Stephen Booth - Blind to the Bones

Then a dark shape flashed across Cooper’s field of vision, and a set of sharp white teeth clashed together a few inches from his face. He caught a brief glimpse of a wildly rolling eye as the Alsatian threw itself into the air and lunged its head above the gate in its desperation to sink its fangs into him. He stepped back, sweating. If he had leaned over the gate to see where the dog was, several inches of skin would have been missing from his face by now.

But it was the silence of the dog that was the most terrifying. It was the silence of an animal trained to attack and injure, rather than simply to frighten.

‘Mr Oxley!’ he called. ‘I’m a police officer. This isn’t an acceptable way to behave, you know.’

Silence. And now even the faces had disappeared, satisfied at last. Perhaps this was the favourite form of entertainment in Waterloo Terrace.

Cooper took a few deep breaths and moved several paces back from the gate. He wondered what his next move should be. He had a strong feeling that he’d made a stupid tactical mistake. He hadn’t been thinking about what he was doing, or why. As a result, he’d put his own safety at risk.

It wasn’t something he should admit to, if he could avoid it. He was aware that there had been incidents in the recent past that had already put that question mark over his actions, in some people’s minds. DS Diane Fry would take pleasure in marking it down in his personnel record, he was sure.

Follow procedure, he had been told. But sometimes it was hard. One day, he was going to fail to follow procedure, and that would be the end.

‘Are you OK, Ben?’ PC Udall was looking at him from the road, a slightly puzzled expression on her face. Cooper became aware that he probably didn’t look too good. He had been up since well before dawn, and had dressed in his most casual clothes for the raid, which was already a couple of hours ago. He probably hadn’t looked too good to Lucas Oxley, either. It was his own fault that he had nearly lost some skin to Mr Oxley’s dog.

‘Yes, I’m fine.’

‘I thought we’d lost you.’

‘You nearly did just then. Are we ready to go?’

‘Ready when you are.’

As he waved Tracy Udall off from the car park, Ben Cooper poked around for a CD to play on the way back to Edendale in his Toyota. He found a recent Levellers album and was pleased by the title, Green Blade Rising .

On the way out of the village, he noticed two men with a tractor and a length of rope near the pool in the river. Another man was standing in the water in PVC waders. He was already pretty well covered in duckweed as he struggled to attach the rope to one of the boards that floated on the surface of the pool.

‘Strange,’ said Cooper to himself. And he tapped his fingers to the Levellers as he drove out of Withens.

Instead of going back into the wrecked vestry before he left the church that night, Derek Alton turned across the front of the altar and stood for a moment on the patch of stone flags that was always cold. The sunlight from the windows never reached this spot during the day. This was where Alton believed he could feel the presence of the Spirit in the cool air that surrounded him. It was a real, tangible presence. It touched his face with a kind of intimacy and cooled his skin like fresh spring water. It gave him a shiver of pleasure at the awareness of something clean and wonderful beyond the reality of Withens. A few moments of silent contemplation normally helped to calm his anxieties. But tonight it didn’t seem to be working.

Derek Alton had his car parked by the churchyard gate. It was a creaking old Escort – all that he could afford, since Anglican clergymen were employed by God, and God didn’t pay wages. The old rectory was right behind the church, but the incumbent at St Asaph’s no longer had use of it, because it was too big and too expensive for the diocese to maintain. Instead, he and Caroline had been given a bungalow on the new street above the village. And the bungalow was small – too small for the large family that Caroline wanted.

As he passed through the churchyard towards the gate, Alton automatically checked for new litter or damage. Recently, Foster’s lager seemed to have been a favourite among the youths who came here in the evening. He could spot the blue cans easily in the brambles and bracken. They had invariably been emptied, then crushed in the middle. Alton pictured one of the Oxley boys casually showing off his adolescent strength to his friends as he smoked another cigarette, rolled another joint, or sniffed another Evo-Stik from a crisp packet. Well, he really had no idea what the youngsters did in the churchyard at night, and he didn’t care to speculate too much.

The lager cans always joined the dead flowers and plastic plant pots in a black bin by the side of the church porch. But the bin hadn’t been emptied for weeks, and now its lid lay uselessly on the ground, unable to contain the overflowing debris. Alton wondered what the bottom of the bin was like. What was hatching and pupating down there in the foetid darkness? What white, squirming things would be munching their way through the rotting detritus? Now that the weather was warming up, he would soon find out, if the bin weren’t emptied. One morning, he would be battling his way through clouds of mosquitoes and swarms of bluebottles to reach the church door.

He caught a flash of incongruous colour in the darkness near the church wall. But it wasn’t a Foster’s lager can. At some time, a small cloth gnome with a red cap, blue jacket and white beard had been left on the memorial stone for a former churchwarden. Another Oxley, of course.

As he unlocked his car, Alton looked up towards the village. There were streetlamps in Withens – ten of them. He knew the exact number because he’d counted them during the first week after his arrival. They had seemed then to be a symbol that civilization had actually reached the village, and he had clutched at their presence for comfort against the impression communicated by the dark stone houses and gloomy hillsides. But now, as he looked towards the village from the church door, he was struck again by a simple fact about the streetlamps. They lit the road, but not the houses. Their cold, orange glare cast the homes beyond them into even darker shadows.

Even if there had been lighting on their street, he wouldn’t have been able to see the new bungalows from here. In fact, all he could see of Withens were the ten streetlamps on the road, the windows of the Quiet Shepherd, and the outline of the pub’s roof.

But Alton also saw a group of dark figures moving up the road towards the lights of the village. They were passing from one streetlamp to another, and they looked a little unsteady – whether from tiredness or alcohol, or both, he couldn’t tell. He presumed they were the Oxleys – Lucas, Scott, Ryan and a couple of their cousins. Not to mention old Eric Oxley himself. The Border Rats were out tonight.

Diane Fry stared straight ahead through her windscreen at the Sheffield streets, not wanting even to look at the man beside her in the car. She had let him stand by her passenger window for a few moments before she pressed the button to release the central locking. It wasn’t that she had any doubts who he was – his brown overcoat and sparse ginger hair were recognizable even through the rain streaking her car windows. It was just that there was always a little voice at the back of her brain that kept nagging at her when she was doing something stupid. There had been a short, internal battle before she had subdued the voice sufficiently to let him in.

Now that he was inside the car, all her senses were prickling at his presence, and her muscles were tensed for danger. Yet he had shown no sign of being a threat to her. Fry knew she had to take control of the situation to keep it that way.