Cooper and Fry Crime Fiction Series Books 1-3: Black Dog, Dancing With the Virgins, Blood on the Tongue
Three novels featuring Derbyshire police detectives, DC Ben Cooper and DS Diane Fry from award-winning crime writer Stephen Booth.BLACK DOG – The long, hot Peak District summer came to an end when they found Laura Vernon's body. But for local policeman Ben Cooper the work has just begun. His community is hiding a young girl's killer and a past as dark as the Derbyshire night. It seems Laura was the keeper of secrets beyond her years and, in a case where no-one is innocent, everyone is a suspect…DANCING WITH VIRGINS – The ring of cairns known as the Nine Virgins has stood on the windswept moors of Derbyshire for centuries. Now, as winter closes in, a tenth figure is added – a body – and a modern tragedy is added to the dark legend that surrounds the stones. There's no shortage of suspects, but what DS Fry and DC Cooper lack is any kind of motive. As they search separately for answers, it seems the reasons for the strange behaviour of the moor's inhabitants may lie somewhere in the past, in a terrible crime yet to be discovered…BLOOD ON THE TONGUE – Marie's was not the only body lying undiscovered under the Peak District snow that January morning – nor the first. In 1945, the wreckage of a bomber was found, full of dead crewmen. The missing pilot was declared responsible and the only other survivor refuses to talk. When the pilot’s granddaughter arrives to uncover the truth, DC Ben Cooper is intrigued. To his boss, DS Fry, her colleague's interest is entirely unprofessional. But the past has a way of influencing the present and before either knows it, a long-cold trail in the dead of winter has grown dangerously hot …
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Cooper and Fry Crime Fiction Series: Books 1-3
Black DogDancing with VirginsBlood on the Tongue
STEPHEN BOOTH
CONTENTS
BLACK DOG
STEPHEN BOOTH
For Lesley
black dog: 1. melancholy, depression of spirits; ill humour. In some country places, when a child is sulking, it is said ‘the black dog is on his back’.
(Oxford English Dictionary)
CONTENTS
The sudden glare of colours beat painfully on the young woman’s eyes as she burst from the back door of the cottage and hurled herself into the brightness. She ran with her bare feet slapping on the stone flags and her hair streaming in red knots from her naked shoulders.
A harsh voice was cut off suddenly when the door slammed behind her, isolating her from the house. As she sprinted the length of the garden, she stirred the dust from a flagged path whose moisture had been sucked out and swallowed by the sun. A scarlet shrub rose trailed halfway across the path and a thorn slit the flesh of her arm as she brushed against it, but she hardly felt the pain.
‘Wait!’ she called.
But the old wooden garden gate had banged shut on its spring before she could reach it. She threw herself on to the top of the dry-stone wall, flinging out an arm to clutch at the sleeve of the old man on the other side. He was wearing a woollen jacket, despite the heat, and his arm felt stiff and sinewy under the cloth. The young woman scrabbled for a firmer grip, feeling his muscles slide against the bones under her fingers as if she had plunged her hand deep into his body.
Harry Dickinson paused, held back only by the hand that touched his arm, turning his face away from the appeal in his granddaughter’s eyes. The only change in his expression was a slight tightening in the creases at the sides of his mouth as his gaze slipped past Helen to the row of stone cottages. The stone walls and the white-mullioned back windows were at last starting to cool in the early-evening shade, but the sun still glared low over the slate roofs, bad-tempered and unrelenting. The pupils of Harry’s eyes narrowed to expressionless black points until he tilted his head sideways to turn the peak of his cap into the sun.
Helen could smell the impregnated odours of earth and sweat and animals in the wool, overlaid by the familiar scent of old tobacco smoke. ‘It’s no good walking away, you know. You’ll have to face it in the end. You can’t run away from things for ever.’
A loud juddering sound made Harry flinch as it passed across the valley behind him. For an hour now the noise had been moving backwards and forwards over the dense woodland that covered the slope all the way down to the valley bottom. The sound echoed against the opposite hillside like the beating wings of an angry bird, battering the gorse and heather and alarming the sheep scattered on the upper slopes.
‘We’ll understand,’ said Helen. ‘We’re your family. If only you’d tell us …’
The old man’s right arm was held out at an unnatural angle, creasing the sleeve of his jacket into an ugly concertina of fabric. She knew that Harry felt himself being physically tugged towards the woods along the valley side; his body was tense with the effort of resisting the pull. But emotionally he was being drawn in two directions. The conflicting pressures only seemed to strengthen and toughen him, setting his shoulders rigid and hardening the line of his jaw. His face held no possibility of turning away from whatever he had decided to do.
‘Granddad? Please.’
The sharp edges of the stone wall were digging into her thighs through her shorts, and the skin of the palm on her left hand stung where she had scraped it on the jagged topping stones. There had been a sudden, desperate rush, a moment of overwhelming emotion, and now she didn’t know what to say. She felt the impotence of the conventions that surrounded the communication between one adult and another, even when they were members of the same family. She shared with her grandfather an inborn shortage of the words she needed to be able to express her feelings to those closest to her.
‘Grandma is very upset,’ said Helen. ‘But she’ll calm down in a minute. She’s worried about you.’
Helen had never needed many words before, not with Harry. He had always known exactly what she wanted, had always responded to the message in her eyes, to the shy, adoring smile, to the gleam of sun on a wave of flame-coloured hair, and to a small, trusting hand slipped into his own. She was no longer that child, and hadn’t been for years. A teacher learned a different way of communicating, a calculated performance that was all surface gloss and scored no marks for feeling. Harry still understood, though. He knew what she wanted him to do now. But it was too hard for him, a thing completely against a lifetime’s habit.
Gradually the juddering noise was fading to the edge of audibility, muffled to a dull rattle by the trees and the folds of the land. Its temporary absence released the subtler sounds of the evening – a current of air stirring the beech trees, a cow moaning for the bull across the valley, a skylark spilling its song over the purple heather. Harry cocked an ear, as if listening for a voice that no one else could hear. It was a voice that deepened the sadness in his eyes but stiffened his back and tautened the clench of his fists and his grip on the loop of worn black leather held in one hand.
