7

Diane Fry and Gavin Murfin had arrived outside a modern office building made of steel, concrete blocks and aluminium cladding. It stood in the middle of a business park on the southern outskirts of Edendale, constructed on what had once been the flood plain of the River Eden.

‘This is it,’ said Murfin. ‘Eden Valley Software Solutions. Have you seen all that smoked glass and fancy furniture? It looks like a brothel.’

‘You must know some high-class brothels in Edendale,’ said Fry.

‘OK. A hairdresser’s, then.’

As Murfin got out of the car, Fry glanced suspiciously at a paper bag he had left on the ledge over the fascia.

‘What’s in the bag, Gavin?’ she said.

‘Don’t worry. It’s for later,’ he said.

‘Much later, I hope.’

Fry had taken her Peugeot to be valeted only two days before, and it was largely because she could no longer stand the debris left by Gavin Murfin when he had been a passenger. There had been crumbs and sticky traces of all kinds ground into her carpet and upholstery. In fact, the man at the valeting company had asked her how many children she had. He had imagined her to be a mum who got lumbered with a car full of whining toddlers on the nursery school run every day. It had been embarrassing, and it was Murfin’s fault.

As soon as they announced themselves at Eden Valley Software Solutions, Alex Dearden emerged from a corridor to meet them in the reception area. He was wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt with a designer logo on it that was so small Fry would have had to rest her nose on his left nipple to read it. Dearden’s face was slim and fine-boned, but his looks were spoiled by two little pouches at the sides of his mouth, which made him look a bit like an angry hamster. His beard might have disguised the effect, except that current fashion dictated he could only have a goatee.

‘You have to sign in and get ID badges,’ said Dearden. ‘Sorry about that. Security, you know.’

‘That’s quite all right, sir,’ said Fry. ‘We’re lucky that you’re open at all on a Saturday.’

‘Oh, it’s seven days a week for some of us here at the moment.’

When they had signed in, Dearden went to a solid-looking door and stood with his back carefully turned towards them as he keyed numbers into a keypad. The door clicked, and he pulled it open. A burst of noise came down the corridor – voices talking and laughing, someone shouting, a printer humming.

‘It’s just like going into our custody suite back at the station,’ said Murfin. ‘I guess they don’t want your inmates escaping and running amok on the streets either?’

Dearden laughed politely. ‘Actually, we’re thinking of switching over to fingerprint-recognition technology,’ he said. ‘Much more secure. Code numbers are too easy to get hold of.’

‘Absolutely. We can’t fault you for your security measures.’

‘You have to be careful,’ said Dearden. ‘There’s a lot of crime about.’

‘Have you ever had any problem with break-ins here?’

‘Actually, no. We had a bit of vandalism a while ago. Somebody broke the window in the front of reception. We’ve had reinforced glass put in since then. They scrawled graffiti on the outside wall, too. Something about Manchester United FC, all spelled wrong.’

‘That doesn’t sound like Edendale’s gang of notorious computer software thieves, anyway.’

Dearden stopped. ‘My God, who are they?’

‘Just joking,’ said Fry. But she saw that Dearden wasn’t amused.

‘There’s an awful lot of money tied up in what we’re developing here,’ he said. ‘Unbelievable amounts of money. There’s no way of calculating how much.’

‘I’m sorry, sir.’

‘You don’t appreciate what we’re developing here. It’s really ground-breaking stuff. If we roll some of these programs out for all platforms –’

‘There’s no need to explain,’ said Fry. ‘That wasn’t what we came about.’

But Dearden wanted to explain. Or at least, he wanted to talk about a subject that had nothing to do with a visit by the police.

‘We’ve actually used top consultant psychologists in the development of this concept,’ said Dearden. ‘That’s how serious we are about it.’

‘Mmm.’

Dearden had led them down the corridor and into a small conference room, where there was a long table, a flipchart on a stand, and a projection screen against the end wall. It looked like a million other meeting rooms that Fry had been in for briefings and training sessions. She looked around for an overhead projector to go with the screen. But of course presentations here would be done in PowerPoint from someone’s laptop.

To her surprise, Alex Dearden sat at the head of the table as if he were about to chair a meeting. Fry had expected to be facing him across the table. This way suited her, though. It meant she and Murfin could be on either side of him. Dearden couldn’t concentrate on both of them at once.

‘It’s about Emma Renshaw,’ said Fry, taking a chair.

‘Emma? But that’s a long time ago,’ said Dearden. ‘It was all dealt with a long time ago.’

‘It wasn’t exactly dealt with, sir. Emma has never been found.’

‘Of course, I know that. And it’s been very distressing for all of us who knew her.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘But, I mean, I told the police everything I knew at the time, which wasn’t very much. It was all gone through over and over, though it didn’t do any good. Tragic though it is for her family, I think there comes a point when we have to put these things behind us and move on, don’t you?’

Fry stared at him. She had to remind herself how old Alex Dearden was. Twenty-two, according to his file. But he sounded like someone thirty years older. He sounded like a respectable middle-aged citizen irritated at being pestered over something that had happened long ago in his past, when he had been a different person entirely.

‘You knew Emma from a very young age, I believe,’ said Fry.

‘For ever. We lived in the same village. In Withens. Do you know it at all?’

‘I haven’t been there yet.’

‘Well, when you see it, you’ll understand. There’s nothing to the place. Children of around the same age couldn’t help but know each other. We went to the same junior school, in Tintwistle. And later on, to the same secondary school, too. But our parents were on friendly terms anyway, so we were thrown together a lot.’

‘And after school, you even ended up going to the same university.’

‘No,’ said Dearden. ‘You have that wrong. I went to Birmingham University. Emma was at UCE, where she attended the art school. That’s the University of Central England. It’s a former polytechnic.’

‘Right.’ Fry looked at Alex Dearden and saw the little superior smile. He thought he had the better of her now, and was feeling more relaxed.

‘But our universities were close enough that we thought it might be a good idea to pitch in together and rent a house,’ he said. ‘It beats being thrown in with a load of strangers. You don’t know who you’re going to have to live with for three or four years when you do that. It’s madness. At least I knew Emma wouldn’t be too much trouble. And our parents thought it was a good idea, too. They put the money up front for the deposit, of course.’

‘Of course,’ said Fry. She had never been to university herself, and had never had any parents either willing or able to put the money up to rent a house for her. But she nodded and smiled to encourage him.

‘And your other housemates – one was Neil Granger.’

‘Ah, well, he’s a bit of an odd character, is Neil.’

‘Odd?’

‘Well, don’t get me wrong. He’s OK really. But he didn’t mix with us so much back in Withens, you know, because he was one of the Oxleys.’

‘I’m sorry? Could you explain?’

Dearden shifted on his seat and his smile faded. He glanced at Gavin Murfin, unnerved by the silent one, as they always were.

‘You’ll have to find out about the Oxleys,’ said Dearden. ‘They’re a bit of a rough lot, always in trouble. We never normally had anything to do with them. Actually, I thought you would know of them already – they’ve all got criminal records, of course.’

He looked at Murfin again, who stared back at him blankly, in the way that only Murfin could. Holding his gaze, Murfin began to work his jaws a bit, as if he were chewing gum. But Fry knew that he hated gum. He said it was like going out with a prick-teaser – it promised to be food, but never was.

She looked down at the notes she’d brought. ‘I think I have heard the name Oxley, now you mention it,’ she said.

Dearden looked relieved. He was on safe ground again, talking to people who were on the same wavelength. He was uncomfortable about his attitude to the Oxleys, and he didn’t like having to justify himself. Fry filed away that piece of information for future reference.

‘Neil Granger is some kind of cousin of the Oxleys,’ said Dearden. ‘There’s Neil and his brother Philip, and they were brought up with the Oxleys. But he’s a decent enough bloke, Neil. When you’re talking to him, you can forget he’s an Oxley.’

‘He was at the same school with you and Emma? In the same class?’

‘Yes.’

‘And which university did he go to? Birmingham or Central England?’ She shuffled her papers. ‘I’m afraid I don’t seem to have that information, either.’

Fry looked at Alex Dearden with a hopeful expression, and was pleased to see the complacent smile was back.

‘Neither,’ he said. ‘Neil wasn’t at uni.’

‘But he shared this house with you in, where was it, Bearwood? Why did he go all that way to share a house? I don’t understand.’

‘It was a bit of a coincidence, really. At first, when we went down there, it was just the three of us – me, Emma and her friend Debbie, who was on the same course. The two girls were big pals, you know, and they went everywhere together. But there was a fourth bedroom in the house, and after a while we started to think we’d have to try to find someone else to share. To be honest, the rent was a bit of a struggle for the three of us. You don’t appreciate what expenses you’re going to have, you know – books and all that. Emma and Debbie had a lot of equipment to buy for their course work.’

‘And there would be socializing, I suppose?’ said Fry.

Dearden looked at her suspiciously. ‘Why do you suppose that?’

‘Well – student life. There’s a lot of socializing, isn’t there? Or so I’m told.’

‘A bit. But if you have any sense, you don’t go mad. Not if you want to get through your course with good grades, which we all did.’

‘I see. But life was proving a bit expensive, all the same?’

‘Yes. Things we hadn’t budgeted for – Council Tax, electricity, the phone bill. You know.’

‘Yes, I do know.’

‘Anyway, it was around then that Neil got in touch. He said he had a job to go to in Birmingham. It was a two-year contract on a development project on the inner ring road, as I remember. Neil wanted to know if we’d let him rent the other room in the house. Our parents weren’t too happy, but we talked about it between us, and we decided to go for it.’

‘Because he was somebody you knew, rather than a stranger?’

Dearden hesitated. ‘Well, the thing that really swung it was the salary he was earning. He was getting good money on this contract, and the rest of us were just students living on loans. So we thought he’d be useful.’

Fry wanted to do something to remove that smile now, but she needed to keep Alex Dearden on her side. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Murfin chewing more quickly, as if he had found something with an unpleasant taste in his mouth that he wanted to spit out.

‘Mr Dearden,’ said Fry, ‘did it ever occur to you that Neil Granger might have a particular reason for wanting to rent the room in your house?’

‘It was just convenience, I think. It can be quite hard to find reasonable rented accommodation, especially in a city with so many students.’

‘No, what I meant was – do you think he might have had an additional reason? A personal reason.’

Dearden still looked puzzled.

‘An interest in Emma Renshaw, perhaps?’

He raised his eyebrows then. ‘Good heavens. Neil? No, I think you’re wrong.’

He didn’t quite say ‘again’, but he might as well have done.

‘Thank you, sir. In that case, can you tell me about any boyfriends that Emma had during the time she was in the West Midlands? I’m sure she must have had some, despite what you said about the lack of socializing.’

Dearden shook his head. ‘There were a few boys Emma and Debbie talked about sometimes. I didn’t take any notice, really. When the two girls went out, they always seemed to go together. So I’m afraid I don’t know if there were any particular boys involved in their lives. Well, all right, I expect there were. But I’m sure Neil wasn’t one of them, Sergeant.’

‘Did Neil have his own friends while he was working in Birmingham?’

‘Yes, I expect so. Some of his workmates from the development project, I imagine.’

‘You don’t seem too sure.’

‘I didn’t ask him. I was busy. I was working hard for my degree. It wasn’t my concern where Neil Granger went in the evenings.’

‘Or Emma either?’

‘Well, no.’

‘Despite the fact that she’d been a friend of yours since you were very young?’

‘I don’t see what that has to do with it.’

‘I just thought you might have shown a bit more interest in what she was doing. A bit more concern for who she might have been getting involved with.’

‘Emma was OK,’ said Dearden confidently. ‘She was sensible enough.’

‘OK? A large city can be a dangerous place for a young woman away from home for the first time. There are all kinds of people she might have come into contact with.’

‘In Bearwood? The place was just boring, if you ask me. Not dangerous at all.’

‘But Mr Dearden,’ said Fry, ‘your friend Emma Renshaw never came home from Bearwood.’

Dearden stopped smiling and started to fidget in his chair. ‘I went through all this before, two years ago,’ he said. ‘I had the police on to me, and I had her parents after me about it constantly. I don’t know why Emma didn’t come home. I don’t know where she went.’

‘Are Emma’s parents still in touch with you?’

He laughed. ‘Every bloody week. One day, I’m going to take out an injunction against them for harassment. I mean it. I know they’re upset about Emma disappearing, and all that. But if you ask me, it’s turned their minds completely. They’re absolutely unreasonable.’

‘In what way, sir?’

‘Well, Mrs Renshaw phones me every single week to ask if I’ve seen Emma. And every time I talk to her, it’s as if she can’t remember having phoned me last week with the same question. And the week before, and the week before that. Every call she makes, it’s as if she thinks she’s asking me for the first time.’

Dearden leaned forward towards Fry. She could almost make out the designer logo on his T-shirt, but not quite.

‘And I know she’s going to keep phoning and phoning me,’ he said, ‘until I give her the answer she wants, which I can’t do. There isn’t even any point in changing my number at home, because she would only start phoning me here. And that would be a nightmare.’

‘It must be very difficult for her,’ said Fry.

‘What about me? It’s difficult for me, too. Isn’t there anything you could do about it? Couldn’t you have a word with her? It’s getting to be a real nuisance.’

‘OK, I’ll mention it, sir.’

Dearden sighed. ‘Yeah. A fat lot of good it will do.’

‘And Neil Granger?’

‘Neil again? What about him?’

‘Are you still in contact with him?’

‘Not really.’

‘When did you speak to him last?’

Dearden shrugged. ‘It’d be a few months ago. I was visiting my parents, and I called in the Quiet Shepherd in Withens for a quick drink on the way back. Neil was in there, with some of his relations. The Oxleys, you know. So we didn’t say much to each other. It was just “hi”. There was no conversation.’

‘And neither of you mentioned Emma, I suppose?’

‘No,’ said Dearden. ‘Neither of us mentioned Emma.’

‘This software you’re developing …’ said Fry.

‘It’s highly confidential at the moment.’

‘Can you give me a clue?’

‘Well, imagine this. The human brain can run routines and recurrent actions, just like a computer does. But occasionally, you get minor damage to the frontal lobes of the brain, which is the system governing attention. Then actions can still be triggered automatically, but out of sequence, or can’t be stopped. The psychologists say it’s the penalty we pay for being able to automatize our actions.’

Fry looked at Murfin, warning him not to laugh. She hoped that Alex Dearden wasn’t actually a robot but could be stopped at the appropriate moment.

‘It’s a bit like having a dodgy auto-pilot,’ he said. ‘For the psychologists, it helps them to understand human fallibility. From our point of view, it helps us to design the technology to allow for human error. It’s why computer programs won’t let you close a document without deciding whether you want to save it or not,’ he said. ‘But we’re going to take that concept a whole lot further. A whole lot further. I really can’t tell you any more than that.’

‘Or you’d have to kill me?’ said Fry.

‘Sorry?’

‘Never mind.’

When they got out of Eden Valley Software Solutions, Gavin Murfin stopped in the car park and pretended to spit out the imaginary gum he’d been chewing. He trod it into the tarmac and ground the toe of his shoe on it until he was satisfied.

‘Feel better now?’ said Fry.

‘Not until I get a piece of that pie inside me.’

‘Not in my car, you don’t, Gavin.’

‘I’ll be careful of the crumbs, honest.’

‘Do you know how much it cost me to get this car valeted?’

‘Look, I’ll not even take it out of the bag.’

‘No.’

Murfin’s face crumpled, and he sighed deeply. ‘Where to next, then?’

‘We need to speak to Neil Granger, but I tried to phone him, and he’s not at home.’

‘Does that mean we call it a day then?’

‘Yes. Until tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow? It’s Sunday tomorrow, Diane.’

‘A good day for a drive to Withens, then.’

Murfin sniffed. ‘There’s no good day for a drive to Withens.’

Ben Cooper had his hand on the gate, and had been about to lift the latch. But he stopped at the sound of the voice. A man stood near the end house of Waterloo Terrace, watching Cooper carefully. He had been standing quite still, so that Cooper, who had been more interested in the state of the gardens, hadn’t even noticed him. The man was wearing a dark suit and a white shirt, but no tie, and his suit trousers were tucked into black wellington boots. Cooper guessed him to be in his fifties. He had a balding head and some strands of sandy hair that stood up at his temples and moved in the breeze. But his hair was the only thing about him that moved. Even his eyes were quite still, fixed firmly on Cooper. His hands were hanging by his sides, and he carried no weapon of any kind, yet still managed to convey a clear threat.

Cooper felt slightly nervous as he reached for his warrant card, worried that the movement might be taken the wrong way. Maybe he was becoming paranoid, but he had begun to feel that there were other pairs of eyes watching him, too, from somewhere.

‘Detective Constable Cooper, Edendale Police,’ he said. ‘Who am I speaking to?’

The man didn’t reply. His expression shifted subtly from suspicion to contempt, as if a detective ought to know whose house he was visiting.

‘Are you Mr Oxley?’ said Cooper.

‘What do you want?’

Cooper realized that he would have to read the answers in the man’s eyes. This was almost certainly Mr Oxley. Lucas, presumably. The father of Scott, Ryan, Jake and maybe of Sean.

‘If you’re Mr Lucas Oxley, I’d like to talk to you.’

‘Don’t come any further, I said.’

Cooper had automatically begun to lift the latch of the gate again, assuming that once he had made verbal contact, he would be allowed to enter. But he was wrong.

‘What I have to ask you, sir, might not be something you want everyone to hear. Not something you’d want to shout out to your neighbours.’

‘That’s perfectly all right. I’ve no intention of shouting.’

‘I need to ask you –’

‘You don’t need anything. Not from me.’

Cooper was sure he could see movement through one of the downstairs windows of the second house, number two. The curtains were open, but the interior was too dark to be sure if there was anyone there, without staring too hard.

‘You are Mr Oxley, aren’t you?’ said Cooper.

‘Happen I am.’

‘I’ve just been to the church, where there’s been a break-in.’

To Cooper’s surprise, Oxley simply turned on his heel and walked away down the passage between the two end houses. The strands of hair bounced around his ears for a moment until he had disappeared into the shadows.

Cooper opened the gate and took a few steps after him.

‘Mr Oxley!’ he called.

Then he stopped. Something had made the back of his neck prickle uneasily. He stood where he was, a couple of yards along the path from the gate, and he looked at the house. There were certainly faces peering through the windows. Two, three or four of them. He could see their eyes watching his movements. They were like a family glued to a television screen, waiting for the next exciting moment, another car chase or a fight scene. They didn’t look worried, or frightened. They looked expectant.

Yet now that Lucas Oxley had disappeared, there was almost complete silence in the front gardens of Waterloo Terrace. Almost, but not quite. Cooper’s ears caught a faint click, then a strange skittering noise approaching from the far end of the ginnel.

At the last moment, Cooper turned and ran for the gate. He knew he didn’t have time to open it, so he dived at the wall and vaulted it just as a huge, shaggy-haired Alsatian burst from the arched entrance of the ginnel and hurtled down the path towards him.

Cooper stood gasping in the roadway on the other side of the wall, ready to run for his car. But nothing happened. The dog was utterly silent. It hadn’t barked once, or even let out a snarl. It had made no sound as it went for him, except for the skittering of its claws on the concrete of the ginnel. But it seemed to have halted the moment Cooper was on the other side of the gate, and therefore out of its territory.

Cooper looked up at the house, expecting to see satisfied expressions on the faces behind the window. But they weren’t satisfied yet. They were still expectant.

Then a dark shape flashed across Cooper’s field of vision, and a set of sharp white teeth clashed together a few inches from his face. He caught a brief glimpse of a wildly rolling eye as the Alsatian threw itself into the air and lunged its head above the gate in its desperation to sink its fangs into him. He stepped back, sweating. If he had leaned over the gate to see where the dog was, several inches of skin would have been missing from his face by now.

But it was the silence of the dog that was the most terrifying. It was the silence of an animal trained to attack and injure, rather than simply to frighten.

‘Mr Oxley!’ he called. ‘I’m a police officer. This isn’t an acceptable way to behave, you know.’

Silence. And now even the faces had disappeared, satisfied at last. Perhaps this was the favourite form of entertainment in Waterloo Terrace.

Cooper took a few deep breaths and moved several paces back from the gate. He wondered what his next move should be. He had a strong feeling that he’d made a stupid tactical mistake. He hadn’t been thinking about what he was doing, or why. As a result, he’d put his own safety at risk.

It wasn’t something he should admit to, if he could avoid it. He was aware that there had been incidents in the recent past that had already put that question mark over his actions, in some people’s minds. DS Diane Fry would take pleasure in marking it down in his personnel record, he was sure.

Follow procedure, he had been told. But sometimes it was hard. One day, he was going to fail to follow procedure, and that would be the end.

‘Are you OK, Ben?’ PC Udall was looking at him from the road, a slightly puzzled expression on her face. Cooper became aware that he probably didn’t look too good. He had been up since well before dawn, and had dressed in his most casual clothes for the raid, which was already a couple of hours ago. He probably hadn’t looked too good to Lucas Oxley, either. It was his own fault that he had nearly lost some skin to Mr Oxley’s dog.

‘Yes, I’m fine.’

‘I thought we’d lost you.’

‘You nearly did just then. Are we ready to go?’

‘Ready when you are.’

As he waved Tracy Udall off from the car park, Ben Cooper poked around for a CD to play on the way back to Edendale in his Toyota. He found a recent Levellers album and was pleased by the title, Green Blade Rising.

On the way out of the village, he noticed two men with a tractor and a length of rope near the pool in the river. Another man was standing in the water in PVC waders. He was already pretty well covered in duckweed as he struggled to attach the rope to one of the boards that floated on the surface of the pool.

‘Strange,’ said Cooper to himself. And he tapped his fingers to the Levellers as he drove out of Withens.