Стивен Бут - Blind to the Bones

During the first week or so after he had moved into his new flat in Welbeck Street he had checked out all the pubs within walking distance. There were several of them, some of which he had visited before, but one or two were new to him. He wasn’t a heavy drinker, not like some of his colleagues, who took to it to help them deal with the pressure and some of the depressing realities of the job. A drink or two did help him relax. But most of all, a decent pub provided company.

That was why he needed the right sort of place — not one that attracted only tourists, so that the same faces were never in the bar two nights running. And definitely not an Irish bar with singing waiters and ceilidh nights.

At night, some town-centre streets became drinking strips. An area around the front door of each pub became a bubble of noise and smells, loud music and scores of young people yelling to make themselves heard above it. Inside, it was like walking into a tropical micro-climate. Hot, sweating faces above yards of bare flesh moved around in the heat and humidity of an Amazon rainforest, exhuding a miasma of antiperspirant and alcohol fumes.

Occasionally there were fights at closing time. And of course, there were the drugs. On Friday and Saturday nights, there was a permanent police presence — a personnel carrier with caged accommodation in the back and a riot visor over its windscreen, multiple foot patrols of officers who had drawn the short straw and been rostered for the late shift.

Tourists learned to avoid those areas at night, when they saw the change that had come over a town that had looked so quaint during the day, with its cobbled alleys and tall stone buildings, its antiques shops and tea rooms. Even the pleasantest of England’s market towns could have a Jekyll and Hyde nature.

But to Cooper, Edendale still had character, a proper sense of place. It had its own smells and sounds and sights — that accumulation of sensations that gave it a unique identity, so that you always knew where you were. The same couldn’t be said of many towns, whose high streets looked indistinguishable.

On his way to the Hanging Gate, he passed through streets that had rows of terraced houses with names like Riversleigh and Rockside. In the window of a cottage, someone had let a yucca plant flourish, and it had filled the little bay window completely. A small tabby cat had squeezed into the tiny amount of space left on the window ledge, and it peered out at him through the plant’s spiky leaves. Antique bottles were lined up in another window next door. They were carefully arranged by size — the largest at either end and the smallest in the middle.

Cooper shook his head. The windows of these houses were so small that they allowed in little enough light already, without being cluttered up with dusty bottles and overgrown yucca plants. Windows like these always made him wonder what the people inside the houses had to hide. Or were they symbolically protecting themselves against the world outside by lining up their peculiar talismans on the edge of their property? Were glass bottles a kind of charm to ward off the evils of the outside world? Maybe there was some psychological reassurance from viewing the world through brown glass or the leaves of a yucca.

He was always curious about people’s minds, the bizarre mental processes that made them do the things they did. A part of him would love to be able to knock on a few of these doors to see who was behind them, and then to ask the questions. Why the bottles? What’s the yucca all about? Wouldn’t you prefer a bit of sunlight in your life?

Like many pubs in the area, the Hanging Gate had scenic Peak District views in framed prints on the walls. The same old CD of 60s and 70s pop classics seemed to be playing, too. But it also had Bank’s Bitter and Mansfield Cask Ale and Pedigree, not to mention a choice of lagers like Stella Artois and white wine on draft. On uneven stone flags, the cigarette machine, jukebox and slot machines had been pushed back against the wall, out of the way.

Cooper ordered a steak pie and chips and nodded to a few casual acquaintances as he found a table. He had a paperback novel in his pocket that he’d brought to read if there was no one to talk to.

Stained-glass panels were set into the ceiling and red roses in the pattern of the carpet. None of the colour schemes in the décor seemed to fit together when you took the pub as a whole. One corner might seem to make sense on its own, but when Cooper sat in the middle of the room, as he did now, he got quite a different perspective. Now, there were too many painful clashes, too many choices that made no sense, too many failures of taste and logic. It was chaos — a jumble of pieces that would never fit together as a whole.

A few minutes later, there was a slight change in the background noise in the bar. Ben Cooper looked up from his pie. He saw the men sitting by the bar turn their heads towards the door. Probably some tourists had wandered into the pub to get out of the rain and were rustling their cagoules in the porch as they shook themselves off like wet dogs. Maybe they had an actual wet dog with them, too.

If they were lucky, someone might make a bit of room for them near the log fire, which the landlord always kept ready and had lit because of the change in the weather. He didn’t like anyone being hostile to tourists in his pub, because they tended to buy shorts rather than beer, which made a difference to his profit margin. They might even be tempted to a Hanging Gate All-Day Breakfast.

But no one moved away from the fire. No rustling cagoules passed Cooper on their way to the bar, no flashes of orange and yellow clashed with the purple patterns of the wallpaper as they appeared from behind the glass partition. Instead, Cooper became aware of water dripping on to the end of the polished oak-effect table, and a pair of grubby trainers that stopped on the industrial-thickness carpet just inside his line of sight.

‘Hello, Ben.’

‘What are you doing in here, Angie?’

‘I came in for a drink. You’re going to buy me one, aren’t you?’

‘How did you find me?’

‘You’re a man of habit. It’s not so hard.’

She sat down in an empty chair, smiling as if sure of her welcome. Cooper leaned across the table to speak to her, anxious not to draw the attention of the other customers too much.

‘Look, I can’t put up with this. I want to know how you got my name and address in the first place.’

‘Maybe I hired a detective. There are some good ones around these days.’

‘Angie—’

‘If you’re not going to buy me a drink, I could ask one of those people over there. I don’t mind. I’m quite good at asking for money.’

‘Sit down,’ said Cooper. ‘Just try not to drip on my book. What is it you want?’

‘For a start, a tonic water would be nice.’

‘You drink tonic water?’

‘Yes. But I drink it straight from the bottle, to be trendy.’

‘OK.’

‘Oh, and a packet of cheese-and-onion crisps.’

Cooper went to the bar to get her drink. While he waited, he looked back at Angie Fry. She wasn’t paying any attention to him at all, but had picked up his book and was slowly turning the pages. Her pale fingers lying against the cover reminded him of the hands of the skeleton protruding from the shallow grave in St Asaph’s churchyard.

He kept his back to the men sitting against the wall. They were silent now, wondering quite what to make of Angie. Normally, they might have ribbed him or given him a friendly wink about having a girlfriend. But even they sensed that there was something not quite right about Angie.

‘Do you read books a lot?’ she said, when he took her the tonic water and crisps.

‘Quite a bit. They’re relaxation. Especially since I’ve lived on my own. I don’t want to end up watching telly every night, like a vegetable.’