felt sure he was being patronizing. It was ridiculous to find himself lecturing a clergyman on showing an interest in his parishioners. But the vicar genuinely didn’t seem to mind. Probably he had received far blunter advice from his parishioners.
‘PC Udall tells me there have been some problems in the village with the children of the Oxley family.’
‘I’ve had to complain to their father a few times,’ said Alton. ‘They do tend to gather in the churchyard in the evenings – particularly at the back here, because it’s completely secluded and no one can see what they’re up to.’
‘And what are they up to?’
‘I shudder to think sometimes. I regularly pick up beer cans, and that kind of thing. They cause a bit of damage, and there’s some graffiti. It’s just a nuisance, really.’
‘But you find their father co-operative?’
‘Lucas? He listens. And so does Marion, of course. But I’m not sure how much control they have over some of the children.’
‘How many children are there?’
‘Oh,’ said Alton vaguely. He looked at the fingers of his gloves, as if he needed something to count on, but couldn’t find enough fingers. ‘There are so many of them down at Waterloo Terrace. Lucas has at least three sons – Scott is the eldest, and then there’s Ryan and Jake. And possibly Sean. Then there are a couple of married daughters. Well, one is married, but I don’t think Fran has ever bothered. And Lorraine and Stacey are the younger girls. But there are some cousins around, too, like Neil. He’s a Granger, but I think he’s Lucas Oxley’s nephew. It’s hard to keep track, you know – especially if you see them all in a group. Very often, I can’t sort out which is which, except for little Jake, of course.’
‘Jake – is he the one they call the Tiny Terror?’
‘Yes, poor boy. Now, I think Jake pays more attention to his grandfather than to his parents. That’s old Mr Oxley. It’s quite surprising, really, since Jake is only nine years old, and Eric must be about eighty. But perhaps Jake is going to take after his grandfather one day. We can but hope. Eric was a hard worker in his day, by all accounts.’
Cooper was having as much difficulty as Alton in counting the number of Oxleys. He had Lucas and Marion placed as the parents, but he’d already lost track of the number of children. Was it seven or eight? There were Scott, Ryan and Jake, but did Sean count? And how many cousins were there? Did the married daughters have children of their own? It was confusing enough, but now there was an older generation to take into account.
‘Is old Mr Oxley a member of your congregation here at St Asaph’s?’ he asked.
‘Sadly not.’
‘I’m surprised. I felt sure he would be. At his age, he would have been raised in the expectation that he would go to church every Sunday. Unless he’s a nonconformist, of course. There are a lot of Methodists in these parts.’
‘Wash your mouth out,’ said Alton, and smiled down at his scythe.
‘Is he a Methodist?’ asked Cooper.
‘I wouldn’t know,’ said the vicar. ‘I haven’t had the chance to ask him. Eric Oxley hasn’t spoken a word to me since I arrived in the village. Though I’ve passed him on the road several times and spoken to him, he’s never acknowledged me, never spoken to me at all.’
‘Not a word?’ said Cooper.
‘Not a word.’
‘Mr Alton, do you think the Oxley youngsters were responsible for breaking into your vestry?’
Alton sighed. ‘I really don’t know. They’re obvious suspects. But it’s a bit beyond what they normally get up to. They’ve never got inside the church before. There’s some quite serious damage to the doors and the furniture. And, of course, there are several items missing. They’ve never stolen things before.’
‘Some silver plate, I understand?’
‘Yes. Oh, they were nothing much, but they were the only things we have of any value at St Asaph’s. They were a gift from one of the founders, back in the 1850s.’
‘It’s quite possible we might be able to get them back.’
‘It’s kind of you to give me some hope.’
‘Not at all.’
‘If it turns out that it was the Oxley youngsters, what I really hope is that someone will find a way of halting their slide into criminality before it’s too late. The boys are getting older. Scott is quite a young man now, and so is one of his cousins. Glen, I think they call him. They’re not a good example for the younger ones. Sooner or later, something more serious is going to happen, and then an innocent person might get hurt. I wouldn’t want that to happen.’
‘I understand.’
Cooper looked at the flourishing undergrowth all around them in the churchyard. There ought to be flower borders under the church walls on either side of the porch, but instead the soil was hidden under elder saplings and clumps of ladies’ bedstraw. Later in the year, there would be a good crop of blackberries from the brambles covering the vestry. And it wasn’t even the beginning of May. At this rate, the church would have vanished completely by July.
Alton followed his gaze, and sighed again.
‘Are the words “losing battle” hovering on your lips?’ he said.
‘Something like that,’ said Cooper. ‘Or is it “Fight the good fight with all thy might”?’
Alton intoned: ‘“Lay hold on life, and it shall be; Thy joy and crown eternally.”’ He swung the scythe as he sang, and Cooper warily took a pace back. He saw that Alton had unintentionally beheaded a clump of dandelions. Their yellow petals fell at Cooper’s feet, like tiny shards of spring sun.
The vicar seemed to see the petals, too. ‘Fight the good fight,’ he said. ‘The darkness and the light.’
While PC Udall went to call in to see if the suspects were ready for interviewing, Ben Cooper tried to identify Waterloo Terrace, where the Oxley family lived.
There weren’t many places to choose from. Apart from the church, the pub, and the farms, there were a few detached homes and a little crescent of bungalows. But beyond the car park and below the road, Cooper could see a roofline and a series of brick chimney pots, just visible behind a thick screen of sycamores and chestnut trees. He began to wander towards it, intending only to take a look at the place.
Without the presence of any troublesome youngsters, Withens seemed eerily silent. There was no traffic on the road through the village, and it was protected from the noise of the A628 by the black humps of the peat moors in between. Cooper could hear only two sounds. One was the harsh cacophony of calls from a flock of rooks somewhere in the trees below the road. The other was the equally harsh, but higher-pitched, voice of a petrol-driven chainsaw.
To get to the houses that he could see, he had to pass the entrance to one of the farms. He paused at the farm gate and looked down through a jumble of buildings. Near the gate was an ancient stone barn with narrow, unglazed windows like arrow slits. Further from the road, the buildings were more recent, and a tractor was parked in the space between them. Cooper found he was looking downhill through a tunnel of buildings to a spectacular view of heather-covered slopes in the distance. The dark mass of Bleaklow lay directly across the valley.
He moved on a few yards, sticking to the grass verge because there were no pavements and the edges of the road were starting to crumble. There were streams of small stones at the roadside that had been swept down by the water running off the hills. Here and there, scraps of black plastic from torn silage bags lay like tattered oil slicks on the verges.
In Withens, water seemed to run wherever it chose. At this moment, it was running directly into the entrance to Waterloo Terrace. Because the