Стивен Бут - Blind to the Bones

Cooper recalled the glimpse of Michael Dearden sitting in his car, terrified at the sight of Jake and the other boys in the road outside Waterloo Terrace.

‘Are you sure, Mr Oxley?’ he said quietly.

Oxley gazed at him for a moment, waiting for an explanation.

‘You might not realize this,’ said Cooper, ‘but Michael Dearden has been obsessed with the idea that members of your family are persecuting him, ever since the incident with Jake. He imagines Oxleys in the darkness around his house every night. He even avoids driving through Withens because he has to pass the spot where he ran over Jake. I think Mr Dearden is consumed with guilt, but he won’t ever admit it to you.’

‘Happen you’re right, then,’ said Oxley.

Then Cooper smiled. It had occurred to him that, after the incident in the Oxleys’ yard on Wednesday, he might be imagining Oxleys in the darkness at night for a little while himself.

‘Take a look at these—’ said Lucas, gesturing at a couple of black box files on a table. ‘They go back years. Years and years of getting nowhere. Years of people not listening to us. We don’t fit into their computer systems, so they don’t know what to do about us, apart from getting rid of us. Read some of them — they keep repeating a lot of jargon that doesn’t mean anything. Whatever we say, it comes up against a blank wall. The bureaucracy machine just rolls on. One day, it’s going to roll over us.’

Cooper picked up some of the letters.

‘Did you know,’ he said, ‘that one of these is an eviction notice?’

Lucas shrugged. ‘It’s not the first.’

‘You do realize that if nobody does anything about it, your family is in danger of being evicted from Waterloo Terrace?’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Have you talked to anyone. Got proper advice?’

‘There’s no one we can trust.’

‘There must be someone .’

‘Everyone we’ve ever dealt with has let us down, or outright lied. It’s too late now. But we can dig in; we’re ready for a fight.’

‘That won’t do any good at all, Mr Oxley.’

‘It’ll keep our pride.’

Exasperated, Cooper looked at the old man, Eric Oxley. In a strange way, he was the one member of the Oxley family who made most sense to him. Eric made him think of a Border collie that had lived with the Coopers at Bridge End Farm when he and Matt were children. The collie had been called Sam, and he had first arrived as a puppy, bounding with energy. But he’d lived to be a grey-muzzled old dog who spent his life panting painfully in the heat of the sun, endlessly circling and circling until he could find a comfortable place to sleep. Eric was like that old collie, grey and tired, seeking only a place to settle down and rest. Yet a glimpse of the strong young man that he had once been was still visible now and again, as if it lingered in his shadow.

In another way, Eric reminded him of his great-uncle, whom he had known as a child, and had been fascinated by. He still clearly remembered the smell of his great-uncle’s clothes and the feel of his trousers as he clutched the fabric tightly between his fingers and pushed his face shyly into his leg. He had loved his great-uncle when he was a small boy. But he had died when Ben was seven or eight years old.

And then there was Lucas. Surely Lucas Oxley was nothing like his own father. Nothing like him at all.

‘We don’t reckon much to you as a policeman,’ Lucas was saying. ‘But you’re a sight better than most of the buggers we’re expected to deal with. If that’s what we have to put up with, you’ll have to do.’

‘Thanks,’ said Cooper.

Eric stirred in his chair. ‘Though happen you ought to be looking elsewhere, instead of bothering the likes of us.’

‘What do you mean, sir?’

‘Look for the foreigners.’

‘Foreigners?’

‘You’ve been around here asking about last Friday night, before Neil got himself killed?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Well, look for the foreigners. There were foreigners in the pub that night.’

‘What foreigners?’

‘That’s up to you to find out.’

Ryan had come into the room, and Cooper could see straight away that he was nervous. But the boy looked from his father to his grandfather, and he seemed to take reassurance from their presence.

Cooper remembered from the files that Ryan’s date of birth was 26 June, so he had entered the world just after the 1987 General Election, when Margaret Thatcher won a landslide victory and became Prime Minister for the third time. In fact, anyone between thirteen and twenty-three had been born in the 1980s, that decade of marginalization and social exclusion, when some parts of society were making more money than they had ever dreamed of. All of the Oxley boys had been born into that time, except Jake.

And the reason Cooper could remember Ryan’s birthday was that it was almost the same date as his own, though a different year. They were fellow Cancerians. They were known for clinging to their shells.

Emma Renshaw had been born in the 1980s, too — some time in the spring of 1982, around the time of the Falklands War. Cooper was willing to bet that Howard Renshaw had done well in the 1980s — the companies he carried out work for had no doubt benefited from the boom in the construction business. So was Howard worth a lot of money? Did he have a nice nest egg of capital stashed away that he had managed to protect from the decline in the stock market?

Money was such an obvious motive for every kind of crime. Cooper made a mental note to ask Fry if she knew where Howard stood financially.

‘What was it you wanted to tell me, Ryan?’ he said.

Ryan swallowed before he spoke. Cooper was expecting something about minor offences — the damage to the church vestry, perhaps. But what Ryan wanted to say was nothing like that.

‘It’s about Barry,’ he said.

Cooper had to re-focus his thoughts quickly. There was only one person he’d heard of by that name recently.

‘Barry? Barry Cully?’

He noticed Lucas and Eric had suddenly gone very still. Maybe this hadn’t been what they expected, either. There was a silence in the room that allowed the croaking of the rooks to penetrate from outside.

‘Fran’s bloke,’ said Ryan.

‘I know who you mean. But I’ve never seen him. He’s away, isn’t he?’

‘Yes.’

Lucas Oxley cleared his throat. It was one of those signals that ought to mean something to his family. A warning perhaps. But Ryan refused to look at his dad now. He was staring fixedly at Cooper as if clinging to something he had finally managed to grasp.

‘He knocked Fran about a lot,’ said Ryan. ‘She never said anything, but some of us knew about it. We could tell when we went round there. The door is never locked, and sometimes we’d go in when she wasn’t expecting us. We worked it out all right.’

‘Did Fran ever make a complaint?’

‘No.’

‘I’m going to have to talk to her. When is Cully due back?’

Then Lucas interrupted. ‘We don’t know,’ he said.

‘Can you give me a phone number where I can contact him? Or tell me what company he’s working for?’

‘To be honest, he’s left,’ said Lucas.

‘For good?’

‘We hope so. We don’t know how to get in touch with him.’

Cooper looked at Ryan. The boy’s stare was so fixed that his eyes were becoming glassy, and he was pale with some painful internal effort.

‘It was Craig who used to get most upset about it,’ said Ryan. ‘He used to get really, really angry.’

Lucas took a couple of steps forward and stood over his son. There were veins standing out on his neck, and his fists were clenched.

‘We don’t—’ he began. But whatever he was going to say seemed to stick in his throat when he saw the boy’s expression. It was fear. But not a fear of his father.