Blind to the Bones (56 page)

Passengers were starting to squeeze past Cooper to get on the bus as he stood talking to the driver. He became aware that a couple of old ladies had sat down near the front of the bus and were listening to his conversation, with their hands folded on their laps and their eyes bright with interest.

‘Can you drop me off there?' he said.

‘Where?'

‘Wembley Avenue.'

‘'Course. But you'll have to wait while I finish getting passengers on.'

Cooper sat down opposite the old ladies, who nudged each other and eyed him eagerly. He looked out of the window at the town hall, desperate not to meet their gaze. He had a horrible premonition of what they were going to say to him, given a minimum of encouragement.

The façade of the town hall boasted four decorative pillars. They stood on ornate bases, which had been partially obscured by the disabled ramps and handrails installed a few years ago to make the place accessible. The building had been edged with decorative stones that had been carved with a wavy pattern. There were so many of them that they were distinctive, and local people had nicknamed their town hall ‘The Wavy House'.

He found he was looking at the noticeboard on the wall of the town hall. The building hosted far more than just council meetings. There were notices announcing line-dancing classes, a slimming club, the WI market, Darby and Joan sessions, bridge nights, a book fair, and t'ai chi lessons. He tried to imagine the old ladies doing t'ai chi, just to keep himself amused.

Finally, the bus set off and wound its way through the streets of Edendale town centre before emerging on to Greaves Road and going north. Cooper tried to appear interested in every single thing that they passed. The old ladies gathered their belongings and got off, casting reluctant glances back.

‘Next stop Wembley Avenue,' said the driver.

Cooper stood up and waited by the doors. ‘Thanks a lot. You've been very helpful.'

‘No trouble. Are you sure you don't want his name?'

Cooper paused on the step of the bus as the doors folded open. ‘Whose name?'

‘The chap with the walking stick, of course. The one you've been asking about.'

‘You know his name?'

‘'Course I do. He's an OAP. He has to show me his bus pass every time he gets on. His name's Jim Revill.'

‘I was going to walk up and down Wembley Avenue knocking on people's doors asking for a man with a stick,' said Cooper.

‘Well,' said the driver, ‘that would have been a bit daft, wouldn't it?'

J
im Revill was totally baffled to find Ben Cooper standing on his doorstep. It was obvious that at first he didn't recognize him at all. Cooper was used to that feeling himself. He had often seen someone walking down the street and felt sure that he knew them, but from an entirely different context. The woman who served him in the petrol station twice a week was very familiar, but she was unrecognizable when she had come out from behind the counter and was dressed up to the nines, having a drink with her boyfriend in Yates's Wine Bar. It was a bit unsettling. People should stay in their contexts, safe and familiar.

‘Detective Constable Cooper, Edendale Police,' he said.

‘Eh?'

‘Sunday mornings at Somerfield's supermarket.'

‘Ah! Chinese meals for one.'

‘Yes,' said Cooper, with a sigh. ‘That's me.'

‘But what are you doing here? This is where I live.'

‘Yes, I know, Mr Revill.'

‘Did you follow me?'

‘In a manner of speaking.'

Mr Revill's face took on a stubborn look. ‘I don't let people in without seeing their identification and checking up on them.'

‘Quite right.'

Cooper showed his warrant card again, and had to wait while Mr Revill phoned the station. But while the old man made the call, he left the front door open, so that Cooper could easily have walked into his house and pulled the phone right out of the wall, if he had wanted to commit a robbery.

But, to be honest, there was very little that looked worth stealing. The shopping bag on wheels stood against the wall near the door. Its handle had worn a bare patch in the wallpaper and its wheels had scuffed the skirting board. There were some cardboard boxes stacked against the wall further along the passage. According to the printing on them, they had once contained tins of cat food and baked beans, though presumably not any more – not unless Mr Revill was stocking up to survive an emergency. If those were the extent of his supplies, Cooper thought the cat would be all right, if it didn't mind a permanent diet of Whiskas beef and lamb. But Mr Revill would be in danger of spontaneous combustion.

‘They say you're all right.'

‘Thank goodness for that.'

‘So is it about the burglaries that you've come?'

‘Well, yes.'

‘I didn't see anybody. But I've got some registration numbers.'

‘You have? Suspicious vehicles? Have you passed them on to the station?'

‘They weren't interested,' said Mr Revill. ‘Like I told you, nobody bothers coming out for us.'

‘Can I have a look?'

‘In the front room.'

Cooper followed him through a doorway and into a room full of furniture. A dining table and four chairs dominated the space, and there was hardly enough room to walk around them, because of the sideboard and display cabinets against the walls. And there were more boxes in the far corner. Fairy Liquid and Utterly Butterly.

‘Here. I keep a notebook by the window, so that I can write them down straight away. Otherwise, I would forget them, and that would be no use to anybody.'

Cooper looked at the notebook he was offered. He saw a page of car registration numbers, written in large letters in a shaky hand. He turned over a page. There were more numbers. He flicked through the rest of the notebook. Every page was covered in registration numbers. There were hundreds of them.

‘These are suspicious vehicles?' he said.

‘Yes.'

‘What makes them suspicious?'

‘They're strangers. I know the cars that come down here regular. There's nothing wrong with my memory. Is it any use to you?'

‘Not unless I had a registration number I wanted to compare them to. They aren't even dated. You haven't written down what day you saw them.'

‘Well, there's a page for each day.'

‘For which days, though?'

‘Every day. I start a new page each morning,' said Mr Revill, as if forced to explain it to an idiot. ‘Like a diary. You know what a diary is.'

‘Right. So I could work my way backwards to say, the sixteenth of last month?'

‘Today's the second. So you just turn back sixteen pages, see?'

Cooper flipped back. There were ten numbers on the page he was looking at. ‘I don't suppose you can remember what make or model any of these were? Or the colour? Or how many people were in them?'

‘No. It never occurred to me to write those things down. I thought the police went off registration numbers. Can't you do a check on the computer, and see if one of them is stolen?'

‘Yes, I suppose so.'

‘I didn't expect to have to tell you your job, lad. But I suppose you're young yet. Still learning, are you?'

Cooper copied down the numbers. At least there were only ten of them. It would be easier to make a match.

‘You've been very helpful, sir,' he said.

‘Are we going to catch some burglars? Send a gang of them to prison? Can I tell Mrs Smith at number 16? She says she won't come out again until they've all been locked up.'

‘It's a bit early to say that, I'm afraid. But we'll be working on it.'

‘Aye. We'll not hold our breath, then.'

B
en Cooper had all the registration numbers through the PNC by the communications room. He was aware that he was spending a lot of time on this hunch, especially as he'd had to wait for a bus back into town. He wouldn't have been able to justify it very easily, if he was asked. So the best thing to do was just keep quiet about it, unless it produced results.

As he anticipated, several of the vehicles turned out to belong to local residents, or were registered to companies which might be expected to have a legitimate reason for visiting homes on the Southwoods estate. One was actually in the name of the council housing department. So Mr Revill wasn't too choosy about where his suspicions were directed. Or perhaps he was.

Cooper managed to sift the vehicles down to four that were from out of the area. Two of them were vans, which were of particular interest where burglaries were involved. But he remembered the nature of the items that were being stolen – all small and easily concealed.

Almost the last vehicle he did a PNC check on was an Audi. He was starting to lose interest by now, wondering whether he should leave the rest until later, perhaps tomorrow. There were more productive things to be doing. But then he finally hit a name he recognized.

‘No, that isn't possible. Can you check again?'

‘That's the name and address of the last registered owner.'

‘It just isn't possible,' said Cooper. ‘Emma Renshaw has been missing for two years.'

W
hen Ben Cooper got into the CID room he found Diane Fry alone. She had her elbows on her desk, and she was staring out of the window, as if she were wondering where the rest of the world had gone. Cooper was tired, too, but Fry looked exhausted. He glanced at her cautiously as he went through his messages. There was lots of stuff he didn't want to know about. But no invitations from the Oxleys to call for tea. What a surprise.

‘Diane, something strange happened this morning. I did a check on some vehicles that were seen at the time of the Southwoods Grange break-in.'

Fry turned her head towards the sound of his voice, but seemed to be looking straight through him.

‘One of the cars turned out to be registered to Emma Renshaw. The break-in was two weeks ago. I wondered what happened there.'

‘I don't know.'

Cooper watched her for a few minutes. She didn't seem to have been listening to anything he said. Something was definitely wrong.

‘Had a bad time with the Renshaws?' he said finally.

‘What?'

Fry seemed to wake from her dream and stared at him. He thought she genuinely hadn't even noticed him until then.

‘Oh, the Renshaws. Yeah.'

‘In a way, you know, it must be a relief to them,' said Cooper. ‘After all this time, it ought to help them a bit to know for certain that Emma's dead, instead of wondering about it for ever. At least now they can get on with their lives.'

‘Mmm. Yeah.'

Cooper realized that she was avoiding his eye. There was more to her manner than just a harrowing session with bereaved parents.

‘What is it, Diane? What's wrong?'

She looked at him properly for the first time since he had come into the room. Her eyes really did look weary. Weary, and baffled. Like someone who had thought the end was in sight, but now had to start all over again rolling the boulder back up the hill.

‘We got the preliminary report from the pathologist,' she said. ‘On the remains Alton found in the churchyard.'

‘It's going to take time to get a definite identification on the remains, I suppose.'

‘Yes, but we have some information.'

‘Cause of death?'

‘No.'

‘No – that was too much to hope for, I suppose. Maybe later, then. They can probably do some tests –'

Fry pushed the report towards him impatiently. ‘You don't need to read that far. Just take a look at the first section.'

Cooper started to read. There was some introductory stuff, then the initial assessment of the state of the remains – skeletalized, obviously. And a mention of a missing finger joint on the left hand, which made Cooper frown. Then there was a whole list of measurements – the cephalic index of the skull, its width and length, the dimensions of the nasal aperture. From the growing ends of bones and the gaps between the bones of the cranium, age had been estimated at twenty-four. Then the report moved on to a lot of stuff about pelvic width and something called the ischium-pubis index. It said the jawbone was pointed, the nasal aperture long and narrow, with rectangular eye orbits and a pronounced brow ridge.

He stopped reading.

‘Diane –'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘It isn't Emma Renshaw. The corpse from the vicar's churchyard is male.'

‘But the Renshaws …'

‘I know,' she said. ‘The bloody Renshaws. Howard Renshaw held the skull in his own hands. He recognized the shape of it, he said. He knew the skull of his own daughter instantly. Oh yes, and all the stuff about drying her hair. I actually believed him.'