Стивен Бут - Blind to the Bones

The stone cladding on the front of the terrace had been only a façade. The cladding ended suddenly, presumably because it hadn’t been worth the expense of covering the back of the houses. It had been all about outward appearance.

Cooper went back into the house and found Philip Granger sitting on a chair in the kitchen.

‘And there’s no girlfriend around?’ he said.

Philip had already been prompted for the names of anyone in a close relationship who might need to be contacted before news of his brother’s death began to leak out. But it was surprising what important details slipped the minds of bereaved relatives, only to be remembered at the second or third time of asking.

‘Neil had a lot of girlfriends, on and off,’ said Philip. ‘I don’t think there was anyone particular recently. I suppose I’ll have to do some phoning round.’

‘Please let us have any names and phone numbers, too. We’ll need to speak to them. Also to any other friends or associates.’

‘Associates?’

‘Work colleagues, perhaps. I don’t know. Anyone your brother had connections with. Particularly anyone he might have fallen out with.’

Granger looked up from his feet and tried to focus on Cooper. ‘Who do you think did it, then?’

‘We don’t know at the moment, sir. That’s why we need any leads you can give us.’

‘You think it was someone Neil knew?’

‘Yes, it seems likely in the circumstances.’

‘Somehow, that makes it even worse,’ said Granger.

‘Yes, it always does. Are you older than your brother?’

‘Yes, by three years. It isn’t much, but it always seemed a lot between us. He was always my little brother. I felt quite responsible for him after our mum died. She had cancer of the stomach, you know.’

‘What about your father?’

‘He was sent down for burglary when we were teenagers, and we never saw him again. He was let out a few years ago, but he didn’t bother coming home. Mum wasn’t too upset about that.’

‘Did he come to her funeral?’

‘No. We’ve never heard anything from him, and we haven’t tried to find him either.’

‘So you don’t even know whether he’s still alive?’

‘I suppose not.’

‘He ought to be told about Neil, if we can trace him.’

‘Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t help there.’

Cooper caught sight of himself in a mirror on the wall near the front door. He looked more at home here than Philip Granger did. Briefly, the thought crossed his mind that the house would be coming on the market. He pushed it away guiltily.

‘When did you last speak to your brother, Mr Granger?’

‘A few days ago. I’m not sure exactly when.’

‘During the last week?’

‘Yes.’

‘The beginning of the week?’

‘I’m not sure.’

Granger was starting to flag a bit. He probably wouldn’t be able to provide any more useful information at the moment.

‘But you said earlier that Neil was in Withens on Friday evening, is that right?’

‘Yes,’ said Philip. ‘He was at a rehearsal.’

‘You weren’t there yourself?’

‘Oh. Yes.’

‘And you didn’t speak to your brother at the rehearsal?’ said Cooper.

‘Not really. It was kind of busy. And, you know — noisy.’

‘This was a rehearsal for...?’

‘The Border Rats.’

Philip looked around the room with a puzzled frown, cocking his head as if listening for a voice that wasn’t there.

‘They’ll have a vacancy now,’ he said.

Ben Cooper was glad to get back to his flat in Welbeck Street that night. Withens and all the people connected with it had started to depress him, and he wasn’t quite sure why. Maybe it was the air of distrust he had met from everyone he had spoken to. They had been suspicious either of the police, or of each other, or even of the world in general. A police officer lived with suspicion, of course. But when it was unjustified, it was peculiarly depressing.

Cooper knew he was due to get a new neighbour in the upstairs flat. The previous tenant had been there for years, but had started to get a bit frail and had taken the chance of sheltered housing when she received an offer. Cooper expected his landlady, Mrs Shelley, to advertise the vacancy, as she had done with the ground-floor flat. ‘Reliable and trustworthy professional people only’. That’s what the advert had said in the bookshop that day, when he had seen it by sheer chance.

But Mrs Shelley showed no signs of advertising the flat, or even getting any maintenance work or decorating done when the old tenant’s belongings had been moved out. Cooper was curious to know what was going on. He had heard almost no noise from the old lady, but if someone less quiet moved in upstairs, it could have an impact on his life.

Funnily enough, Mrs Shelley had taken to him in a big way. He had thought she might have blamed him for the death of her nephew, who had died during the course of a murder enquiry three months earlier, with Cooper the only person present. But when everything had been explained to her, Mrs Shelley had decided that Cooper was a hero. In a way, he had actually taken the place of her nephew, and now she took a special interest in him. He thought he could probably have asked for anything and she would have said ‘yes’. But it was unfair to take advantage of her.

Mostly, he wanted to establish the flat as his own private territory and he was nervous of encouraging her too much, in case she decided to pop in every few minutes to see how he was. The bolts helped there, of course. Though she had keys for the locks, there was no way she could just walk into the flat when he was there. That privacy felt very precious to him at the moment. It was a privacy he had never enjoyed before, since he had lived at Bridge End Farm with his family all his life. Finally, approaching his thirtieth birthday, he felt free for the first time. He could create his own world in this little flat. And he was surprised at how territorial he had immediately become.

He forked some duck-and-turkey Whiskas into a bowl for Randy, who rubbed himself briefly against Cooper’s legs. Though they had met each other only a few months before, the cat was very much part of the scenery in Cooper’s new life — which went to prove that you didn’t need to work at a relationship for years and years, didn’t it?

‘Where’s your friend, Randy?’

He called the other cat Mrs Macavity, because she came and went so mysteriously. In fact, Cooper wasn’t sure where she really lived. Apart from the couple of months she had spent in his conservatory, caring for the five rather scruffy black-and-white kittens she’d produced in her basket one morning, her presence was unpredictable. He thought she might have an entire list of homes she called on when she felt like it. A meal here today, next door tomorrow.

Once new homes had been found for all the kittens among his family, Mrs Macavity had returned to her old ways. She was much more of a free spirit than Randy, who didn’t wander far from his warm basket next to the boiler in the conservatory. He used the cat flap to do whatever he needed to do in the garden, weighed up the weather, and either lay for a while in the sun or came straight back in to his basket. He was an animal with a fixed routine and firm ideas about what was his territory and what wasn’t. Cooper liked that. He thought there was something in that attitude that enabled a person to establish a home.

He’d asked Dorothy Shelley if he could be allowed access to the back garden. There was a door in to it from the conservatory, but the conservatory wasn’t part of his flat, according to the tenancy agreement, so he had no rights over it. In fact, it belonged more to the cats than to him.