Blind to the Bones
A death in the family-from-hell bring Detectives Fry and Cooper to a remote and unfriendly rural community in their fourth psychological thriller.'And as it grew dark, Withens became almost entirely silent. Except for the screaming.'A small village in the Peak District, Withens is troubled by theft and vandalism, mostly generated by local family-from-hell, the Oxleys. Now it is the focus of a murder investigation – a man's body has been found on the bleak moors nearby, and the man is an Oxley. To crack the case, DC Ben Cooper must break open the delinquent clan.His boss, DS Diane Fry, is also in Withens. Grim new evidence has turned up in the case of a missing student but her parents refuse to believe she could be dead.The darkness in Withens's heart is growing. And things are only going to get nastier…
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Blind to the Bones
STEPHEN BOOTH
HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain in 2003 by HarperCollins
This edition published in 2010.
Copyright © Stephen Booth 2003
Stephen Booth asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Source ISBN: 9780007130672
Ebook Edition © April 2012 ISBN: 9780007369218 Version: 2015-04-29
For Tom Jefferson
Iâm grateful to John and Von Morley, and members of Black Pig, for their help during the writing of this book. Although the Border Rats are fictional, the Border tradition exists in many parts of Britain.
Contents
Friday
As soon as he opened the door, he could hear the screaming. It ripped through the damp air and shrieked in the yews. It echoed from the gravestones and died against the walls. It was like the sound of an animal, dying in pain. Yet this sound was human.
With every breath he took, Derek Alton seemed to draw the noise into his own lungs with the air, until something like an answering scream came from deep inside him. The asthmatic wheeze of his inflamed air passages was so high pitched that his ears couldnât locate its direction, but identified it as a noise that came from the air around him. The pain in his upper chest told him where that noise came from.
And Alton knew where the screaming came from, too.
With shaking fingers, he brushed some of the dust from his sleeve. The exertion had made his collar stick to the back of his neck, and a few strands of hair had fallen over his forehead, where they lay like barbed wire on his skin. He rubbed at a fresh scratch on his knuckles, but managed only to smear a streak of blood across the back of his hand. He could taste dust in his mouth, too â old dust, the debris of years, stirred into the air by a random act of violence.
The screaming reminded Alton of the shriek of agony he had once heard from a rat, when a terrier had flushed it from its nest in a barn and its back had been broken under a farmerâs spade. The dying rat had squealed with its last strength, as its legs kicked and its pale claws clutched and uncoiled in the dry earth.
Now he waited, expecting to hear other noises. At first, there was only the stirring of the breeze in the yews and the drip of rainwater from the ivy on the church walls. But gradually he began to distinguish something else â a rhythmic thudding. It reverberated inside a room some distance away, well beyond the first houses on the road into Withens. It was like a ritual drumbeat, folding over on itself and creating multiple layers of sound. He shivered as he recognized the undertones of menace, which spoke of imminent death.
Then there was a burst of laughter somewhere in the village, followed by the slam of a door. A female voice shouted something that Alton couldnât make out. It was just one sentence, half a dozen words, and then the voice had gone. Further away, a ewe called to its lambs on the slopes of Withens Moor, where the hefted flocks still roamed their territories on the heather and peat bog. Alton had seen Withens Moor. He had seen Black Hill and Hey Moss, too. And he knew the moors themselves were dying.
Death had been on Derek Altonâs mind all day. He had awoken with a jolt in the early hours of the morning, panicking that he might have disturbed Caroline with one of his bad dreams. But as soon as he opened his eyes and stared at the faint light on the bedroom curtains, he realized that his mind had been banging back and forth like a pendulum, swinging between the distant dualities of darkness and light, winter and spring, death and renewal. He might have been thinking of the end of winter and the first invasion of spring. But, mostly, he was sure he had been thinking of death.
Alton heard footsteps approaching through the aisle of the church. There were no carpets in St Asaphâs, and his visitor was wearing heavy work boots that thumped on the stone flags.
