Стивен Бут - Blind to the Bones

‘Yes, I’ll help.’

‘You will?’

‘I said yes, didn’t I? Talk to me tomorrow. I’ll look forward to visiting the Oxleys.’

Ben Cooper stood outside Waterloo Terrace and studied the black brick houses. So what was going on behind the doors of numbers 1 to 5? How many of the Oxleys were here, rather than in the upstairs room at the pub? Did they know he was out here, or were they oblivious, locked up in their own isolated little lives? It wasn’t only Mrs Wallwin who was isolated here in Waterloo Terrace. But what was the difference between the Oxleys standing against a world that wanted rid of them, and Mrs Wallwin, alone in a world that just didn’t care? The difference was that the Oxleys had each other.

Cooper paused at the thought. He had taken the Oxleys’ closeness for granted. For years, he had been taught not to assume anything, but the Oxleys had pushed him into the wrong response. Did they really have each other? Or was that only a front they presented to the outside world? Who could know what was going on within the walls of Waterloo Terrace, except the family themselves?

He didn’t think Mrs Wallwin was suspicious at all. She wasn’t creepy. And she wasn’t unfriendly. But also, she wasn’t an Oxley.

Could the Oxley family really be afraid of her, feeling they had to keep her at bay and defend their territory from her? Mrs Wallwin was an unlikely invader. But, to the Oxleys, she was an alien, a stranger in their midst — and therefore as threatening as a full-scale siege might have been. Mrs Wallwin, the Trojan horse.

Then Cooper remembered Mrs Wallwin mentioning her son, who worked for the water company. Was it possible that the company had put her into the house at Waterloo Terrace as a spy? Could the Oxleys be right to be suspicious of her?

Remembering the silent Alsatian, Cooper hesitated before he went through the gate. Some body armour would have been nice, and gloves and a riot helmet. Maybe an entire set of flame-proof overalls, boots and shin protectors, like the public-order teams wore. But he had nothing at all to protect him. Finally, he shrugged and walked up the path to ring the bell at number 5 Waterloo Terrace. There was no barking or growling, no scratching of claws on the tiles in the hallway behind the door. There was just the sound of the bell itself, which in fact was more like a buzzer. He pressed it again, and waited. Nothing.

Wearily, Cooper rang the bell again. Was it for the fifth time, or the sixth time in just a couple of days? He listened to the buzzing in the house, noting a slightly different tone to the noise. It was somehow clearer today. Maybe Fran Oxley had cleaned the cobwebs away from the box. Inevitably, he got no reply, so he knocked on the door, giving it a good double rap that anyone in the house ought to hear. He found the door moved under his fist, swinging inward slightly. It hadn’t even been on the latch, let alone locked.

He pushed the door a bit more, until he had a view into the hallway, but without moving from the outside step.

‘Hello!’ he called. ‘Anybody home?’

There was silence from the house. He could see right down the hallway to a set of stairs leading to the first floor, and at the end of the passage a door was open into a small kitchen. The silence here wasn’t threatening, but worrying in a different way.

‘Anybody home?’

There was no answer.

‘It’s the police. Detective Constable Cooper, from Edendale.’

Still no answer.

‘I called the other day. I was with PC Udall, from the Rural Crime Team. You asked me to come and see you. Hello?’

Now he was in a quandary. He had to make a judgement on whether he was justified in entering the house. He had no grounds for suspicion that a crime was taking place. He had been invited to the house by the occupier, but not actually invited in. Indeed, all along this terrace it had been made clear to him that he wasn’t welcome in their houses by the Oxleys. If he entered, he would have to be able to justify it later. Worse, he might be giving the Oxleys an excuse to treat him as an intruder.

But somewhere in Fran Oxley’s house he could hear a rustling. It was a surreptitious movement, perhaps the sole of a shoe moving cautiously across a bare floorboard, or a sleeve brushing against the wall. It seemed to be coming from the hallway, or from the bottom of the stairs. Cooper felt his way across the kitchen, conscious of his feet sticking to the vinyl flooring as he passed the cooker. Before he could reach the door, he trod in something particularly sticky, and his shoe left the floor with a tearing noise. He froze, with his foot in mid air. There was a moment of silence. Then he heard somebody scuttling back down the hallway and out of the side door of the house into the passage.

‘Damn.’

Cooper tripped over a loose flap of vinyl as he ran through into the hallway. Despite the lack of light, he could see that the side door was open, but just beginning to swing shut. He reached it and paused, putting out his hand to stop the door closing fully. Slowly, he pushed the door open again, careful to make sure that no one was standing on the other side of it in the dark passage. The door met no resistance, but went back against the wall of the house with a small thump. He wished he’d brought a torch with him from the car — but who would have expected to need a torch inside a house?

He had no need to let his eyes get accustomed to the darkness, as it was actually less dark out in the passageway than it had been indoors. He checked the passage was clear to the left, then walked carefully towards the back garden. He could no longer hear anyone running, which meant either that they had been too quick for him and had got well away from the scene already, or that they were hiding nearby in the darkness.

In the Oxleys’ yard, the fusty smell of old timber was overpowering. There were a couple of old outhouses built of the same black brick as the terrace itself. They must have been outside toilets once. Privies. These things were tourist attractions in some places. There was even a book about them. But Cooper was sure that the Oxleys’ outhouses wouldn’t feature in any book. If a writer had ever dared to venture into the yard behind Waterloo Terrace to get a glimpse of them, he was probably even now lying dead and mouldering behind the sagging wooden door with a broken hinge on the end privy.

A ragged black-and-white cat was patrolling the stacks of pallets. As Cooper watched, it slithered slowly into the darkness in the middle of one of the stacks, vanishing bit by bit until only the white tip of its tail could be seen, twitching slowly. Then even the tail disappeared. There must be at least mice living under there, maybe rats. But if there were rats, what the Oxleys needed was a good terrier.

The thought made Cooper remember the dog. The one he had encountered four days previously had been a long-haired Alsatian, and it had been as silent a killer as the cat.

He stopped at the corner of the pallets and listened, trying to orientate himself. He wasn’t sure how big the yard was, or even whether it ran parallel to the terrace, or at an angle. The dog had come down the passage between numbers 1 and 2, which must be towards the far end. But if he walked along the back wall of the yard, would he be getting further away from the houses, or nearer?

At the moment, there was no sound that would suggest the presence of the dog — no click of claws on concrete or of a chain rattling. The fusty smell of wood and rusted iron was too strong for him to pick up a canine scent. But he would have to watch out for a kennel or a pen of some kind when he got closer to number 2. The dog had been taught not to bark or growl before it attacked, and that had two results. It would give him no warning of an attack, but it also meant the dog could listen more acutely without the noise of its own barking to hinder it. Cooper knew that it would hear him much sooner than he heard it. There would be no contest. If the dog came for him, his only hope might be to climb the pallets and hope the stacks were more stable than they looked.