phone again. Was there something he ought to know about? But nobody had called him, and his radio was back in the car. Besides, it was his day off, and no one would know that he was in Withens.

As if to reflect the tragedy at the Deardens’ house, a retaining wall had collapsed during the night. It had been holding back part of the slope behind the lodge, but now it looked as if an explosion had taken place in the hillside and burst through the wall. The dressed stones lay scattered across the yard, covered in black soil, small pebbles and plant debris. It seemed as if even the landscape had managed to force its way through their defences.

Earlier, Diane Fry had watched the ambulance bounce carefully down on to the road. Derek Alton had been alive when the paramedics got to him. But shotgun wounds were messy, and it was difficult to tell how serious his internal injuries might be. Fry couldn’t believe that she might be about to lose another potential witness.

Since Shepley Head Lodge was over the border, South Yorkshire Police had been called to deal with the incident, though for once liaison had worked and news had filtered through to Fry. But with Michael Dearden holed up in the house, nobody was making a move until a firearms unit arrived.

Fry wondered where Ben Cooper was, and whether he would even pick up on news of the incident when it was a neighbouring force’s operation.

‘Has Dearden got any family in there?’ asked the South Yorkshire inspector who had arrived to take charge.

‘His wife, sir.’

‘We need to get her out safely. That’s the first priority.’

Fry reckoned Gail Dearden would be safe as long as she didn’t do anything stupid. From what she had heard of Michael, he was reacting to a perceived threat from outside, not inside.

‘Are we going to talk to him?’ she said.

‘The negotiator will talk to Dearden when he arrives. Perhaps he’ll see sense, but it depends what his state of mind is. I’m not putting any of our officers at risk.’

‘I suspect Michael Dearden didn’t even know who he was shooting at,’ said Fry. ‘But what I’d really like to know is what the hell the vicar came up here for.’

Fry looked at the outbuildings and the back door of Shepley Head Lodge. Probably it was perfectly normal in this area to call at the back door of a house when you were visiting someone you knew. But in the dark?

‘Did Mr Alton have a torch?’ she said to the officers nearby. ‘Anybody seen one?’

They shook their heads and shrugged. Fry turned back to the inspector.

‘There are some people called Renshaw down in Withens, they’re friends of the Deardens. Perhaps we should give them a call and ask them to talk to Michael Dearden.’

‘Time enough for that later,’ said the inspector. ‘Where is the negotiator?’

‘On his way, sir.’

Ben Cooper reached the Withens car park and got back into his Toyota. He sat for a few minutes listening to the messages going backwards and forwards to the control room on the radio, but there seemed to be nothing immediately pressing in his part of Derbyshire.

He had parked where he could see both Waterloo Terrace and the rest of the village. But he found that, if he looked straight ahead, he was facing the slopes of Withens Moor, where the air shafts were trailing a few wisps of steam as the cool morning air met the heat produced by the high-voltage cables.

It was strange to think that there were three abandoned railway tunnels two hundred feet below the shafts, and not far away their entrances, protected by steel gates and warning notices. Cooper found himself thinking about the navvies who had built the original tunnels back in the nineteenth century. Most of them had not been Irish immigrants, as he had always thought navvies were. Maybe he had just been prejudiced by the stereotyped image of the Irish labourer in big boots, with a handkerchief tied round his head and his backside protruding from his trousers.

But surely it was more than that. Irish migrant workers had played a major part in building England’s canal and railway systems, and had later moved into other areas of the construction industry. Wasn’t there one little island off the west coast of Ireland where almost all the men of working age went into tunnel building? They were all related and might even have had the same surname, too, though Cooper couldn’t remember what it was.

So why were the Woodhead navvies almost exclusively English? They were from Yorkshire, a lot of them. And Cheshire, too. But Woodhead had been in Cheshire back then. The whole of Longdendale had been in Cheshire. So really it was the Yorkshiremen who had been the foreigners in these parts.

Cooper was wondering whether he ought to call in and check there was nothing he was missing when he jerked upright, startled by a loud rap on the passenger’s side window. He bumped his head on the grab handle, and rubbed at it guiltily as he peered through the window, expecting to see Diane Fry or a senior officer catching him out. He hadn’t been dozing, not really. Just thinking.

But it wasn’t Diane Fry, or anybody more senior. It wasn’t even Gavin Murfin grinning at him through the window, pleased at having made him jump. The face he saw was Lucas Oxley’s.

Cooper was so surprised that he was a bit slow to respond. He saw Oxley try the door handle, but of course the locks were on. He noticed the brim of Oxley’s hat resting against the glass, turning over at the edge so that Cooper could see the man’s eyes more clearly, despite the distracting reflections of his wan, startled face. Oxley rapped again, getting irritated, and gestured at him to wind the window down.

At last, Cooper pressed the button for the electric window. Well, it was pretty unbelievable. But it seemed that Lucas Oxley finally wanted to talk to him.