Blind to the Bones by Stephen Booth

Author:Stephen Booth
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

They drove into the car park in Withens. Fry switched off the engine, and they sat for a few minutes looking at the square stone houses, the tower of the church beyond the yew trees, and the background of black hills.

To Cooper, the hills seemed to have moved in a little closer every time he came here, making Withens a bit more claustrophobic, a bit more impermanent. What had Tracy Udall said? It didn’t look like a place that would last. But surely it had lasted. The railway navvies’ shanty town had been here in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the farms must already have existed long before that. So why did it feel so temporary?

Cooper wondered where exactly the shanty town had been. Where had fifteen hundred navvies lived in such appalling conditions? Was it here, where the village now stood? Or further down the road, past the church, among the banks of bracken and peat bogs?

‘You’re meeting PC Udall here?’ said Fry.

‘At the church.’

‘What’s she like?’

‘She’s very sound. Dedicated. Good at her job.’

‘Great. I think you ought to try harder on the Oxleys. I don’t think you’re wasting your time.’

‘You think if we dig hard enough, we’ll find some connection with Emma Renshaw?’

‘Ben, if you can find what this blacked-up faces thing is all about, it would help.’

‘Neil Granger might just have been using it as a form of disguise, or camouflage at night. It’s only theatrical make-up. Anyone could get hold of it, but if he had it lying around anyway for rehearsals for this dance group –’

‘Yeah, a dance group. What did the Renshaws say it was called?’

‘The Border Rats.’

‘Peculiar sort of a name.’

‘Granger was at a rehearsal the night before he was killed,’ said Cooper. ‘Down at the village pub there – the Quiet Shepherd.’

‘Have you been there yet?’

‘No.’

The Yorkshire Traction bus came into the car park again and did its circuit. Today, there were three old ladies sitting on the bus. They gazed down at Cooper and Fry without curiosity. None of them made any move to get off, and the driver accelerated away again.

‘So,’ said Fry. ‘What was your impression of the Renshaws?’

Cooper hesitated. ‘Howard,’ he said. ‘What does he do? For a living, I mean?’

‘He’s retired now. But he was Sales Director for a steel refractory in Sheffield. A very successful one, by all accounts.’

‘Yes, I can imagine.’

‘What do you mean, Ben?

‘It just seemed to me,’ said Cooper, ‘that Howard Renshaw was trying to sell us something. And doing it very well.’

Fry sighed, but with a sense of relief. ‘That’s what I think, too,’ she said. ‘I was worried that I was being paranoid.’

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