Стивен Бут - Blind to the Bones

Ryan looked past Lucas at Cooper, like a trapped animal seeking the smallest escape route.

‘Craig got really angry,’ he repeated desperately.

‘But Craig is dead,’ said Cooper. ‘I can’t ask him about it.’

There was a message here that Cooper knew he wasn’t picking up. His brain felt really slow, as if his thoughts had been blunted by the days of frustration and lack of communication.

The Oxleys were watching him almost pityingly, in the way they might watch a dumb animal trying to figure out what was happening as it blundered blindly from its pen to be slaughtered. The old man had a particularly disturbing stare. It had begun to feel like something physical, a sensation on Cooper’s skin, as if a spider had landed on him and was crawling across his neck. Cooper wondered what was going on in the old man’s mind that made his thoughts so uncomfortable.

Then Cooper realized there was an important question he should be asking. But nobody here had been cautioned, and he couldn’t invite them to incriminate themselves.

‘Tell me something about Barry Cully,’ he said, looking now at Lucas.

‘What do you want to know?’

‘For a start,’ said Cooper, ‘does he have a finger missing on his left hand?’

‘Hold on, what’s happening now?’ said the South Yorkshire inspector, pacing the yard at Shepley Head Lodge.

‘He’s coming out, sir.’

‘Everybody move back.’

‘He doesn’t seem to be armed.’

‘Thank God.’

Michael Dearden walked across the yard with his hands in the air and tears running down his face. His wife appeared in the doorway behind him, shielding her eyes against the glare of the lights.

Four officers moved quickly in on Dearden from different directions, shouting instructions at him. Within a few seconds, he was handcuffed and had been searched for weapons. One of the officers gave a thumbs-up sign.

‘It’s all over,’ said the inspector with undisguised relief.

But it didn’t feel over to Fry. There was a smell in the air that was too strong to be the lingering reek of a discharged shotgun. It was a smell that carried a meaning and presence as powerfully as the scent of Rive Gauche from Emma Renshaw’s car. She turned away from the house and swung her binoculars upwards.

‘Smoke,’ she said.

‘What? Not another damn moorland fire!’ said the inspector. ‘If you ask me, those kids from Manchester should be shot and roasted over the flames.’

‘No,’ said Fry. ‘This smoke isn’t coming from the moors. It’s coming from Withens.’

Ben Cooper had asked to use the loo, when he heard Marion Oxley begin to shout. He’d really wanted to take a look upstairs, where he found a door had been knocked through the wall from number 1 into number 2, providing access to the bedrooms in both houses without having to go outside and back in again. He thought this was probably one of the unauthorized structural alterations that J. P. Venables had complained about.

He had also been looking for a chance to use his mobile phone without the Oxleys overhearing. Under cover of the noise of the toilet flushing and water running into the hand basin, he called Diane Fry.

‘Ben,’ she said, ‘I was just going to call you. I’m on my way down to Waterloo Terrace. You might want to get there as soon as you can.’

‘Er, Diane, that’s where I am already.’

‘You what ?’

‘I’m at number 1, Lucas Oxley’s house.’

‘Ben—’

‘Listen, that skeleton in the churchyard — it looks as though it might turn out to be Barry Cully, Fran Oxley’s bloke.’

‘Ben, haven’t you noticed the fire?’

‘The what?’

‘Fire. Smoke, flames. You must be right in the middle of it. Get everybody out, for God’s sake.’

Cooper turned off the running tap and pulled back the lace curtain to peer out of the tiny bathroom window. It looked out on to the back yard, with its mountains of scaffolding poles and wooden pallets, and towards the front doors of the derelict houses of Trafalgar Terrace.

‘Oh shit,’ he said. ‘That’s more than just smouldering tyres.’

Now he could hear what Marion Oxley was shouting in the kitchen downstairs. It came to him clearly above the increasing noise of crackling flames and the barking of the normally silent Alsatian dog.

‘Where’s Jake?’ she was shouting. ‘Has anybody seen Jake?’

By the time Diane Fry reached Withens, the derelict houses of Trafalgar Terrace were well ablaze. Coming over the hill from Shepley Head Lodge, she could see the smoke billowing out of the upstairs windows, thick and black. There was an acrid stench in the air, as if the houses themselves had been full of old tyres that were now burning. The upper floor must already be smoke-logged. The windows had been shattered by the heat, and the smoke was pouring out of them in waves. The smoke was so thick that only the occasional tongue of flame could be seen in the midst of them.

Fry found PC Tracy Udall and a colleague parking their Vauxhall across the road to stop any traffic going further than the car park.

‘Where the hell’s the fire service?’ said Fry.

‘According to Control, some of the local crews are still up on Withens Moor damping down. The nearest appliance is coming from New Mills.’

‘Is there anyone inside?’

‘We don’t know. We’ve looked in the ground-floor rooms at this end of the row, as far as we could. But the fire seems to have started at the other end, and the smoke is too bad to get near. The fire crew might find anybody who’s in there, if they get here soon. But if there was anyone upstairs, then I reckon they’ve had it by now. No one could breathe in that smoke.’

‘And what about the people in the other terrace?’

‘Mrs Wallwin is over there, from number 7. She’s perfectly OK.’

‘And her neighbours? The Oxleys?’

‘She doesn’t know. She’s a bit stressed and confused.’

‘They all have to come out. There are hundreds of railway sleepers and wooden pallets stacked in the yard at the back. A couple of vehicles, too. If all that stuff catches fire, their homes will go up like a bomb.’

‘There are some demolition contractors down there in the field with a JCB and a bulldozer,’ said Udall. ‘They say they’ve been sent in by the landlords. They were due to start work on knocking down those empty houses, but someone has got to them first.’

‘So I see.’

‘The contractors have created an access through the fence at the bottom of the field. The trouble is, we can’t get to Waterloo Terrace.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they’ve dropped a couple of trees across the entrance, using chainsaws.’

They jogged through the farmyard and down the field to where the contractors’ machinery stood uselessly by.

Now Fry could see the pigeons circling Trafalgar Terrace. Their pale grey shapes were passing in and out of the smoke like tiny ghosts. At the far end of the terrace, the roof slates were glowing red from the heat of the burning rafters beneath them. But the pigeons kept trying to land on the ridge of the roofs, despite the heat and the flames, which were now licking through the slates. After making repeated attempts to land on the roof, one of the birds was finally caught by a burst of flame that erupted from a gap in the tiles. Its pinion feathers flared and blackened immediately, and its feet curled and shrivelled as the tendons burned. The pigeon tumbled on to the roof, where it writhed and flopped desperately as it roasted in the intense heat from the slates. But finally it gave up the struggle, slid down the roof and disappeared into the smoke. Oblivious to its fate, the other birds continued to attempt to land.