Black Dog. Stephen Booth

the track said that the farmhouse itself provided bed and breakfast. Trees overhung the road as it wandered away from the village. In the distance, he glimpsed a shoulder of moor with a single tree on its summit.

      Two hundred yards from the church was a long row of two-storey cottages built of the local millstone grit, with stone slate roofs and small mullioned windows. They had no front gardens, but some had stone troughs filled with marigolds and petunias against their front walls. One or two of the cottages had plain oak plank doors with no windows. The doors were painted a dark green, with lintels of whitewashed stone tilted at uneven angles.

      By the time Cooper found which of them was Dial Cottage, the perspiration was running freely from his forehead and the back of his neck and soaking into his shirt. His face was red and he was breathing heavily when he knocked on the door. He could barely bring himself to speak when it was answered.

      ‘Detective Constable Cooper, Edendale Police.’

      The woman who opened the door nodded, not even looking at the warrant card held in his sticky palm.

      ‘Come in.’

      The old oak door thumped shut, shutting out the street, and Cooper blinked his eyes to readjust them to the gloom. The woman was about his own age, maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight. She was wearing a halter-necked sun top and shorts, and her pink limbs immediately struck him as totally out of place in the dark interior, like a chorus girl who had wandered into a funeral parlour. Her hair shone as if she had brought a bit of the sun into the cottage with her.

      They stood in a narrow hallway, made even narrower by a heavy mahogany sideboard loaded with cut-glass vases and a fruit bowl, all standing on lace mats. In the middle was a colour photograph of a large family group, taken at the seaside somewhere. Recently applied magnolia woodchip wallpaper could not disguise the unevenness of the walls underneath. An estate agent would have called it a charming period look.

      Cooper stood still for a moment, fighting to get back his breath, his chest heaving. He wiped the back of his hand across his brow to stop the trickles of sweat running into his eyes.

      ‘We had a report at the station,’ he gasped. ‘A phone call.’

      ‘It’s Ben Cooper, isn’t it?’

      ‘That’s right.’ He looked at the young woman again, recognition dawning only slowly, as he found it did when you saw someone out of their familiar surroundings.

      ‘Helen? Helen Milner?’

      ‘That’s it. I guess I’ve changed a bit since the sixth form at Edendale High.’

      ‘It was a few years ago.’

      ‘Nine years, I suppose,’ she said. ‘You’ve not changed much, Ben. Anyway, I saw your picture in the paper a while ago. You’d won a trophy of some sort.’

      ‘The Shooting Trophy, yes. Look, can we –?’

      ‘I’ll take you through.’

      ‘Do you live here then?’

      ‘No, it’s my grandparents’ house.’

      They stepped through into a back room, hardly less gloomy than the hallway despite a window looking out on to the back garden. There was a 1950s tiled fireplace in the middle of one wall, scattered with more photographs and incongruous holiday mementoes – a straw donkey, a figure of a Spanish flamenco dancer, a postcard of Morocco with sneering camels and an impossibly blue sea. Above the fireplace, a large mirror in a gilt frame reflected a murky hunting print on the opposite wall, with red-coated figures on horseback galloping into a shadowy copse in pursuit of an unseen quarry. Cooper smelled furniture polish and the musty odour of old clothes or drawers lined with ancient newspapers.

      There were two elderly people in the room – a woman wearing a floral-patterned dress and a blue cardigan sitting in one armchair, and an old man in a pair of corduroy trousers and a Harris wool sweater facing her in the other chair. They both sat upright, stiff and alert, their feet drawn under them as if to put as much distance between themselves as they could.

      In front of the empty fireplace stood a two-bar electric fire. Despite the warmth of the day outside, it gave the impression of having been recently used. Cooper, though, was glad of the slight chill in the room, which had begun to dry the sweat on his face as the two old people turned towards him.

      ‘It’s Ben Cooper, Granddad,’ said Helen.

      ‘Aye, I can see that. Sergeant Cooper’s lad.’

      Cooper was well used to this greeting, especially from the older residents around Edendale. For some of them, he was merely the shadow of his father, whose fame and popularity seemed eternal.

      ‘Hello, sir. I believe somebody phoned the station.’

      Harry didn’t answer, and Cooper was starting to form the idea that the old boy might be deaf when his granddaughter stepped in.

      ‘It was me, actually,’ said Helen. ‘Granddad asked me to.’

      Harry shrugged, as if to say he couldn’t really be bothered whether she had phoned or not.

      ‘I thought it’d be something you lot would want to know about, like as not.’

      ‘And your name, sir?’

      ‘Dickinson.’

      Cooper waited patiently for the explanation. But it came from the granddaughter, not from the old man.

      ‘It’s in the kitchen,’ she said, leading the way through another door. An almost brand-new washing machine and a fridge-freezer stood among white-painted wooden cupboards, with an aluminium sink unit awkwardly fitted into place among them. Neither of the old people followed them, but watched from their chairs. The rooms were so small that they were well within earshot.

      ‘Granddad found this.’

      The trainer lay on a pine kitchen table, lumpy and grotesque among the bundles of dried mint and the brown-glazed cooking pots. Someone had put a sheet from the Buxton Advertiser underneath it to stop the soil that clung to its rubber sole from getting on to the surface of the table. The trainer lay in the middle of an advertising feature for a new Cantonese restaurant, its laces trailing across a photograph of a smiling Chinese woman serving barbecued spare ribs and bean sprouts. On the opposite page were columns of birth and death notices, wedding announcements and twenty-first birthday greetings.

      Cooper wiped his sweaty palms on his trousers and took out a pen. He gently prised open the tongue of the trainer to look inside, careful not to disturb the soil that was starting to dry and crumble away from the crevices in the sole.

      ‘Where did you find this, Mr Dickinson?’

      ‘Under Raven’s Side.’

      Cooper knew Raven’s Side. It was a wilderness of rocks and holes and tangled vegetation. The search parties had been slowly making progress towards the cliff all afternoon, as if reluctant to have to face the task of searching it, with the expectation of twisted ankles and lacerated fingers.

      ‘Can you be more specific?’

      The old man looked offended, as if he had been accused of lying. Cooper began to wonder why he had thought it was cooler inside the cottage. Despite the open windows, there was no breath of air in the kitchen. The atmosphere felt stifling, claustrophobic. The only bit of light seemed to go out of the room when Helen went to answer a knock at the door.

      ‘There’s a big patch of brambles and bracken down there, above the stream,’ said the old man. ‘It’s where I walk Jess, see.’

      Cooper was surprised by a faint scrabbling of claws near his feet. A black Labrador gazed up at him from under the table, responding hopefully to the sound of its name. The dog’s paws were grubby, and it was lying on the Eden Valley Times. The sports section, by the look of it. Edendale FC had lost the opening match of the season.

      ‘Was there just the trainer? Nothing else?’

      ‘Not