Стивен Бут - Blind to the Bones

‘We hoped Alton would leave. We hoped the church would be closed.’

‘We?’

‘The family were behind me,’ said Granger.

‘But the vicar put a spanner in the works.’

‘He was a bit obsessed about that graveyard. I don’t know why it was so important to him.’

‘The damage to the vestry?’ said Hitchens. ‘The theft? The vandalism to his car?’

‘We didn’t have anything against him, really. But nothing seemed to take his attention away from that bloody graveyard. He should have left things well alone.’

Fry consulted the notes she had made before starting the interview. One of the first things she’d noted was the record of Neil Granger’s calls from his mobile phone the night he was killed. They were calls to a number in Glossop — his brother’s number.

‘Well, there you go, then,’ said Philip, when she asked him about the calls. He glanced at his solicitor with a little triumphant smile, but the solicitor didn’t respond. ‘Would Neil have phoned me to arrange to meet, if he thought I would do anything to him?’

‘The fact that Neil didn’t expect you to attack him doesn’t cast any light on your intentions,’ said Fry.

‘I didn’t mean to kill him. I mean, why would I?’

‘You tell me.’

‘Look, he pestered me to go up there. He had an idea about some ceremony at dawn on May Day, and he wanted to rehearse it. I think he’d had a row about it with Uncle Lucas and the others. So he had a point to prove. He was a bit like that, Neil — pig-headed. But it was no good to him doing it on his own, because he needed somebody to prove his point to. That’s why he thought of me. I had my uses, even for my little brother. Hell, do you think I wanted to go up the hill to that air shaft in the middle of the night? He pestered me until I said “yes”. I don’t know why I agreed to it.’

‘Perhaps you suddenly realized what a convenient opportunity you’d been presented with.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Philip, shaking his head.

Hitchens folded his hands together on the table as he took a turn to let Fry prepare her next question.

‘How did you actually get up to the air shaft to meet Neil?’ he said. ‘We’ve interviewed lorry drivers on the A628, and no one saw any cars parked in the lay-by, except your brother’s.’

‘I don’t have a car. I ride a motorbike. I parked it behind Neil’s car, where no one would see it from the road.’

‘And you walked up to the air shaft from the lay-by?’

‘It isn’t that far. If Neil could walk it, why shouldn’t I?’ Philip grimaced. ‘I was a bit shattered by the time I got there, to be honest. I’m not quite so clean living as good old Neil. That was another way he always made me feel second best.’

‘You could have ridden up on the bike,’ said Hitchens.

‘I’m not totally stupid. There would be tracks.’

‘You were worried about leaving tracks, yet you say you didn’t intend to kill your brother?’

Philip opened his mouth, then stopped and looked at his solicitor, who shook his head sadly.

‘That’s a “no comment”.’

Fry looked at Hitchens, who sat back, content. Time for a change of tack. If Granger thought he could get off lightly, he was going to be mistaken.

‘Mr Granger,’ said Fry, ‘according to the postmortem report on your brother, some of the cerebrospinal fluid from his head injury was transferred to his hand while he was dying. That could only have been done by you. Do you agree?’

Granger looked a little sick. If he could have gone any paler, he would have done. His voice was a little quieter when he spoke.

‘It was still quite dark, but I remember the sound,’ he said. ‘It was a sort of thud and crunch, like somebody had dropped a packet of biscuits in the street. I could see that Neil wasn’t dead. He was still moving a bit, and making noises like an animal. But I couldn’t hit him again. I couldn’t hit someone who was injured, it’s not the same.’ He looked up at Fry for some understanding. She found she couldn’t look away.

‘I was always like that,’ he said. ‘I could never understand how uncle Lucas and some of my cousins could kill injured animals. Lucas always said it was putting them out of their misery, that it was a kindness. But I could never bring myself to do it like he could, not killing an injured thing in cold blood, no matter how badly hurt it was.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I held Neil’s hand and waited with him, until he died.’

‘Do you expect us to believe that?’ said Hitchens.

Granger dropped his head. ‘He took a long time to die. But time always passes, doesn’t it?’

Fry looked at Hitchens. They both knew that Philip Granger’s account didn’t quite tally with the postmortem report on his brother’s injuries.

They allowed Granger a moment to recover. But Fry had a lot of important questions she still wanted to ask him.

‘And now, Mr Granger, we come to the subject of Emma Renshaw.’

The maintenance crew at the wind farm turned out to be Danish. They said they were employed by the turbine manufacturers, a specialist wind-power company in Denmark. The wind farm looked quite different at close quarters. The towers were elegantly tapered, but the massive blades of the turbines looked like propellers from an aircraft of unimaginable size. When six of the turbines were lined up, they reminded Cooper of that Hindu goddess with too many arms. Their eighteen blades rotated hypnotically, like white scimitars carving the Pennine air.

When Cooper drove into the parking area near the sub-station building, he noticed that the towers were numbered on their sides. At the moment, numbers five and eight were motionless, the ends of their blades turned back like claws. Small doors set into each tower were reminiscent of bulkheads in a submarine. Built on concrete bases, the towers hardly seemed to vibrate, despite the weight and the movement of the blades.

‘You should get plenty of wind up here,’ said Cooper to the foreman of the maintenance crew. ‘Too much, perhaps.’

‘Yes, sometimes. But there are aerodynamic stalls on the blade tips to prevent damage to the gearbox and generator, and hydraulic disc brakes to lock the turbines.’

‘You know what looks a bit frightening about these things?’

‘Frightening? What’s that?’

‘These blades are so big. They’re out of proportion. They look too big for the tower to support.’

‘Yes, the rotors are over 120 feet in diameter,’ said the foreman. ‘The towers are 114 feet.’

‘So they are wider than the tower is high. It seems wrong.’

The foreman smiled at him. ‘It’s perfectly safe.’

The noise of the wind was in Cooper’s ears up here. But it couldn’t disguise the sound of the turbines, that steady whoosh-whoosh, like a giant washing machine on its rinse cycle. No — a whole laundrette full of giant washing machines. Closer to number one tower, Cooper could hear the hum of the motor inside the base and the occasional metallic clunk of a switch. But there was an eerie whistling somewhere, too — a high-pitched keening from the blades as they sliced through the air. It was like a ghostly voice singing on the wind. And since the turbines ran constantly, all day and all night, that uncanny whistling and thudding must never cease.

It might be a little scary to come upon the wind farm unexpectedly in the dark, and to have your car headlights catch the movement of those vast white arms as they turned against the night sky.

Cooper turned his back on the towers to look out over Longdendale. Viewed from this height, the valleys were like deep wounds in the moors, and it seemed amazing that there were people living down there. To the west, the sky was so dark and heavy that it seemed more solid than the land.