Стивен Бут: Blind to the Bones

For some reason, PC Tracy Udall was wearing her body armour, too. No doubt it was a sensible precaution, but it looked a bit odd when the most dangerous thing in sight was a patch of stinging nettles. Besides, she seemed to Cooper like a candidate for a breast reduction operation to make the vest fit properly.

For the moment, PC Udall had left her yellow waterproof jacket in the car. But the banks of darker clouds rapidly moving towards them from the east suggested that she might regret moving too far away from the car without it.

‘If we’re right about their source of income, they won’t be worrying about sharing a bit of it with Powergen,’ she said.

He wiped the rain off his binoculars so that he could study the house more carefully. It had been a farmhouse at one time, but part of the side wall had been taken out and replaced with floor-to-ceiling glass, which must let more light in than had ever been seen by several generations of Derbyshire hill-farming families. There was new glass at the back too, and dormer windows had been built into the stone-tiled roof.

The room he could see through the glass had a floor made from patterned blocks of light-coloured wood, where once there would surely have been stone flags. There was a glimpse of light from another window way down at the far end. That could only mean that an internal wall had been removed to create one large room running right through to the back of the house. An estate agent would probably call it an open-plan living space.

As they had descended into the valley, the police team had been careful not to disturb the dawn with the lights of their beacons and the wail of their sirens. But now the time for discretion had passed. On the way to the raid, one of the task force officers had joked that they’d need to get inside the house quickly to be out of the rain. Kevlar fibres were known to deteriorate if they got wet. Also if they were exposed to direct sunlight. That was why police officers in body armour never went out in sunlight, or so they said. But at least it provided a lot more protection than if you had left it hanging in your locker at the station.

A few hundred yards beyond the target house was another cluster of roofs, including a number of old farm buildings, one of which had been converted into a double garage. But there was also a four-wheel-drive vehicle standing on the brick-paved driveway — a Toyota or a Mitsubishi, he couldn’t quite be sure from this distance. As he watched, a large, shaggy-haired dog wandered into sight, sniffed at the vehicle’s front near-side tyre, looked over its shoulder guiltily, and slunk off towards the back of the house. There was a paddock at the side of the driveway, newly fenced and containing a Shetland pony, a Jacob sheep and two Muscovy ducks.

‘What about the neighbours?’ said Cooper.

‘Well, the house actually belongs to an architect,’ said Udall. ‘Apparently, he’s employed by the Cooperative Society, and he designs grocery shops and crematoria for a living.’

Udall had an air of briskness that Cooper liked. In the car on the way from Glossop section station, she told him that she’d been in the force ten years. She was a single mother, and had joined up after her youngest child was old enough to attend nursery school. When she had been on the wrong shifts — which she usually was, she said — her mother had collected the children from school. Now her son was thirteen, and she was starting to get worried about him.

‘Grocery shops and crematoria?’

‘Or, as Sergeant Boyce puts it, “rashers to ashes”. He’s a scream.’

‘Every team needs a comedian.’

‘But the architect is working abroad. Somewhere in the Gulf States, I think. So he leased the house for a couple of years. The present occupier also has an address in South Manchester, where his neighbours say he’s a motor dealer.’

One of those brief, unnerving silences had developed down at the house. The officers waiting outside checked their earpieces. These moments never lasted long, but they were worse than any amount of overexcited shouting over the airwaves.

Cooper looked at the unused farm buildings and thought of his brother Matt, struggling more than ever now to support his family on the income from Bridge End Farm. Revenue from livestock farming had plummeted, and not just because of the aftermath of the foot-and-mouth outbreak. Farmers like Matt lived on a knife edge, wondering when the bank would pull the plug on their overdraft. There were some advantages to a regular salary from Derbyshire Constabulary, after all.

‘What about the barn conversion?’

‘Holiday lets,’ said Udall. ‘It’s divided into two studio apartments, with a shared patio round the back. No doubt they provide a useful bit of extra income, in case the crematorium market dries up.’

‘Not much chance of that. There’s no shortage of people to burn. And nowhere to bury them these days, either.’

‘No, the graveyards are really in demand. People are dying to get in them.’

‘Is that one of Sergeant Boyce’s, too?’

Udall flushed a little, but said nothing. She tugged at the bottom edge of her vest to pull it down over her hips, where her duty belt was heavily hung with baton, handcuffs, CS spray, and a series of leather pouches that Cooper had forgotten the use for. In fact, he didn’t think they even had all those things to wear in the days when he was in uniform. Changes happened fast in the police service, and six years away from a uniform was long enough to get out of touch.

Tracy Udall had dark hair pulled back almost painfully tightly into a short ponytail that protruded from her white trilby-style hat. Cooper had presumed from what she’d told him that the father of her child hadn’t been around from the word go. Now she must be only a couple of years on the other side of thirty. Unfortunately, Sergeant Jimmy Boyce was married, with four kids of his own.

Cooper knew he could probably learn a lot from PC Udall and her colleagues — the day-to-day, on the ground stuff about policing that had started to pass him by after six years at a CID desk in Edendale. It was his chief superintendent at E Division who had first uttered the words ‘lateral development’ when he had failed to get promoted to the detective sergeant’s job he had hoped for. Lateral development meant a move to a different speciality without the benefit of promotion, but it came with the suggestion that wider experience might count favourably towards future advancement. On the other hand, his mother might have said it was just a case of ‘always jam tomorrow’.

Yet, suddenly, here he was on a secondment to the Rural Crime Team — playing an advisory role to Sergeant Boyce’s pro-active squad of uniformed officers. These were people who knew the problems of the Peak District’s villages. They had gained their knowledge from years as community constables, liaising with the local people and listening to their troubles. Those troubles often involved a catalogue of burglaries, petty thefts, vandalism and car crimes that were committed with impunity, to all intents and purposes. Prioritization was the buzz word these days, and property crime was low priority. Members of the public in some areas could consider themselves lucky if they got any police response at all, except for the offer of a crime number for their insurance claim and a sympathetic letter from Victim Support.

Cooper was glad to help, if he could. But while he stood with PC Tracy Udall on this roadside in the Longdendale valley, he couldn’t help wondering if this was the first step on the path of his lateral development. Was Sergeant Boyce tipped to move onwards and upwards after the initial success of his team? Did a uniformed sergeant’s job await some lucky detective constable in a few months’ time? He wondered what Detective Sergeant Diane Fry would make of that, as his immediate supervisor. But it didn’t take much effort to imagine the smile on her face. She would be glad to be rid of him, he was sure of it.