Black Dog. Stephen Booth

Valley Trail, the path that connected to the long-distance Pennine Way a little to the north. It was a favourite with ramblers, who passed this way in their thousands in the summer.

      But the spot where he stood was as remote and isolated from life on the path down there as if it had been on top of Mam Tor itself. A passing walker would not have been able to see Cooper up there among the bracken, even if he had bothered to look up.

      He turned round, wafting his hand across his face against the flies. He was looking back through the trees and thick brambles as if towards the end of a dark tunnel, where the figure of Harry Dickinson stood framed in a network of grasping branches. Cooper had to squint against the contrast of a patch of dazzling light that soaked the hillside in strong colours. The old man stood in the glare of the low sun, with the hot rocks shimmering around him like a furnace. The haze of heat rising from the ground made his dark outline blur and writhe, as if he were dancing a slow shimmy. His vast shadow, flung across the rocks, seemed to wriggle and jerk as its jagged shape fragmented among the bracken and brambles.

      The expression in Harry’s eyes was unreadable, his face lying partly in the shade from the peak of his cap. Cooper couldn’t even tell which way he was looking, whether he had turned away or was staring directly towards him into the trees.

      He wanted to grab the old man by the shoulders and shake him. He wanted to tell him that somebody had disturbed the spot, and recently. The evidence was right there for anyone to see and to smell. There had been two people, and at least one of them had been looking for more than just rabbits. The smell that lingered under the trees was of stale blood, overripe meat and urine. And the flies had found something even more attractive than Cooper’s sweat to feed on.

       5

      ‘OK. Secured?’

      ‘Officers at all points,’ said Hitchens promptly.

      ‘Scenes?’

      ‘On their way.’

      Diane Fry stood behind DI Hitchens and Detective Chief Inspector Tailby, twenty feet from where the body of the girl lay. The scene had already been well-organized. Hitchens had made a big performance of it, posting officers along the track, calling for information so that he could pass it on to the DCI. But it had seemed to Fry that everything necessary had already been done even before Hitchens had arrived.

      ‘Scientific support?’

      ‘Ditto.’

      ‘Incident room?’

      ‘DI Baxter is i/c.’

      Tailby was head and shoulders taller than the inspector, slim and slightly stooped around the shoulders, as very tall men often were. His hair was greying at the front but still dark at the back, and it was left to grow thicker than the cropped heads favoured by most of his junior colleagues. He was wearing green wellingtons, which were not ideal footwear for stumbling over half a mile of rough ground scattered with rabbit holes and hidden stones. He was lucky to have reached the scene without a broken ankle. Fry congratulated herself on her habit of wearing strong, flat-soled shoes and trousers.

      ‘Photographer?’ said Tailby.

      ‘Here, ready.’

      ‘Let him get on with it.’

      Fry waited for the DCI to ask about the doctor, but she looked up and realized that he could already see Dr Inglefield making his way down the path.

      ‘Finder?’ said Tailby.

      ‘Back at the cottage, sir. With DC Cooper.’

      ‘Let’s see what the doc says then.’

      The doctor was giving his name to a PC standing halfway up the path. Tailby waited impatiently while they compared watches to agree the time, and the PC wrote it down in his notebook. Most of the other officers who had inevitably begun to gather round the scene had been sent away to continue their search, grumbling all the more at the futility of it.

      Blue and white tape hung in strands for several yards around the body, wound round the trunks of trees and a jutting stump of black rock. From where the detectives stood, all that could be seen of Laura Vernon was a lower leg. The black fabric of her jeans contrasted with the glare of a white, naked foot, its toenails painted blood-red. The rest of the body was hidden in a dense clump of bracken, and around it there were numerous signs of trampling. Fry knew that the broken stems and crushed grass raised the odds in favour of the crime scene examiners producing the sort of evidence that would lead to a quick arrest. She longed to get nearer, to get a close look at the body, to see the girl’s face. How had she died? Had she been strangled or battered, or what? Nobody was saying. At this stage, nobody wanted to commit themselves. They simply stood and watched the doctor do his official business as he nodded at the policemen without a word and made his way gingerly along a marked-out strip of ground to the crushed bracken.

      They were, of course, assuming the body was that of Laura Vernon. There seemed little doubt, but it was not considered a fact until one of her parents had been dragged through the process of identification.

      ‘No hope of getting the caravan down here,’ said Tailby.

      ‘Nowhere near, sir,’ agreed Hitchens.

      ‘Is there a farm track nearby? What’s over that side of the trees?’

      ‘Don’t know, sir.’

      Hitchens and Tailby both turned to look at Fry. Hitchens frowned when he saw who she was, as if he had been expecting someone else.

      ‘See if you can find out, Fry,’ he said. ‘Closest access we can get for the caravan.’

      ‘Yes, sir.’

      Fry wondered how she was expected to do this, when there was no habitation in sight. The village itself was invisible beyond the huge outcrop of rock. There was a cliff face at her back and dense woodland stretching in front of her down to the road.

      She was aware of the tall DCI studying her. He had a thin, bony face and keen grey eyes with a vigilant air. She had not encountered him face to face until now – he had simply been a figure passing in the distance once, pointed out to her and noted as one of the people who mattered. The last thing she wanted to do was to look useless now, on their first meeting. First impressions lasted a long time.

      ‘Perhaps you could find somebody who has a bit of local knowledge,’ suggested Tailby.

      Hitchens said: ‘Maybe we’d better ask –’

      Then Diane Fry registered the noise that she had been aware of in the background all the time they had been on the hillside. It was a juddering and clattering noise, stationary now somewhere over the trees to the east. The helicopter was holding position until its crew were given instructions to return to base.

      Fry pulled out her radio, and smiled. ‘I think I’ve got a better idea, sir.’

      The DCI understood straightaway. ‘Excellent. Get them to let Scenes and Scientific Support have a location as well for their vans.’

      Dr Inglefield had taken only a few minutes before he was walking back up the path towards Tailby.

      ‘Well, dead all right,’ he said. ‘Skull bashed in, I’d say, not to put too fine a point on it. You’ll get the technical details from the PM, of course, but that’s about it. Rigor is almost completely resolved and decomposition has started. Also we have quite a few maggots hatching in the usual places. Eyes, mouth, nostrils. You know … The pathologist should be able to give you a pretty good idea of the time of death. Normally I’d say at least twenty-four hours, but in this weather …’ He shrugged expressively.

      ‘Sexually assaulted?’ asked Tailby.

      ‘Mmm. Some disturbance of the clothing, certainly. More than that I couldn’t say.’

      ‘I’ll