Стивен Бут - Blind to the Bones

‘He’d just oiled it,’ said Lucas. ‘He got oil all over the handles and didn’t bother wiping it off. He’s lucky he didn’t break his silly neck or chop his hand off.’

‘Or someone else’s,’ said Cooper.

The interior of 1 Waterloo Terrace came as a surprise. It was remarkably clean and neat, with two Laura Ashley-patterned sofas crammed into the little sitting room, matching curtains, and even a mock goatskin rug in front of the fireplace. It had a distinctly feminine feel, and suddenly both Lucas and Eric Oxley looked awkward and out of place. Eric was wearing worn brown slippers, while Lucas had removed his boots on the doorstep to reveal woollen socks bunched uncomfortably at the toes.

‘You’ve been all along this terrace asking questions,’ said Lucas. It was a plain statement of fact, a preliminary laying out of the ground.

‘Yes, I’ve made no secret of it,’ said Cooper. ‘I’m conducting enquiries in connection with a murder investigation, as I’m sure you know, Mr Oxley. The murder of your own nephew, Neil Granger.’

‘He was my wife’s brother’s lad.’

‘I know.’

‘But nobody here knows anything about that. You’ve been asking your questions in the wrong place, if that’s really what you’re up to.’

‘Why should I be up to anything else?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Oxley. ‘That’s for you to tell us.’

‘I’ve just explained it.’

There were no handshakes at Waterloo Terrace. And there were very few rural Derbyshire homes where Cooper would not have been offered at least a cup of tea by now, unless he had actually come to arrest a suspect. But the Oxleys seemed to think that they were automatic suspects, and they were behaving accordingly. Perhaps, Cooper thought, he should be regarding them as automatic suspects. But he’d always had a contrary instinct. If everyone else thought the Oxleys must be guilty of something, he’d find himself looking for their good side. With the Oxleys, though, he might have to look very hard.

The old man, Eric Oxley, wore striped braces beneath a knitted cardigan, but over his shirt. They weren’t the brightly coloured braces once favoured by city whizzkids of the 1980s. These braces dated from an earlier fashion, and their colours had faded with age. Besides, they weren’t for show at all — their function was to support the baggy trousers.

Eric’s body was almost swallowed by the worn armchair he sat in. The chair didn’t match the rest of the furniture in the Oxleys’ sitting room. It was much older, and wasn’t at all the right colour to match the Laura Ashley patterns or even the mock goatskin. Eric and his armchair looked like an island surrounded by a sea of encroaching modern frippery.

Cooper wondered how many battles there had been over the armchair when the new furniture had arrived, and whether the old man had clung to its arms with his thick fingernails as his family tried to prise him loose. There was a space two or three feet further towards the centre of the room where the armchair would have fit more neatly with the arrangement of the furniture. He could picture Marion Oxley moving the armchair into that spot every night after the old man had gone to bed, perhaps pushing it on its casters with the toe of her carpet slipper, rather than touch its grease-darkened upholstery. Equally clearly, he could see Eric sucking his false teeth as he heaved his chair back to its place by the fireside every morning. Territory was important, even if it consisted of an old armchair by a fire.

‘You know they want us out?’ said Lucas.

‘I understand it’s the empty houses they’re demolishing,’ said Cooper. ‘They must be dangerous. A health hazard, at least.’

Lucas curled his lip. ‘It’s the first step. It’s us they want out, so they can sell this place and make a nice bit of money. They think we’re dirty. Our homes are unsightly. We are unsightly. We don’t fit into this world today.’

‘Aye, they want to get shut of us,’ said Eric. ‘I just hope I pop my clogs first.’

Lucas nodded. ‘They think we’re mucking up the water for folks in Manchester — all the water that comes off these hills and goes through the aqueduct down the valley. It seems funny, doesn’t it, when it was our folk who were killed by the cholera that came from the filthy water they were given to drink? We might as well run over the hill and throw ourselves in the reservoir, like a lot of lemmings. That would solve everybody’s problems.’

‘I was assured by Mr Venables at Peak Water that these houses aren’t a problem for the catchment area.’

Lucas Oxley’s expression said merely that it was Cooper’s own fault if he allowed himself to be fooled by people like J. P. Venables.

‘When they come to try to move us out, I suppose it’ll be your lot behind ’em putting the boot in, making sure us little folk don’t get in the way of progress. I don’t suppose our homes look much to you, do they? Got a nice, modern detached house back in Edendale, have you?’

‘Well, not exactly.’

‘If we didn’t have our homes in Withens, where would we go? People like us can’t afford to buy anywhere. And what chance is there of finding somewhere we can all live close together? They’d split us up and put us on council estates. It would be the end of this family.’

Through a doorway, Cooper watched Marion Oxley fussing around in the kitchen, slamming cupboards, peeping under the lids of saucepans as if some secret lurked inside that she could never share with anyone, and glaring suspiciously at the windows. Her disapproval filled the moments of silence like a bad smell.

The glimpses of her reminded him of his own mother, as she had been in her best days at Bridge End Farm. Though she seemed to be busy, she was watching. Always watching.

The picture of family life he was gathering from the Oxleys was completely unlike what he had been used to, yet they were as close as the Cooper family, in their own way. The comparisons he saw all around him made Cooper uneasy. He was trying to concentrate on the job in hand, but his memory kept unpacking old recollections of his childhood at Bridge End Farm. Time and again, he had pushed the remembered images back into their boxes. But as soon as his mind was distracted by a phrase or a gesture, the memories came tumbling out again, unfolding their carefully packed shapes, falling open like the petals of pale flowers, too long untouched by the sun.

‘Did they tell you at the water company that somebody wants to buy this land?’ said Lucas.

‘Yes, I know there’s a developer interested.’

‘But I don’t suppose they told you who’s working for that developer locally.’

‘No. Who?’

‘Dearden.’

‘Michael Dearden?’

‘Aye, at Shepley Head Lodge. The people with the money are in London, but they pay him to do the negotiating locally. He’s a surveyor of some kind.’

‘How do you feel about that?’ said Cooper.

‘It doesn’t surprise me. I’ve had the odd set-to with Dearden.’

‘You had an argument with Mr Dearden?’

‘Aye. You might say so. A disagreement.’

‘What about?’

‘The road. That road up there. It runs all the way down to their place, Shepley Head. We never could agree on who ought to keep it in order. He’s always chunterin’ about it, silly bugger. He goes on about how the potholes are damaging that car of his. I wasn’t standing for that. So I gave him what for.’

‘How did he take it?’

‘I thought he was going to burst into tears. What a mard-arse. I’ve never come across anyone so mardy in my life. But I knew what he was on about really. He blamed the road for the time he hit our Jake and smashed his leg. He blamed everything and everybody but himself.’