‘Not quite, surely?’
She put down her glass and positioned it carefully on a coaster, wiping off a mist of condensation.
‘My dad was a local newspaper journalist too. Old school. He ended up as a subeditor on the
Sheffield Star
. He once told me that when he was a trainee reporter, if he had the police stories to cover, he actually went round to the police station every morning and spoke to the desk sergeant. That was when there were such things as desk sergeants, of course. The sergeant would look in the incident book and tell him what had happened overnight. And because they spoke every morning, they got to know each other. So if the sergeant was busy, he just gave Dad the incident book to read for himself. It’s a question of trust, you see.’
‘That was, what? The seventies?’
‘I suppose so.
Dixon of Dock Green
might still have been on the telly.’
‘It wouldn’t happen now.’
‘Too true. The reporters on police calls now never see a police officer, let alone get to know one. They never go inside a police station, either. All they do is make a phone call and get a recorded message. There’s absolutely no personal contact, and no trust. My dad pulls his hair out when I tell him what it’s like now.’
‘My dad would, too,’ said Cooper.
She opened her mouth as if to ask him about his father. But perhaps she read something in his face, because she kept the question to herself. That required quite a lot of self-control for a journalist.
‘Anyway, enough of that,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you don’t want to listen to me moaning. This is what you wanted to see.’
She handed Cooper a clear plastic wallet containing a single sheet of paper and an envelope. The note itself was crudely written. He might actually have said drawn rather than written. It looked as if it had been scrawled in felt-tip pen by a clumsy child. Just one sentence.
‘Sheffeild Rode,’ he said thoughtfully.
‘I know it’s crude,’ said Byrne. ‘And illiterate, too.’
‘Sheffield isn’t all that difficult a word to spell, surely.’
‘It could be written by someone whose first language isn’t English?’
‘Maybe. And what’s this symbol?’
The note was accompanied by a rudimentary sketch – a short horizontal line with an arrow beneath it, pointing to the centre of the line. If it was supposed to represent a road, with a particular house indicated on it, the sketch was worse than useless. But perhaps it wasn’t that at all. It looked more symbolic than representational.
‘I don’t know,’ said Byrne. ‘No one in the office could identify it.’
‘And you didn’t look it up?’
‘We’d normally do a Google search, of course. But there’s no way of entering a picture as a search term. No way that I know of, anyway.’
‘No, that’s right.’
‘So without a clue what to look for, we were a bit stumped. That’s why my editor agreed we should pass it to you. On the understanding that we, you know …’
‘Get some information in return?’
‘Yes. Or at least a bit of a head-start on the nationals when there’s a breakthrough.’
Cooper nodded. ‘I understand.’
‘So, what are you going to do? Raid all the houses on Sheffield Road?’
He laughed. ‘I would have difficulty justifying that on the grounds of an anonymous message.’
‘Yes, I see the problem.’
‘But we can get it forensically examined. Something might emerge.’
‘I’ll leave it with you, then.’
Cooper looked at her as she got ready to leave.
‘You’re not covering the show this afternoon?’ he said.
‘Oh, Riddings Show? That’s today, is it? No, we don’t have time to cover things like that. We pay a village correspondent a few pennies to write down the names of all the winners. Names still sell papers, they say. If necessary, we give them a little digital camera so they can take their own photos, too. Much cheaper than sending a photographer out from Chesterfield. We don’t have our own snappers in Edendale any more.’
‘It’s the way everything’s going.’
‘Oh, I know. We get policing on the cheap too now.’
‘I won’t argue with that.’
‘Well, I’m sure there must be lots of things you should be doing. I bet some of the residents around here would be furious if they saw you sitting in the garden of the Bridge Inn having a drink with a journalist. They’d be writing to the chief constable in their scores.’
Cooper thought that was probably true. But right at this moment, he didn’t care.
Byrne got up to leave. ‘Will you report our conversation to your boss?’
Cooper hesitated. He couldn’t mention his contact with the press to Superintendent Branagh. He’d heard her berate other officers for the slightest communication with the media, or for taking their claims seriously. He would risk being tainted by the meeting.
‘I ought to.’
Byrne smiled. ‘There are a lot of things we ought to do, Detective Sergeant Cooper. Sometimes it’s much more fun doing the things we shouldn’t.’
When she’d gone, Cooper checked his phone for messages, then decided to stay for a few minutes to finish his drink.
He opened the copy of the
Eden Valley Times
and flicked through the pages, glancing at the photographs. He wasn’t interested in the lead story about the Savages. It wouldn’t tell him anything he didn’t know, and might well fill his head with misconceptions and half-truths.
Halfway through the paper, just before the property section, were the pages of community news. What was going on in the villages, in other words. As usual, that seemed to be mostly WI meetings and summer fetes, tractor rallies and fund-raising garden parties. But there they were, underneath next week’s church services – a party of balsam bashers pictured by the side of Calver Weir. With their boots and waterproofs, packed lunches and water bottles, they looked ready for a happy day of non-native-plant destruction.
He peered more closely. The photograph was in colour, which ought to help identification. But this was the
Eden Valley Times
, and the colour register had been slightly off alignment when the page was printed. So everyone in the picture seemed to have a faint magenta shadow blurring the left side of their face. It was an odd effect, like looking at a 3D image without the proper glasses on. But Cooper recognised Martin and Sarah Holland, standing just to one side. Barry Gamble was over to the right, lurking close to a couple of Peak District National Park rangers who had posed in the foreground wearing red rubber gloves and clutching tall plants with pink flowers.
It was the expression on Gamble’s face that grabbed Cooper’s attention. Despite the off-register printing, it was clear that he wasn’t smiling for the camera like everyone else. He wasn’t looking towards the photographer at all. In fact, he had been caught in an unguarded moment as he waited for the click of the shutter.
In that second, Barry Gamble had turned his head to the right and was staring directly at the Hollands. And the look on his face told a whole different story from the accompanying piece on the benefits of balsam bashing. His expression was a mixture of loathing and triumph. He had the air of a man taking one last, gloating look at his intended victims.
Riddings Show was held on Froggatt Fields, right on the western edge of Riddings where it met the neighbouring village of Froggatt, another of the duke’s creations, known for its quaint seventeenth-century bridge.
The show was said to be an offshoot of the village cow club, but there were no cows present now. Small-scale livestock shows had become far too complicated and risky to organise. They were too bound up in red tape and form-filling, too constrained by DEFRA regulations, too exposed to the possibility of another outbreak of disease. Foot and mouth, blue tongue, BSE – they had all contributed to the decline. Many village shows had never recovered from last-minute cancellation, and insurance premiums were beyond the reach of societies with limited sponsorship. Cloven-hoofed animals had become an event organiser’s nightmare.
So Riddings Show had transformed itself into a more genteel August bank holiday occasion. Cooper expected there would be flowers, vegetables and handicrafts, with the only livestock being the ponies and riders in the gymkhana ring.
It had begun to rain on and off almost as soon as he’d left the garden of the Bridge Inn, and he needed his windscreen wipers as he joined the flow of traffic into the showground. When he drove through the gate on to Froggatt Fields, he was greeted by the smell of engine oil, and the chug of vintage farm equipment. There were a few nods to the show’s agricultural origins after all.
The marquees and stands had been set up in the lower field, separated from the river by a line of trees. At the far end, the gymkhana arena lay in a natural hollow. As Cooper walked down the slope from the parking area, a brass band was playing a medley of James Bond themes.
Goldfinger
,
From Russia with Love
. The grass in the parking area had been mowed, but not removed, so the cuttings lay everywhere in deep swathes. They wrapped themselves around the tyres of the car, and covered everyone’s shoes. He found himself wading through heaps of wet grass all the way down to the show ring.
He stopped for a moment to watch a children’s entertainer in a sparkly blue jacket, who was talking to a dummy Afghan hound. The dog didn’t answer, except by whispering in his ear. What did you call a ventriloquism act where the dummy didn’t speak? He had no idea.
Cooper turned away. There were already too many people whispering to each other in this case. Why didn’t everyone say out loud what they thought? It would make life so much easier. His life, anyway.
Carol Villiers was already on the showground. She was dressed off duty, in jeans and a T-shirt, with a jacket tied round her waist. She looked every bit the outdoor girl, the sun bringing out the colour in her face. Out in the sunlight, between showers, Cooper noticed how pale her eyes were. Sandy, as if they had been bleached in a desert climate.
They walked towards the long canvas marquee, where signs announced that it had just opened to the public after judging.
‘I’ve heard you’re engaged, Ben,’ said Villiers. ‘Congratulations.’
Astonished, Cooper turned and stared at her as if she were a witch. Psychic, at least.
‘I haven’t told anyone here about that yet,’ he said.
‘Well, someone has.’
‘Blast. I didn’t expect it to get round so quickly.’
‘It’s one of the perils of having a relationship with a colleague,’ said Villiers. ‘I should know.’
‘I suppose so.’
Cooper realised this was going to take some getting used to. Once his engagement was announced, and was out in the public domain, it became real.
Inside the marquee, the long rows of tables looked spectacular. They were lined with all kinds of produce, from bottles of red sloe wine to jars of runner bean chutney. The scone classes seemed to have been particularly popular, and some of those extravagant flower arrangements must have taken many hours to create. Someone had even embroidered butterfly species around a cottage scene.
Cooper saw that the band was a local one, from Hathersage. Mostly middle-aged men, dressed in red jackets. Though a bandstand had been set out for them, they were playing inside the produce tent to avoid the rain. One of the musicians had stored his tuba case under a trestle table covered in mammoth cabbages and strings of onions.
‘My brother used to be in a brass band,’ said Villiers. ‘Soprano cornet.’
‘I’d forgotten you had a brother.’
‘Charlie. You must have met him.’
‘I’m sure I did. I just can’t quite …’
‘He only joined the band for the beer,’ said Villiers.
At the other end of the tent, Cooper stopped to look at the winner in the photographic competition, a stunning close-up shot of frost on a barbed-wire fence. The photographer had caught the spikes of the frost mirroring the angle of the steel barbs. The clarity of the detail was amazing. Every facet of the ice crystals shone out of the picture.
Next to it on the table were entries in another photographic class – local scenes. Each entry was labelled with the name and village of the photographer, and one sprang out at him immediately. B. Gamble, Riddings. Of course. A keen amateur snapper like our Barry wouldn’t have been able to resist showing off his talents in the local show.
Mr Gamble hadn’t won a prize, though. Not even highly commended. His entry showed a corner of Riddings that Cooper wasn’t familiar with. An ancient building with a corrugated-iron roof, moss growing on the stone walls, a door half covered in peeling green paint. No windows visible, so it was probably an old farm building. A lot older than most of the properties in Riddings. Perhaps it was a remnant of an agricultural holding that had stood in the village before the big houses were built.
Cooper guessed that Gamble had been going for an artistic statement about decay and abandonment. The building had reached a fairly picturesque stage of dilapidation. The weeds in front of it were dense and impenetrable. A bird had built its nest on top of a broken downspout. But he could also see why the photograph hadn’t received even a commendation from the judge. The composition was all wrong. The angle of the shot was awkward, and the building itself was off-centre, part of it concealed by an ugly tree stump that had got in the way, as if the photographer hadn’t noticed it. Cooper wasn’t an expert, but even he could see that the picture would have been improved immensely if Gamble had simply moved ten yards to the right and got a few steps closer to his subject.
‘Our Mr Gamble,’ said Villiers, looking over his shoulder. ‘Will he be here?’
‘Oh, he wouldn’t miss this.’
‘A chance to observe his neighbours out in the open.’
‘The same reason we’re here, in fact.’
Cooper looked around, searching for the familiar faces of Riddings residents. The relationships and hierarchies were difficult to assess without seeing people together. He had been speaking to them only on their own territory, where they could present themselves in their best light, give an account of their relations with their neighbours that they wanted him to believe, tell him any story without fear of contradiction.
Outside the tent, children were running around with giant inflatable hammers their parents had won at a hoopla stall. Cooper and Villiers passed a vicar with cropped grey hair and a goatee beard, wearing muddy black jeans. A visitor had noticed his dog collar and stopped him:
We don’t see a clergyman around here very often
. The vicar started to explain that he covered a huge area, stretching from Riddings and Curbar across a vast swathe of the Peak District to Great Longstone and Stoney Middleton. The sighting of a Church of England clergyman in an English village was becoming as rare as a working phone box.
The thought created a series of associations in Cooper’s mind. Erin Byrne had mentioned that the phone calls to the
Eden Valley Times
had been made from a public call box somewhere. And one of the walkers Gavin Murfin had spoken to had mentioned seeing someone in the phone box in the centre of Riddings on Tuesday night, making a call.
It was a bit of a stretch. But it was one possible link in a case where nothing seemed to be connecting.
Nearby, an old Lister engine chugged, whirred, and belched out fumes. He saw that there were tractors, too. Not doing anything, just standing in a couple of rows like exhibits in a museum. One of the owners was leaning against his old grey Ferguson. In other years, Matt might have been here with his own Fergie. But not any more.
The first people Cooper recognised at Riddings Show were the Chadwicks. They seemed to have made a beeline for the book stall and snapped up all the Bill Brysons. Mrs Chadwick wore a blue anorak, and red cargo pants that stopped halfway up her calves, with white trainers. Her husband was in a green Craghoppers cagoule and matching straw hat. They looked as though they’d made a great effort to be casual. But William Chadwick wore a slightly hunted look, his eyes darting from side to side as he passed through the crowd, perhaps fearing to encounter a pupil or a member of staff from his school.
‘Mr and Mrs Chadwick,’ said Cooper.
They stopped, surprised. Mrs Chadwick almost dropped her books into the grass, but recovered her poise.
‘Oh. It’s …’
‘Detective Sergeant Cooper. This is my colleague, DC Villiers.’
Mr Chadwick remained frozen, words failing him for a moment, anxiety filling his eyes. A trickle of perspiration ran down his temple.
‘I’m really sorry to bother you,’ said Cooper. ‘I realise this is a social occasion. But there was something I wanted to ask you.’
‘Well … go ahead.’
‘Did you ever have any disputes with your closest neighbours in Riddings?’
‘Neighbours?’
‘Well, you live adjacent to the Hollands at Fourways, the Barrons at Valley View. Perhaps Mr Kaye at Moorside House?’
The Chadwicks looked at each other, but actually seemed relieved at the question.
‘There was an incident with Jake Barron a while ago,’ admitted Mrs Chadwick.
‘It was silly really,’ said her husband. ‘It was at a time when I was feeling particularly stressed. Because of, you know …’
‘The incident,’ said his wife. ‘It was a very difficult period, in both our lives.’
‘I understand.’
‘Anyway, the Barrons had a dog then.’
‘Did they?’
‘Yes, a Dobermann. They always had it out on the drive in a fancy collar, running about behind the gates. It used to bark incessantly.’
‘The Barrons told us once that Dobermanns are emotionally sensitive,’ said Mrs Chadwick. ‘And if they’re upset about anything, they bark. They claimed it was part of the animal’s duty as a guard dog. We politely suggested they might take the trouble to train it properly, but they took no notice, of course.’
Chadwick nodded. ‘Then one afternoon I couldn’t stand it any longer. It was going on for hour after hour, day after day. It was intolerable. We shouldn’t have to put up with that, should we? So when I saw him coming by in his car, I stopped him.’
‘What did he say when you confronted him?’
‘He became very aggressive. Started shouting and swearing at me. Threatening retaliation, just because I had the nerve to complain. Yes, he soon showed his true colours. The man turned into a foul-mouthed thug in front of my eyes. I’ve got to tell you, having them as neighbours has been like living next door to a family of yobs on a council estate.’
‘Yet they‘ve always thought they were so superior,’ added Mrs Chadwick. ‘It makes me sick.’
‘But the dog isn’t there now, at Valley View,’ said Cooper. ‘There was no sign of a Dobermann, or any other breed.’
‘No. It went, about a month ago.’
The Chadwicks looked at each other again. There were moments when Cooper wished he had the power to read minds. He would really love to know what this couple were thinking right now.
‘We heard it got sick and died,’ said Mrs Chadwick finally. ‘Sad for the animal, of course. But still …’
They were silent for a few moments, gazing at Cooper and Villiers as if they expected to be challenged.
‘I suppose you think we shouldn’t talk about the Barrons like this,’ said Mrs Chadwick. ‘In view of what happened, I mean.’
‘On the contrary,’ said Cooper. ‘We much prefer it if people tell us the truth, instead of holding information back.’
They watched the Chadwicks walk off towards the marquee. A few minutes later, Cooper saw their daughter drifting through the showground, dark hair hanging over her face, her manner giving the impression that she was far too sophisticated for all this nonsense.
‘Oh, hello,’ she said when he stopped her.
‘You’re off to university soon, aren’t you?’
‘God, yes. I can’t wait.’
‘Is it that bad?’
‘I need to get away. I have to get away from them.’
‘From your parents?’
‘Yeah. Well … from all of them. All the people here, in this place. Look at it. Our house is a like a prison inside a prison.’
She drifted away again, and was swallowed up by a group of young people. No doubt some of the same bunch that had been at the party on Thursday night.
The crowds were getting thicker now as the show became busier. The clothes on display were fascinating in themselves. Cooper saw pink wellies, white wellies with blue polka dots, wellies with roses on them. An incredible range of dogs was here at the show, too. Within a few yards he passed Great Danes, spaniels, pugs, golden retrievers, Airedales. There was even a St Bernard – and you didn’t see those very often. No Dobermanns, though.
He looked at Villiers, trying to decide if it was a good time to ask her a personal question.
‘I wondered,’ he said. ‘I thought you might have reverted to your maiden name when you came back here to Derbyshire.’
‘I suppose I ought to,’ she said. ‘Yes, you’re right, I should.’
‘But …?’
‘But?’ She turned her face away. ‘Well, Glen’s name is the only part of him that I have left. How could I just throw that aside?’
There was nothing he could say to that.
‘Let’s try down this way.’
From his sign, Cooper gathered that the children’s entertainer was called Doctor Woof. And the dog seemed to be called Trevor. Surely it would have made more sense if the entertainer’s name was Trevor and the dog was Doctor Woof? But perhaps they had swapped personalities. The dummy certainly seemed to be the more lively of the two.