The Kill Call

bookmark stuck into the pages to show where he’d got up to. About a third of the way through, he judged.
    But wait. It wasn’t really a bookmark at all. When he’d closed the book last night, too tired to keep the lines of text from blurring in front of his eyes, he’d picked up the first thing that came to hand. It was a habit he’d developed as a child, and had never got rid of. In fact, he didn’t think he’d ever owned a proper bookmark – not one with leather fringes and gold-blocked lettering, the sort that other people had. He just used anything that would fit between the pages.
    Cooper opened the book. He saw that last night he’d used the postcard he brought back from Eyam. Plague Cottage and the memorial plaque to the Cooper boys. Like most of the other plague victims, their graves had never been found, but their names still lived on.
    He drank only half the beer and put it down reluctantly, remembering that he was driving tonight. He thought about what Gavin Murfin had said about Eyam. Personally, he couldn’t see why the village should be considered creepy. In spite of the tourists, it seemed a peaceful kind of place. Perhaps that was because its memories weren’t locked away in the dark, as they were in other places. In Eyam, they were out on display, for everyone to see.
       
    Fry had watched Ben Cooper leave the office. It had been another bad day, and Cooper always seemed to be involved somehow. Perhaps he didn’t actually intend to show up her failings. But he did it so effortlessly.
    She so hated to admit that Cooper was right. That he was ever right. In retrospect, she much preferred the old Ben Cooper, the one who’d been careful not to say anything, had tried not to rub it in, even when he’d turned out to be right in the end. These days, he seemed to be proving that he knew better at every turn. The bastard.
    When she got into her car to leave West Street, Fry sat for a moment in a kind of dull apathy. She didn’t really want to go home to her flat in Grosvenor Avenue. But she couldn’t think of anywhere she did want to go. It wasn’t as if there was anything to look forward to, except more bad days.
       
    Half an hour later, Cooper drove down the track to Bridge End Farm. At one time, his nieces would have run out to meet him when they heard his car coming down the lane. Now, there was no sign of them. Busy doing their homework? Well, perhaps. More likely, they couldn’t even hear his engine above the music playing on their iPods.
    He pulled up in the farm yard, and got out of the car. Then he stood for a moment, doing nothing. Just listening to the familiar sounds, and smelling the familiar smells. And he realized Claire was right – he’d stayed away from home far too long.

24
     
     
    Journal of 1968
    Well, it was quite a year, 1968. It was all Dr Strangelove and the Prague Spring – Soviet tanks crushing Czechoslovakia, the USA getting a kick up the arse by the Viet Cong, and Enoch Powell making his Rivers of Blood speech. In Londonderry, it was the start of The Troubles. In Paris, students thought they were starting a revolution. That summer, the two best-known people in the world were Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray. Famous because they’d killed the right people.
    But most of the time, we were too busy listening to the Beatles’ White Album , and watching Hawaii Five-O on TV. Trying to shut out reality, some might say. And that wasn’t the same after 1968, either.
    Some people talk about the sixties as if it was nothing but sex and drugs, and love and peace, the decade of liberation. Well, that’s a pretty bad joke. It might have been all free love and Carnaby Street down there in London, but things take a bit longer to change in these parts. Here, we still had narrow minds and twitching curtains. There was no Technicolor in Birchlow back then, just the same old black-and-white grimness, the dyed-in-the-wool, stuck-in-a-rut, holier-than-thou hypocrites whose disapproval ruined people’s lives. If you took one wrong step, then everyone knew it. The Swinging Sixties? Here, it was still the fifties. In some ways, it was still the Dark Ages.
    But if you were young in 1968, you could sense the world changing. Every day, you felt things shifting under your feet, as if the whole of existence could tip in one direction or the other at any moment. We might shake off the old ways, or we might all be destroyed. It was hard to tell. We didn’t know what the future