Стивен Бут - Blind to the Bones

‘Sorry?’

She smiled. ‘You invited me round for coffee the night before last, and when I called you weren’t in. Or you didn’t answer the door anyway. Did I get the time wrong?’

‘Oh God, I’m sorry.’

‘You forgot.’

‘Well...’

‘I was hoping you got called away on urgent police business or something exciting.’

‘Well, it was something like that.’

‘You’re not very convincing, Ben.’

‘I’m really sorry.’

‘And now you’re blushing.’

‘Look, can we make it Monday instead? I’m off duty then. Or maybe we can have lunch?’

‘OK, that would be great.’

To Cooper’s relief, she seemed to put it out of her mind then, and turned to watch the dancers. They had begun a chant. The words seemed to be something about darkness and light, death and renewal.

Peggy had an expensive-looking digital camera with an LCD display on the back panel. Cooper watched her try to focus on the performance over the shoulders of the crowd.

‘Why digital?’ he said.

‘I’m going to e-mail some shots to my mom in Chicago,’ said Peggy. ‘She can’t wait to see what Edendale is like now.’

‘I see.’

‘Also, I have a personal website. I’m going to put up a report of my trip when I get back.’

Before Cooper could say more, an ominous drum roll preceded the next dance. The dancers lined up in two rows of four, shouldering their sticks and steadying their breathing. The drum stopped, and there was a tense pause. Then, from a passage between the shops, the rat ran out into the courtyard.

Cooper knew that when the Border Rats talked about their beast, they didn’t mean what everyone else might mean. ‘Beast’ could be used by a cattle farmer to refer to one of his animals. It was also prison slang for the despised sex offenders, particularly paedophiles. But when the Border Rats referred to their ‘beast’, they meant the man in the rat costume.

Lots of dance teams had a beast — it was traditional, like the Betty and Tommy in the mummers’ plays. Most beasts were a hobbyhorse, or something like that. But it might as well be a rat. So the rat was the beast. And Lucas Oxley was its operator, the man called the Beast Master.

The costume consisted of grey painted canvas stretched over a wire frame that concealed Lucas’s body. The large head was complete with eyes, ears and mouth, and there were even whiskers around a sharp-pointed nose. A long tail dragged on the floor behind Lucas. Cooper couldn’t see what it was made of, or how the right impression of scaliness had been achieved. The overall result ought to have been absurd, but it was more than countered by Lucas Oxley’s jerky, scurrying movements, the spasmodic clutching of his wiry fingers, and the scrape of the tail on the paving stones. The audience drew back and hung on to their children, as if they might be snatched away by the rat. Some of the adults looked distinctly nervous, too — especially when the dancers suddenly surrounded Lucas. That was when the screaming began.

The dance itself involved little springs in the air while clashing the stick on the ground, like monkeys in a display of aggression. The dancers moved around the circle, banging their sticks on the ground, narrowly missing the feet of the rat caught in the middle. They built up the rhythm steadily, and there was no mistaking the threatening message. They were hunters who had caught their prey and were building themselves up for the finishing stroke.

They rapped their sticks on the ground, crouching and splaying their arms to keep their balance. Beneath the pounding of their sticks was the sound of their boots scraping on the flags and the rustling of their rag coats. They struck so hard and so fast that it seemed certain they would splinter their sticks. But gradually they were moving forward, step by step, cracking their sticks and grinning from their black faces.

And in the middle of it all Lucas darted backwards and forwards in his rat costume, screaming the high-pitched scream that Cooper had heard him practising at the Quiet Shepherd. It was certainly realistic. Somewhere nearby in the crowds, Cooper could hear dogs starting to bark. A terrier of some kind was working itself into a frenzy.

Some of the Border Rats’ sticks were taking a hammering now. Fragments of bark were flying off, and splinters of the pale wood were flaking away. The dancers put so much energy into the dance that bits of their rag coats fell off, too, and occasionally a flower from their hats. When they’d finished, sweat was pouring from their temples and streaking their black make-up.

‘So what is it supposed to represent?’ said Peggy Check. ‘Do you know, Ben? I bet you do.’

‘Well, as it happens, I do.’

‘I knew I’d picked the right person.’

‘The tradition started in the nineteenth century,’ said Cooper, ‘when workmen were building some railway tunnels a few miles north of here. The site was infested with rats, and the dance represents the workmen killing the rats with sticks.’

‘Mmm.’ Peggy sounded doubtful.

‘They call themselves the Border Rats. Border is the old working men’s dance tradition, with the sticks and blacked-up faces, like mummers. And the rats bit is obvious.’

‘It looked like more than that to me,’ said Peggy. ‘I studied a bit of folklore as an undergraduate. And this looked like a classic resurrection ritual. They were always performed around this time of year. They represent the death of winter and the arrival of spring, the growth of new crops.’

‘But the rat—’

‘ Someone is being symbolically killed. I think the rat is a symbol. Of course, the blacking of faces is just a disguise.’

‘Nathan Pidcock,’ said Cooper.

‘Excuse me?’

‘A killing. But not symbolic. A real one.’

Cooper looked across the courtyard to where Eric Oxley stood next to the musicians watching the dance. Eric had said there were foreigners in the pub the night that Neil Granger was killed. What foreigners? Did he mean lorry drivers? But they parked their lorries in the lay-bys on the A628, and they wouldn’t want to walk all the way down into Withens. Or were the foreigners walkers on Euroroute E8? Perhaps. But surely Eric Oxley wouldn’t be bothered by a few hikers passing through the village, even if they did have foreign accents? It was possible that by ‘foreigners’ he might mean people from the other side of the hill, in Yorkshire. Attitudes like that still survived in the more isolated valleys of the North of England. In Longdendale, Cooper himself was a foreigner.

A few minutes later, Cooper reached his car and began the battle to get out of Edendale through the tourist traffic and the diversions. He found he was passing the cricket ground, where the first match of the season was getting under way. Because of a stoppage ahead of him, he had to sit in his car watching the players moving slowly around the pitch.

From a distance, the cricketers in their white flannels bore a striking resemblance to the Cotswold morris dancers. Some of the players wore hats, and the batsmen were padded up and carried the bats over their shoulders. Many of the players even had beards and beer guts. As Cooper watched, they took their places in the field and began the first innings. After only a couple of deliveries, the entire field seemed to leap into the air and give a cry of ‘howzat!’ The bowler took out a hankie and mopped his brow. After six balls, they all changed places.

To an untrained eye, there weren’t all that many differences. The ritual was pretty much the same. Their square had been carefully prepared and marked out — what had the Reverend Alton called that sacred space? The temenos. Cooper had no doubt the cricketers would consider their square sacred, something to be worshipped and protected, preserved for their weekly ritual. And the first match on the sacred ground marked the end of the winter and the start of spring, the rebirth of their hopes for a successful season. Later on, perhaps, there would be a harvest of trophies and winners’ medals. Or maybe not, in Edendale’s case.