Black Dog. Stephen Booth

could see that her grandmother thought that Harry was just being a bad-tempered old man, that she had done something to annoy him. But Helen’s thoughts were running on some serious illness troubling him, something he was keeping to himself, an awful secret he wouldn’t want to inflict on his wife and family.

      There were so many possibilities when you were in your late seventies, when you smoked, when you had spent most of your working life in a lead mine, when you had fought your way through a vicious war. Her grandmother, Gwen, would not think of these things. She would believe that Harry had a bad cold right up to the moment they put him in the ground at St Edwin’s.

      ‘But if he’s ill it doesn’t stop him going off down there with Jess. It doesn’t stop him going off with those friends of his, either.’

      ‘No, Grandma.’

      Helen put hot water into the teapot and emptied it out again, dropped three tea bags in and poured on the boiling water from the electric kettle.

      While she waited for the tea to brew, she looked out of the window, across the back garden towards the valley. The garden itself was bright with beds of petunias and violets, rows of potato plants with white and yellow flowers, and canes wrapped round with runner beans. But beyond the garden, the woods that ran down the valley looked dark and brooding. Helen could see the police helicopter hovering over the tops of the trees half a mile away. They were still looking. Still hoping.

      ‘They’ve changed him. He thinks more of his cronies than he does of me. More than he does of his family.’

      ‘Granddad thinks the world of his family.’

      ‘They’ve changed him. That Wilford Cutts and the other one, Sam Beeley.’

      ‘Them? They’re just Granddad’s friends. His old workmates. They’re nothing to do with it.’

      ‘It’s them that’s done it.’

      ‘I’m sure they haven’t done anything, Grandma. They’re just his friends from Glory Stone Mine. He’s known them for years.’

      ‘Not like now. It was different before, when they were working. But now they’ve led him away, filled his head with thoughts.’

      ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Helen.

      But she had wondered herself, sometimes, about what the three old men got up to when they were together out on the hill, or up on Wilford’s untidy smallholding with the flock of hens and the odd little collection of ageing animals. Sometimes Harry brought home a capful of speckled brown eggs from the Cuckoo Marans or a bag of potatoes from the disused paddock that he and Wilford had converted into a huge vegetable patch. At other times, the three of them just went to the pub, where Sam Beeley came into his own and bought the drinks.

      ‘Since he’s had no work, he’s been different,’ said Gwen. ‘All of them have. It doesn’t do for men to be at a loose end. Not men like them. The devil makes evil work.’

      ‘You’re talking nonsense now, Grandma.’

      Helen found a carton of long-life milk in the fridge and dropped a tiny amount into a cup. Then she poured the tea, making sure it was good and strong.

      Her grandmother had kept her old lino on the floor in the kitchen. She had protested so much when they had laid the new fitted carpet in the sitting room that her son-in-law, Andrew, had been forced to give in on this one point. She had said it was easy to keep clean. For Helen, looking at the blue lino now, it also seemed to be inseparable from the dark oak panelling and the bumpy walls and the whitewashed stone lintels over the doors.

      ‘He thinks more of them than me, anyway. That’s what I say. He’s proved it now.’

      ‘Let’s forget about it for a bit, Grandma. Enjoy your tea.’

      ‘You’re a good girl. You were always his favourite, Helen. Why don’t you talk to him?’

      ‘I will try,’ promised Helen.

      She stood by the old woman’s armchair, looking down on her white hair, so thin she could clearly see the pink scalp. She wanted to put her arm round her grandmother’s shoulders and hug her, to tell her it would be all right. But she knew that Gwen would be embarrassed, and in any case she wasn’t at all sure that it would be all right. A sudden surge of affection and frustration made her turn away.

      Then she saw her grandfather, a small figure way down at the bottom of the hillside path, just emerging from the trees at the foot of Raven’s Side. Whether it was something about the way he moved or the set of his shoulders, she couldn’t say. But she knew immediately that there was something badly wrong.

      Gwen cocked her head and peered at Helen, sensing the tension in her silence.

      ‘What is it, dear?’

      ‘Nothing, Grandma.’

      Helen unlatched the back door and stood on the whitewashed step. Suddenly she felt an irrational flood of memories streaming out of the old cottage behind her like coils of smoke escaping from a burning house. They were childhood memories, mostly of her grandfather – memories of him taking her by the hand as they walked on this same path to look at the fish jumping in the stream, or to pick daisies for a daisy chain; of her grandfather proudly sitting her on his knee as he showed her how he filled his pipe with tobacco and lit it with the long coloured-paper tapers. Fleeting smells flickered by her senses, passing in a second, yet each one with enough emotional power to fill her eyes with instant tears. They were the remembered smells of pipe smoke and Brylcreem and boot polish.

      Harry had always seemed to be polishing his shoes. He still did. It was one of those signs that she knew her grandfather by even as he had changed over the years. Without those signs, she thought, old age might have made him unrecognizable to the child who had known the strong, indestructible man in his fifties.

      It was in just the same way that, at this moment, she knew her grandfather only by his walk. It was a slow, purposeful walk, upright and solemn, the pace of a soldier at a funeral, bearing the coffin of a dead comrade.

      She heard the helicopter turn again and come straight towards her. Two faces stared down at her, expressionless behind their dark glasses. She felt as though the watching policemen could see straight into her heart. Their presence was somehow personal and intimate, and yet for ever too far away.

       3

      ‘OK, take a break.’

      The word came down the line from the uniformed sergeant at the opposite end from Ben Cooper. The men in blue overalls and wellingtons backed away from the line of search and sat on the tussocks of rough grass in a half-circle. Someone produced a flask of tea, someone else a bottle of orange juice.

      PC Garnett settled down comfortably, tossing his pole aside, taking off his cap to reveal receding hair cropped short at the sides. They said it was the helmets that made so many policemen start to lose their hair early. Cooper himself was conscious that one day he would start to see a thinning on either side of his forehead. Everybody told him that his fine brown hair was just like his father’s, who had never been anything but halfway bald, as far as he could remember. So far, though, he was still able to let a lock of hair fall across his forehead as he had always done. Fashions had tended to pass him by.

      Garnett smiled as he mopped his brow with his sleeve and eased himself into gossip mode. ‘So what about this new recruit in your department, Cooper? The new DC?’

      ‘I’ve not met him yet. I’ve only just come back from leave.’

      ‘It’s a “her”, mate, a “her”. Diane Fry, they call her.’

      ‘Right.’

      ‘She’s from Birmingham.’

      ‘I’ve not heard anything about her.