Dying to Sin
Dying to Sin
Stephen Booth
Detectives Fry and Cooper return in another supremely atmospheric Peak District thriller, perfect for fans of Peter Robinson and Reginald HillBuilding work at an isolated farm has unearthed more than just the usual remains… two human are discovered, seemingly buried years apart.With little forensic evidence to go on, Detectives Diane Fry and Ben Cooper have to look back into the farm's history, where they uncover decades of abuse of migrant workers. Is the truth to be found somewhere in this piteous history?Or does the answer lie elsewhere, hidden in the ground, and still waiting to be discovered?
STEPHEN BOOTH
Dying to Sin
Dedicated to the officers and staff of Derbyshire
Constabulary B Division, with particular thanks
to Divisional Commander, Chief Superintendent
Roger Flint (the man with all the best anecdotes),
and PC 2204 Rachel Baggaley
For he that is dead is freed from sin.
Romans 6:7
Contents
Title Page (#ud248d6f6-b045-52f0-b41d-f83a6dcbe939)Dedication (#u4d2a2e2a-46a6-5a62-aa2b-0b1263b019d1)Chapter One (#u3fa6478f-d379-5073-9e14-8377a42ae630)Chapter Two (#ud175ef65-cf6d-5da9-a616-baf64c14faf3)Chapter Three (#u35e7f987-2562-56fc-bde5-de3f9efd4dd5)Chapter Four (#uf36775b1-79c0-57aa-a31e-ddf8af39e9fc)Chapter Five (#u3348a7e8-2f1b-5cd2-88ec-12754d04cde3)Chapter Six (#ubccbe922-920f-5026-b9fe-fe24a8dc8007)Chapter Seven (#u7d122f15-3c9d-534a-9b68-bdbd6f07dd02)Chapter Eight (#u722f64df-f5a3-5b99-abfc-0110b428d75c)Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Eight (#litres_trial_promo)About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)By The Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1 (#uf6d6d0cd-8496-5b2a-9e54-a1361606c8cd)
Thursday
The mud was everywhere at Pity Wood Farm. It lay in deep troughs under the walls of the house, it surged in wet tides where the cattle had poached the ground into a soup. And it was all over Jamie Ward’s boots, sticky and red, like blobs of damson jam. His steel toe-caps were coated with the stuff, and smears of it had splashed halfway up his denims – long, fat splatters, as if he’d been wading in blood.
Crouching in a corner of the yard, Jamie stared down at the mess and wondered when he’d get a chance to wipe it off. He couldn’t remember if he had a clean pair of jeans back at his parents’ house in Edendale, whether his mother had done his washing this week, or if he’d thrown his dirty clothes behind the bed again, where she wouldn’t find them. She’d been complaining for the past month about the amount of dirt he brought into the house, the number of times she had to clean the filter on the washing machine. He wondered what she’d say about this latest disaster when he got in.
And, as he heard the first police sirens wailing up the valley, it occurred to Jamie to wonder whether he’d actually be going home tonight at all.
‘Damn it, boy. Why didn’t you just cover it up again? It would have been for the best all round.’
Jamie shook his head. You couldn’t just do that, could you? No matter what anyone else said, it wasn’t right, and that was that. He’d done the only thing he possibly could, in the circumstances. He’d done the right thing, so there was nothing to regret.
‘Throw some dirt on it and forget it. There’s no need for all this.’
He felt bad about it, all the same. It was bad for Nikolai and the other blokes. This was a nightmare they didn’t want, and some of them couldn’t afford. Just before Christmas, too, when they needed the money more than ever, he supposed. He was going to be popular, all right.
Jamie felt his muscles beginning to stiffen. The longer he stayed in one spot, the more he felt as though his boots were sinking into the ground. If he stayed here long enough, perhaps the blood-tinted earth would slowly close in and swallow him. His own weight would bury him.
Of course, he knew the mud only looked red because the soil here was clay when you got a few inches down. It was so unusual for this part of Derbyshire that he’d noticed it as soon as he started digging. Clay and mud, tons of crushed brick and corroded iron. It had been a nightmare of a job, almost impossible for his spade to deal with. Jamie’s rational mind told him that the colour was only because of the clay. And if the stuff on his boots looked too red, too dark, too wet … well, that was just his imagination, wasn’t it?
Jamie Ward thought he had plenty of common sense. He was educated, after all – not like most of the other lads on the crew. He would never be a victim of superstition and ignorance. He wasn’t even particularly religious – he didn’t cross himself when they passed a church, or hang a statue of the Virgin Mary over the dashboard of the van, the way Nikolai did.
But this mud was so sticky, and so smelly. It stank as though it had been rotting for centuries. Now, when Jamie finally straightened up, he saw a thick gob slide from his boot on to the ground. It formed a sort of oozing coil, like the dropping of some slimy creature that had been living on the old farm, left to itself when the owners moved out and the cattle disappeared. He pictured something that only came out at night to feed on carrion, scavenging among the ruins of pigsties before slinking back into a dark, damp corner between those abandoned silage bags.
‘Damned fool. Kretyn.’
He remembered the way Nikolai’s fist had gripped his jacket, the feel of the older man’s face pushed against his, rain glistening in his thick eyebrows and on his moustache. Jamie couldn’t believe how angry Nikolai had been, not over something like this. The foreman had tolerated his bungling and his ignorance of the building trade with raucous good humour – until now. Yet suddenly this morning he’d been a different man, a wild thing, dangerously on the verge of violence. And all over a muddy hole.
Jamie swallowed a spurt of bile that hit the back of his throat. He’d been trailing backwards and forwards over this same patch of earth for days now. Shifting stacks of breeze block for the brickies, unloading bags of sand from the lorry, stopping for a quick fag behind the wall. Damn it, his boot prints were all over the place. Anyone who cared to look would see the pattern of his rubber soles, pressed deep in the mud. His eyes followed the criss-crossing trails he’d left, curving in long arcs that stretched twenty yards or more. His tracks were so numerous and extensive that they were probably visible from space like the Great Wall of China, place-marked on Google Earth. They were so distinct that they might as well be the swirls of his fingerprints. Jamie Ward’s signature on the job, perfectly clear and complete.
Soon, people would be talking about him and pointing at him. Before much longer, he’d be answering questions, endless questions, re-living over and over the moment he was trying to forget. He’d seen the TV cop shows, and he knew they never let you alone once they had you in one of their little interview rooms.
He could hear two sirens now, their yelp and wail teasing playfully against each other, fading and getting louder as the cars took one of the bends in Rakedale, dipping behind stone walls and clumps of trees until they reached the top of the hill and turned into the farm.
Jamie thought back to the morning he’d got out of the van, stretched his legs and stepped on to Pity Wood Farm for the first time. It was strange to think there had been grass growing here when the crew arrived on site. Now the whole gateway was churned up, and the soil either side was bare and exposed. In one corner, a wheel rut from a reversing truck had sliced through his boot prints.
He didn’t remember noticing anything unusual that first time. Well, maybe there had been a slight difference in the level of the ground just here, a low bump that was only noticeable if you happened to be pushing a wheelbarrow load of sand over it. And perhaps the grass had been a bit greener, too – only a tiny bit, if you looked closely. Perhaps the blades had gleamed with faintly unnatural health in the winter sunlight. He wouldn’t have looked twice at the time, and he’d never made anything of it. No one would have done.
But then Nikolai had asked him to start digging a trench for the footings of a new wall. Jamie had dug barely more than a few inches into the ground before the soil changed colour. It had taken him a while to get even that far down, though. There were so many stones to be prised free with the spade and lifted out, not to mention lumps of concrete and long splinters of rusted metal. Without his gloves, his fingers would have been raw by now.
After half an hour, he’d been starting to think that Nik had given him the job as a punishment for something, or just because he was the youngest on the crew and a student at that, the one they called ‘The Professor’. Or maybe it was on account of the fact that he didn’t understand what they were going on about when the blokes started joking around on site, and they were taking advantage of him. Probably there wasn’t going to be a wall here at all. Nobody had ever shown him the plans for the new development, so he couldn’t be sure. But during the last few days Jamie had made his own plans. He reckoned that if he’d bought the farm himself, he’d have kept the old dry-stone wall and turned this bit of ground into a nice patio. All it needed was a few yards of paving, not a fancy brick boundary wall that needed some idiot to dig a trench for twelve-inch footings.
Damn that trench. Just the thought of its moist, slippery sides made Jamie feel like throwing up. If it weren’t for all the other blokes standing around gabbling to each other in Polish, he’d have lost his breakfast ages ago.
Even in his distracted state, Jamie noticed that one or two of the labourers were looking a bit nervous as the police sirens got nearer. No papers, he supposed. Illegal workers. Well, it wasn’t his business, and he bet the cops wouldn’t care either, not today.
Nevertheless, Jamie automatically counted up the men. Nine, all present, but standing behind Nikolai for safety.
And all of the crew were looking in the same direction now – at the cluster of objects Jamie had accidentally uncovered with his spade. There wasn’t much to look at, not really. A strip of plastic sheeting and a scrap of rotted leather. A bulge of cloth, torn and faded, a surprising eggshell blue where patches showed through the dirt. And there had been a faint glint of metal, slick with the dampness of clay, reflecting a glimmer of light and the movement of his spade.
But most of all, he knew they were staring at the only thing worth seeing – that unmistakable object laid out in the mud, like a bird trapped in cement, or an ancient fossil preserved in the clay. It was like a five-limbed sea creature, bony and white.
It was the shape of a human hand.
Detective Sergeant Diane Fry stepped out of her car on to the muddy ground, drew her coat tighter round her shoulders and wiped the rain from her face. All the activity seemed to be taking place on the other side of the track. Uniformed officers setting up cordons, SOCOs climbing into scene suits, a bunch of bystanders gaping like idiots. She looked around with a weary sigh. A week before Christmas, and wouldn’t you know it? A major enquiry in prospect, if she wasn’t mistaken.
Fry slammed the door of her Peugeot, her hands already wet and slipping on the handle. There was only one ray of hope. From the initial reports that had come in to Control, this air of activity might be misleading. Something quite different was going on here.
In fact, everyone was waiting with barely restrained anxiety for a verdict on the age of the body that had been unearthed. If it was recent, the entire division was in for a ruined holiday. If they were lucky, it could prove to be a historic burial, the remains of a medieval graveyard disturbed by the construction work. And then they could hand it over to the archaeologists and drive off home with a cheery wave and shouts of ‘Have a good Christmas.’
All right, that was probably too much to hope for. But even a decade or two on the bones would be good news. At least they could take their time making enquiries. Victims who’d been missing for ten or twenty years would wait a little while longer for their identity to be established.
Besides, what family wanted a knock on the door over Christmas and a police officer standing on the step to inform them that their missing loved one had been found in a shallow grave in some godforsaken spot at the back of beyond? That sort of thing could ruin Christmas for ever.
She called to a uniformed officer in a yellow high-vis jacket. ‘Is DC Murfin here somewhere, do you know?’
‘Yes, Sergeant. Shall I fetch him?’
‘Please.’
Yes, Christmas. In Fry’s experience, there were already far too many families who were unable to regard it as a time for gladness and joy. This time of year had a nasty tendency to bring back memories for people. Recollections of happier times, of opportunities lost, of friends and relatives who had passed on to celebrate Christmas in a better place.
No, the festive season wasn’t all about peace and goodwill, not these days. Anyone in the emergency services could tell you that. Christmas didn’t make much difference to the lives of all those poor, pathetic and dysfunctional people who cluttered up the police stations and courts from one month to the next.
A few days ago, two men wearing Santa Claus outfits had raided a building society in Chesterfield. They’d been carrying baseball bats inside their fur-fringed sleeves, and a customer had ended up in hospital with a fractured skull when he got in their way. The suicide and domestic violence rates jumped at this time of year, the number of road accident victims multiplied, and the streets of Edendale were full of brawling drunks. The cells at West Street were never fuller, the hospitals were over-stretched, and hosing out the divisional vans was a full-time job. Lots of ho, ho, ho.
But perhaps she was just a bit jaundiced in her view. Personally, she hadn’t celebrated Christmas for over a decade. Not in a paper hat and cracker, turkey and mistletoe sort of way. There had never been a decorated spruce tree standing in the corner of her damp little flat in Grosvenor Avenue, no tinsel over the mantelpiece, no Nine Lessons and Carols on the radio on Christmas morning. She was lucky if she had a present to unwrap – at least, one that she hadn’t sent to herself for appearance sake. What was there to celebrate?
DC Gavin Murfin appeared at her side, teetering dangerously on the edge of the mud. The bottom four inches of his trouser legs were rolled up to reveal a pair of green paisley socks and a strip of deathly white flesh. Fry looked away, feeling suddenly queasy. On balance, the sight of a partially decomposed corpse might be preferable.
‘Do you think there’ll be any overtime on this one, boss?’ asked Murfin as they approached a PVC body tent erected over the makeshift grave.
‘You’re already rostered for duty over Christmas anyway, aren’t you, Gavin?’
Murfin looked crestfallen.
‘Damn, you’re right. I’d forgotten.’
Fry heard the dismay in his voice, but felt no pity. ‘If it’s a historic burial, you could be the officer in charge for a while.’
‘Great. That’s just … great.’
‘Most DCs would appreciate that kind of opportunity,’ said Fry.
‘It makes a change from processing nominals, I suppose.’
Reluctantly, Fry smiled. Ah, nominals. The official name for the area’s most prolific criminals – the repeat offenders, all those individuals the law makers called ‘recidivists’. They came into custody at regular intervals, might even get a short prison sentence if they were unlucky. But, before long, they were back out there on the litter-ridden streets of the Cavendish Estate – or ‘the community’, as it was known in the criminal justice system. Edendale’s nominals would be celebrating Christmas, all right. No one wanted them cluttering up the custody suite.
Murfin was silent for a moment as they watched the medical examiner directing a SOCO where to uncover vital parts of the body. The exposed edge of a bone here, a bit of decomposed flesh there.
‘Diane, do you mean there are people who’d prefer to attend a postmortem than be at home carving the turkey?’ asked Murfin.
‘There isn’t much difference, is there?’
‘Now that you mention it. Not the way I do it, anyway. And the company might be better in the mortuary – especially since we have to visit the in-laws at Alfreton on Boxing Day.’
Fry peered over the tape into the grave. The hole was gradually getting bigger, even as she watched. The hand that had been exposed by the workman looked fairly fresh. But the torso that was now being painstakingly revealed seemed to be badly decayed.
A cold case, or a warm one? Fry was unashamedly ambitious – she wanted the next move up the promotion ladder, and for that she needed cases to her credit. Successful cases, airtight prosecutions that led to convictions. Clear-ups, not cock-ups. It would be PDR time in April, the annual round of dreaded staff appraisals. She had to file something away that she could point to as a recent triumph, evidence of her outstanding skill and expertise, proof of her ability to manage an enquiry to a successful outcome, blah, blah, blah. Senior management believed it if it was down on paper, typed on an official form. Would Pity Wood Farm give her that case?
‘OK, let’s move these people back behind the cordon. What are they all doing here anyway?’
‘They’re witnesses, Sergeant.’
‘All of them?’
‘So it seems.’
‘Well, get their names and addresses and put them somewhere out of the way, for God’s sake.’
‘They don’t seem to speak English.’
‘Oh, Jesus.’
Rain had begun to fall again – big, fat drops splattering on to the roof of her car and pitting the already treacherously soft ground. Around her, uniformed and paper-suited figures speeded up their actions, as if suddenly instilled with a newfound sense of urgency. Within a few minutes, they were all sheltering against the walls of the farmhouse or sitting in their vehicles.
And it was only then that Fry really noticed Pity Wood Farm for the first time. Until this moment, she’d been concentrating on the ground, trying to keep her footing in the slippery mud that was coating her shoes and trickling in between her toes. But she looked up, and she saw it in all its glory.
She was confronted by a collection of ancient outbuildings leaning at various angles, their roofs sagging, doors hanging loosely on their hinges. By some curious law of physics, the doors all seemed to tilt at the opposite angle to the walls, as if they were leaning to compensate for a bend. Some doorways had been blocked up, windows were filled in, steps had been left going nowhere. Mud ran right up to the walls of the outbuildings, and right up to the door of the farmhouse itself. From the evidence, Fry thought it probably continued inside the house, too. The exterior was grimy and flecked with dirt, a bird’s nest trailed from a broken gutter. Piles of rubbish were strewn across the dead grass of what might once have been garden. Was this really a farm?
‘Who else is here, Gavin?’ she asked, in despair.
‘The DI’s on his way,’ said Murfin. ‘But in the meantime, it’s you and me, boss.’
‘DC Cooper?’
‘Ben? He’s on a rest day. We don’t know where he is.’
‘Strange,’ said Fry. ‘This is exactly his sort of place.’
Crouching uncomfortably, Detective Constable Ben Cooper studied the withered object carefully. In all his years with Derbyshire Constabulary, including seven in CID, he’d never seen anything quite like this. There had been plenty of dead bodies – some of them long dead, others nice and fresh. And some of them perhaps not quite dead, after all. But this?
The flesh had shrivelled away from the fingers, leaving them thin but not quite skeletal. The fact that there was still a layer of leathery skin shrunk tight to the fingers somehow made it worse than if he was just looking at bones. The result was that the hand appeared to have been shrinkwrapped in a film of wrinkled, yellow plastic. The thumb was bent strangely out of shape, too, as though it had been broken and never re-set. The severed wrist was ragged, and the tattered skin looked as though it had been sealed with some kind of sticky substance.
He straightened up, easing the painful muscles in his back. He’d been playing squash this morning, and his opponent had smashed the ball into his kidneys when he was out of position recovering a drop-shot. You could never trust police officers not to get you in the back.
‘The hand of glory,’ he said. ‘They’re very rare these days.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Very rare. Not rare like steak, but rare as in very unusual. There aren’t many of them about.’
Cooper had the suspicion that he was babbling, spouting nonsense. He did it just because there was a silence that had to be filled. It wasn’t the first time it had happened. Not even the first time today.
He looked at his companion, unsure of her reaction because of the silence. ‘What do you think of it, then?’
‘It’s gross.’
‘Gross?’
‘Like, totally yucky.’
Cooper nodded. ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’
It wasn’t exactly a technical assessment – but accurate, all the same. There were many occasions when a police officer in E Division might want to use it. A Saturday night on drunk patrol, for example. Another body lying in the gutter on the High Street? I’m not touching that, Control – it’s yucky. Yes, that would work.
But today was his rest day, and he’d volunteered to take his eldest niece out for the day, since the Christmas holidays had started. So he had an obligation to be interesting and informative. Volunteered? Was that really the right word? His recollection was that he’d happened to be hanging around at Bridge End Farm chatting to his brother Matt, when Amy had kidnapped him. But he’d never prove that in court. He had no evidence.
‘The “hand of glory” supposedly comes from an executed criminal and was cut off the body while the corpse was still hanging from the gibbet,’ said Cooper, reading from the guide book.
‘There’s a recipe here,’ said Amy, interrupting him. She was eleven now, and strangely adult in some ways. Cooper was starting to feel sorry for the teachers at Amy’s new school. She could be merciless if you were boring her.
‘A what, Amy?’
‘A recipe.’
‘Like Delia Smith? That sort of recipe?’
‘I suppose. “The recipe for the preparation of a hand of glory is simple,” it says.’
Cooper looked down at his niece, surprised by the sudden change in her tone. Now she was interested. It was yucky just to stand and look at a preserved hand, but learning how to preserve one yourself – now that was cool. He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised.
‘“Squeeze the blood out of the hand. Embalm it in a shroud and steep it in a solution of saltpetre, salt and pepper for two weeks. Then dry in the sun.” What’s saltpetre, Uncle Ben?’
‘Erm … I’m not sure.’
Amy snorted gently. ‘“The other essential item is a candle made from hanged man’s fat, wax and Lapland sesame.” What’s Lapland sesame?’
‘Erm …’
‘Sesame seeds from Lapland, obviously.’ She frowned. ‘Do sesame plants grow in Lapland?’
‘I, er …’
‘Never mind.’
‘I know how the hand of glory was used,’ said Cooper desperately. ‘You fixed candles between the fingers of the hand, and then you lit them when you broke into a house.’
‘When you did what?’
‘Well, it was used by burglars. According to the legends, it made them invisible. It was also supposed to prevent the owners of the house from waking up.’
There was a final bit on the little interpretative panel that he didn’t bother reading out. Wicks for the candles were made from locks of hair dipped in grease from the murderer’s body and the fat of an old tom cat, then consecrated by saying the Lord’s Prayer backwards. Ah, the old Lord’s Prayer backwards – that always worked, didn’t it?
They moved on through the museum. Cooper glanced out of the window, and saw that it was still raining. He didn’t mind Edendale in the rain, but Amy objected to getting wet. And since it was the start of her Christmas holidays, and only his rest day, she got to say what they did and where they went. And that didn’t involve going out in the rain, thanks.
In the centre of town, Victoria Park had been taken over for a Victorian Christmas Market. These things seemed to be very popular, judging by the crowds coming into town. There was a smell of roasting chestnuts in the air, and the sound of a fairground organ. And there was an innovation for Edendale this year – a Continental market, where stalls sold French bread and German sausages. Some of the stallholders spoke with foreign accents and might even be French or German. You never knew these days.
In the evenings, mime artists, stilt walkers and clowns would mingle with the crowds, and Santa would turn up on his sleigh at exactly the same time every night. A couple of weeks earlier, a local TV presenter had been brought in to switch on the lights, but the headline act on the main stage tomorrow would be an Abba tribute band.
They stopped by a costume display. The rough trousers and leather knee-pads of a lead miner, the gowns and bonnets of an elegant lady.
‘So how are you liking school, Amy?’ he said, aware of an unfamiliar silence developing.
‘It’s so cliquey. They’re all goths or emos. Or chavs.’
‘Chavs, eh?’
‘They’re so stupid. There aren’t any real people, Uncle Ben.’
‘Would you rather be at home, or at school?’
‘Well, home is all right. I like being around the farm and the animals. But Mum and Dad are so immature sometimes.’
‘Oh, are they?’
‘They only think about money and possessions – they’re very materialistic. I can’t believe they never stop and think about serious subjects now and then.’
Cooper found himself trailing after his niece, as if he was the child demanding attention. It was supposed to be the other way round, but it never seemed to work like that in reality.
‘Well, they’re very busy looking after you and Josie,’ he said. ‘And they have to try to make sure the farm makes enough money to support the whole family. It’s very hard work, you know.’
Amy didn’t seem to hear. He could see that she was thinking about something again. It was very unnerving the way she did that, switched to auto pilot while her brain concentrated on some totally different subject. Perhaps she was already learning to multi-task, practising that skill all women claimed to have.
‘It’s just like Draco Malfoy, in that shop in Knockturn Alley,’ she said.
Cooper frowned, stumped again by the turn of the conversation. ‘Is it?’
His brain turned over, trying to pin down the reference. It was humiliating to find that his brain worked so much more slowly than Amy’s but he was finding it more and more difficult to keep up with his nieces’ interests these days. Their lives seemed to change so quickly, the pop stars they liked being different from one week to the next. Even the language they used evolved so rapidly that it left him behind.
‘Wait a minute – Draco Malfoy, did you say? That’s Harry Potter.’
‘Of course it’s Harry Potter.’ Amy could barely conceal the contempt in her voice. ‘It’s in The Chamber of Secrets. Draco Malfoy finds a hand of glory when he’s in the shop with his father. “Best friend of thieves and plunderers,” that’s what the shopkeeper says.’
‘“Best friend of thieves and plunderers.” OK, that would make sense.’
‘So it’s magic,’ said Amy.
‘Yes, of course. What did you think it was?’
‘I thought it was for real. Well, it’s in the museum, isn’t it? All this other stuff is for real – the costumes and the tools, and the old furniture.’
‘Yes.’
‘But the hand of glory isn’t real – it’s magic.’
‘It’s a genuine hand,’ said Cooper defensively. ‘A hand that belonged to a real person once.’
‘But it’s still magic. Magic is make-believe. Harry Potter is made up. It’s fiction, Uncle Ben.’
‘The fact is,’ said Cooper, treading cautiously, ‘people in the past believed those things were for real. They didn’t know that magic was just something out of stories like Harry Potter. They actually thought it worked, in real life. The hand of glory, all kinds of stuff.’
They got to the door of the museum and looked out on to the street. There were fewer umbrellas being carried by the pedestrians now, so the rain must be easing.
‘People can be really weird, can’t they?’ said Amy. ‘They believe in such stupid things.’
The old man’s dreams were worse during the day. He drifted in and out of consciousness, hardly aware of his surroundings, pressed down into the darkness of sleep by a great weight. At times, he wasn’t even sure he was still alive, it felt so impossible to wake up. It was so difficult, so far beyond his strength.
Our dawns and dusks are numbered. They’ll steal our land next, and our hills. I always thought the place would last for ever, but now I don’t care. I wouldn’t pass on the curse. It’ll die with me, and none too soon. It will an’ all.
Dark filth, cruel brutes. Coming to my home for their evil purposes, stealing away my life. Our life. They turned up in their white vans, and they went away again. Dark, some of them. Speaking in tongues. They might as well have had the number stamped on their foreheads. Them and their minions, traipsing all over the shop. A load of rammel in the sheds, I don’t know what …
Words and phrases repeated in his head, meaningless yet desperately important, the only thing that mattered.
For he that is dead. For he that is dead.
Aye, it were silin’ down again. That morning, he was fast on, so I didn’t waken him. He’d only be lorping around the house, the old dosser. Yammeringabout his mad ideas. Sacrilege and superstition, damnation and desecration.
The night before, they’d all been popped-up again. I thought I’d go scranny if they didn’t stop. Look, he’s a wick ’un, I said. I told you he was a wick ’un.
The old man opened his eyes for a moment, aware of movement and light, but sank back into sleep before his brain could focus.
But he was sickly, and always was. Weak in the head, and sick in the body. Sound, me. I’m sound, I always said. But him, he was badly. I never cottoned on how badly. But it makes no odds now, does it? It’s all for the best, in the end.
For he that is dead.
For he that is dead.
For he that is dead is freed from sin.
2 (#uf6d6d0cd-8496-5b2a-9e54-a1361606c8cd)
A single hair follicle was enough to make a DNA match. Polymerase chain reaction and short tandem repeats could get a result from one head hair, or even an eyelash. Invisible stains would work, too. Stains of saliva. Tears and blood.
Watching the activity at Pity Wood Farm, Diane Fry despaired of being able to rely on modern scientific techniques. Even the fingerprints Jamie Ward had left on his spade a few hours ago would have bloomed in the damp atmosphere and become useless.
Yet more vehicles had arrived at the scene, jockeying for parking places on the drier patches of ground. They were wasting their time, because there wouldn’t be a dry inch left by the end of the day. Even now, the sound of spinning wheels whined in the air as a driver churned another rut into the mud.
‘Well, I see the builders have trampled all over the job long before we got here.’
Fry turned to see Detective Inspector Paul Hitchens approaching the inner cordon, casually clad in jeans and green wellington boots, as if he’d only popped out to walk the dog on a Sunday afternoon.
‘Morning, sir.’
‘Morning, Diane.’ He looked down at the sea of mud. ‘That’s just great. What a start. But I suppose it makes a change from our own plods doing the trampling.’
‘Does it? I can’t see any difference from where I’m standing. All size-twelve boots look the same to me. I’m not bothered what type of helmets they were wearing when they were doing the trampling. It’s not as if they were bouncing around on their heads, is it?’
‘True.’
‘If we found an imprint of a Derbyshire Constabulary cap badge in the mud, that would be a different matter,’ said Fry. ‘Then we’d be looking for some uniformed idiot who’d tripped over his own feet. And we’d have a list of potential suspects right under our noses.’
Hitchens laughed. ‘Shall we have a look at the centre of all this attention?’
With DC Murfin trailing reluctantly behind, they followed a line of wooden planks borrowed from the builders to create a temporary bridge. Their feet thumped on the planks as if they were walking out on to a pier at the seaside. Blackpool, with mud.
And here was the end-of-the-pier show – a sort of gipsy fortune teller lurking in her shadowy tent, consulting the bones.
The Home Office pathologist, Mrs van Doon, straightened up as they approached. She brushed a stray lock of hair from her forehead, leaving a smear of dirt from her glove across her temple.
‘I shouldn’t worry too much about contamination of your crime scene,’ she said. ‘This body has been here long enough for half the population of Derbyshire to have passed through the area on their way to the pub and back again.’
Murfin looked suddenly interested. ‘There’s a pub?’
‘In the village,’ said the pathologist, gesturing with a trowel. ‘About a mile in that direction.’
Hitchens grunted impatiently. ‘How long has it been here exactly?’
‘Exactly? Is that a joke, Inspector?’
‘Make an estimate, then. We won’t hold you to it.’
‘On that understanding …’ Mrs van Doon gave an apologetic shrug. ‘A year or so? I assume you’ll be getting the forensic anthropologist in to examine the remains. Dr Jamieson might be able to give you a better estimate.’
‘At first glance, the body looks pretty well preserved to me,’ said Hitchens.
‘Oh, you’re looking at the hand. Well, the hand isn’t too badly decomposed, that’s true. But it had been well covered up and protected from the air – at least, before some individual stuck the edge of a spade through the plastic sheeting. There are some old rips in the covering at the head end, though. So the condition of that area of the body is a bit different.’
‘At the head end? That sounds like bad news. What are our chances of an ID going to be?’
Mrs van Doon shrugged in her scene suit, rustling faintly. ‘It’s too early to say. But I can tell you the victim has lost quite a bit of flesh on the left side. Down to the bone in places. I’ll know more when I can get her back to the mortuary. That might take a bit of time, though.’
‘Why?’
‘We need to be careful digging her out. Some of the skin is sloughing off, and the less of her we lose at this stage, the better. Wouldn’t you agree?’
‘It is a “her”, though,’ said Fry. ‘You did say “her”.’
‘Yes, I’m pretty sure of that, Sergeant,’ said the pathologist, her boots squelching as she squatted to peer into the hole. ‘Unless you’ve got a cross-dresser with a penchant for tights and blue skirts on your missing persons list.’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘I’ll pass the remains into Dr Jamieson’s care when he arrives. We can consult later, when she’s safely in the lab.’
‘Thank you, Doctor.’
As they re-crossed the plank bridge, Hitchens cast an eye over the farm buildings.
‘What do we know about the occupants?’
‘Apparently, the farm was owned by two elderly brothers,’ said Murfin, producing a notebook and demonstrating that he’d actually been doing some work while everyone else was standing around gassing. ‘One of them died quite recently, and the other is in a care home in Edendale.’
‘Was owned?’
‘Well, the place has been bought for development – hence the presence of all these builders in their hard hats. Development, or conversion. I’m not quite clear what they’re telling me.’
‘So who’s the present owner?’
‘A Mr Goodwin. He’s a lawyer, lives in Manchester. Mr Goodwin is the man employing the builders. I’ve got his contact details from the site foreman. But that seems to be all the bloke knows.’
‘Get on the phone, Gavin, and find out everything you can about the previous owners,’ said Fry. ‘We need names, dates, relationships. We need to know who else was in the household. Dig out anything that’s on record about them. Get some help, if you need it.’
‘If?’ said Murfin. ‘If?’
‘The body has been here for a year at least, according to the pathologist.’
‘That puts the victim in situ before Mr Goodwin took ownership, then. The sale went through only three months ago, I gather. The farm has been empty for about nine months, after the surviving owner went into care.’
Fry looked at their surroundings in more detail, the farm buildings beyond the stretch of mud and the track and the parked vehicles.
‘Does that explain the state of the place? How could it get like this in nine months?’
Ben Cooper would probably tell her that all this was evidence of the evolution of the farm over the centuries, as its owners adapted to new ways of working, changed the use of their buildings from cattle to sheep, from hay storage to machinery shed. Or whatever. To Fry, it looked like dereliction and chaos, pure and simple. Not an ounce of design or planning had gone into the farm, not even in the newer buildings.
Of course, farmers were a law unto themselves in so many ways. They were even allowed to create these shanty towns, reminiscent of the slums of some Third World country where there was no running water or drainage, and rubbish was dumped in the streets. In Rio de Janeiro, you might expect it. But not in Middle England.
‘What a place,’ she said, unable to avoid voicing her feelings for once.
‘The builders have hardly started on the house or outbuildings yet,’ said Murfin. ‘The foreman tells me they’ve been doing some work on the foundations and building an approach road. Then they have to tackle some of the exterior walls where they’re unsound. And of course there’s the roof. Not much point in trying to do any work on the interior until you’ve sorted out the roof, is there?’
‘What is it going to be when they’ve finished?’ asked Fry.
‘The foreman says a gentleman’s residence. Office suite, swimming pool, guest annexe.’
‘They’ve got a hell of a job on.’
Unrepaired splits in the iron guttering had allowed rainwater to run down the walls, dragging long grey stains across the stone. Wires sagged from the telegraph pole. Two black crows swayed on the wire in the wind, flicking their wings to keep their balance.
Fry noticed a large shed behind the house. A very large shed indeed, with a convex roof. Wheel tracks led from one end of the shed towards the stretch of ground where the body had been found. Old tracks that had been made when the ground was soft, but whose ruts had hardened and survived until the recent rain. That was the sort of building where anything could go on, out of sight of the public. Out of earshot, out of mind.
The rain was getting heavier. That could be a problem.
But then Fry corrected herself. There were never any problems, only challenges. No obstacles that couldn’t be overcome.
At least the FOAs had been right on the ball, getting that body tent over the makeshift grave as soon as they saw the conditions. By now, this rain could have washed away the evidence if they hadn’t acted quickly. Lucky they’d had one in the boot of their car. In these circumstances, there was an evens chance that they would have had to sit and wait for one to arrive.
According to their advertising, these tents were supposed to go up in ten seconds, but she bet it had taken a good bit longer than that. The peg-down eyelets looked none too secure in the soft ground, and the guy ropes were slippery with mud.
‘Duckboards,’ someone was saying into a radio. ‘We need duckboards here. Lots of duckboards.’
Fry turned back to Murfin again. ‘So where’s this builder who found the body?’
‘Waiting in the van over there. Ward is his name – Jamie Ward, aged twenty. I’d hardly call him your typical builder, actually.’
Fry looked at him. ‘So what would you call him, Gavin?’
Murfin closed his notebook. ‘Terrified,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’d call him – a terrified kid.’
Matt Cooper had loaded some sheep into a trailer and was doing the paperwork in the Land Rover when his brother arrived. Ben could see a sheaf of forms resting on a clipboard. Pink copy for the destination, blue for the haulier, yellow for the holding of departure.
Matt opened the door, the usual frown caused by paperwork clearing from his face.
‘Hello, little brother. How was Amy? Did she have a good time?’
‘Oh, yes. She was fascinated by the recipe for preserving a severed hand.’
‘That sounds about right. She’s been in a funny mood recently.’
Matt was still putting on weight. That was a new set of overalls he was wearing, and they were a size larger than the last ones. He was only in his mid-thirties, so he still had middle-aged spread to look forward to.
‘Amy talks in quite a grown-up way sometimes, doesn’t she?’ said Ben.
‘Oh, you noticed that. Yes, it’s a bit of a new thing. I think it’s some influence at school – she must have some new friends, or something.’
‘Or a new teacher she’s got a crush on?’
‘Do girls have crushes on teachers?’
‘Yes, I believe so, Matt.’
‘I mean … well, I think they’re mostly female teachers that she has at that school.’
‘Even so.’
Matt was silent for a moment. ‘I’ll ask Kate to have a quiet word,’ he said.
Ben turned to look at the farmhouse, conscious of its presence behind him, the old family home. Now that he no longer lived here, he noticed that Bridge End Farm was starting to look middle-aged, too. The house hadn’t been painted for a while, and he could see that some work needed doing on the roof of the barn. He supposed there wasn’t much money in the bank to spare for repairs these days.
‘It’ll just be a phase Amy is going through, won’t it?’ he said.
‘Are you sure?’
‘It could be a lot worse, Matt. She’s a sensible girl.’
Matt put his paperwork aside. ‘Ben, how come you know so much more about pubescent girls than I do? I’m the dad around here.’
‘You see all sorts of things in the job.’
‘I suppose you do. And of course, you don’t always talk about it, do you, Ben? Especially these days. Whenever you come to the farm now, you seem to have changed a little bit more.’
Ben watched Amy coming across the field, walking with exaggerated care, instead of running in an uninhibited way, as she once would have done.
‘Perhaps some of us are maturing faster than others,’ he said.
Ben couldn’t deny that he was losing his sense of connection to Bridge End Farm. The ties were no longer quite so binding since he’d moved out and rented his own flat in Edendale. Memories of his childhood at the farm were objects in the far distance, unless he stopped to think about them. And then the details could spring at him with unexpected ferocity, like wild animals that hated to be stared at.
‘Nothing much happening, then?’ asked Matt. ‘No urgent crime on the streets of Edendale to take you away from us? If you’re at a loose end, you could help me batten down for the weather. It’s not looking too good.’
Ben turned and looked at the hills in the east, where the bad weather came from. A bank of cloud was building up, dark and ominous. Those easterly winds had been a feature of his early years. At Bridge End, when the wind blew from the east it made all the shutters bang and the doors of the loose boxes rattle against their latches. The trees on the eastern ridge would be bent over at unnatural angles, their bare branches flailing helplessly against the power of the gale. At night, animals would stir uneasily in the barns as the young Ben lay listening to the banging and the moaning of the wind, jumping at the crash of a bucket hurled across the yard or a tile dislodged from the roof.
Just when Cooper was thinking that nothing would ever make him jump with alarm like that any more, the phone in his pocket began to ring.
Jamie Ward was shivering miserably in the front seat of the crew bus that had brought the builders to Pity Wood Farm. It was a converted Transit, smelling powerfully of cigarettes and muddy clothes. The seats were worn thin, the floor scuffed by dozens of work boots. Fry moved a hard hat aside, slid in next to him, and wound the window down to prevent the interior steaming up. Rain covered the windscreen, blocking out the view of the farm.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked.
‘I’ll be OK.’
He didn’t sound very sure, but Fry let it pass. The sooner she finished with him, the better it would be. If he went into shock, he’d be useless.
Murfin had been right about Jamie Ward. He was younger than any of the other men she’d seen standing around the site, and he had an entirely different look about him. His hair was streaked blond, and was gelled up at the front – hardly the typical builder’s style. But he was a well-built lad, six feet tall at least, a good build for a rugby player. His hands were powerful and broad, just as suitable for hard physical work as for playing rugby.
‘I’m studying Microbiology at Sheffield University,’ said Jamie when she asked him. ‘But I need to find work whenever I can, you know – to get some dosh.’
‘You work as a builder’s labourer? That’s a bit of an unusual vacation job for a student,’ suggested Fry.
Jamie shrugged. ‘It suits me. It beats working in McDonald’s, anyway. I like to be outside in the open air, doing a bit of physical work. I’d go mad otherwise. I don’t have any skills or training, but I can use a spade and push a wheelbarrow about.’
‘And carry a hod full of bricks?’
‘We’re not allowed to use hods any more,’ said Jamie. ‘Health and Safety – you could do your back in, or drop bricks on someone’s head.’
‘Really?’
He nodded. ‘Besides, we’re not using bricks on this site. It’s going to be entirely stone on the outside, to match the original walls. Breeze block on the inside, of course.’ Jamie wiped off a few inches of condensation and looked at the figures moving about in the rain. ‘Funny, really, when there’s all this clay lying about. But stone is much more fashionable. That’s what the owner wants.’
Fry saw him relaxing a little, now that he had managed to get off the painful subject of the body he’d found.
‘So you like to be outside in the open air?’ she asked, thinking that Jamie Ward reminded her a little of Ben Cooper. ‘Are you from a farming family, by any chance?’
‘Well, I used to help my grandfather around his place when I was a teenager. Just at weekends and during the school holidays. He doesn’t have the farm any more, though – Granddad sold up when it stopped making money.’
‘Sensible man.’
‘Right. Well, I wouldn’t have wanted to spend my life doing the job that Granddad did. He was at it twenty-four seven. There was no let-up from looking after the animals. Livestock farming is for losers, don’t you think? Anyone with any sense is getting out as fast as they can.’
They both sat for a moment peering through the patch of cleared glass at the buildings of Pity Wood Farm, like divers examining a deep sea wreck.
‘I mean,’ said Jamie, ‘look at this place, for example.’
‘You’re right there.’
Ward glanced sideways at her. ‘But you want me to tell you what happened, don’t you? How I came to find the … well …’
‘I know you’ll have gone through it before, but it would help me if you could describe the incident in your own words, Jamie.’
‘The incident, yes. I suppose that’s what it was.’
‘Take your time. I’m not going anywhere for a while.’
‘Nik had me digging this trench, see. To put in some footings for a new wall, he said.’
‘And Nik is …?’
‘Nikolai. He’s the gaffer, the foreman. Polish, of course, but he’s OK. He leaves me pretty much to myself most of the time. I don’t get the best jobs, obviously – I’m just a labourer. In fact, they sometimes send me up to the village for cigarettes, if they run out. Anyway… I’d been digging this trench for a couple of days. It was hard work – that soil is so heavy, especially when it’s wet. You can see how wet it is.’
‘Yes, I’ve seen how wet it is,’ said Fry, becoming aware of the dampness soaking into her feet where the mud had overflowed her shoes.
‘And there’s all kinds of stuff in the ground here. You wouldn’t believe the rubbish I’ve turned up. Nothing that’d interest an archaeologist, but I’ve thought once or twice of asking the Time Team to come and give me a hand.’
There was silence for a moment as the full deadliness of his joke drifted through the van like a bad smell. Fry saw him go pale, and thought she was going to lose him.
‘Are you all right, Jamie?’
He gulped. ‘Yeah. Thanks. It was mentioning the hand. Not that I meant that hand, but … Shit, I’m not making any sense. I’m sorry.’
‘You’re doing just fine. You were telling me about the rubbish you had to dig out for the trench. What kind of thing do you mean?’
‘A lot of it was rusty lumps of metal, half-bricks, nails, broken buckets. It looked as though the farmers had used that area for a tip. I cursed Nik a few times, I can tell you. There were even some of those glass jars that people use for making pickles, with lids that have an airtight seal. Do you know what I mean?’
Jamie was making gestures with his hands to indicate the size of the containers he’d found.
‘Mason jars?’ said Fry.
‘That’s it. Oh, and an old, broken cross on a chain, some Coke bottles, and a packet of coffee filters. The things people chuck out. Why don’t they use their wheelie bins – some of that stuff ought to be recycled.’
‘Where did you put all these items you dug out of the trench?’
‘In a barrow, then they went into the big skip round the back of the house.’ Jamie paused. ‘Why are you asking questions about the rubbish?’
‘Because some of the items you dug out might have belonged to the victim,’ said Fry as gently as she could.
‘Oh, God. I never thought of that.’
‘An old, broken cross, you said.’
‘It was nothing. Just a cheap crucifix on a chain, with part of the base chipped away. A bit of worthless tat.’
‘You didn’t notice any personal items, did you?’
‘Such as?’
‘A purse, jewellery, coins,’ said Fry. ‘Items of clothing.’
An entire handbag would be nice, she was thinking. A driving licence, credit cards, a letter from an embittered ex-lover?
‘No, nothing like that,’ said Jamie.
‘I don’t know if anyone has mentioned that the body is that of a female, fairly young?’
Jamie swallowed again. ‘Well, some of the blokes have been listening in, you know. Word got around.’
‘I mention it because there might have been items you were unfamiliar with.’
Jamie shook his head. ‘Only the – what do you call them? Mason jars.’
So she might have been making pickles when she was buried, thought Fry. That helps. But she knew she was being unfair on the young labourer. Why should he have taken any notice of what he was tossing away in his wheelbarrow? It would be up to the SOCOs to go through the contents of the skip. Who was going to tell them about that job? Mrs Popularity, she supposed.
‘All right. Let’s move on. How far down had you dug before you noticed anything wrong?’
‘Nearly three feet. I was shifting a big lump of stone out of the clay. It was heavy, and I was thinking of calling one of the other blokes over to give me … I mean, to help me lift it. But they laugh at me if I ask for help, so I tried to manage on my own. I’d climbed down into the trench, and I managed to get both hands round the stone and hoist it up. I remember it came out with a sort of sucking sound, and it left a big, round impression in the clay where it had been lying. I must have stood there like an idiot for I don’t know how long, watching the water slowly fill in the hole where the stone had been. And there it was – the hand.’
Fry kept quiet. She could see that he was in the moment now, living the experience. This was the time he might remember the little details best.
‘I shouted then, I think,’ said Jamie. ‘And I dropped the stone, too – I’ve just remembered that, I dropped the stone. Somebody came running over straight away, one of the other blokes working nearby. They thought I’d hurt myself, of course. I could already hear Nik swearing in Polish and calling me an English cretin.’
Jamie finished with a laugh. ‘And he’s right – that’s what I am. What an idiot for making all this fuss.’
‘Not at all,’ said Fry. ‘You did exactly the right thing.’
Jamie didn’t look convinced. He rubbed his own hands together, as if trying to remove the mud he’d seen on the thing he’d uncovered.
‘So you could hear Nik cursing. Was it him who came running over when you shouted?’
‘No, someone else. Nik turned up a bit later. I can’t remember who it was who came first. I didn’t take any notice at the time.’
‘But it must have been somebody working nearby.’
‘Yes. Well, it must have been.’ Jamie shrugged apologetically. ‘But I don’t know who. It was a bit of a blank by then.’
‘Don’t worry. You’ve done really well, Jamie.’
‘You know what I’m thinking now?’ he said. ‘Thank God that woman’s hand was under that stone. If I’d been digging and hit it with my spade, I’d have sliced right through it. Well, I would, wouldn’t I?’
‘Possibly.’
He looked pleadingly at Fry. ‘I need to go outside now,’ he said. ‘Right now. I’m sorry. Tell everyone I’m sorry.’
Strips of plastic sheeting that had been ripped from passing lorries were snagged on barbed-wire fences and hawthorn branches. They streamed and fluttered in the wind like tattered pennants. No need for windsocks here. It was always obvious which direction the wind was blowing from.
Cooper had Peak FM on in the car and was listening to a series of tracks from seventies bands. UB40 and Dire Straits. A bit of Duran Duran even. Well, it was that or BBC local radio, where the playlists seemed to be regressing to the sixties, with more and more artists that he’d never heard of. The Beatles maybe, but most of it was stuff his parents must have listened to when they were children.
Pity Wood Farm, according to Control. He’d never heard of it, but he knew where Rakedale was – the southern edge of the limestone plateau, maybe even beyond the limestone, somewhere down past Monyash and Hartington. Much further south, and this body would have been D Division’s problem.
The peat moors were the brownish yellow of winter. An oddly shaped cloud was rearing over the hill, as if there had been a nuclear explosion somewhere near Buxton. Bare, twisted branches stood outlined against the skyline, gesturing hopelessly, as if they thought the spring would never come.
Cooper found Fry inside the outer cordon, shaking the rain from her jacket.
‘Diane – what do you want doing?’
‘We’re going to have to start on the house and outbuildings some time, but I don’t know where’s best to begin. Take a look around, will you? Give me your impressions. Perhaps you could start with that shed over there.’
‘Shed?’
‘That shed over there. The big one.’
‘No problem.’
Cooper watched her go. Impressions, was it? That wasn’t normally what she asked him for. Fry was usually hot on firm evidence. Maybe there was something about this place that bothered her. If so, she wasn’t likely to say it. She was putting that responsibility on to him – let DC Cooper come up with the impressions, the vague feelings, the gut instincts. Then she could always dismiss them, if necessary. Cooper’s contribution could be trampled underfoot, without any shadow on her own reputation.
Oh, well. Fair enough. It seemed to be his role in life since Diane Fry had become his DS. He either had to accept it, or find somewhere else.
When the police had finished with him, Jamie Ward looked around for a few minutes. There were a lot of cops here now, and some other people he took to be forensics. He could imagine the blokes in his crew blabbing to the police. Yes, that’s him over there. We call him the Professor. But not all of them would be eager to talk to the authorities, he bet. A few of them would make out they didn’t speak any English at all.
Nikolai was standing over by the house, talking to a bunch of the men. He was speaking quietly in Polish, almost whispering, though it was unlikely anyone would understand him, except his own lads. Jamie frowned, and counted them again. Seven. He looked around, wondering if he could be mistaken. But no. There were seven, plus Nikolai. Two men short.
He sighed, foreseeing more complications, and more trouble. Jamie recalled that faint glint of metal, slick with the dampness of clay, reflecting a glimmer of light and the movement of his spade. He remembered the impression he’d had, the thing that had made him stop digging, his spade frozen in his hands as he stared down into the hole. For a second, that flicker of light had looked like an eye – an eye that had turned to watch him from its muddy grave. He thought he would probably still be able to see that eye in his dreams tonight.
3 (#uf6d6d0cd-8496-5b2a-9e54-a1361606c8cd)
It was more than just a shed. When you got right up to it, the building that Fry had pointed out was more like a vast, corrugated-iron tunnel. When Cooper walked into it, he felt as though he was entering a cathedral, with airy space all around him and light filtering down from the roof, shafts of it striking through cracks in the iron sheeting. Water dripped somewhere ahead of him, and the sides gleamed with patches of damp as he moved.
Many of the older farms in this area still used wartime Nissen huts for storage, relying on the fact that they were built to last a long time and took many years before they finally collapsed from age and neglect. But this thing was bigger than any Nissen hut Cooper had ever seen. A hundred feet long at least, with central posts holding up the ridge of the arc high above him. The structure was open to the elements at both ends, but the middle was dry and sheltered.
Inside, he found two tractors parked on a concrete base alongside a pick-up truck. More vehicles stood outside – a lorry fitted with a winch, an old Escort with a pig trailer attached to the tow bar. The equipment stored in here included an interesting yard scraper made from twenty-four-inch tractor tyre sections. Matt would love that. Cheap, but effective.
Heaps of old tyres lay around the yard, and the vehicles were overshadowed by a huge fortress of silage bags. At first glance, the bags looked like plastic boulders painted black, with strips of loose wrapping stirring in the breeze. Cooper pictured them in summer, with bumble bees buzzing around the stack, attracted by the sweet smell of the silage. But a shiver of cold air reminded him that it was December, and the silage shouldn’t still be standing here, untouched.
Outside, the sides and roof of the shed were starting to turn from their original yellow to rust red. The branches of a hawthorn tree scratched restlessly against the sides – the only sign of life in the abandoned farmyard.
Behind the farmhouse stood a typical skeleton of an open Dutch-style barn, its timbers supporting only a few tatters of roof. He could see that the ridge of the house sagged in a couple of places, and the windows at the back were hung with dusty curtains. A grimy caravan stood in what might once have been the garden. Ancient bales of hay were visible through a ragged hole in the wall of a stone byre.
Another range of old stone buildings was practically in ruins. Cooper found himself inhaling whiffs of a powerful smell here and there as he moved around. A hint of ammonia suggested the presence of a number of cats. Farm cats, that lived outside and prowled the barns and sheds for rodents, doing a job of work.
Beyond the Dutch barn, a few yards down the slope, he found a series of dilapidated poultry sheds. They weren’t all that old, but had never been maintained properly. He peered through a dusty window, expecting rows and rows of battery cages. But there were none to be seen. So the sheds must have been deep-littered with straw for the birds, unless the cages had been removed.
Cooper was already starting to find this place depressing. Parts of Bridge End Farm might be deteriorating because there was no money for maintenance and repairs. But Bridge End was a model of modernity, compared to Pity Wood.
He turned his attention to the house itself. Limestone, with those distinctive gritstone corners called quoins. Some of the walls had been rendered with cement to combat the effects of the weather. But, judging from the scabrous patches where the render had flaked off, the weather was winning. In fact, it had been winning for some time. This farmhouse had thrown in the towel.
If there were any answers to how the body had ended up in that shallow grave a few yards away, they would most likely be found inside the house. Cooper enquired who’d taken possession of the keys, and he eased open the back door.
In the hallway, the first thing he saw was a huge, black family Bible, laid out on a table like a warning.
Fry knew she had to get control of the scene and protect any forensic evidence – though what kind of evidence might have survived the slow decay and partial demolition of Pity Wood Farm she couldn’t imagine.
These were the critical hours. If any evidence did turn up, she had to be able to demonstrate chain of custody. It was so important to look ahead to the possibility of a trial some time in the future. If the prosecution didn’t have chain of custody, it presented a gift to the defence. No matter what happened between now and that hypothetical date, her present actions could cast doubt on an entire investigation or provide it with a solid foundation.
The SOCOs had a rule of thumb. If an item of potential evidence was vulnerable, if everyone was going to walk over it on the way in and out of the scene, it should be removed or protected. If it was out of the way, it could be left in place. There could be evidence that had already been walked over several times on the way in and out.
So those builders had to be kept clear, to minimize any contamination to that they’d already caused. The digging operations had to be done in a controlled manner – someone would have to keep an eye on the diggers and stop them wandering around the farm.
And those vehicles parked up on the muddy track and in the entrance to the yard … well, it was already too late, probably. No matter what action she took now, there was no way she could turn back time.
‘Sutton,’ said Murfin breathlessly, breaking into her thoughts. ‘Sutton.’
‘What?’
‘The previous owners of the farm. Name of Sutton. Raymond is the brother now residing in a care home back in town – we don’t know which yet, but we’ll find out. He’s quite elderly, in his late seventies, we think. There was a younger brother, Derek, who died about a year ago.’
‘Not bad, Gavin.’
‘Thanks. Unfortunately, we can’t find any sign of anyone else in the household at that time, other than the two brothers. We’ve checked the electoral register, and they were the only two adults listed.’
‘So no women?’
‘No women,’ said Murfin. ‘Just peace and quiet.’
Inside the farmhouse, Cooper found the rooms to be a strange mixture of conversion and preservation. Passing from one room to another for the first time was an unpredictable experience. Some spaces were littered with building materials and tools left behind by Jamie Ward’s workmates. Sacks of sand and cement, piles of breeze block, buckets, a ladder, a couple of steel toolboxes. These rooms had been stripped of their original contents – all dumped in the yellow skip he’d seen outside the back door, presumably – and they’d been transformed into building sites instead.
Other rooms, though, had yet to be touched by anyone. Those still contained evidence of the farm’s occupants and their day-today existence – two pairs of wellington boots by the back door, a smelly overcoat still hanging in a cupboard under the stairs.
Upstairs, there were three bedrooms. It was difficult to tell which of them had been occupied most recently, since they were all equally full of junk and old clothes. The middle bedroom overlooked the yard, and it seemed darker and colder than the other two. If Cooper had been choosing a bedroom, it would have been any one but this.
The kitchen seemed to be the part of the house that was most intact. A black, cast-iron cooking range dominated one end of the room, and near it a tap still dripped in a Belfast sink, as if someone had only just failed to turn it off properly. All the furniture was still here, too – a large pine table with scarred and blackened legs, two ancient armchairs, a dresser filled with plates and cutlery.
In the corner and along the back wall, Cooper unearthed a number of less identifiable objects. He counted a dozen cardboard boxes, some standing on top of each other, the bottom one crumpling slightly under the weight. There was a heap of clothes on a chair near the cooking range and more coats and overalls hung behind the outer door. It was a Marie Celeste of a kitchen, frozen in time, preserved in the moment that the owners had finally walked out one day.
Even the fridge was still here, an old Electrolux with a split rubber seal. But that wasn’t still working, surely? Cooper opened the door, and was surprised to see the interior light come on, and feel a draught of cold air on his face. But then he saw why it was switched on. The builders had been keeping their milk in it, ready for their tea breaks. Their carton of semi-skimmed sat among some less reassuring items – jars without labels, tins that had been opened and left to grow mould, as if someone had been trying to culture penicillin. The contents of the nearest jar had crystallized and lay on the bottom, defying him to figure out what they’d originally been.
The smell was disturbing, and Cooper shut the door again quickly. The fridge responded by breaking into an unsteady hum, rattling slightly on the tiled floor.
As he moved around the house, Cooper felt the skin on the back of his neck begin to crawl. The surroundings were innocuous enough, if depressing. But the atmosphere was really bad. His instincts were telling him that something awful had happened here at Pity Wood Farm. Painful memories had imprinted themselves into the walls, the aftershock of some traumatic event still shuddered in the air.
Cooper shivered, and tried to put the sensation aside. It was the sort of feeling that he couldn’t mention, particularly to Diane Fry. He’d been accused of being over-imaginative too often to risk the put-down. Evidence was all that anyone was interested in, and he had none of that.
He might describe his feeling to Liz when he saw her – she would understand what he meant. Cooper glanced at his watch. Hopefully that might be tonight, if he was lucky. The sense of urgency that pervaded most major crime scenes was missing from Pity Wood – presumably because the body was judged to be too old. The twenty-four-hour rule didn’t apply here. Vital evidence that could disappear in the first day or so after a murder was long gone in this case. Anything that was left would be preserved down there, in the mud with the body – or here, inside the house. Better to take it slow and carefully, so that nothing remaining was missed.
That’s what he’d be thinking if he was SIO, anyway. Not that he was ever likely to reach that position – you needed to be promoted at regular intervals to achieve it. He’d probably slipped too far behind already when he failed to get his promotion to DS. He was thirty, after all, and there would be eager young officers overtaking him before he knew it. Just the way it had happened to Gavin Murfin, and many others.
Cooper looked through the kitchen window and saw DI Hitchens standing in the yard with the crime scene manager, Wayne Abbott. Right now, Abbott was doing the talking, and the DI was nodding wisely. He did that pretty well, the nodding bit. From a distance, he looked intelligent and in control, a man who knew exactly what the plan was. Cooper knew he could never look that way himself, whether from a distance or close up. He’d always just look like a confused DC who was having uneasy feelings that he couldn’t explain. Fry had told him that often enough. Keep your mouth firmly shut, Ben – that’s the best way. Don’t give them an excuse to laugh at you.
He heard a noise behind him, a faint crunch of cement dust underfoot. He turned to find Diane Fry standing in the doorway, her usual silent approach thwarted by a layer of builders’ debris. Her gaze roamed around the room, taking in the furniture and the yellowed walls. Cooper tried to think of something intelligent he could say to her, a few words that would make it look as though he’d been gathering useful evidence, rather than dwelling on eerie atmospheres.
‘Jesus,’ said Fry, before he could speak. ‘Don’t you feel as though something horrible happened in here?’
* * *
In the more distant outbuildings, there had been that powerful smell of cat urine. Yet Cooper had seen no sign of any cats as he walked round the property. He wondered what had happened to them when the Suttons left. Dispersed, like everything else, he supposed.
But everything hadn’t been dispersed, had it? Far from it, in fact. There was all that machinery and equipment in the big shed, the silage bags, the hay, and the vehicles parked in the yard.
‘You know, it would be normal practice to have a farm sale in these circumstances,’ said Cooper as they went back outside.
‘A what?’ asked Fry.
‘A farm sale. I don’t mean the sale of the buildings themselves. Before it got to that stage, they would usually sell off all the equipment – the tractors and trailers, tools, field gates, spare fencing posts. There are buyers for most things. They could probably sell the silage and the tyres, too, maybe even this shed itself. But they should have done that before the house and land were put on the market, so there was a tidy site for buyers to look at. I can’t understand why all this stuff is still standing here. It doesn’t make sense.’
Fry shrugged. ‘Perhaps they’re planning to do it later. There’s no law against it.’
‘I’ll enquire at the local auctioneers, Pilkington’s – they’d almost certainly be the people called in for a job like that.’ Cooper shook his head. ‘But it’s really bad planning to do it this way round. They should have cleared everything out first.’
Murfin stuck his head round a corner. ‘Oh, there you are. Mr Hitchens wants everyone out front for a confab.’
‘We’re coming.’
DI Hitchens was Fry’s immediate boss, the man whose job she might have to get if she planned to stay in Derbyshire E Division. But the thought of staying here wasn’t part of her future plans, and places like Pity Wood Farm only confirmed her view. There were times when she longed for the city, or even for the peculiar urban fusion that was the Black Country where she’d grown up.
Hitchens looked calm and unruffled, allowing the rain to fall on his head without flinching. As he waited for the officers to gather round him at the RV point, he wiped some moisture from his face, flashing the white scar that crawled across the middle knuckles of his fingers.
‘Well, as some of you already know,’ he said, ‘this body has been in the ground for a year or more.’
‘So there’s no point in us rushing around if the case is so old, sir?’ asked someone.
‘Well … that’s not something I want to hear anyone saying publicly. But it does mean we can let the anthropologist and forensics team do their thing for a while yet, and the mince pies might not have to go cold.’
There were a scattering of half-hearted cheers, but the relief was palpable.
Hitchens acknowledged the reaction with a slight smile. ‘Meanwhile, a few basic procedures are in order, to make sure we’ve covered the ground. If we do have to open a murder enquiry later on, I don’t want to hear that we missed vital evidence in the early stages because someone was in too much of a hurry to do their Christmas shopping. Understood?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘For a start, we need information on all these workmen – anyone who’s been on site. Names and addresses, dates of birth – you know the drill. Then we can run them through the PNC if necessary.’
‘What about their status?’ asked Fry.
‘Status?’
‘I was thinking that some of them might have residency or immigration issues. You know how difficult it is to get information when they’re worried about being arrested or deported.’
‘I thought someone told me they were all Polish?’ said Hitchens. ‘Poles don’t have residency or immigration issues – they’re members of the EU, so they can come and go when they like, and they don’t need work permits either.’
Murfin raised a hand, enjoying being the man with the answers for once. ‘Apparently, most of these blokes work for an agency, which sends them wherever the work is. It means they don’t have a settled address, sir. They live in digs, bed and breakfasts, caravans, whatever is available. They say it’s worth their while – they get about twice the minimum wage, enough to send money home, if their families aren’t in this country.’
Fry glanced across at the little huddle of builders in their safety boots and yellow hard hats. ‘We’re only assuming they’re all Polish. The foreman is, but we haven’t checked the rest out yet, so we might get some surprises.’
‘Don’t tell me we’re going to have to find translators,’ said Hitchens. ‘At Christmas? Their statements alone could take weeks to process.’
‘Well, maybe we don’t need them.’
‘No. You’re right, DS Fry. Let’s prioritize, shall we? We’re dealing with the foreman and the lad who actually found the body. What’s his name?’
‘Jamie Ward.’
‘Jamie Ward, right. The rest can wait, as long as we know where to find them. Meanwhile, we need everything we can get on the family who lived here. Two brothers, Raymond and Derek Sutton, and anyone associated with them. I’ll be speaking to the surviving brother myself this afternoon, when we establish which care home he’s in. There’s a village over that way somewhere, called Rakedale. We’ll be starting house-to-house there tomorrow morning. Everyone OK with that?’
There were murmurs of agreement and a general shuffling. Everyone was now anxious to get finished and go home.
Cooper fell into step with Fry as the impromptu meeting broke up. Their feet squelched as they walked back towards their vehicles from the outer cordon.
‘What do you think, Diane? Are we going to have to interview all the builders?’
‘I hope not.’
The crew working on the conversion of Pity Wood Farm had created their own access, widening an old field entrance and laying down a gravel roadway to reach the back of the farm. The area they’d been working in was getting very muddy, and Scenes of Crime had managed to lay a series of duckboards to reach the site of the grave, which would protect evidence better than their temporary bridge. Anyone who stepped off those duckboards was getting splattered with mud. One or two of the more carelessly parked vehicles might have to be towed out at the end of the day.
Cooper could see Liz Petty talking to two of her SOCO colleagues. They were probably awaiting the arrival of the Northern Area Scientific Support Officer, who was based at C Division headquarters in Chesterfield.
He badly wanted to acknowledge Liz, but they’d agreed to keep their relationship low profile when they were at work. Not secret, exactly – it would never be a secret in E Division. But they both felt it was important to be professional, and not to give anyone cause for complaint.
When he saw the front of the farm, Cooper realized why the builders had gone in the back way. The main access must already have been an ocean of mud when they arrived. It looked as though the previous owners had allowed their cattle free rein. The ground was seriously poached, right up to the walls of the farmhouse. The lane from the gate past the barn would be almost impassable on foot, unless you were wearing waders.
Cooper shook his head. No one would have allowed that to happen unless they no longer cared about the farm, or had no stake in its future.
He pulled his Toyota over towards the wall and leaned on the topping stones for a while. He could see that someone had been into Pity Wood this way, and quite recently. Tyre tracks ran through the mud, where a vehicle had churned deep, wet ruts. The tracks didn’t run all the way up to the house, but stopped near the barn. If he looked a bit more closely at the ruts, then asked around to find out when cattle were last in here, he could probably have a good stab at how long it was since the vehicle had come and gone.
But it didn’t matter, did it? This crime wasn’t recent enough.
Cooper felt sure they’d be looking into the past to find the information they needed, studying that little time capsule of a kitchen, not the cement-covered building site. The answers would lie in the lives of the people who’d abandoned Pity Wood Farm to its fate.
4 (#uf6d6d0cd-8496-5b2a-9e54-a1361606c8cd)
At The Oaks residential care home in Edendale, Raymond Sutton was sitting in the big lounge – the one with a view of the fields at the back, where he got an occasional glimpse of cattle grazing in the distance. Holsteins, but it was better than nothing. The TV was on, of course. Some of the old girls watched it all the time, though they didn’t always know what they were seeing. Most of the stuff that was on during the day was rubbish – brainless quiz shows, old films, kiddies’ cartoons. He’d never been one for sitting indoors watching the telly. Raymond liked the news, though. Just because you were old and getting a bit stiff in the joints, it didn’t mean you should let your brain cells die.
He saw a car enter the gateway from the road and head up the drive. Thanks to his new hearing aid, he could hear the tyres crunch on the gravel. There were many sounds that he’d missed when his hearing started to fail, but the noise of cars wasn’t one of them. His home at Pity Wood had been far enough off the road to save him from traffic.
He didn’t recognize this particular car. Red, which was unusual these days. Everyone seemed to go for grey or silver, which made it difficult to distinguish between them. He could see it was a four-wheel drive, too. Japanese – Mitsubishi, Toyota? One of those makes. He might have known the difference once, but it didn’t matter that much any more.
Four-wheel drive, though, and very muddy around the wheel arches and the bottom of the doors. Somebody who knew the countryside, then. He wondered which of the residents they were visiting.
One of the carers came into the room. The one called Elaine. Young, dark-haired, one of the nicer ones. She was always gentle with him when she had to get him out of bed or into the bath. A little bit of kindness could make his last days more tolerable.
‘Raymond,’ she said. ‘Are you feeling up to visitors? There are some people here asking to see you. They’re from the police.’
Cooper felt he could probably have done a better job interviewing Raymond Sutton on his own. But DI Hitchens was in charge of the investigation for now, so he was within his rights to do whatever he wanted. Some might say that the Senior Investigating Officer should be back at the office co-ordinating the enquiry and allocating resources, but what did he know? He was just a DC.
They were shown into a lounge by the care assistant, whose name badge said she was called Elaine. Mr Sutton had either been put in there on his own, or the other residents had been moved out somewhere else when they arrived. Whichever it was, they found the old man in splendid isolation, perched in one of those big chairs that only old people ever sat in. There were other, similar chairs ranged round the walls of the room, and a big television set stood in the corner, mercifully switched off a moment before. Many interviews conducted in people’s own homes resulted in conversations shouted over the noise of the telly. It was often a temptation to take someone down to the station just for the sake of being able to hear what they were saying.
‘Mr Sutton? I’m Detective Inspector Hitchens, and this is Detective Constable Cooper. From Edendale CID.’
Hitchens offered a view of his warrant card, as procedure recommended. But Sutton held out his hand instead to greet his visitors, and Hitchens was obliged to shake it. Cooper did the same, grasping a hand with paper-thin skin that trembled slightly in his palm. The old man smelled of soap, and his clothes were clean and neat, though the cardigan he was wearing no longer fit him so well as it once might have.
They sat on chairs either side of him, and Hitchens opened the conversation.
‘Mr Sutton, you are the former owner of Pity Wood Farm at Rakedale. Is that right?’
‘Aye. That’s where I live. Pity Wood.’
Hitchens shook his head. ‘That’s where you used to live. You sold the farm, didn’t you?’
‘I did. You’re right. I don’t remember who bought it.’
‘We know who bought it, Mr Sutton.’
‘Who was it? I can’t remember their name.’
‘Mr Goodwin, from Manchester.’
‘I don’t know him. It was all done through the estate agents and solicitors. You’ll have to ask them where he is.’
‘No, we want to ask you about Pity Wood Farm.’
‘Pity Wood, that’s where I live.’
‘You don’t live there any more. Don’t you remember?’
Sutton laughed – a dry, crackly laugh, with little humour in it, as if the DI was tormenting him with a feather in a sensitive spot.
‘I remember some things quite well. But I don’t recall this feller that bought the farm. What did you say his name was?’
‘Goodwin.’
‘I don’t know him.’
‘No sir –’
The old man turned away from Hitchens and studied Cooper instead, his eyes glinting. ‘You’ll come to see me again, won’t you? I don’t get many visitors.’
Hitchens became impatient then, and made the mistake of putting his hand on Sutton’s sleeve to get his attention. The old man drew his arm away abruptly and stared at Hitchens in indignation.
‘Just a minute, young man. Take your hands off me, or I’ll get them to send for the police.’
‘Mr Sutton. We have to ask you some questions, I’m afraid, sir. There have been human remains found at Pity Wood this morning. The dead body of a woman. We need to know how this person ended up buried on your farm.’
‘Questions? Well, you can only try. Open the barn door, and you might find a cow.’
Hitchens opened his mouth, but shut it again quickly, as if he’d just found the cow and didn’t want it to escape.
They left Mr Sutton sitting in the lounge on his own, and found the care assistant who’d let them in to The Oaks.
‘I’m sorry if you didn’t have much luck, Inspector,’ she said. ‘Raymond has good days and bad days. You’d be surprised how much he can remember sometimes. His brain is still quite active. But other times, he gets a bit, well… confused, even distressed. It’s perfectly normal for his condition, but you can never quite tell what’s going to upset him. Memories, I suppose.’
‘If he has a good day, would it be possible to bring him out for a couple of hours?’ asked Hitchens. ‘We’d like him to come and see the farm.’
‘His old home? Oh, I’m sure Raymond would love that.’
‘I take it he’s physically fit enough?’
‘Oh, yes. He has no major health problems, considering his age. In fact, the doctor says Raymond is quite a tough old bird. He’ll probably still be around in ten years’ time, when all our other residents have gone. It must come from being a farmer, I suppose.’
‘And the wonderful care he gets here, I’m sure.’
‘Why, thank you, Inspector.’
Hitchens nodded, turning on his most charming smile. Cooper couldn’t help raising an eyebrow. Personally, he didn’t think Raymond Sutton would love a day out at Pity Wood Farm at all, but perhaps he was wrong about that, too.
‘Yes, if the weather is decent, we’ll put a wheelchair into the minibus and Colin will drive Raymond up to Rakedale to visit the farm. But you won’t tire him out, will you?’
‘Not at all. We’ll send him back as soon as he wants to come.’
‘Fine, Inspector. Can we give you a call when we think he’s ready?’
The DI produced his card and handed it over with a gesture almost like a small bow. Cooper felt like gagging. But then, he wasn’t the person the Hitchens charm was being aimed at.
‘Sir,’ said Cooper as they were leaving, ‘do you think Raymond Sutton knows who buried the body at the farm?’
‘Almost certainly.’
‘Could he be in danger? Might someone want to make sure that Mr Sutton doesn’t talk?’
‘They might. But how would they get to him in The Oaks? Their security is pretty good, and the staff know where every resident is twenty-four hours a day.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ said Cooper.
With a weary curse, Nikolai Dudzik tipped his yellow hard hat back from his eyes. ‘Look at these outbuildings. All the roof structures are rotten. Completely rotten. The whole lot will have to be stripped off, you know. We’re talking about a massive amount of new timber for the joists alone.’
Fry could see that Dudzik’s workmen had dug a network of trenches behind the barn for the new drainage and water supply. No pipes had gone in yet – they still lay in heaps at the edge of the field. But the trenches were half full of water, thanks to the rain that continued to fall intermittently on Pity Wood Farm. She could see that the clay must be non-porous. Further north, the limestone would let rain water through like a sieve. It was one of the few geological facts she’d learned since leaving Birmingham for the Peak District.
‘There must be some old drains over that way somewhere,’ said Dudzik, gesturing towards the tumble-down ruins of a cowshed. ‘We haven’t found them, and we’re not looking for them any more. God knows what state they’ll be in. They must be very, very old.’
Inside the outbuildings, someone had started chipping the old plaster off the walls. Layers of dust covered the floor, and the exposed stonework looked inexplicably damp.
‘If it was up to me, the whole thing would come down,’ said Dudzik. ‘Then we could start from scratch and do a proper job. But we have to retain the original features. Original features! Bits of old stone and rotten timbers. What’s the point? I ask you.’
Fry let him talk for a while longer. Then she thought of a question. ‘Why haven’t you dug up the old drains, did you say?’
Dudzik shrugged. ‘There’s no way of knowing where they are exactly. There are no records for these old places, no proper site maps, yes? And the drainage often goes off at odd angles, when it’s so old. It will be sections of clay pipe, you see – useless by now. Useless. Besides, there’s nothing in the new plans for that area. It’ll just be a bit of garden or a paddock, so what’s the point of us digging it up?’
‘And this area where Jamie Ward found the body – there wasn’t supposed to be a wall here at all?’
‘No, no. There was no wall here. It was a job I gave to Jamie, you know – to keep him out of the way.’
‘Can I have a look at the plans, please?’
‘Sure.’
Dudzik pulled a rolled-up plan out of his back pocket and handed it to her.
‘It looks as though this area was going to be left pretty well untouched,’ she said. ‘It’s shown as grass on the drawings.’
Dudzik shrugged. ‘I know. But what a waste. This is the perfect place for a nice patio. Some good paving, you know. A water feature maybe. We could have made it nice.’
‘That’s pretty much what Jamie said too.’
‘That boy. He’s not stupid – just not practical, you know.’
‘He would have noticed soon enough that no wall was being built, wouldn’t he?’
‘I guess so, Detective.’
Fry had been listening to his accent. She knew he was Polish, but it was only the sound of his vowels that gave him away. His command of idiom was very good, and he hadn’t faltered on the use of tenses, which was often a problem for nonnative speakers.
‘Your English is excellent, Mr Dudzik. How long have you been in this country?’
The builder looked wary. ‘Eight years, Sergeant. I learned English back home, when I was a kid at school in Poland. When I came here, I talked English all the time with the people I met. Some of my fellow countrymen, when they come now, they don’t think they have to bother to learn English. It’s too much trouble for them. They think things will be translated into Polish for them, because they are so many. But I was one of the first to come, before my country was a member of the European Union, even. I always wanted to live in England, so I learned English. It’s the only way to fit in, yes?’
‘Yes, of course.’
He looked at her, still uncertain. ‘My papers are in order.’
‘I’m not doubting it,’ said Fry. ‘But you could do one important thing for me. Would you give my colleague, Detective Constable Murfin, a list of the men who have been working on your team here at the farm?’
Raymond Sutton stood to one side of the window and watched the police officers get into their car at the end of the drive. Quietly, he muttered a sentence to himself.
‘And they answered and said unto him, Where, Lord?’
As the car passed out of sight, he let the curtain drop. He turned back to face the room, looked around him for a moment, and finished the quotation.
‘And he said unto them,
Wheresoever the body is, there will the eagles be gathered.’
‘I’m sorry, Raymond? Did you say something?’
Sutton stared at Elaine, confused by her presence. He hadn’t noticed her come into the room. He’d been thinking that he was somewhere else, far away, in another life almost.
‘The Gospel of St Luke,’ he said. ‘Chapter seventeen, verse thirty-seven.’
‘I see, Raymond. Are you ready for your tea yet?’
‘King James version. Obviously.’
‘I’ll fetch it in, shall I?’
‘You can do what you like. It makes no difference now.’
5 (#uf6d6d0cd-8496-5b2a-9e54-a1361606c8cd)
A team from Sheffield University had been unloading equipment – shovels and trowels, wire-mesh screens for sifting bone fragments from the soil, evidence bags, tape measures and orange markers. One of the students was already using a video camera to record the position of the remains from every angle before the team approached it.
Fry knew that digging a dead body out of a grave was never as easy as burying a fresh one. When an unprotected corpse was placed in the ground, it formed an intimate union with the earth. Flesh rotted, fabric disintegrated, the skull, spine and pelvis became embedded in the soil. A casual digger would soon despair of freeing the entire body, even after it had spent a year or so in the ground. If anyone removed a body to bury it elsewhere, they were bound to leave a few bits behind.
‘We’re being allowed to approach for a few minutes’ consultation with the anthropologist,’ said DI Hitchens. ‘But then we have to keep clear. Dr Jamieson says he wants to protect himself from assumptions.’
‘Whose assumptions?’
‘Ours, I think.’
The forensic anthropologist’s task was the recovery of human remains, and the determination of age, sex, stature, ancestry, time since death, and any physical trauma that might indicate manner of death. Beyond that, he was not part of the investigation.
Fry laughed. ‘Are we allowed to speak to him at all?’
‘You could probably wish him a Merry Christmas.’
When he heard the laughter, the anthropologist looked up from the excavation with a suspicious scowl. He had a pale, bald head, almost the same colour as the paper scene suit he was wearing. Water gleamed on his scalp. From rain or sweat, it was impossible to tell.
‘How is it going, Doctor?’ called Hitchens.
‘Mixed fortunes, I’m afraid. A dry soil would have preserved the body better. But this is, well …’ He scooped a handful of mud that seeped through his fingers.
‘Too wet?’
‘Correct. Much too wet.’
‘But there’s some good news, I take it?’
‘Well, you know, there are plenty of opportunities on an isolated farm for disposing of a body. If your aim is to reduce the remains to something unidentifiable, then burial is actually one of the slowest and least successful ways to achieve that.’
‘It’s much quicker just to leave it exposed somewhere, if you can get away with it,’ suggested Cooper.
‘Yes. How do you know that?’
‘Every livestock farmer knows that a dead sheep left out in the open during the summer will be reduced to a skeleton within a month.’
‘Exactly. Burying a corpse just slows the process of decomposition. A deeply buried body can take eight times as long to decompose as one exposed on the surface. In this case, burial and the use of plastic sheeting are the two factors which might enable the victim to be identified.’
Protective clothing was being distributed to the forensics team – coveralls, hair caps, gloves and shoe protectors. Trace evidence was transferred so easily that it could be carried away from a crime scene just as easily as it was carried there.
Next to the grave an area had been provided for the scientists to work in, preventing any more disturbance of the grave itself than was necessary. Soil would be removed by lifting it in layers of about ten inches at a time, then it would be passed through sieves of various mesh sizes to extract evidence. They would be trying to locate fragments of bone, personal items, anything that had been dropped or didn’t belong in the area. Some of the anthropology students had begun cursing when they saw the condition of the soil they were supposed to sieve.
‘Yes, buried bodies can be said to be protected from the elements to a large extent. If the soil is acidic, the body will tend to decompose more rapidly. In temperate zones, or areas with severe winters, the processes of decomposition are slowed. Did you know that fat people skeletalize much faster? It’s because their flesh feeds huge armies of maggots. It’s not a weight-loss programme I’d recommend, but maggots can strip forty pounds of surplus flesh off an obese body in twenty-four hours.’
The remains would have to be exposed completely before they could be lifted from the grave. There was too much risk of losing body parts to the sucking grasp of the wet clay. The excavation team had come equipped with an array of small tools – dental picks, bamboo sticks, paint brushes and hand trowels. Fry could see that this was going to be a long, slow, painstaking job. And even after the remains had been removed, the excavation would continue. The anthropologist had called for a further ten inches of soil to be taken from below the body, in case small bones or other evidence had been left behind.
The whole process was being recorded by video and digital photography, as well as handwritten records at every stage. Items that were discovered with the body which might indicate an identity couldn’t be assumed to belong to the victim. Intentional placing of false documents had been known. Anything to confuse investigators.
Fry leaned forward to get a view of the remains, her shoes slipping on the edge of the duckboard.
‘Some parts of the body look very grey, Doctor.’
‘Saponification. It’s a factor that can affect a body after burial, especially if it’s buried in a moist area or directly exposed to water and kept free of air. The fatty tissues of the body turn into adipocere. That’s the greyish, waxlike substance you can see.’
It was that unnatural greyness that Fry would remember most about the victim at Pity Wood Farm. There was a big difference between a violent death and a natural death, between the killing of another human being and death as part of life. The latter she’d come to accept. The former she never would.
Cooper found himself drawn back into the farmhouse by some irresistible urge. It was if the house was calling to him, coaxing him into its rooms so it could tell him its story.
This time, he noticed that the whole kitchen had a curious yellow tinge. The wallpaper above the table might have been lemon once, and the cupboards were made of that golden pine which never seemed to darken completely. But there was also a sort of patina over the ceiling and the walls, particularly near the armchairs. Cooper guessed the Sutton brothers must have been heavy smokers. He could picture them sitting in those two armchairs in the evening, one either side of the fireplace. They would be puffing away, not talking to each other much, if at all. Thinking their own thoughts, but keeping those thoughts to themselves.
Turning away from the kitchen to look back into the sitting room, Cooper found himself disorientated. With the black range and the dripping tap behind him, and the smell of paint and fresh cement in front of him, he felt as though he was standing on the threshold between two worlds. For a moment, he wasn’t sure whether he was standing in the present, looking back into the vanished past, or somehow occupying a brief second of history, sharing the forgotten warmth of the Suttons’ kitchen while getting a glimpse of the future.
He wished he could pin down his sense of life and the lack of it, why some of the rooms were different from others. He was sure there were no scientific data that would back up his impressions. It was more a question of a feeling in the walls, a faint gleam that reflected the generations who’d survived an uncomplicated existence here, accepting life and death as it came. So why was that feeling lacking in some parts of Pity Wood Farm? Why was the gleam missing from the kitchen, why did the shadows seem blacker and more permanent in that middle bedroom on the first floor?
Outside, it was getting dark quickly. No surprise, since it was almost the shortest day of the year. At this time of year, darkness snuck up on you almost without you noticing, so that suddenly it was pitch black. Cooper could just make out the corrugated-iron roof of the shed and the faint gleam of the cars parked in the yard. The mountain of silage bags seemed to be spreading dark shadows across the farm.
But someone had pulled their fingers out and got the floodlights up. Now, part of Pity Wood Farm was bathed in a yellow glare that turned the muddy ground into a corner of the Somme. Mud and trenches and decomposing bodies.
The anthropology team were still working, but Scenes of Crime had gone home for the night, and only a couple of uniformed officers were left on scene protection duty. Soon, the farm would be settling back into its ancient silence.
When darkness descended totally, all he could see beyond the floodlights were the distant, isolated lights of scattered farmhouses. There were no streetlights out here, not even on the B road down in the valley. There was no upward glow from the lights of a town to reflect off the sky. There were no towns near enough. Soon, the shadows would have taken over the world. Or the whole of Rakedale, at least.
To the south of the farm, Cooper could just see Pity Wood itself, or what was left of it. Dark clumps of trees, their bare branches dripping with rain. And from the direction of the big shed, the only sound he could hear was the incessant scratch, scratch, scratch against the corrugated-iron sides.
As if Fry didn’t have enough on her plate, Ben Cooper was behaving oddly. Well, even more oddly than usual. She could see him stopping periodically, and sniffing. Sometimes he even crouched and sniffed close to the ground. Quietly, she came up behind him, realizing that he was totally absorbed in whatever he was concentrating on. When he stopped to squat on the ground again, she tapped him on the shoulder.
‘Hey, what are you supposed to be? General Custer’s Red Indian guide?’
Cooper almost overbalanced, and had to push a hand palm down in the mud to stop himself falling.
‘Oh, for – Diane, don’t do that.’
She found him a clean tissue in her pocket, noting that he’d been so taken by surprise that he didn’t even bother to correct her inappropriate use of the term ‘Red Indian’.
‘What’s with all the sniffing?’
‘There’s a strange smell in this area,’ said Cooper. ‘I thought at first it was just cat urine, but there’s more to it than that.’
‘It’s a farm,’ said Fry. ‘Farms have smells like dogs have fleas. Haven’t you noticed that before?’
‘Not a livestock kind of smell. It’s a chemical odour. Ammonia, but something else too.’
‘This must have been the machinery shed. There’d be diesel, lubricating oil. Damn it, there must have been fertilizer and herbicides, too. Disinfectant – all kinds of chemicals. What’s one whiff among friends?’
‘Can you actually smell it?’ asked Cooper.
‘No. But, then, I think I’m getting a cold.’ Fry turned her face up to the drizzle that had started while they were speaking. ‘And if I stand out here much longer, it’ll be pneumonia.’
Fry sent Cooper to see if the DI needed anything doing before he went off duty. She shook her head as she watched him go, despairing at her inability to understand him, even now.
There were so many things about Cooper that bothered her. She was aggravated by his tendency to look hot and flustered, as if he’d only just got out of bed. These days, he’d probably been in bed with that SOCO, Liz Petty. Or maybe it was just the stress of running from one obsession to another. At least he didn’t look quite so dishevelled as he used to, so maybe he’d learned to wash and iron for himself since he moved out of the family farm into his little flat at Welbeck Street.
When she first met him, Fry had mostly been struck by that disarray and by his air of innocence, which was lacking in those around him. He looked as though he’d hardly left the sixth form at High Peak College. Now, she wasn’t so sure whether what she saw was innocence any more. For a start, his hair wasn’t quite so untidy. It no longer fell over his forehead, but had been styled. His tie still needed straightening, though, and that scuff mark had been on his leather jacket for months.
She looked up as Cooper’s car passed, catching his profile as he drove by. In retrospect, it was amazing that he’d ever seemed innocent at all.
Fry recalled the day he’d told her about his father, Sergeant Joe Cooper, and his death on the streets of Edendale at the hands of a gang of thugs. ‘Three of them got two years for manslaughter, the others were put on probation for affray. First-time offenders, you see. Of course, they were all drunk too.’ And then there had been his mother, the psychiatric illness and the complications that had taken her life only a few months ago, with Ben at her bedside in the nursing home.
Fry wanted to be fair to him, she really did. In the circumstances, she supposed it was surprising that Cooper still retained a positive outlook on life at all, let alone the concern he so often showed for the problems of other people. He ought to be cynical. He ought to have grown as cynical as she was herself. She wondered how he managed to avoid it.
Before she left Pity Wood, Fry took another look inside the inner cordon to see how work on the remains was progressing. Under the floodlights, the shadows of the diggers against the sides of the PVC tent. The body was emerging bit by bit, but it was a painstaking job.
Something dark and fibrous in the soil caught Fry’s attention. She couldn’t make out what it was at first. Then she realized it was a hank of black hair that had become detached from the head.
In a way, she found it more bearable when a corpse had started to decompose. At least it definitely looked dead. Fresh bodies were more disturbing, because they still had the look of life about them, as if they might spring up at any moment and carry on as normal. At those times, it was hard to be unaffected by the most distinctive things about a dead body – the coldness, the utter stillness, and the knowledge that a human life had just been snuffed out an hour, or even a few minutes, before you arrived.
In other ways, a body left in a shallow grave for years, undiscovered and unidentified, was the saddest sort of case. Somewhere, there must be family and friends, wondering even now what had happened to this woman.
Fry knew that hand would live in her memory for a while. It was bent into a gesture, welcoming, almost inviting. It was as if the dead woman was greeting her visitors, enticing them down into her grave.
She’d waited a long time to have company. And it must have been lonely down there.
6 (#uf6d6d0cd-8496-5b2a-9e54-a1361606c8cd)
Oh, I’m a man from a distant land,
A place where camels roam
It’s hot and flat, and dry as bone
And if they don’t like your face, they’ll cut off your hand
It’s the place that I call home!
The Pedlar turned to the chorus, who joined in with the song. They were all dressed as Chinese peasants – colourful tunics and coolie hats. Within minutes, the scene had shifted to the street outside Widow Twankey’s house, which meant the Emperor Ping Pong would soon arrive with his beautiful daughter.
Edendale’s Royal Theatre was full for the highlight event of the year, the annual Christmas pantomime. Ben Cooper was sitting several rows back from the stage, behind dozens of excited children waiting for the chance to boo and hiss and shout ‘Oh no, you didn’t’ at any opportunity.
There were many variations on the script for Aladdin, but Eden Valley Operatic Society seemed to have opted for one of the more politically incorrect versions. Not that there was such a thing as a politically correct Aladdin, with the characters of Wishy Washy and Inspector Chu of the Chinese Police Force. But he was particularly doubtful about Abdulla O’Reilly, listed in the programme as ‘an Irish half-wit’. And then there was Ugga-Wugga, chief of the cannibal tribe.
Cooper squirmed in his seat. Criminal investigations had been launched for less blatant examples of racist humour. But this was panto, and it was traditional. Surely no one came into the theatre without having a good idea what to expect? Cheap jokes, comic names, a cheerful confusion of racial stereotypes.
In the next seat, Liz nudged him and whispered. ‘Ben, have you had a think about coming to my parents’ on Christmas Day?’
‘No,’ hissed Cooper back.
‘No, you haven’t had a think? Or no, you’re not going to come?’
‘We’ll talk about it later.’
‘Oh, yes. You’re always so busy, though.’
A chorus of boos heralded the first arrival on stage of the wicked wizard, Abanazar. Within seconds, it was clear that he was being played pretty much as an evil Arab who’d accidentally wandered into a Chinese city. It certainly gave an extra edge to the lines of the opening song: ‘Andif they don’t like your face, they’ll cut off your hand.’
Cooper settled a bit lower on his seat, hoping not to be recognized. Some hopes. He’d already been greeted by a dozen acquaintances as he came through the lobby.
Liz nudged him again. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You look shifty.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Aren’t you enjoying it?’
‘Yes, it’s great.’
‘Only, we can’t leave. Not until after my friends have been on for their bit. They’re Chinese policemen, and they don’t appear until halfway through Act Two.’
Oh, God. The Chinese policemen. There were bound to be a few bobby jokes, and people would be looking at him when they laughed.
‘No, I’m fine, I don’t want to leave. Stop talking, or people will get annoyed with us.’
Every panto had its stock characters. There was always a very obvious villain – in this case, Abanazar, who had a large and challenging role, especially if he was going to carry off that turban and scimitar convincingly. And, of course, there was the pantomime dame. This Widow Twankey ran a Chinese laundry in the time-honoured way, allowing for the usual hoary old jokes about being closed for sock-taking, and so on.
Cooper turned to his programme, squinting to read the print in the subdued light of the theatre. Many of the names of the cast were familiar to him. If he didn’t know the performers themselves, he’d often come across their parents. Or, in the case of the children’s chorus, their grandparents. But most of them were individuals he’d made contact with in a positive way. Pantomime seemed to attract the respectable classes.
‘What are you thinking about, Ben?’
‘Nothing,’ he whispered. ‘I’m just looking at the programme.’
‘You’re not thinking about work?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘No “of course” about it. I know you.’
Reading down the list, Cooper found the names of the Chinese police officers. Apart from Inspector Chu, the performers were women. Their names were all local, too – Beeley, Holmes, Wragg, Marsden, Brindley. The latter was probably related to the actor playing Abanazar, since they had the same surname. He wasn’t sure which of them he was supposed to be watching out for.
‘Liz, what are your friends called again?’
‘Cheryl Hague and Harriet Marsden.’
‘Hague? Do I know her?’
‘Probably.’
‘Is she the attractive blonde we met in the pub last week?’
‘Hey. I thought you said not to talk.’
A storm of booing and jeering greeted Abanazar as he grasped the magic lamp triumphantly and rolled an artificial rock across the cave entrance to entomb Aladdin. That meant there would be a genie making his appearance soon.
Cooper glanced at Liz, but she was completely absorbed. And she was right, she was starting to know him. They’d been going out for a few months now, a lot longer than any previous girlfriend had lasted. One of the things he liked was that he discovered new aspects of her character all the time, and glimpsed unsuspected parts of her life. She surprised him constantly. This year, she’d even bought a Christmas present for his cat.
And he hadn’t realized Liz was interested in pantomimes until a few days ago. He supposed he was lucky she wasn’t actually up there on stage in a costume. God forbid, she might even try to persuade him to join the cast.
Cooper shuddered, then pulled his jacket closer, trying to give the impression he was cold rather than filled with revulsion.
‘Are you sure you’re OK, Ben?’
‘Absolutely fine. Loving every minute.’
And here they came, at last – the comedy policemen. A little troop of them, six or seven women of various sizes wearing tunics and tights, and carrying little comic truncheons. Their drooping Fu Manchu moustaches made them unrecognizable, but Liz seemed happy to cheer them indiscriminately.
Well, perhaps they’d actually arrest the villain and Cooper could cheer, too. But in the meantime, they had to get through a few more awful jokes.
When Aladdin was over, they squeezed out of the theatre with the crowds, hoping to find somewhere to eat before all the restaurants filled up. It wasn’t the first Aladdin Cooper had been to. He remembered seeing the same show at the same theatre when he was a teenager. In fact, he thought he’d probably watched slightly different versions of it three or four times.
There were only a handful of traditional pantomimes, and they seemed to come round regularly, as if on a strict rota. Cinderella one year, Mother Goose the next. But he’d sometimes heard of different stories being used. Peter Pan, Sinbad the Sailor, Robinson Crusoe. Robinson Crusoe? A story with only two characters? Maybe he’d have to be a bit adventurous one year and seek out somewhere that was doing the show, to see how they bent the plot to introduce a pantomime dame on to a desert island.
In Victoria Park, the fair was in full swing. Among the fairground rides, a big wheel spun green lights across the park as it turned, and a carousel made the faces of the crowd glow with pink luminescence. Free mince pies and glasses of mulled wine were being handed out to visitors.
This was by far the busiest time of year in Edendale’s social calendar. There was an E Division pub crawl planned for later in the week. Another annual tradition. This year, the officers organizing it had settled on a theme – seasonal ales, which they intended to track down all over town. There were plenty to be found. Every year, the breweries produced beers like Rocking Rudolph, Hark and Black Christmas.
But Cooper wouldn’t get a chance to try them. He wouldn’t be with his colleagues on the pub crawl this week, as he might have been in previous years. His priorities had changed in the last twelve months. He wasn’t quite so single as he used to be.
‘Well, if you won’t come for Christmas with me, at least you won’t forget the baptism service on Sunday, will you?’ said Liz.
‘I’m looking forward to it. Yes, honestly.’
Liz’s best friend had married a gym instructor two years ago, and their first baby was being baptized in Edendale on Sunday. He always thought ‘first baby’ when the subject came up, because he’d met the friend and he sensed she was the sort of woman who intended to have lots of children.
‘It’s church, so everybody will be dressed up, Ben.’
‘Yes?’
‘You do have a suit and tie, don’t you?’
‘Oh, er … absolutely.’
Cooper thought of his brother squeezing into a suit for the first time this year. Now that he was too old to attend the Young Farmers’ Club Christmas Ball, Matt’s only social occasion had been the end-of-term nativity play at Josie’s primary school. Unlike the pantomime, this production had varied the usual plot. There had been no appearances by Mary or Joseph. In fact, there wasn’t even a role for the baby Jesus. Instead, the nativity story had been told from the point of view of the Bethlehem inn keeper and his family, exploring the impact on their lives. Having to deal with a sudden influx of shepherds and wise men, for a start. Well, lots of Peak District landlords would sympathize with the difficulty of mixing tourists with the locals.
Matt hadn’t been impressed by the production, though. He was turning into a real diehard traditionalist as he aged. New ideas upset him.
Later this week, Ben would be singing with the police male voice choir in the Methodist church, a concert for senior citizens, followed by a children’s party. The old folk loved it, though, especially around Christmas time. It was good PR, too.
Cooper recalled when he’d first met Diane Fry on her transfer to Derbyshire from West Midlands Police. She’d been scornful of everything in those days, so prickly that he soon developed the habit of letting her comments go by unnoticed. When he’d told her about singing in the choir, she had been predictably derisive. ‘Do you sing soprano?’ she’d asked. ‘No. Tenor.’ And he hadn’t even seen the barb until much later.
Oh, well. Fry had mellowed a bit since then, hadn’t she? Surely she had. Cooper frowned slightly. There was always the possibility that he’d just become very good at letting everything pass him by.
When he lifted his hand off the gear stick, Liz took his fingers for a moment and held them gently.
‘Thanks for coming to the panto with me, Ben.’
On the road out of town that night, taking Liz home to Bakewell, Cooper felt content. Below him, the sprawling outline of Edendale was marked by a network of lights, but most of the Peak District lay in darkness. After all that had happened in his life, things seemed to be coming right at last. He’d found someone he cared about. And, above all, he was in the only place he’d ever wanted to live in the world.
With a surge of blind rage, Diane Fry grabbed her sister’s arm and dragged her back, pulling her off balance and throwing her on to the bed.
‘Hey!’ gasped Angie, shocked by the sudden violence.
‘Angie, what the hell are you up to?’
Diane could hear her voice coming out in a spiteful hiss. It sounded awful, but she couldn’t have changed it. Her throat was too tightly constricted by the flood of emotions overwhelming her. Anger, bitterness, a sense of betrayal. And other emotions she’d never experienced before, too fleeting to be pinned down and named.
‘Me?’ Angie tried to laugh it off, sitting up on the bed and straightening her sleeve as if it were just a family game, a bit of rough and tumble between siblings. ‘Sis, you know I’m always up to something. The original problem kid, that’s me.’
‘I’m not joking here. I want to know what you think you’re doing.’
‘Come on, Di. Lighten up.’
Diane felt herself flushing angrily. She’d told herself she wouldn’t get angry with her sister. But here it was, all that rage, bubbling just below the surface. Anything could release it, a wrong word or an unguarded expression.
‘Don’t try to get round me, Angie,’ she said. ‘Just don’t try it. It might have worked once, but it doesn’t work on me now. Things have changed between us. I’m not your kid sister any more.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Yes, really. You’ve got to start understanding that, or there’s no future between us.’
‘But that was always true, wasn’t it?’ snapped Angie. ‘We never had any future between us.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We have a past, that’s all. That’s the only thing we share, the one factor we have in common. And that’s all it is – the past. We’d never have stayed together, Di. I know you couldn’t see it at the time, but I was always going to go my own way, and it wasn’t the same as yours. We’d have split up pretty soon, and you’d have gone off to your college and your police training feeling ashamed of your big sister. You ought to thank me for what I did. It was much the best way.’
Diane felt the anger draining from her. It was replaced by a strange chill that crept over her skin, like the first indications of approaching flu.
‘But we’re back together again now. We have to think about what sort of future there’s going to be,’ she said. ‘We have to sort some things out to make that future work.’
Angie got up from the bed, and Diane backed away to put some distance between them.
‘You haven’t been listening, have you?’ said Angie. ‘You just hear whatever you want to. I just said we have no future. Not just back then, but now, too. We have nothing in common, Di. And we never will have. If you imagine any different, you’re fooling yourself.’
‘No, you’re wrong.’
‘Oh dear. It doesn’t fit the image, does it? Had you built up some nice, rosy picture of Angie and Di settling down together, sharing girly chats about boyfriends and babies? Holding each other’s hands when we need a good cry, giggling in bed together over a couple of good books? It ain’t going to happen, Sis. So it’s about time you faced up to the real world.’
‘Look, I know you’ve changed. God knows, I’ve made allowances for that. All those years we were apart, we were bound to go our different ways –’
‘Changed? You’re damn right. Yes, I’m the one who’s grown up. I grew up a long time ago.’
‘Oh, yes? Using heroin isn’t a sign of being grown up, you know.’
‘Fuck off.’
Diane took a step forward. She saw Angie begin to edge towards the door, and realized that her sister was actually scared of her. The physical outburst a few minutes ago had taken Angie by surprise and frightened her a little. She, too, had things to discover about her kid sister that she might not like very much.
‘Come on, we can make this work, Angie. We just have to be honest with each other.’
‘Oh, and you want me to go first, right? Confession time, is it? “Come on, dear, tell the nice police officer everything you know. How about the names and addresses of all your friends for a start?” Di, you’re just not getting it, are you?’
Diane didn’t answer. Second by second, she was watching their relationship turn round, seeing her big sister become more and more uneasy in her presence, like a guilty child. For the first time in her life, Diane felt as though she was the one with the power. In some way, she had the ability to affect Angie’s life, instead of the other way about. She knew this, but she didn’t understand why. And the knowledge didn’t make her feel any better.
Angie looked at her uncertainly, pulling on her jacket. ‘I’m off to work, then.’
‘You can’t escape for ever. We’ll have to sort things out between us some time soon.’
‘Yeah, yeah. Whatever you say.’
As she watched Angie sneak towards the door, Diane found herself torn by conflicting impulses – a desire to bring her sister closer, but the urge to hurt her at the same time.
‘There’s one thing you’re just not getting either, Angie,’ she said.
‘Tell me about it some other time.’
Then her sister had slipped out of the room, and her feet were clattering on the stairs as she ran towards the front door.
Diane stood at the top of the stairs, unable to control something inside her that refused to let go of the argument.
‘And why did you go to Ben Cooper?’ she shouted. ‘Right at the beginning, why did you go to him?’
Angie stopped, but only to shout back. ‘Because he cares about people.’
‘Oh, yes? Well, I care about people, too. I just don’t care about you.’
As soon as the front door slammed, Diane had begun to regret her last words. But it was too late by then.
She glared at one of the students from the next flat, who’d stuck her head round the corner to see what was going on. As the student disappeared, Diane wondered whether she might ever get another chance to tell Angie what it was that she just wasn’t getting.
Diane went back into the flat and began to pick up the cushions that had been knocked on the floor. She was surprised by how much mess there was, almost as if the place had been broken into and ransacked. If it had been a crime scene she was visiting, she would have said there was evidence of a violent altercation.
Was the heroin still the problem with Angie? She didn’t think so, but addicts did need large amounts of money on a regular basis. Many women were out there on the streets to feed their habit, and for no other reason. Heroin or crack cocaine, or both. OK, drugs might not have put them on the street in the first place, but it was heroin that kept them there.
Diane knew that drug dealers from the big cities had moved into smaller towns like Edendale years ago. You could find drugs everywhere, pretty much anything you wanted. They were cheap, too. Perhaps it was some kind of marketing ploy to expand the customer base, but intelligence showed that Edendale was one of the least expensive towns in the country for buying drugs. Last she heard, heroin was going for about twenty pounds a bag.
It had just gradually crept in, that link between heroin and prostitution. Now it was unbreakable. The vicious circle was in play.
Diane was surprised by a sudden taste in her mouth. Dark, bitter, comforting. It was a very familiar taste, so full of memories that it seemed to sum up the whole of her life, all the low points and loneliest moments encapsulated in one brief tingle of the taste buds.
It was the return of her old craving for chocolate, and the familiarity was so intense it was almost shocking. She hadn’t thought about the craving for months, not really. But some residual instinct had leaked into the nerve endings of her mouth, triggered by a moment of stress.
It wasn’t so easy to get rid of an addiction. It could still creep up and surprise you long after you thought you’d beaten it. It lurked in your body and waited for a moment of weakness. But Diane Fry knew she wasn’t weak, not any more.
Addictions were for everyone else, but not for her.
7 (#uf6d6d0cd-8496-5b2a-9e54-a1361606c8cd)
Friday
Jamie Ward woke up late next day. For a while, he lay in bed listening for noises in the house, or in the street outside, not sure what he was expecting to hear. His parents’ semi-detached was in a comfortable suburb of Edendale, close to the best secondary school and the nicest church. There was rarely anything interesting to hear. The sirens were always across town, on the housing estates.
At first, Jamie’s mind shied away from remembering the day before, but gradually the memories crept back. All the details were still there, fresh and vivid. The mud, the police, the argument. The hand.
And then he had a sudden conviction that this couldn’t just be a normal day, not after what had happened at Pity Wood Farm. It was inconceivable that life would go on in its ordinary, routine way. Getting up, having breakfast, going for a jog, phoning his mates for a chat. It just wouldn’t feel right.
Jamie went into the bathroom and found his muddy jeans on top of the laundry basket. The first day he’d turned up for work at the building site, he’d been wearing his trainers. His second best pair, not the cool ones he went out with his friends in. And Nikolai had laughed at him. So had all the other blokes, though not quite so obviously.
‘Little Jamie, do you want to lose your toes?’ Nikolai had said, lighting up a Benson and Hedges and blowing the smoke towards his feet. ‘Boy, you won’t last a day on my site. We’ll find you some proper boots, OK?’
‘OK, Nikolai.’
‘Call me Nik.’
Most of what had gone on at the site was a mystery to Jamie. The brickies and carpenters and plasterers were skilled men who worked quickly and often silently, wielding specialist tools he didn’t even know the names for.
Some of it was obvious – the trenches dug for the new drains, the gravel laid for site access. But a few things had been odd. If he’d felt more comfortable with the other men, he would have asked them the reasons for things they did. Jamie knew that you should ask if you didn’t understand something, and not worry about looking stupid. If you didn’t ask questions, you’d never know the answers, and that was more stupid, wasn’t it?
The only good thing about the way he’d been treated on the site was that Nikolai and the men hadn’t always worried about whether he was hanging around with them, or how hard he was working.
Jamie showered and hunted out some clean clothes. Then he went to find his mother, to see if he could borrow her car to drive over to Rakedale.
Cooper arrived at work that morning to find forty-three new emails in his inbox. No spam, no jokes, no personal emails – in accordance with force policy, the IT department had blocked all those. No, these forty-three were all work-related. Not necessarily related to his own work, of course. Unfortunately, he had to open every one of them and read it all the way through before he could be sure it wasn’t relevant to him.
Today, he’d received a fairly typical batch. There were the usual requests from the Criminal Justice Unit for completed statements and copies of notebook entries. There was a series of directives and advisory notices from the senior management team, many of them related to key performance indicators. He had a couple of emails from the Police Federation, and there were notifications of five entirely new policies and procedures, all with start dates in the next month.
Each new policy had accompanying documents, which he was supposed to study and learn, then apply. He didn’t know where to begin. But some desk jockey would be appointed as a compliance officer to monitor the new policies, so he’d have to get up to speed.
Now and then, Cooper kept some congratulatory emails about the force’s Investors in People and Work Life Balance Awards. Just in case he needed cheering up some time.
‘Happiness is an empty inbox,’ said Murfin.
‘Emails?’
‘Yes. But I never read them.’
‘How do you get away with that, Gavin?’
‘Dunno. I tend to look at them the way I do all the junk mail I get at home, wanting to give me a bigger penis. I reckon they’re meant for someone else, since I obviously don’t need them.’
‘There might be something about a new course for you to go on,’ suggested Cooper.
‘I don’t need one of those, either. Not since I did my sewage training.’
Cooper laughed. Gavin had never recovered from the shock of being sent on a public order training exercise last year. Along with a couple of hundred other officers, he’d been kitted out in riot gear and deployed to the sewage works in Derby. For a couple of hours, he’d faced an angry mob of Severn Trent Water staff and special constables hurling bricks and petrol bombs at him, just to make the exercise as realistic as possible. His PDR said he’d gained valuable experience in policing a major disturbance. Gavin said all he’d learned was that shit stinks.
Still laughing, Cooper glanced at the first email attachment he’d opened. He read it a second time, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. It made a reference to something called the Community Security Policy Compliance Matrix.
The briefing that morning was relatively low-key. Detective Chief Inspector Oliver Kessen was present as crime manager for the division, though he was currently Senior Investigating Officer for a major enquiry in the Matlock area. It wasn’t uncommon for the same senior detective to be SIO for more than one case at a time, but right now Pity Wood hadn’t even been officially classed as a murder enquiry.
‘It’s too early to start combing through the missing persons reports,’ said DI Hitchens when the team had assembled. ‘Not until we have an idea of the age of the victim and the time of death. The list is too long otherwise – we need something to narrow it down. There are no records of incidents at Pity Wood Farm, or any missing persons reports anywhere in Rakedale. We have to cast the net wider. Any suggestions?’
‘We could still start with the owners of the farm. How long has the place been empty?’ asked someone.
‘Nine months. But there were no women recorded in the household. Pity Wood Farm was run by two elderly brothers, Derek and Raymond Sutton. Derek died twelve months ago, and Raymond is in residential care in Edendale, diagnosed as suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Perhaps the farm was sold to pay for his care. He wouldn’t have been able to run it now, anyway.’
‘They must have had some help with the farm work,’ said Fry. ‘The place is pretty run down, but two old men couldn’t have managed on their own, could they?’
‘Have you seen some of these hill farmers?’ said Cooper. ‘They’re a tough bunch. Some of them just keep on going until they wear out.’
‘Even so …’
‘Well, there was clearly some labour employed at Pity Wood from time to time, but there’s no indication so far that any of the help was female. The brothers must have cooked and cleaned for themselves, by the looks of it.’
Cooper remembered the state of the farmhouse, and didn’t answer for a moment. There might have been some cooking going on in that kitchen, but he was pretty sure cleaning wasn’t high on the brothers’ agenda. Maybe squalor would be called a lifestyle choice these days.
‘The trouble with that is, the more workers we trace, the more potential suspects it gives us.’
‘Is there actually evidence of a crime?’
‘Well, illegal disposal of a body, anyway. Someone dug the grave, then filled it in, didn’t they? But as for the cause of death … I can’t tell you. Also, I can’t say whether it was murder, suicide, accident or natural causes. Sorry.’
‘But what facts have we got, Paul?’ asked Kessen. ‘Apart from the presence of a body with an unknown cause of death, do we have any evidence of unlawful killing?’
This was a tough question, but the answer was crucial. If the SIO misinterpreted the scene and set up a murder investigation when it turned out to be a suicide or death from natural causes, he could find himself criticized for wasting resources. On the other hand, if he attributed death to natural causes and a subsequent postmortem contradicted him, then his decision could have serious consequences for the success of any future investigation. The SIO’s assessment had to be made under pressure, so it took judgement to get it right, to make an accurate decision based on limited information.
‘We’re reserving judgement at the moment,’ said Hitchens. ‘There’s no murder enquiry yet.’
Kessen grunted noncommittally. ‘So who’s going to look into the farming background?’
‘DC Cooper. He’s the man with his roots in the soil. All right, Ben?’
Cooper nodded automatically, not having been given any chance to think about it.
‘Meanwhile, I’m hoping the forensics teams can find me some fresh evidence. Fresher than the body, at least.’
‘Fresher than the body – that shouldn’t be difficult,’ said Murfin quietly to Cooper.
‘We’ve got house-to-house in the village today, and that means all hands to the pumps,’ said Hitchens. ‘Rakedale is a small village, so we’ll be hitting every household. And don’t miss the isolated farms. You all know what these places are like – local knowledge could be the key. Some old biddy will provide us with that vital bit of information. So let’s get to it.’
‘Before you go,’ said Kessen, raising his voice above the developing hubbub, ‘the Chief has an announcement to make. He wants to see the CID team in his office, as soon as we’re finished here.’
‘Uh-oh,’ said Murfin. ‘This sounds like bad news.’
In her official photograph, she looked stiff and humourless. She gave the impression of a woman who wouldn’t normally have worn make-up, but had felt obliged to make the effort when she posed for the photographer. Cooper thought someone ought to have given her a bit of cosmetics advice. But perhaps they’d all been too frightened of her to say anything. Instead, she’d applied lipstick and mascara with an unpractised hand, and the result was unnatural. He was beginning to feel nervous of her already.
‘And this is …?’ asked Fry.
Hitchens smiled a grim smile. ‘Our new boss.’
‘What?’
Their divisional commander, Chief Superintendent Jepson, was chairing the meeting of the CID team in his office. He gestured at Hitchens to hush him.
‘Ripley have finally made an appointment to the SMT,’ said Jepson. ‘E Division has a new detective superintendent.’
There was a moment of silence as everyone looked at the photo. The latest addition to the senior management team, another source of motivational emails.
‘DS Hazel Branagh,’ said Hitchens to break the tension. The tone of his voice was difficult to pin down, as if he’d made a particular effort to sound neutral.
‘She’s a ferociously efficient administrator,’ said Jepson. ‘And highly respected by her present team. All the people who work for her say the same thing. With Superintendent Branagh, they know exactly where they stand.’
‘Not within striking range, I imagine,’ whispered Murfin to Cooper.
Jepson frowned at the interruption, though he hadn’t heard what had been said. ‘You know, some managers aren’t able to keep their distance from the troops. They try to be too friendly with their junior officers. I know what a temptation it is to do that – you want to be all mates together, that sort of thing. Bonding, they call it these days. But it doesn’t work, you know – you just lose their respect, in the end.’
He was looking at Hitchens, and kept his gaze fixed in that direction until the DI felt obliged to respond.
‘Yes, sir. Absolutely.’
‘No matter how much you crave popularity, you’ve got to stand apart from the crowd to be a real leader. Now Hazel Branagh, on the other hand – she has tremendous respect from the officers in her team.’
Cooper looked at the photo again. Branagh’s badly applied make-up gave her the appearance of a recently deceased auntie who’d been prepared by the funeral director. In this case, the family had been so impressed that they’d propped Aunt Flo in a chair for one last photo before they buried her.
‘The word is that she won’t be with us very long anyway, sir,’ said Hitchens.
‘In tune with the canteen gossip, are we?’ asked Jepson.
‘Something like that.’ The DI didn’t bother to point out that they weren’t allowed to have a canteen any more, to discourage the formation of a canteen culture. ‘I’ve heard the possibility discussed, that’s all.’
‘Well, you’re right, Paul. Superintendent Branagh has already earned a reputation for herself all around the country. The next force that has an ACC’s job up for grabs, it’s certain somebody will come sniffing around here. You can bet on it.’
* * *
Diane Fry laid back her head and closed her eyes. Gradually, the stiffness began to ease, and the tension drained from her shoulders. For hours, she’d been staring at her computer screen, wading through figures and reports, checking online forms, reading endless emails from the SMT. It would take a while longer for the weariness to clear from her brain.
On this side of the building, they had to keep the lights on all day in December, much to the frustration of the admin officer, who’d found it impossible to deal with the lack of daylight by writing a memo.
For Fry, the quality of the light was further hampered by the strings of glittery tinsel and concertinas of red-and-green decorations spelling out ‘Merry Christmas’ above the desks, as if no one would know what time of year it was otherwise. She was surprised that Christmas decorations were allowed under Health and Safety regulations. This was one occasion when she would have welcomed a memo. She was tempted to write one herself, but knew she’d be nicknamed ‘Scrooge’ for the rest of her career.
There was a desultory display of Christmas cards on top of the filing cabinets. Most of the cards were from other agencies, one from their local MP. Cooper had received a few personal messages from members of the public – ‘Thank you for everything you’ve done for us’, that sort of thing. Tasteless cards with teddy bears and glittery nativities, signed with little hearts. He’d put them among the general collection, but that only made it worse.
Fry sneezed suddenly.
‘Bless you,’ said Cooper. She wondered why he, like everyone else, couldn’t keep the note of surprise from his voice when he said it.
‘Damn it,’ said Fry. ‘I’d better not be getting a cold.’
‘Do you get colds much at this time of year?’
‘I never used to, when I lived somewhere civilized.’
‘Oh, really? So they lace the water with Lemsip in Birmingham, do they?’
Fry gazed out of the window. Well, not out of it exactly. She couldn’t see the outside world at all, only the blur of water running down the glass. Not that it mattered much, since all she could see on a good day was the back of the East Stand at Edendale Football Club.
She always tried to get into the office earlier than anyone else in CID, which in the winter meant when it was still dark. It gave her time to do the jobs she needed solitude for. First thing this morning, she’d been on her computer practising assessment techniques, ready for her first set of PDRs – personal development reviews for her DCs – next spring. PDRs were dealt with by the Human Resources manager, who had been known to return them with advice on improving their quality.
‘It’s this bloody weather,’ she said. ‘There’s no way of avoiding it. I’ve been soaked three times this week. Is it any wonder I’m getting a cold? I’ll probably be off with flu by Monday.’
‘It’s a weakness in the immune system, if you ask me,’ said Cooper. ‘It comes with urban life. You don’t get exposed to nature enough when you’re growing up.’
Fry found a tissue and blew her nose, which was starting to run. Hay fever in summer, and a permanent cold in winter. Welcome to the rural idyll.
There was no clear evidence yet of murder, but it could turn up at any moment. With no obvious offender, it would be a grade B enquiry, an initial maximum of sixteen officers, the DI probably doing the day-today co-ordination, with Kessen as nominal SIO. Fry knew she was second-guessing, but she liked to see if her assessments were accurate, whether she had learned the same grasp of priorities that her senior officers operated on.
Of course, there were other factors to be taken into account. Resources, obviously. A major enquiry would generate a ton of paperwork – statements, messages, telexes, personal descriptive forms, questionnaires, officers’ reports, house-to-house forms, transcripts of interviews.
She sneezed again. ‘Damn.’
‘The trouble is, the winters are too mild,’ said Cooper. ‘Bugs don’t get killed off the way they used to. It’s the same with pests on the crops. At one time, no one had to spray insecticide until the spring. Now, it’s a problem all year round.’
‘What are you on about?’
‘Global warming. I’m saying there are no frosts to kill anything off. We get a warm, wet summer and a mild, wet winter. It’s no good in the long term.’
‘I don’t believe in global warming.’
‘What?’
‘I think it’s all just a big scare, to distract us from more important things.’
‘What’s more important than the destruction of the planet?’ said Cooper.
‘You see? You’re exaggerating. People exaggerate about it all the time.’
‘Are we ready for the off, or what?’ said Murfin. ‘The fleshpots of Rakedale await, boys and girls.’
Fry stood up and brushed some silver glitter off the shoulders of her jacket.
‘Damn tinsel. I’m probably allergic to it.’
8 (#uf6d6d0cd-8496-5b2a-9e54-a1361606c8cd)
The mobile incident room was on site at Pity Wood. A thirty-foot trailer equipped with computers, drop-down screens and video and DVD equipment, and a ‘front office’ open to the public. It had on-board generators and floodlight masts. And, most importantly, it had heating, a fully equipped kitchen and toilet facilities. The cold rain falling steadily on the farm was enough to drive officers into the trailer on any pretext.
The initial body tent had been replaced by a larger crime scene tent to allow more space for working in. The digging team could be heard chatting among themselves sometimes, but they were more often silent and absorbed in their task, oblivious to the presence of the police waiting for them to finish their work.
As Fry and Cooper arrived, there was a burst of laughter from the excavation area, slightly brittle laughter, a release of tension.
‘Anybody want a Pyrex baking dish?’ said someone. ‘It’s still in one piece, just needs a bit of mud cleaning off. I’m giving it away. If you don’t want it, I’ll sell it on eBay.’
‘It might be evidence,’ said a police exhibits officer standing nearby with his clipboard.
The diggers groaned and went back to their task.
‘Hello, what is he doing here?’ said Fry as they reported in at the mobile incident unit.
Cooper looked around, but there were too many people to make out which of them Fry had picked out. ‘Who?’
‘Jamie Ward. The builder’s labourer.’
‘The one who found the body?’
‘That’s him. He’s over there, at the outer cordon.’
‘That’s odd.’
‘Normally, I’d say it was downright suspicious,’ said Fry. ‘Members of the public who find dead bodies shouldn’t still be hanging around the crime scene next day – especially when they live miles away, as Jamie does. It makes you look guilty.’
‘But Jamie can’t be a suspect. Maybe he’s come back with some more information.’
‘We’ll see.’
Fry strode over to the cordon. Jamie looked more relieved than startled when he saw her.
‘I didn’t recognize anyone else. I’ve been waiting to speak to you,’ he said.
‘Go ahead, then, Jamie. I’m here now.’
‘I want to show you something.’
Jamie led her to the back of the farmhouse, skirting the police tape that had been strung from gatepost to gatepost and unrolled across the top of a wall. Fry could only see the large yellow skip, a lot of digging, and a cement mixer and wheelbarrows left by the builders. She made a mental note to chase up that search of the skip. God alone knew what evidence could have been dumped in there.
‘See this area here?’ said Jamie. ‘Some of the crew have been getting ready to connect the new drains up.’
‘Yes, I see.’
‘But next to it there’s a disturbed patch of ground. It’s obvious when ground has been disturbed. The subsoil ends up on top, and it looks different. It’s one thing I’ve learned.’
‘So what do you think happened here?’ asked Fry.
Jamie frowned uncertainly. ‘I don’t really know. I think there must have been a change in the plans some time – there was a trench here, but it’s been filled in.’
‘When would this trench have been dug?’
‘One day last week, I suppose. I didn’t see it being filled in again. I reckon Nikolai must have got somebody else to do it while I was busy round the front.’
‘Well, thanks, Jamie. I’ll make sure it’s noted. Our diggers are a bit busy right now, but we’ll be at the scene for a good while yet.’
* * *
With Cooper at the wheel, they drove towards Rakedale on a dark, jungle-green road bordered by stone walls, muddy cattle and a rushing stream. When they reached the hill into the village, Cooper found water running towards him down the road, streaming into two rivulets under his wheels.
‘Oh, great,’ said Fry when she saw the water. ‘It’s like the village is pissing on us already.’
The road was very narrow, barely wide enough for one vehicle, and the stone walls left no room for error. It wasn’t used much, though – grass was growing down the road in the middle of the tarmac. There was better visibility on these roads in the winter than the summer, because the trees were so bare. But the surfaces were always slippery, especially if you had to pull over on to the verge to let another vehicle pass.
Cooper was taking care to look for any possible passing places as he went. Most of the wider verges and gateways that might have been usable in the summer were too muddy for the average car, which would be certain to get bogged down or slide off into the ditch. It was lucky he had four-wheel drive. Even luckier that Diane Fry had agreed to take his car. Her Peugeot would hardly have made it up the hill.
‘Why are you driving so fast on a road like this?’ asked Fry.
‘There are no passing places. We don’t want to meet anyone coming the other way on these straight stretches, or someone would have to reverse a long way.’
Fry sighed. ‘I suppose that makes sense, of a kind.’
The place everyone referred to as a village was no more than a T-junction where the side road from Pity Wood met the B5012. There were farms either side of the road, the entrance to an old quarry, fenced off and blocked with limestone boulders. On the southwest corner of the junction, a stile provided access to a footpath that snaked off across the fields between the dry-stone walls, probably heading towards High Peak Trail, the old railway line to Buxton. The grass verge had been flattened and worn away here – the signs of an unofficial lay-by made by hikers leaving their cars. They’d be less willing to do that in December, the rutted mud making verges treacherous for parking on.
The main part of the village clung to the hillside just below its brow. But there were many far-flung farms, where a hard living had been scraped from sheep farming for centuries. Three or four farms clustering around a double bend formed the centre of Rakedale. There were more cattle sheds than houses, more trailer ramps and livestock gates than front doors. The only observer as they passed was a black-and-white calf peering from a pen in the corner of a yard. The calf watched them miserably, kicking at its straw.
There were no road markings here – no white lines or yellow lines, no chevrons or rumble strips. Even the edges of the road itself were unclear. At the top of the village, where they had to make a sharp right turn, the junction was pretty much indistinguishable. Every direction looked like a farm track.
Cooper parked in front of the village Methodist chapel and they all got out, pulling on their coats, sorting their interview forms into plastic wallets to keep them dry, and dividing the village up into three sectors. Fry looked at a giant puddle between the car and the road.
‘And now I suppose you’ll tell me that Derbyshire is disappearing under water because sea levels are rising.’
‘No, but parts of Lincolnshire are going to disappear,’ said Cooper. ‘Perhaps not in our lifetime, but –’
‘Oh, give it a rest.’
‘You brought it up.’
Fry walked off, and Murfin nudged Cooper as they watched her go. ‘I think you won that one, Ben.’
‘It’s not a competition, Gavin. People should be thinking about these things.’
Murfin pulled a couple of chocolate bars out of his pocket and handed one to Cooper.
‘Blimey. As long we can still grow food, what does it matter?’
House-to-house. It wasn’t always the most popular job on a major enquiry. Especially when it was raining.
And today, in Rakedale, it was definitely raining. From the state of the roads and the farm entrances, it looked as though it had been raining all year. The village might as well exist under some permanent black cloud that trickled constantly, like a leaky hosepipe.
Cooper crossed the road to a row of four cottages. He knocked on the door of the first house, drew up his collar and readied his clipboard. When you did house-to-house, bad weather was a useful barometer for what sort of people you were dealing with. In parts of Edendale, they’d leave you standing in the rain without a qualm, would rather see you drown in front of their eyes than let you over their threshold. If you were visiting an address on the Devonshire Estate in a downpour, you’d better be carrying a warrant, or an umbrella.
Out here, though, you’d expect members of the public to have a bit of sympathy, and not to watch you dripping on their step without a flicker of concern.
But that was exactly what the first householder did, admitting that she’d heard of the Suttons of Pity Wood Farm, but she knew nothing about them, or anyone who’d ever worked there. At the second house, he got the same response. And at the third.
Cooper paused before calling at the end house, and studied the village. There wasn’t much in the way of Christmas decorations visible in Rakedale, but that was true of many Peak District villages. In Edendale, the streets were strung with lights, and almost every shop had a tree fixed to its upper storey, decorated and ready to be lit when darkness came. The same sort of thing could be found in other places – Castleton or Bakewell, for example.
But there was a difference. Some villages relied on income from tourism for their survival, and went out of their way to bring in visitors. Others had no interest in being tourist spots. Quite the opposite. Those were the places where residents didn’t want members of the public clogging their streets and peering into their gardens. In those villages, there were no visitor centres, no helpful signposts, no tea rooms or picnic sites. You could drive through some of them as often as you liked and find nowhere to park. ‘Keep moving’ was their message.
The last cottage in the row was empty, with green paint peeling off the door. On a side lane, where the woods started, Cooper found a 1950s bungalow strung with Christmas lights, and a chained Alsatian barking in a yard. He thought it looked more promising. But, frustratingly, it was the first property on his list where no one was at home. He made a note on the sheet and turned back towards the Methodist chapel, where he’d left the car.
The chapel was a square, unpretentious building standing between two farms. Primitive Methodist, according to the noticeboard. The name was a bit unsettling, but remarkably apt.
The fact that there was no parish church in Rakedale told Cooper something about the village. He was reminded of the old social division in rural communities – chapel for the workers, church for the squire. These non-conformist chapels were where the working classes had first learned to speak for themselves, to educate themselves, and to organize. They’d been a natural breeding ground for trade unions. Once working people had tasted religious freedom, they wanted political and social freedom, too. In some of these ancient villages, the parish church was still associated with the power wielded by the lord of the manor, a symbol of servitude. The priest took the squire’s money, and he preached what the squire wanted to hear.
But not in Rakedale. The nearest parish church must be in Biggin or Hartington. Villagers here were out of the gaze of any squire or landowner. And if the priest tried to visit, he would have been seen coming for miles.
Fry had made a deduction. Mud must be a perfectly normal occurrence in Rakedale. She had found brushes and scrapers by every front door for visitors with muddy boots. Not that she was allowed across the mat very often, but the possibility was at least hinted at in the provision of a scraper.
In other ways, too, everyone she spoke to seemed unsurprised to see her, as if they’d been warned in advance.
So it was a relief to come across the Dog Inn, a small pub set so far back from the road that it was almost hiding. For once, Fry didn’t have to expect some sour-faced woman in a baggy sweater blocking her way. It was a public house, and she was a member of the public. So she must be welcome, right?
The Dog Inn was entered through a tiny porch, its door at right angles to the main entrance to face away from the prevailing wind. The porch door was red, matching the Russian vine covering the walls and a row of three brick chimneys on the roof, and a horseshoe was nailed to the centre panel.
Inside, Fry found a small L-shaped bar with a settle against one wall, and an open fireplace with real logs burning in it and a stone chimney breast. A tiny side room held a pool table and a battered dartboard. A man with a long, grey beard was rolling cigarettes from a battered tobacco tin and brushing the remains of his tobacco off the racing page of the Daily Mirror. A few other men sat at tables further down the bar, all in complete silence. She felt sure it hadn’t been quite so silent before she walked in.
Fry was faced by a ‘Merry Christmas’ sign hanging from the beer pumps, and a row of Christmas figures over the bar counter – a few motley Santas and a snowman. She’d followed a trail of muddy paw prints into the bar that she guessed must belong to the collie dog lying on the floor.
On the jukebox she could see Now That’s What I Call Music – 1964, a bit of Elvis Presley, and the Eagles’ Greatest Hits. The selections were numbered one to twelve down one side, and fourteen to twenty-five on the other. Twenty-eight choices of naff sixties and seventies pop hits. According to a sign, bed and breakfast at the Dog Inn was only twenty-five pounds a night. She didn’t feel tempted.
For a few minutes, Fry thought it was strange that no one seemed to be looking at her, as if they’d accepted her without curiosity. But then she realized that they were watching her, after all. They were making an elaborate pretence of not noticing her, but they were observing out of the corners of their eyes, letting their gaze sweep casually across her as if she wasn’t there, but registering more and more details about her each time they turned their heads. Bystanders were notoriously poor at remembering descriptions, but these people would be able to draw her accurately from memory, each and every one of them. They were all watching her.
As she waited, a desultory conversation started up about the weather. Wasn’t it wet and cold and windy, they said. Wetter and colder and windier than usual for this time of year. It would probably be even wetter and colder over Christmas, just their luck. Somebody must have stood on an ant.
Fry finally got some attention when a middle-aged man emerged from a door behind the bar. He was wearing an old cardigan and carrying a mug of tea with ‘Number One Dad’ printed on it. He introduced himself as Ned Dain, the licensee.
‘The Suttons?’ he said. ‘I remember the two old men. They’re not still at the farm, surely?’
‘No.’
‘I thought not. We haven’t seen them in here for ages. Died, did they?’
‘Only one of them did.’
‘Damn.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Well, I bet that would be really hard on the other brother,’ said Dain. ‘They were so close they were almost like twins. Spoke the same, had a similar manner. Yet someone told me once they didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of things. They kept it hidden well, if that was the case.’ He took a sip of tea. ‘There were a few years between them in age, I think.’
‘We’ve been told Derek was the youngest by four years.’
‘Is he the one that died?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Damn.’
The men in the bar had moved on to discussing the Middle East problem, and whether anyone had seen the darts on the telly last night.
‘Can you tell me anything else about them?’
‘They always kept themselves pretty much to themselves,’ said Dain. ‘But there’s usually somebody who knows something around here. What did you want to know?’
‘Was either of them married, for example?’
‘Hold on. Hey, Jack!’
The man with the long, grey beard looked up. ‘Aye?’
‘The Sutton brothers at Pity Wood – was one of them married?’
Jack glanced slyly at Fry before answering. ‘I don’t rightly recall. Might have been. It was a long time ago, if so.’
‘You’re right,’ said Dain. ‘I don’t recollect they were married. A set of old bachelors, I’d reckon. We mostly saw the brothers together, if we saw them at all. If there was ever a wife, she must have died, too, or walked out – who knows?’
‘Well, who does?’
Dain seemed not to be able to answer a direct question.
‘Derek,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘And then there was, let’s see … Billy? No, of course not. That’s me getting mixed up. I’m getting a terrible memory for names.’
‘Billy?’ The man called Jack coughed and laughed into his beard. ‘There was never any Billy. You’ve got that wrong, Ned.’
‘Raymond,’ said Fry.
‘Raymond. That’s right. Derek, Raymond …?’
‘Yes, Derek and Raymond. Those are their names.’
Dain gave her a quizzical look. ‘All right, if you say so. Well, Raymond, now – he played the organ at the chapel. You could ask the minister about him. He’s circuit, of course, based in Monyash. Or there’s Ellis Bland – he’s the caretaker.’
Jack spoke up again. ‘Ned, they had a funeral at the chapel, didn’t they? The Suttons.’
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Stephen Booth
Detectives Fry and Cooper return in another supremely atmospheric Peak District thriller, perfect for fans of Peter Robinson and Reginald HillBuilding work at an isolated farm has unearthed more than just the usual remains… two human are discovered, seemingly buried years apart.With little forensic evidence to go on, Detectives Diane Fry and Ben Cooper have to look back into the farm's history, where they uncover decades of abuse of migrant workers. Is the truth to be found somewhere in this piteous history?Or does the answer lie elsewhere, hidden in the ground, and still waiting to be discovered?
STEPHEN BOOTH
Dying to Sin
Dedicated to the officers and staff of Derbyshire
Constabulary B Division, with particular thanks
to Divisional Commander, Chief Superintendent
Roger Flint (the man with all the best anecdotes),
and PC 2204 Rachel Baggaley
For he that is dead is freed from sin.
Romans 6:7
Contents
Title Page (#ud248d6f6-b045-52f0-b41d-f83a6dcbe939)Dedication (#u4d2a2e2a-46a6-5a62-aa2b-0b1263b019d1)Chapter One (#u3fa6478f-d379-5073-9e14-8377a42ae630)Chapter Two (#ud175ef65-cf6d-5da9-a616-baf64c14faf3)Chapter Three (#u35e7f987-2562-56fc-bde5-de3f9efd4dd5)Chapter Four (#uf36775b1-79c0-57aa-a31e-ddf8af39e9fc)Chapter Five (#u3348a7e8-2f1b-5cd2-88ec-12754d04cde3)Chapter Six (#ubccbe922-920f-5026-b9fe-fe24a8dc8007)Chapter Seven (#u7d122f15-3c9d-534a-9b68-bdbd6f07dd02)Chapter Eight (#u722f64df-f5a3-5b99-abfc-0110b428d75c)Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Eight (#litres_trial_promo)About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)By The Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1 (#uf6d6d0cd-8496-5b2a-9e54-a1361606c8cd)
Thursday
The mud was everywhere at Pity Wood Farm. It lay in deep troughs under the walls of the house, it surged in wet tides where the cattle had poached the ground into a soup. And it was all over Jamie Ward’s boots, sticky and red, like blobs of damson jam. His steel toe-caps were coated with the stuff, and smears of it had splashed halfway up his denims – long, fat splatters, as if he’d been wading in blood.
Crouching in a corner of the yard, Jamie stared down at the mess and wondered when he’d get a chance to wipe it off. He couldn’t remember if he had a clean pair of jeans back at his parents’ house in Edendale, whether his mother had done his washing this week, or if he’d thrown his dirty clothes behind the bed again, where she wouldn’t find them. She’d been complaining for the past month about the amount of dirt he brought into the house, the number of times she had to clean the filter on the washing machine. He wondered what she’d say about this latest disaster when he got in.
And, as he heard the first police sirens wailing up the valley, it occurred to Jamie to wonder whether he’d actually be going home tonight at all.
‘Damn it, boy. Why didn’t you just cover it up again? It would have been for the best all round.’
Jamie shook his head. You couldn’t just do that, could you? No matter what anyone else said, it wasn’t right, and that was that. He’d done the only thing he possibly could, in the circumstances. He’d done the right thing, so there was nothing to regret.
‘Throw some dirt on it and forget it. There’s no need for all this.’
He felt bad about it, all the same. It was bad for Nikolai and the other blokes. This was a nightmare they didn’t want, and some of them couldn’t afford. Just before Christmas, too, when they needed the money more than ever, he supposed. He was going to be popular, all right.
Jamie felt his muscles beginning to stiffen. The longer he stayed in one spot, the more he felt as though his boots were sinking into the ground. If he stayed here long enough, perhaps the blood-tinted earth would slowly close in and swallow him. His own weight would bury him.
Of course, he knew the mud only looked red because the soil here was clay when you got a few inches down. It was so unusual for this part of Derbyshire that he’d noticed it as soon as he started digging. Clay and mud, tons of crushed brick and corroded iron. It had been a nightmare of a job, almost impossible for his spade to deal with. Jamie’s rational mind told him that the colour was only because of the clay. And if the stuff on his boots looked too red, too dark, too wet … well, that was just his imagination, wasn’t it?
Jamie Ward thought he had plenty of common sense. He was educated, after all – not like most of the other lads on the crew. He would never be a victim of superstition and ignorance. He wasn’t even particularly religious – he didn’t cross himself when they passed a church, or hang a statue of the Virgin Mary over the dashboard of the van, the way Nikolai did.
But this mud was so sticky, and so smelly. It stank as though it had been rotting for centuries. Now, when Jamie finally straightened up, he saw a thick gob slide from his boot on to the ground. It formed a sort of oozing coil, like the dropping of some slimy creature that had been living on the old farm, left to itself when the owners moved out and the cattle disappeared. He pictured something that only came out at night to feed on carrion, scavenging among the ruins of pigsties before slinking back into a dark, damp corner between those abandoned silage bags.
‘Damned fool. Kretyn.’
He remembered the way Nikolai’s fist had gripped his jacket, the feel of the older man’s face pushed against his, rain glistening in his thick eyebrows and on his moustache. Jamie couldn’t believe how angry Nikolai had been, not over something like this. The foreman had tolerated his bungling and his ignorance of the building trade with raucous good humour – until now. Yet suddenly this morning he’d been a different man, a wild thing, dangerously on the verge of violence. And all over a muddy hole.
Jamie swallowed a spurt of bile that hit the back of his throat. He’d been trailing backwards and forwards over this same patch of earth for days now. Shifting stacks of breeze block for the brickies, unloading bags of sand from the lorry, stopping for a quick fag behind the wall. Damn it, his boot prints were all over the place. Anyone who cared to look would see the pattern of his rubber soles, pressed deep in the mud. His eyes followed the criss-crossing trails he’d left, curving in long arcs that stretched twenty yards or more. His tracks were so numerous and extensive that they were probably visible from space like the Great Wall of China, place-marked on Google Earth. They were so distinct that they might as well be the swirls of his fingerprints. Jamie Ward’s signature on the job, perfectly clear and complete.
Soon, people would be talking about him and pointing at him. Before much longer, he’d be answering questions, endless questions, re-living over and over the moment he was trying to forget. He’d seen the TV cop shows, and he knew they never let you alone once they had you in one of their little interview rooms.
He could hear two sirens now, their yelp and wail teasing playfully against each other, fading and getting louder as the cars took one of the bends in Rakedale, dipping behind stone walls and clumps of trees until they reached the top of the hill and turned into the farm.
Jamie thought back to the morning he’d got out of the van, stretched his legs and stepped on to Pity Wood Farm for the first time. It was strange to think there had been grass growing here when the crew arrived on site. Now the whole gateway was churned up, and the soil either side was bare and exposed. In one corner, a wheel rut from a reversing truck had sliced through his boot prints.
He didn’t remember noticing anything unusual that first time. Well, maybe there had been a slight difference in the level of the ground just here, a low bump that was only noticeable if you happened to be pushing a wheelbarrow load of sand over it. And perhaps the grass had been a bit greener, too – only a tiny bit, if you looked closely. Perhaps the blades had gleamed with faintly unnatural health in the winter sunlight. He wouldn’t have looked twice at the time, and he’d never made anything of it. No one would have done.
But then Nikolai had asked him to start digging a trench for the footings of a new wall. Jamie had dug barely more than a few inches into the ground before the soil changed colour. It had taken him a while to get even that far down, though. There were so many stones to be prised free with the spade and lifted out, not to mention lumps of concrete and long splinters of rusted metal. Without his gloves, his fingers would have been raw by now.
After half an hour, he’d been starting to think that Nik had given him the job as a punishment for something, or just because he was the youngest on the crew and a student at that, the one they called ‘The Professor’. Or maybe it was on account of the fact that he didn’t understand what they were going on about when the blokes started joking around on site, and they were taking advantage of him. Probably there wasn’t going to be a wall here at all. Nobody had ever shown him the plans for the new development, so he couldn’t be sure. But during the last few days Jamie had made his own plans. He reckoned that if he’d bought the farm himself, he’d have kept the old dry-stone wall and turned this bit of ground into a nice patio. All it needed was a few yards of paving, not a fancy brick boundary wall that needed some idiot to dig a trench for twelve-inch footings.
Damn that trench. Just the thought of its moist, slippery sides made Jamie feel like throwing up. If it weren’t for all the other blokes standing around gabbling to each other in Polish, he’d have lost his breakfast ages ago.
Even in his distracted state, Jamie noticed that one or two of the labourers were looking a bit nervous as the police sirens got nearer. No papers, he supposed. Illegal workers. Well, it wasn’t his business, and he bet the cops wouldn’t care either, not today.
Nevertheless, Jamie automatically counted up the men. Nine, all present, but standing behind Nikolai for safety.
And all of the crew were looking in the same direction now – at the cluster of objects Jamie had accidentally uncovered with his spade. There wasn’t much to look at, not really. A strip of plastic sheeting and a scrap of rotted leather. A bulge of cloth, torn and faded, a surprising eggshell blue where patches showed through the dirt. And there had been a faint glint of metal, slick with the dampness of clay, reflecting a glimmer of light and the movement of his spade.
But most of all, he knew they were staring at the only thing worth seeing – that unmistakable object laid out in the mud, like a bird trapped in cement, or an ancient fossil preserved in the clay. It was like a five-limbed sea creature, bony and white.
It was the shape of a human hand.
Detective Sergeant Diane Fry stepped out of her car on to the muddy ground, drew her coat tighter round her shoulders and wiped the rain from her face. All the activity seemed to be taking place on the other side of the track. Uniformed officers setting up cordons, SOCOs climbing into scene suits, a bunch of bystanders gaping like idiots. She looked around with a weary sigh. A week before Christmas, and wouldn’t you know it? A major enquiry in prospect, if she wasn’t mistaken.
Fry slammed the door of her Peugeot, her hands already wet and slipping on the handle. There was only one ray of hope. From the initial reports that had come in to Control, this air of activity might be misleading. Something quite different was going on here.
In fact, everyone was waiting with barely restrained anxiety for a verdict on the age of the body that had been unearthed. If it was recent, the entire division was in for a ruined holiday. If they were lucky, it could prove to be a historic burial, the remains of a medieval graveyard disturbed by the construction work. And then they could hand it over to the archaeologists and drive off home with a cheery wave and shouts of ‘Have a good Christmas.’
All right, that was probably too much to hope for. But even a decade or two on the bones would be good news. At least they could take their time making enquiries. Victims who’d been missing for ten or twenty years would wait a little while longer for their identity to be established.
Besides, what family wanted a knock on the door over Christmas and a police officer standing on the step to inform them that their missing loved one had been found in a shallow grave in some godforsaken spot at the back of beyond? That sort of thing could ruin Christmas for ever.
She called to a uniformed officer in a yellow high-vis jacket. ‘Is DC Murfin here somewhere, do you know?’
‘Yes, Sergeant. Shall I fetch him?’
‘Please.’
Yes, Christmas. In Fry’s experience, there were already far too many families who were unable to regard it as a time for gladness and joy. This time of year had a nasty tendency to bring back memories for people. Recollections of happier times, of opportunities lost, of friends and relatives who had passed on to celebrate Christmas in a better place.
No, the festive season wasn’t all about peace and goodwill, not these days. Anyone in the emergency services could tell you that. Christmas didn’t make much difference to the lives of all those poor, pathetic and dysfunctional people who cluttered up the police stations and courts from one month to the next.
A few days ago, two men wearing Santa Claus outfits had raided a building society in Chesterfield. They’d been carrying baseball bats inside their fur-fringed sleeves, and a customer had ended up in hospital with a fractured skull when he got in their way. The suicide and domestic violence rates jumped at this time of year, the number of road accident victims multiplied, and the streets of Edendale were full of brawling drunks. The cells at West Street were never fuller, the hospitals were over-stretched, and hosing out the divisional vans was a full-time job. Lots of ho, ho, ho.
But perhaps she was just a bit jaundiced in her view. Personally, she hadn’t celebrated Christmas for over a decade. Not in a paper hat and cracker, turkey and mistletoe sort of way. There had never been a decorated spruce tree standing in the corner of her damp little flat in Grosvenor Avenue, no tinsel over the mantelpiece, no Nine Lessons and Carols on the radio on Christmas morning. She was lucky if she had a present to unwrap – at least, one that she hadn’t sent to herself for appearance sake. What was there to celebrate?
DC Gavin Murfin appeared at her side, teetering dangerously on the edge of the mud. The bottom four inches of his trouser legs were rolled up to reveal a pair of green paisley socks and a strip of deathly white flesh. Fry looked away, feeling suddenly queasy. On balance, the sight of a partially decomposed corpse might be preferable.
‘Do you think there’ll be any overtime on this one, boss?’ asked Murfin as they approached a PVC body tent erected over the makeshift grave.
‘You’re already rostered for duty over Christmas anyway, aren’t you, Gavin?’
Murfin looked crestfallen.
‘Damn, you’re right. I’d forgotten.’
Fry heard the dismay in his voice, but felt no pity. ‘If it’s a historic burial, you could be the officer in charge for a while.’
‘Great. That’s just … great.’
‘Most DCs would appreciate that kind of opportunity,’ said Fry.
‘It makes a change from processing nominals, I suppose.’
Reluctantly, Fry smiled. Ah, nominals. The official name for the area’s most prolific criminals – the repeat offenders, all those individuals the law makers called ‘recidivists’. They came into custody at regular intervals, might even get a short prison sentence if they were unlucky. But, before long, they were back out there on the litter-ridden streets of the Cavendish Estate – or ‘the community’, as it was known in the criminal justice system. Edendale’s nominals would be celebrating Christmas, all right. No one wanted them cluttering up the custody suite.
Murfin was silent for a moment as they watched the medical examiner directing a SOCO where to uncover vital parts of the body. The exposed edge of a bone here, a bit of decomposed flesh there.
‘Diane, do you mean there are people who’d prefer to attend a postmortem than be at home carving the turkey?’ asked Murfin.
‘There isn’t much difference, is there?’
‘Now that you mention it. Not the way I do it, anyway. And the company might be better in the mortuary – especially since we have to visit the in-laws at Alfreton on Boxing Day.’
Fry peered over the tape into the grave. The hole was gradually getting bigger, even as she watched. The hand that had been exposed by the workman looked fairly fresh. But the torso that was now being painstakingly revealed seemed to be badly decayed.
A cold case, or a warm one? Fry was unashamedly ambitious – she wanted the next move up the promotion ladder, and for that she needed cases to her credit. Successful cases, airtight prosecutions that led to convictions. Clear-ups, not cock-ups. It would be PDR time in April, the annual round of dreaded staff appraisals. She had to file something away that she could point to as a recent triumph, evidence of her outstanding skill and expertise, proof of her ability to manage an enquiry to a successful outcome, blah, blah, blah. Senior management believed it if it was down on paper, typed on an official form. Would Pity Wood Farm give her that case?
‘OK, let’s move these people back behind the cordon. What are they all doing here anyway?’
‘They’re witnesses, Sergeant.’
‘All of them?’
‘So it seems.’
‘Well, get their names and addresses and put them somewhere out of the way, for God’s sake.’
‘They don’t seem to speak English.’
‘Oh, Jesus.’
Rain had begun to fall again – big, fat drops splattering on to the roof of her car and pitting the already treacherously soft ground. Around her, uniformed and paper-suited figures speeded up their actions, as if suddenly instilled with a newfound sense of urgency. Within a few minutes, they were all sheltering against the walls of the farmhouse or sitting in their vehicles.
And it was only then that Fry really noticed Pity Wood Farm for the first time. Until this moment, she’d been concentrating on the ground, trying to keep her footing in the slippery mud that was coating her shoes and trickling in between her toes. But she looked up, and she saw it in all its glory.
She was confronted by a collection of ancient outbuildings leaning at various angles, their roofs sagging, doors hanging loosely on their hinges. By some curious law of physics, the doors all seemed to tilt at the opposite angle to the walls, as if they were leaning to compensate for a bend. Some doorways had been blocked up, windows were filled in, steps had been left going nowhere. Mud ran right up to the walls of the outbuildings, and right up to the door of the farmhouse itself. From the evidence, Fry thought it probably continued inside the house, too. The exterior was grimy and flecked with dirt, a bird’s nest trailed from a broken gutter. Piles of rubbish were strewn across the dead grass of what might once have been garden. Was this really a farm?
‘Who else is here, Gavin?’ she asked, in despair.
‘The DI’s on his way,’ said Murfin. ‘But in the meantime, it’s you and me, boss.’
‘DC Cooper?’
‘Ben? He’s on a rest day. We don’t know where he is.’
‘Strange,’ said Fry. ‘This is exactly his sort of place.’
Crouching uncomfortably, Detective Constable Ben Cooper studied the withered object carefully. In all his years with Derbyshire Constabulary, including seven in CID, he’d never seen anything quite like this. There had been plenty of dead bodies – some of them long dead, others nice and fresh. And some of them perhaps not quite dead, after all. But this?
The flesh had shrivelled away from the fingers, leaving them thin but not quite skeletal. The fact that there was still a layer of leathery skin shrunk tight to the fingers somehow made it worse than if he was just looking at bones. The result was that the hand appeared to have been shrinkwrapped in a film of wrinkled, yellow plastic. The thumb was bent strangely out of shape, too, as though it had been broken and never re-set. The severed wrist was ragged, and the tattered skin looked as though it had been sealed with some kind of sticky substance.
He straightened up, easing the painful muscles in his back. He’d been playing squash this morning, and his opponent had smashed the ball into his kidneys when he was out of position recovering a drop-shot. You could never trust police officers not to get you in the back.
‘The hand of glory,’ he said. ‘They’re very rare these days.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Very rare. Not rare like steak, but rare as in very unusual. There aren’t many of them about.’
Cooper had the suspicion that he was babbling, spouting nonsense. He did it just because there was a silence that had to be filled. It wasn’t the first time it had happened. Not even the first time today.
He looked at his companion, unsure of her reaction because of the silence. ‘What do you think of it, then?’
‘It’s gross.’
‘Gross?’
‘Like, totally yucky.’
Cooper nodded. ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’
It wasn’t exactly a technical assessment – but accurate, all the same. There were many occasions when a police officer in E Division might want to use it. A Saturday night on drunk patrol, for example. Another body lying in the gutter on the High Street? I’m not touching that, Control – it’s yucky. Yes, that would work.
But today was his rest day, and he’d volunteered to take his eldest niece out for the day, since the Christmas holidays had started. So he had an obligation to be interesting and informative. Volunteered? Was that really the right word? His recollection was that he’d happened to be hanging around at Bridge End Farm chatting to his brother Matt, when Amy had kidnapped him. But he’d never prove that in court. He had no evidence.
‘The “hand of glory” supposedly comes from an executed criminal and was cut off the body while the corpse was still hanging from the gibbet,’ said Cooper, reading from the guide book.
‘There’s a recipe here,’ said Amy, interrupting him. She was eleven now, and strangely adult in some ways. Cooper was starting to feel sorry for the teachers at Amy’s new school. She could be merciless if you were boring her.
‘A what, Amy?’
‘A recipe.’
‘Like Delia Smith? That sort of recipe?’
‘I suppose. “The recipe for the preparation of a hand of glory is simple,” it says.’
Cooper looked down at his niece, surprised by the sudden change in her tone. Now she was interested. It was yucky just to stand and look at a preserved hand, but learning how to preserve one yourself – now that was cool. He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised.
‘“Squeeze the blood out of the hand. Embalm it in a shroud and steep it in a solution of saltpetre, salt and pepper for two weeks. Then dry in the sun.” What’s saltpetre, Uncle Ben?’
‘Erm … I’m not sure.’
Amy snorted gently. ‘“The other essential item is a candle made from hanged man’s fat, wax and Lapland sesame.” What’s Lapland sesame?’
‘Erm …’
‘Sesame seeds from Lapland, obviously.’ She frowned. ‘Do sesame plants grow in Lapland?’
‘I, er …’
‘Never mind.’
‘I know how the hand of glory was used,’ said Cooper desperately. ‘You fixed candles between the fingers of the hand, and then you lit them when you broke into a house.’
‘When you did what?’
‘Well, it was used by burglars. According to the legends, it made them invisible. It was also supposed to prevent the owners of the house from waking up.’
There was a final bit on the little interpretative panel that he didn’t bother reading out. Wicks for the candles were made from locks of hair dipped in grease from the murderer’s body and the fat of an old tom cat, then consecrated by saying the Lord’s Prayer backwards. Ah, the old Lord’s Prayer backwards – that always worked, didn’t it?
They moved on through the museum. Cooper glanced out of the window, and saw that it was still raining. He didn’t mind Edendale in the rain, but Amy objected to getting wet. And since it was the start of her Christmas holidays, and only his rest day, she got to say what they did and where they went. And that didn’t involve going out in the rain, thanks.
In the centre of town, Victoria Park had been taken over for a Victorian Christmas Market. These things seemed to be very popular, judging by the crowds coming into town. There was a smell of roasting chestnuts in the air, and the sound of a fairground organ. And there was an innovation for Edendale this year – a Continental market, where stalls sold French bread and German sausages. Some of the stallholders spoke with foreign accents and might even be French or German. You never knew these days.
In the evenings, mime artists, stilt walkers and clowns would mingle with the crowds, and Santa would turn up on his sleigh at exactly the same time every night. A couple of weeks earlier, a local TV presenter had been brought in to switch on the lights, but the headline act on the main stage tomorrow would be an Abba tribute band.
They stopped by a costume display. The rough trousers and leather knee-pads of a lead miner, the gowns and bonnets of an elegant lady.
‘So how are you liking school, Amy?’ he said, aware of an unfamiliar silence developing.
‘It’s so cliquey. They’re all goths or emos. Or chavs.’
‘Chavs, eh?’
‘They’re so stupid. There aren’t any real people, Uncle Ben.’
‘Would you rather be at home, or at school?’
‘Well, home is all right. I like being around the farm and the animals. But Mum and Dad are so immature sometimes.’
‘Oh, are they?’
‘They only think about money and possessions – they’re very materialistic. I can’t believe they never stop and think about serious subjects now and then.’
Cooper found himself trailing after his niece, as if he was the child demanding attention. It was supposed to be the other way round, but it never seemed to work like that in reality.
‘Well, they’re very busy looking after you and Josie,’ he said. ‘And they have to try to make sure the farm makes enough money to support the whole family. It’s very hard work, you know.’
Amy didn’t seem to hear. He could see that she was thinking about something again. It was very unnerving the way she did that, switched to auto pilot while her brain concentrated on some totally different subject. Perhaps she was already learning to multi-task, practising that skill all women claimed to have.
‘It’s just like Draco Malfoy, in that shop in Knockturn Alley,’ she said.
Cooper frowned, stumped again by the turn of the conversation. ‘Is it?’
His brain turned over, trying to pin down the reference. It was humiliating to find that his brain worked so much more slowly than Amy’s but he was finding it more and more difficult to keep up with his nieces’ interests these days. Their lives seemed to change so quickly, the pop stars they liked being different from one week to the next. Even the language they used evolved so rapidly that it left him behind.
‘Wait a minute – Draco Malfoy, did you say? That’s Harry Potter.’
‘Of course it’s Harry Potter.’ Amy could barely conceal the contempt in her voice. ‘It’s in The Chamber of Secrets. Draco Malfoy finds a hand of glory when he’s in the shop with his father. “Best friend of thieves and plunderers,” that’s what the shopkeeper says.’
‘“Best friend of thieves and plunderers.” OK, that would make sense.’
‘So it’s magic,’ said Amy.
‘Yes, of course. What did you think it was?’
‘I thought it was for real. Well, it’s in the museum, isn’t it? All this other stuff is for real – the costumes and the tools, and the old furniture.’
‘Yes.’
‘But the hand of glory isn’t real – it’s magic.’
‘It’s a genuine hand,’ said Cooper defensively. ‘A hand that belonged to a real person once.’
‘But it’s still magic. Magic is make-believe. Harry Potter is made up. It’s fiction, Uncle Ben.’
‘The fact is,’ said Cooper, treading cautiously, ‘people in the past believed those things were for real. They didn’t know that magic was just something out of stories like Harry Potter. They actually thought it worked, in real life. The hand of glory, all kinds of stuff.’
They got to the door of the museum and looked out on to the street. There were fewer umbrellas being carried by the pedestrians now, so the rain must be easing.
‘People can be really weird, can’t they?’ said Amy. ‘They believe in such stupid things.’
The old man’s dreams were worse during the day. He drifted in and out of consciousness, hardly aware of his surroundings, pressed down into the darkness of sleep by a great weight. At times, he wasn’t even sure he was still alive, it felt so impossible to wake up. It was so difficult, so far beyond his strength.
Our dawns and dusks are numbered. They’ll steal our land next, and our hills. I always thought the place would last for ever, but now I don’t care. I wouldn’t pass on the curse. It’ll die with me, and none too soon. It will an’ all.
Dark filth, cruel brutes. Coming to my home for their evil purposes, stealing away my life. Our life. They turned up in their white vans, and they went away again. Dark, some of them. Speaking in tongues. They might as well have had the number stamped on their foreheads. Them and their minions, traipsing all over the shop. A load of rammel in the sheds, I don’t know what …
Words and phrases repeated in his head, meaningless yet desperately important, the only thing that mattered.
For he that is dead. For he that is dead.
Aye, it were silin’ down again. That morning, he was fast on, so I didn’t waken him. He’d only be lorping around the house, the old dosser. Yammeringabout his mad ideas. Sacrilege and superstition, damnation and desecration.
The night before, they’d all been popped-up again. I thought I’d go scranny if they didn’t stop. Look, he’s a wick ’un, I said. I told you he was a wick ’un.
The old man opened his eyes for a moment, aware of movement and light, but sank back into sleep before his brain could focus.
But he was sickly, and always was. Weak in the head, and sick in the body. Sound, me. I’m sound, I always said. But him, he was badly. I never cottoned on how badly. But it makes no odds now, does it? It’s all for the best, in the end.
For he that is dead.
For he that is dead.
For he that is dead is freed from sin.
2 (#uf6d6d0cd-8496-5b2a-9e54-a1361606c8cd)
A single hair follicle was enough to make a DNA match. Polymerase chain reaction and short tandem repeats could get a result from one head hair, or even an eyelash. Invisible stains would work, too. Stains of saliva. Tears and blood.
Watching the activity at Pity Wood Farm, Diane Fry despaired of being able to rely on modern scientific techniques. Even the fingerprints Jamie Ward had left on his spade a few hours ago would have bloomed in the damp atmosphere and become useless.
Yet more vehicles had arrived at the scene, jockeying for parking places on the drier patches of ground. They were wasting their time, because there wouldn’t be a dry inch left by the end of the day. Even now, the sound of spinning wheels whined in the air as a driver churned another rut into the mud.
‘Well, I see the builders have trampled all over the job long before we got here.’
Fry turned to see Detective Inspector Paul Hitchens approaching the inner cordon, casually clad in jeans and green wellington boots, as if he’d only popped out to walk the dog on a Sunday afternoon.
‘Morning, sir.’
‘Morning, Diane.’ He looked down at the sea of mud. ‘That’s just great. What a start. But I suppose it makes a change from our own plods doing the trampling.’
‘Does it? I can’t see any difference from where I’m standing. All size-twelve boots look the same to me. I’m not bothered what type of helmets they were wearing when they were doing the trampling. It’s not as if they were bouncing around on their heads, is it?’
‘True.’
‘If we found an imprint of a Derbyshire Constabulary cap badge in the mud, that would be a different matter,’ said Fry. ‘Then we’d be looking for some uniformed idiot who’d tripped over his own feet. And we’d have a list of potential suspects right under our noses.’
Hitchens laughed. ‘Shall we have a look at the centre of all this attention?’
With DC Murfin trailing reluctantly behind, they followed a line of wooden planks borrowed from the builders to create a temporary bridge. Their feet thumped on the planks as if they were walking out on to a pier at the seaside. Blackpool, with mud.
And here was the end-of-the-pier show – a sort of gipsy fortune teller lurking in her shadowy tent, consulting the bones.
The Home Office pathologist, Mrs van Doon, straightened up as they approached. She brushed a stray lock of hair from her forehead, leaving a smear of dirt from her glove across her temple.
‘I shouldn’t worry too much about contamination of your crime scene,’ she said. ‘This body has been here long enough for half the population of Derbyshire to have passed through the area on their way to the pub and back again.’
Murfin looked suddenly interested. ‘There’s a pub?’
‘In the village,’ said the pathologist, gesturing with a trowel. ‘About a mile in that direction.’
Hitchens grunted impatiently. ‘How long has it been here exactly?’
‘Exactly? Is that a joke, Inspector?’
‘Make an estimate, then. We won’t hold you to it.’
‘On that understanding …’ Mrs van Doon gave an apologetic shrug. ‘A year or so? I assume you’ll be getting the forensic anthropologist in to examine the remains. Dr Jamieson might be able to give you a better estimate.’
‘At first glance, the body looks pretty well preserved to me,’ said Hitchens.
‘Oh, you’re looking at the hand. Well, the hand isn’t too badly decomposed, that’s true. But it had been well covered up and protected from the air – at least, before some individual stuck the edge of a spade through the plastic sheeting. There are some old rips in the covering at the head end, though. So the condition of that area of the body is a bit different.’
‘At the head end? That sounds like bad news. What are our chances of an ID going to be?’
Mrs van Doon shrugged in her scene suit, rustling faintly. ‘It’s too early to say. But I can tell you the victim has lost quite a bit of flesh on the left side. Down to the bone in places. I’ll know more when I can get her back to the mortuary. That might take a bit of time, though.’
‘Why?’
‘We need to be careful digging her out. Some of the skin is sloughing off, and the less of her we lose at this stage, the better. Wouldn’t you agree?’
‘It is a “her”, though,’ said Fry. ‘You did say “her”.’
‘Yes, I’m pretty sure of that, Sergeant,’ said the pathologist, her boots squelching as she squatted to peer into the hole. ‘Unless you’ve got a cross-dresser with a penchant for tights and blue skirts on your missing persons list.’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘I’ll pass the remains into Dr Jamieson’s care when he arrives. We can consult later, when she’s safely in the lab.’
‘Thank you, Doctor.’
As they re-crossed the plank bridge, Hitchens cast an eye over the farm buildings.
‘What do we know about the occupants?’
‘Apparently, the farm was owned by two elderly brothers,’ said Murfin, producing a notebook and demonstrating that he’d actually been doing some work while everyone else was standing around gassing. ‘One of them died quite recently, and the other is in a care home in Edendale.’
‘Was owned?’
‘Well, the place has been bought for development – hence the presence of all these builders in their hard hats. Development, or conversion. I’m not quite clear what they’re telling me.’
‘So who’s the present owner?’
‘A Mr Goodwin. He’s a lawyer, lives in Manchester. Mr Goodwin is the man employing the builders. I’ve got his contact details from the site foreman. But that seems to be all the bloke knows.’
‘Get on the phone, Gavin, and find out everything you can about the previous owners,’ said Fry. ‘We need names, dates, relationships. We need to know who else was in the household. Dig out anything that’s on record about them. Get some help, if you need it.’
‘If?’ said Murfin. ‘If?’
‘The body has been here for a year at least, according to the pathologist.’
‘That puts the victim in situ before Mr Goodwin took ownership, then. The sale went through only three months ago, I gather. The farm has been empty for about nine months, after the surviving owner went into care.’
Fry looked at their surroundings in more detail, the farm buildings beyond the stretch of mud and the track and the parked vehicles.
‘Does that explain the state of the place? How could it get like this in nine months?’
Ben Cooper would probably tell her that all this was evidence of the evolution of the farm over the centuries, as its owners adapted to new ways of working, changed the use of their buildings from cattle to sheep, from hay storage to machinery shed. Or whatever. To Fry, it looked like dereliction and chaos, pure and simple. Not an ounce of design or planning had gone into the farm, not even in the newer buildings.
Of course, farmers were a law unto themselves in so many ways. They were even allowed to create these shanty towns, reminiscent of the slums of some Third World country where there was no running water or drainage, and rubbish was dumped in the streets. In Rio de Janeiro, you might expect it. But not in Middle England.
‘What a place,’ she said, unable to avoid voicing her feelings for once.
‘The builders have hardly started on the house or outbuildings yet,’ said Murfin. ‘The foreman tells me they’ve been doing some work on the foundations and building an approach road. Then they have to tackle some of the exterior walls where they’re unsound. And of course there’s the roof. Not much point in trying to do any work on the interior until you’ve sorted out the roof, is there?’
‘What is it going to be when they’ve finished?’ asked Fry.
‘The foreman says a gentleman’s residence. Office suite, swimming pool, guest annexe.’
‘They’ve got a hell of a job on.’
Unrepaired splits in the iron guttering had allowed rainwater to run down the walls, dragging long grey stains across the stone. Wires sagged from the telegraph pole. Two black crows swayed on the wire in the wind, flicking their wings to keep their balance.
Fry noticed a large shed behind the house. A very large shed indeed, with a convex roof. Wheel tracks led from one end of the shed towards the stretch of ground where the body had been found. Old tracks that had been made when the ground was soft, but whose ruts had hardened and survived until the recent rain. That was the sort of building where anything could go on, out of sight of the public. Out of earshot, out of mind.
The rain was getting heavier. That could be a problem.
But then Fry corrected herself. There were never any problems, only challenges. No obstacles that couldn’t be overcome.
At least the FOAs had been right on the ball, getting that body tent over the makeshift grave as soon as they saw the conditions. By now, this rain could have washed away the evidence if they hadn’t acted quickly. Lucky they’d had one in the boot of their car. In these circumstances, there was an evens chance that they would have had to sit and wait for one to arrive.
According to their advertising, these tents were supposed to go up in ten seconds, but she bet it had taken a good bit longer than that. The peg-down eyelets looked none too secure in the soft ground, and the guy ropes were slippery with mud.
‘Duckboards,’ someone was saying into a radio. ‘We need duckboards here. Lots of duckboards.’
Fry turned back to Murfin again. ‘So where’s this builder who found the body?’
‘Waiting in the van over there. Ward is his name – Jamie Ward, aged twenty. I’d hardly call him your typical builder, actually.’
Fry looked at him. ‘So what would you call him, Gavin?’
Murfin closed his notebook. ‘Terrified,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’d call him – a terrified kid.’
Matt Cooper had loaded some sheep into a trailer and was doing the paperwork in the Land Rover when his brother arrived. Ben could see a sheaf of forms resting on a clipboard. Pink copy for the destination, blue for the haulier, yellow for the holding of departure.
Matt opened the door, the usual frown caused by paperwork clearing from his face.
‘Hello, little brother. How was Amy? Did she have a good time?’
‘Oh, yes. She was fascinated by the recipe for preserving a severed hand.’
‘That sounds about right. She’s been in a funny mood recently.’
Matt was still putting on weight. That was a new set of overalls he was wearing, and they were a size larger than the last ones. He was only in his mid-thirties, so he still had middle-aged spread to look forward to.
‘Amy talks in quite a grown-up way sometimes, doesn’t she?’ said Ben.
‘Oh, you noticed that. Yes, it’s a bit of a new thing. I think it’s some influence at school – she must have some new friends, or something.’
‘Or a new teacher she’s got a crush on?’
‘Do girls have crushes on teachers?’
‘Yes, I believe so, Matt.’
‘I mean … well, I think they’re mostly female teachers that she has at that school.’
‘Even so.’
Matt was silent for a moment. ‘I’ll ask Kate to have a quiet word,’ he said.
Ben turned to look at the farmhouse, conscious of its presence behind him, the old family home. Now that he no longer lived here, he noticed that Bridge End Farm was starting to look middle-aged, too. The house hadn’t been painted for a while, and he could see that some work needed doing on the roof of the barn. He supposed there wasn’t much money in the bank to spare for repairs these days.
‘It’ll just be a phase Amy is going through, won’t it?’ he said.
‘Are you sure?’
‘It could be a lot worse, Matt. She’s a sensible girl.’
Matt put his paperwork aside. ‘Ben, how come you know so much more about pubescent girls than I do? I’m the dad around here.’
‘You see all sorts of things in the job.’
‘I suppose you do. And of course, you don’t always talk about it, do you, Ben? Especially these days. Whenever you come to the farm now, you seem to have changed a little bit more.’
Ben watched Amy coming across the field, walking with exaggerated care, instead of running in an uninhibited way, as she once would have done.
‘Perhaps some of us are maturing faster than others,’ he said.
Ben couldn’t deny that he was losing his sense of connection to Bridge End Farm. The ties were no longer quite so binding since he’d moved out and rented his own flat in Edendale. Memories of his childhood at the farm were objects in the far distance, unless he stopped to think about them. And then the details could spring at him with unexpected ferocity, like wild animals that hated to be stared at.
‘Nothing much happening, then?’ asked Matt. ‘No urgent crime on the streets of Edendale to take you away from us? If you’re at a loose end, you could help me batten down for the weather. It’s not looking too good.’
Ben turned and looked at the hills in the east, where the bad weather came from. A bank of cloud was building up, dark and ominous. Those easterly winds had been a feature of his early years. At Bridge End, when the wind blew from the east it made all the shutters bang and the doors of the loose boxes rattle against their latches. The trees on the eastern ridge would be bent over at unnatural angles, their bare branches flailing helplessly against the power of the gale. At night, animals would stir uneasily in the barns as the young Ben lay listening to the banging and the moaning of the wind, jumping at the crash of a bucket hurled across the yard or a tile dislodged from the roof.
Just when Cooper was thinking that nothing would ever make him jump with alarm like that any more, the phone in his pocket began to ring.
Jamie Ward was shivering miserably in the front seat of the crew bus that had brought the builders to Pity Wood Farm. It was a converted Transit, smelling powerfully of cigarettes and muddy clothes. The seats were worn thin, the floor scuffed by dozens of work boots. Fry moved a hard hat aside, slid in next to him, and wound the window down to prevent the interior steaming up. Rain covered the windscreen, blocking out the view of the farm.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked.
‘I’ll be OK.’
He didn’t sound very sure, but Fry let it pass. The sooner she finished with him, the better it would be. If he went into shock, he’d be useless.
Murfin had been right about Jamie Ward. He was younger than any of the other men she’d seen standing around the site, and he had an entirely different look about him. His hair was streaked blond, and was gelled up at the front – hardly the typical builder’s style. But he was a well-built lad, six feet tall at least, a good build for a rugby player. His hands were powerful and broad, just as suitable for hard physical work as for playing rugby.
‘I’m studying Microbiology at Sheffield University,’ said Jamie when she asked him. ‘But I need to find work whenever I can, you know – to get some dosh.’
‘You work as a builder’s labourer? That’s a bit of an unusual vacation job for a student,’ suggested Fry.
Jamie shrugged. ‘It suits me. It beats working in McDonald’s, anyway. I like to be outside in the open air, doing a bit of physical work. I’d go mad otherwise. I don’t have any skills or training, but I can use a spade and push a wheelbarrow about.’
‘And carry a hod full of bricks?’
‘We’re not allowed to use hods any more,’ said Jamie. ‘Health and Safety – you could do your back in, or drop bricks on someone’s head.’
‘Really?’
He nodded. ‘Besides, we’re not using bricks on this site. It’s going to be entirely stone on the outside, to match the original walls. Breeze block on the inside, of course.’ Jamie wiped off a few inches of condensation and looked at the figures moving about in the rain. ‘Funny, really, when there’s all this clay lying about. But stone is much more fashionable. That’s what the owner wants.’
Fry saw him relaxing a little, now that he had managed to get off the painful subject of the body he’d found.
‘So you like to be outside in the open air?’ she asked, thinking that Jamie Ward reminded her a little of Ben Cooper. ‘Are you from a farming family, by any chance?’
‘Well, I used to help my grandfather around his place when I was a teenager. Just at weekends and during the school holidays. He doesn’t have the farm any more, though – Granddad sold up when it stopped making money.’
‘Sensible man.’
‘Right. Well, I wouldn’t have wanted to spend my life doing the job that Granddad did. He was at it twenty-four seven. There was no let-up from looking after the animals. Livestock farming is for losers, don’t you think? Anyone with any sense is getting out as fast as they can.’
They both sat for a moment peering through the patch of cleared glass at the buildings of Pity Wood Farm, like divers examining a deep sea wreck.
‘I mean,’ said Jamie, ‘look at this place, for example.’
‘You’re right there.’
Ward glanced sideways at her. ‘But you want me to tell you what happened, don’t you? How I came to find the … well …’
‘I know you’ll have gone through it before, but it would help me if you could describe the incident in your own words, Jamie.’
‘The incident, yes. I suppose that’s what it was.’
‘Take your time. I’m not going anywhere for a while.’
‘Nik had me digging this trench, see. To put in some footings for a new wall, he said.’
‘And Nik is …?’
‘Nikolai. He’s the gaffer, the foreman. Polish, of course, but he’s OK. He leaves me pretty much to myself most of the time. I don’t get the best jobs, obviously – I’m just a labourer. In fact, they sometimes send me up to the village for cigarettes, if they run out. Anyway… I’d been digging this trench for a couple of days. It was hard work – that soil is so heavy, especially when it’s wet. You can see how wet it is.’
‘Yes, I’ve seen how wet it is,’ said Fry, becoming aware of the dampness soaking into her feet where the mud had overflowed her shoes.
‘And there’s all kinds of stuff in the ground here. You wouldn’t believe the rubbish I’ve turned up. Nothing that’d interest an archaeologist, but I’ve thought once or twice of asking the Time Team to come and give me a hand.’
There was silence for a moment as the full deadliness of his joke drifted through the van like a bad smell. Fry saw him go pale, and thought she was going to lose him.
‘Are you all right, Jamie?’
He gulped. ‘Yeah. Thanks. It was mentioning the hand. Not that I meant that hand, but … Shit, I’m not making any sense. I’m sorry.’
‘You’re doing just fine. You were telling me about the rubbish you had to dig out for the trench. What kind of thing do you mean?’
‘A lot of it was rusty lumps of metal, half-bricks, nails, broken buckets. It looked as though the farmers had used that area for a tip. I cursed Nik a few times, I can tell you. There were even some of those glass jars that people use for making pickles, with lids that have an airtight seal. Do you know what I mean?’
Jamie was making gestures with his hands to indicate the size of the containers he’d found.
‘Mason jars?’ said Fry.
‘That’s it. Oh, and an old, broken cross on a chain, some Coke bottles, and a packet of coffee filters. The things people chuck out. Why don’t they use their wheelie bins – some of that stuff ought to be recycled.’
‘Where did you put all these items you dug out of the trench?’
‘In a barrow, then they went into the big skip round the back of the house.’ Jamie paused. ‘Why are you asking questions about the rubbish?’
‘Because some of the items you dug out might have belonged to the victim,’ said Fry as gently as she could.
‘Oh, God. I never thought of that.’
‘An old, broken cross, you said.’
‘It was nothing. Just a cheap crucifix on a chain, with part of the base chipped away. A bit of worthless tat.’
‘You didn’t notice any personal items, did you?’
‘Such as?’
‘A purse, jewellery, coins,’ said Fry. ‘Items of clothing.’
An entire handbag would be nice, she was thinking. A driving licence, credit cards, a letter from an embittered ex-lover?
‘No, nothing like that,’ said Jamie.
‘I don’t know if anyone has mentioned that the body is that of a female, fairly young?’
Jamie swallowed again. ‘Well, some of the blokes have been listening in, you know. Word got around.’
‘I mention it because there might have been items you were unfamiliar with.’
Jamie shook his head. ‘Only the – what do you call them? Mason jars.’
So she might have been making pickles when she was buried, thought Fry. That helps. But she knew she was being unfair on the young labourer. Why should he have taken any notice of what he was tossing away in his wheelbarrow? It would be up to the SOCOs to go through the contents of the skip. Who was going to tell them about that job? Mrs Popularity, she supposed.
‘All right. Let’s move on. How far down had you dug before you noticed anything wrong?’
‘Nearly three feet. I was shifting a big lump of stone out of the clay. It was heavy, and I was thinking of calling one of the other blokes over to give me … I mean, to help me lift it. But they laugh at me if I ask for help, so I tried to manage on my own. I’d climbed down into the trench, and I managed to get both hands round the stone and hoist it up. I remember it came out with a sort of sucking sound, and it left a big, round impression in the clay where it had been lying. I must have stood there like an idiot for I don’t know how long, watching the water slowly fill in the hole where the stone had been. And there it was – the hand.’
Fry kept quiet. She could see that he was in the moment now, living the experience. This was the time he might remember the little details best.
‘I shouted then, I think,’ said Jamie. ‘And I dropped the stone, too – I’ve just remembered that, I dropped the stone. Somebody came running over straight away, one of the other blokes working nearby. They thought I’d hurt myself, of course. I could already hear Nik swearing in Polish and calling me an English cretin.’
Jamie finished with a laugh. ‘And he’s right – that’s what I am. What an idiot for making all this fuss.’
‘Not at all,’ said Fry. ‘You did exactly the right thing.’
Jamie didn’t look convinced. He rubbed his own hands together, as if trying to remove the mud he’d seen on the thing he’d uncovered.
‘So you could hear Nik cursing. Was it him who came running over when you shouted?’
‘No, someone else. Nik turned up a bit later. I can’t remember who it was who came first. I didn’t take any notice at the time.’
‘But it must have been somebody working nearby.’
‘Yes. Well, it must have been.’ Jamie shrugged apologetically. ‘But I don’t know who. It was a bit of a blank by then.’
‘Don’t worry. You’ve done really well, Jamie.’
‘You know what I’m thinking now?’ he said. ‘Thank God that woman’s hand was under that stone. If I’d been digging and hit it with my spade, I’d have sliced right through it. Well, I would, wouldn’t I?’
‘Possibly.’
He looked pleadingly at Fry. ‘I need to go outside now,’ he said. ‘Right now. I’m sorry. Tell everyone I’m sorry.’
Strips of plastic sheeting that had been ripped from passing lorries were snagged on barbed-wire fences and hawthorn branches. They streamed and fluttered in the wind like tattered pennants. No need for windsocks here. It was always obvious which direction the wind was blowing from.
Cooper had Peak FM on in the car and was listening to a series of tracks from seventies bands. UB40 and Dire Straits. A bit of Duran Duran even. Well, it was that or BBC local radio, where the playlists seemed to be regressing to the sixties, with more and more artists that he’d never heard of. The Beatles maybe, but most of it was stuff his parents must have listened to when they were children.
Pity Wood Farm, according to Control. He’d never heard of it, but he knew where Rakedale was – the southern edge of the limestone plateau, maybe even beyond the limestone, somewhere down past Monyash and Hartington. Much further south, and this body would have been D Division’s problem.
The peat moors were the brownish yellow of winter. An oddly shaped cloud was rearing over the hill, as if there had been a nuclear explosion somewhere near Buxton. Bare, twisted branches stood outlined against the skyline, gesturing hopelessly, as if they thought the spring would never come.
Cooper found Fry inside the outer cordon, shaking the rain from her jacket.
‘Diane – what do you want doing?’
‘We’re going to have to start on the house and outbuildings some time, but I don’t know where’s best to begin. Take a look around, will you? Give me your impressions. Perhaps you could start with that shed over there.’
‘Shed?’
‘That shed over there. The big one.’
‘No problem.’
Cooper watched her go. Impressions, was it? That wasn’t normally what she asked him for. Fry was usually hot on firm evidence. Maybe there was something about this place that bothered her. If so, she wasn’t likely to say it. She was putting that responsibility on to him – let DC Cooper come up with the impressions, the vague feelings, the gut instincts. Then she could always dismiss them, if necessary. Cooper’s contribution could be trampled underfoot, without any shadow on her own reputation.
Oh, well. Fair enough. It seemed to be his role in life since Diane Fry had become his DS. He either had to accept it, or find somewhere else.
When the police had finished with him, Jamie Ward looked around for a few minutes. There were a lot of cops here now, and some other people he took to be forensics. He could imagine the blokes in his crew blabbing to the police. Yes, that’s him over there. We call him the Professor. But not all of them would be eager to talk to the authorities, he bet. A few of them would make out they didn’t speak any English at all.
Nikolai was standing over by the house, talking to a bunch of the men. He was speaking quietly in Polish, almost whispering, though it was unlikely anyone would understand him, except his own lads. Jamie frowned, and counted them again. Seven. He looked around, wondering if he could be mistaken. But no. There were seven, plus Nikolai. Two men short.
He sighed, foreseeing more complications, and more trouble. Jamie recalled that faint glint of metal, slick with the dampness of clay, reflecting a glimmer of light and the movement of his spade. He remembered the impression he’d had, the thing that had made him stop digging, his spade frozen in his hands as he stared down into the hole. For a second, that flicker of light had looked like an eye – an eye that had turned to watch him from its muddy grave. He thought he would probably still be able to see that eye in his dreams tonight.
3 (#uf6d6d0cd-8496-5b2a-9e54-a1361606c8cd)
It was more than just a shed. When you got right up to it, the building that Fry had pointed out was more like a vast, corrugated-iron tunnel. When Cooper walked into it, he felt as though he was entering a cathedral, with airy space all around him and light filtering down from the roof, shafts of it striking through cracks in the iron sheeting. Water dripped somewhere ahead of him, and the sides gleamed with patches of damp as he moved.
Many of the older farms in this area still used wartime Nissen huts for storage, relying on the fact that they were built to last a long time and took many years before they finally collapsed from age and neglect. But this thing was bigger than any Nissen hut Cooper had ever seen. A hundred feet long at least, with central posts holding up the ridge of the arc high above him. The structure was open to the elements at both ends, but the middle was dry and sheltered.
Inside, he found two tractors parked on a concrete base alongside a pick-up truck. More vehicles stood outside – a lorry fitted with a winch, an old Escort with a pig trailer attached to the tow bar. The equipment stored in here included an interesting yard scraper made from twenty-four-inch tractor tyre sections. Matt would love that. Cheap, but effective.
Heaps of old tyres lay around the yard, and the vehicles were overshadowed by a huge fortress of silage bags. At first glance, the bags looked like plastic boulders painted black, with strips of loose wrapping stirring in the breeze. Cooper pictured them in summer, with bumble bees buzzing around the stack, attracted by the sweet smell of the silage. But a shiver of cold air reminded him that it was December, and the silage shouldn’t still be standing here, untouched.
Outside, the sides and roof of the shed were starting to turn from their original yellow to rust red. The branches of a hawthorn tree scratched restlessly against the sides – the only sign of life in the abandoned farmyard.
Behind the farmhouse stood a typical skeleton of an open Dutch-style barn, its timbers supporting only a few tatters of roof. He could see that the ridge of the house sagged in a couple of places, and the windows at the back were hung with dusty curtains. A grimy caravan stood in what might once have been the garden. Ancient bales of hay were visible through a ragged hole in the wall of a stone byre.
Another range of old stone buildings was practically in ruins. Cooper found himself inhaling whiffs of a powerful smell here and there as he moved around. A hint of ammonia suggested the presence of a number of cats. Farm cats, that lived outside and prowled the barns and sheds for rodents, doing a job of work.
Beyond the Dutch barn, a few yards down the slope, he found a series of dilapidated poultry sheds. They weren’t all that old, but had never been maintained properly. He peered through a dusty window, expecting rows and rows of battery cages. But there were none to be seen. So the sheds must have been deep-littered with straw for the birds, unless the cages had been removed.
Cooper was already starting to find this place depressing. Parts of Bridge End Farm might be deteriorating because there was no money for maintenance and repairs. But Bridge End was a model of modernity, compared to Pity Wood.
He turned his attention to the house itself. Limestone, with those distinctive gritstone corners called quoins. Some of the walls had been rendered with cement to combat the effects of the weather. But, judging from the scabrous patches where the render had flaked off, the weather was winning. In fact, it had been winning for some time. This farmhouse had thrown in the towel.
If there were any answers to how the body had ended up in that shallow grave a few yards away, they would most likely be found inside the house. Cooper enquired who’d taken possession of the keys, and he eased open the back door.
In the hallway, the first thing he saw was a huge, black family Bible, laid out on a table like a warning.
Fry knew she had to get control of the scene and protect any forensic evidence – though what kind of evidence might have survived the slow decay and partial demolition of Pity Wood Farm she couldn’t imagine.
These were the critical hours. If any evidence did turn up, she had to be able to demonstrate chain of custody. It was so important to look ahead to the possibility of a trial some time in the future. If the prosecution didn’t have chain of custody, it presented a gift to the defence. No matter what happened between now and that hypothetical date, her present actions could cast doubt on an entire investigation or provide it with a solid foundation.
The SOCOs had a rule of thumb. If an item of potential evidence was vulnerable, if everyone was going to walk over it on the way in and out of the scene, it should be removed or protected. If it was out of the way, it could be left in place. There could be evidence that had already been walked over several times on the way in and out.
So those builders had to be kept clear, to minimize any contamination to that they’d already caused. The digging operations had to be done in a controlled manner – someone would have to keep an eye on the diggers and stop them wandering around the farm.
And those vehicles parked up on the muddy track and in the entrance to the yard … well, it was already too late, probably. No matter what action she took now, there was no way she could turn back time.
‘Sutton,’ said Murfin breathlessly, breaking into her thoughts. ‘Sutton.’
‘What?’
‘The previous owners of the farm. Name of Sutton. Raymond is the brother now residing in a care home back in town – we don’t know which yet, but we’ll find out. He’s quite elderly, in his late seventies, we think. There was a younger brother, Derek, who died about a year ago.’
‘Not bad, Gavin.’
‘Thanks. Unfortunately, we can’t find any sign of anyone else in the household at that time, other than the two brothers. We’ve checked the electoral register, and they were the only two adults listed.’
‘So no women?’
‘No women,’ said Murfin. ‘Just peace and quiet.’
Inside the farmhouse, Cooper found the rooms to be a strange mixture of conversion and preservation. Passing from one room to another for the first time was an unpredictable experience. Some spaces were littered with building materials and tools left behind by Jamie Ward’s workmates. Sacks of sand and cement, piles of breeze block, buckets, a ladder, a couple of steel toolboxes. These rooms had been stripped of their original contents – all dumped in the yellow skip he’d seen outside the back door, presumably – and they’d been transformed into building sites instead.
Other rooms, though, had yet to be touched by anyone. Those still contained evidence of the farm’s occupants and their day-today existence – two pairs of wellington boots by the back door, a smelly overcoat still hanging in a cupboard under the stairs.
Upstairs, there were three bedrooms. It was difficult to tell which of them had been occupied most recently, since they were all equally full of junk and old clothes. The middle bedroom overlooked the yard, and it seemed darker and colder than the other two. If Cooper had been choosing a bedroom, it would have been any one but this.
The kitchen seemed to be the part of the house that was most intact. A black, cast-iron cooking range dominated one end of the room, and near it a tap still dripped in a Belfast sink, as if someone had only just failed to turn it off properly. All the furniture was still here, too – a large pine table with scarred and blackened legs, two ancient armchairs, a dresser filled with plates and cutlery.
In the corner and along the back wall, Cooper unearthed a number of less identifiable objects. He counted a dozen cardboard boxes, some standing on top of each other, the bottom one crumpling slightly under the weight. There was a heap of clothes on a chair near the cooking range and more coats and overalls hung behind the outer door. It was a Marie Celeste of a kitchen, frozen in time, preserved in the moment that the owners had finally walked out one day.
Even the fridge was still here, an old Electrolux with a split rubber seal. But that wasn’t still working, surely? Cooper opened the door, and was surprised to see the interior light come on, and feel a draught of cold air on his face. But then he saw why it was switched on. The builders had been keeping their milk in it, ready for their tea breaks. Their carton of semi-skimmed sat among some less reassuring items – jars without labels, tins that had been opened and left to grow mould, as if someone had been trying to culture penicillin. The contents of the nearest jar had crystallized and lay on the bottom, defying him to figure out what they’d originally been.
The smell was disturbing, and Cooper shut the door again quickly. The fridge responded by breaking into an unsteady hum, rattling slightly on the tiled floor.
As he moved around the house, Cooper felt the skin on the back of his neck begin to crawl. The surroundings were innocuous enough, if depressing. But the atmosphere was really bad. His instincts were telling him that something awful had happened here at Pity Wood Farm. Painful memories had imprinted themselves into the walls, the aftershock of some traumatic event still shuddered in the air.
Cooper shivered, and tried to put the sensation aside. It was the sort of feeling that he couldn’t mention, particularly to Diane Fry. He’d been accused of being over-imaginative too often to risk the put-down. Evidence was all that anyone was interested in, and he had none of that.
He might describe his feeling to Liz when he saw her – she would understand what he meant. Cooper glanced at his watch. Hopefully that might be tonight, if he was lucky. The sense of urgency that pervaded most major crime scenes was missing from Pity Wood – presumably because the body was judged to be too old. The twenty-four-hour rule didn’t apply here. Vital evidence that could disappear in the first day or so after a murder was long gone in this case. Anything that was left would be preserved down there, in the mud with the body – or here, inside the house. Better to take it slow and carefully, so that nothing remaining was missed.
That’s what he’d be thinking if he was SIO, anyway. Not that he was ever likely to reach that position – you needed to be promoted at regular intervals to achieve it. He’d probably slipped too far behind already when he failed to get his promotion to DS. He was thirty, after all, and there would be eager young officers overtaking him before he knew it. Just the way it had happened to Gavin Murfin, and many others.
Cooper looked through the kitchen window and saw DI Hitchens standing in the yard with the crime scene manager, Wayne Abbott. Right now, Abbott was doing the talking, and the DI was nodding wisely. He did that pretty well, the nodding bit. From a distance, he looked intelligent and in control, a man who knew exactly what the plan was. Cooper knew he could never look that way himself, whether from a distance or close up. He’d always just look like a confused DC who was having uneasy feelings that he couldn’t explain. Fry had told him that often enough. Keep your mouth firmly shut, Ben – that’s the best way. Don’t give them an excuse to laugh at you.
He heard a noise behind him, a faint crunch of cement dust underfoot. He turned to find Diane Fry standing in the doorway, her usual silent approach thwarted by a layer of builders’ debris. Her gaze roamed around the room, taking in the furniture and the yellowed walls. Cooper tried to think of something intelligent he could say to her, a few words that would make it look as though he’d been gathering useful evidence, rather than dwelling on eerie atmospheres.
‘Jesus,’ said Fry, before he could speak. ‘Don’t you feel as though something horrible happened in here?’
* * *
In the more distant outbuildings, there had been that powerful smell of cat urine. Yet Cooper had seen no sign of any cats as he walked round the property. He wondered what had happened to them when the Suttons left. Dispersed, like everything else, he supposed.
But everything hadn’t been dispersed, had it? Far from it, in fact. There was all that machinery and equipment in the big shed, the silage bags, the hay, and the vehicles parked in the yard.
‘You know, it would be normal practice to have a farm sale in these circumstances,’ said Cooper as they went back outside.
‘A what?’ asked Fry.
‘A farm sale. I don’t mean the sale of the buildings themselves. Before it got to that stage, they would usually sell off all the equipment – the tractors and trailers, tools, field gates, spare fencing posts. There are buyers for most things. They could probably sell the silage and the tyres, too, maybe even this shed itself. But they should have done that before the house and land were put on the market, so there was a tidy site for buyers to look at. I can’t understand why all this stuff is still standing here. It doesn’t make sense.’
Fry shrugged. ‘Perhaps they’re planning to do it later. There’s no law against it.’
‘I’ll enquire at the local auctioneers, Pilkington’s – they’d almost certainly be the people called in for a job like that.’ Cooper shook his head. ‘But it’s really bad planning to do it this way round. They should have cleared everything out first.’
Murfin stuck his head round a corner. ‘Oh, there you are. Mr Hitchens wants everyone out front for a confab.’
‘We’re coming.’
DI Hitchens was Fry’s immediate boss, the man whose job she might have to get if she planned to stay in Derbyshire E Division. But the thought of staying here wasn’t part of her future plans, and places like Pity Wood Farm only confirmed her view. There were times when she longed for the city, or even for the peculiar urban fusion that was the Black Country where she’d grown up.
Hitchens looked calm and unruffled, allowing the rain to fall on his head without flinching. As he waited for the officers to gather round him at the RV point, he wiped some moisture from his face, flashing the white scar that crawled across the middle knuckles of his fingers.
‘Well, as some of you already know,’ he said, ‘this body has been in the ground for a year or more.’
‘So there’s no point in us rushing around if the case is so old, sir?’ asked someone.
‘Well … that’s not something I want to hear anyone saying publicly. But it does mean we can let the anthropologist and forensics team do their thing for a while yet, and the mince pies might not have to go cold.’
There were a scattering of half-hearted cheers, but the relief was palpable.
Hitchens acknowledged the reaction with a slight smile. ‘Meanwhile, a few basic procedures are in order, to make sure we’ve covered the ground. If we do have to open a murder enquiry later on, I don’t want to hear that we missed vital evidence in the early stages because someone was in too much of a hurry to do their Christmas shopping. Understood?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘For a start, we need information on all these workmen – anyone who’s been on site. Names and addresses, dates of birth – you know the drill. Then we can run them through the PNC if necessary.’
‘What about their status?’ asked Fry.
‘Status?’
‘I was thinking that some of them might have residency or immigration issues. You know how difficult it is to get information when they’re worried about being arrested or deported.’
‘I thought someone told me they were all Polish?’ said Hitchens. ‘Poles don’t have residency or immigration issues – they’re members of the EU, so they can come and go when they like, and they don’t need work permits either.’
Murfin raised a hand, enjoying being the man with the answers for once. ‘Apparently, most of these blokes work for an agency, which sends them wherever the work is. It means they don’t have a settled address, sir. They live in digs, bed and breakfasts, caravans, whatever is available. They say it’s worth their while – they get about twice the minimum wage, enough to send money home, if their families aren’t in this country.’
Fry glanced across at the little huddle of builders in their safety boots and yellow hard hats. ‘We’re only assuming they’re all Polish. The foreman is, but we haven’t checked the rest out yet, so we might get some surprises.’
‘Don’t tell me we’re going to have to find translators,’ said Hitchens. ‘At Christmas? Their statements alone could take weeks to process.’
‘Well, maybe we don’t need them.’
‘No. You’re right, DS Fry. Let’s prioritize, shall we? We’re dealing with the foreman and the lad who actually found the body. What’s his name?’
‘Jamie Ward.’
‘Jamie Ward, right. The rest can wait, as long as we know where to find them. Meanwhile, we need everything we can get on the family who lived here. Two brothers, Raymond and Derek Sutton, and anyone associated with them. I’ll be speaking to the surviving brother myself this afternoon, when we establish which care home he’s in. There’s a village over that way somewhere, called Rakedale. We’ll be starting house-to-house there tomorrow morning. Everyone OK with that?’
There were murmurs of agreement and a general shuffling. Everyone was now anxious to get finished and go home.
Cooper fell into step with Fry as the impromptu meeting broke up. Their feet squelched as they walked back towards their vehicles from the outer cordon.
‘What do you think, Diane? Are we going to have to interview all the builders?’
‘I hope not.’
The crew working on the conversion of Pity Wood Farm had created their own access, widening an old field entrance and laying down a gravel roadway to reach the back of the farm. The area they’d been working in was getting very muddy, and Scenes of Crime had managed to lay a series of duckboards to reach the site of the grave, which would protect evidence better than their temporary bridge. Anyone who stepped off those duckboards was getting splattered with mud. One or two of the more carelessly parked vehicles might have to be towed out at the end of the day.
Cooper could see Liz Petty talking to two of her SOCO colleagues. They were probably awaiting the arrival of the Northern Area Scientific Support Officer, who was based at C Division headquarters in Chesterfield.
He badly wanted to acknowledge Liz, but they’d agreed to keep their relationship low profile when they were at work. Not secret, exactly – it would never be a secret in E Division. But they both felt it was important to be professional, and not to give anyone cause for complaint.
When he saw the front of the farm, Cooper realized why the builders had gone in the back way. The main access must already have been an ocean of mud when they arrived. It looked as though the previous owners had allowed their cattle free rein. The ground was seriously poached, right up to the walls of the farmhouse. The lane from the gate past the barn would be almost impassable on foot, unless you were wearing waders.
Cooper shook his head. No one would have allowed that to happen unless they no longer cared about the farm, or had no stake in its future.
He pulled his Toyota over towards the wall and leaned on the topping stones for a while. He could see that someone had been into Pity Wood this way, and quite recently. Tyre tracks ran through the mud, where a vehicle had churned deep, wet ruts. The tracks didn’t run all the way up to the house, but stopped near the barn. If he looked a bit more closely at the ruts, then asked around to find out when cattle were last in here, he could probably have a good stab at how long it was since the vehicle had come and gone.
But it didn’t matter, did it? This crime wasn’t recent enough.
Cooper felt sure they’d be looking into the past to find the information they needed, studying that little time capsule of a kitchen, not the cement-covered building site. The answers would lie in the lives of the people who’d abandoned Pity Wood Farm to its fate.
4 (#uf6d6d0cd-8496-5b2a-9e54-a1361606c8cd)
At The Oaks residential care home in Edendale, Raymond Sutton was sitting in the big lounge – the one with a view of the fields at the back, where he got an occasional glimpse of cattle grazing in the distance. Holsteins, but it was better than nothing. The TV was on, of course. Some of the old girls watched it all the time, though they didn’t always know what they were seeing. Most of the stuff that was on during the day was rubbish – brainless quiz shows, old films, kiddies’ cartoons. He’d never been one for sitting indoors watching the telly. Raymond liked the news, though. Just because you were old and getting a bit stiff in the joints, it didn’t mean you should let your brain cells die.
He saw a car enter the gateway from the road and head up the drive. Thanks to his new hearing aid, he could hear the tyres crunch on the gravel. There were many sounds that he’d missed when his hearing started to fail, but the noise of cars wasn’t one of them. His home at Pity Wood had been far enough off the road to save him from traffic.
He didn’t recognize this particular car. Red, which was unusual these days. Everyone seemed to go for grey or silver, which made it difficult to distinguish between them. He could see it was a four-wheel drive, too. Japanese – Mitsubishi, Toyota? One of those makes. He might have known the difference once, but it didn’t matter that much any more.
Four-wheel drive, though, and very muddy around the wheel arches and the bottom of the doors. Somebody who knew the countryside, then. He wondered which of the residents they were visiting.
One of the carers came into the room. The one called Elaine. Young, dark-haired, one of the nicer ones. She was always gentle with him when she had to get him out of bed or into the bath. A little bit of kindness could make his last days more tolerable.
‘Raymond,’ she said. ‘Are you feeling up to visitors? There are some people here asking to see you. They’re from the police.’
Cooper felt he could probably have done a better job interviewing Raymond Sutton on his own. But DI Hitchens was in charge of the investigation for now, so he was within his rights to do whatever he wanted. Some might say that the Senior Investigating Officer should be back at the office co-ordinating the enquiry and allocating resources, but what did he know? He was just a DC.
They were shown into a lounge by the care assistant, whose name badge said she was called Elaine. Mr Sutton had either been put in there on his own, or the other residents had been moved out somewhere else when they arrived. Whichever it was, they found the old man in splendid isolation, perched in one of those big chairs that only old people ever sat in. There were other, similar chairs ranged round the walls of the room, and a big television set stood in the corner, mercifully switched off a moment before. Many interviews conducted in people’s own homes resulted in conversations shouted over the noise of the telly. It was often a temptation to take someone down to the station just for the sake of being able to hear what they were saying.
‘Mr Sutton? I’m Detective Inspector Hitchens, and this is Detective Constable Cooper. From Edendale CID.’
Hitchens offered a view of his warrant card, as procedure recommended. But Sutton held out his hand instead to greet his visitors, and Hitchens was obliged to shake it. Cooper did the same, grasping a hand with paper-thin skin that trembled slightly in his palm. The old man smelled of soap, and his clothes were clean and neat, though the cardigan he was wearing no longer fit him so well as it once might have.
They sat on chairs either side of him, and Hitchens opened the conversation.
‘Mr Sutton, you are the former owner of Pity Wood Farm at Rakedale. Is that right?’
‘Aye. That’s where I live. Pity Wood.’
Hitchens shook his head. ‘That’s where you used to live. You sold the farm, didn’t you?’
‘I did. You’re right. I don’t remember who bought it.’
‘We know who bought it, Mr Sutton.’
‘Who was it? I can’t remember their name.’
‘Mr Goodwin, from Manchester.’
‘I don’t know him. It was all done through the estate agents and solicitors. You’ll have to ask them where he is.’
‘No, we want to ask you about Pity Wood Farm.’
‘Pity Wood, that’s where I live.’
‘You don’t live there any more. Don’t you remember?’
Sutton laughed – a dry, crackly laugh, with little humour in it, as if the DI was tormenting him with a feather in a sensitive spot.
‘I remember some things quite well. But I don’t recall this feller that bought the farm. What did you say his name was?’
‘Goodwin.’
‘I don’t know him.’
‘No sir –’
The old man turned away from Hitchens and studied Cooper instead, his eyes glinting. ‘You’ll come to see me again, won’t you? I don’t get many visitors.’
Hitchens became impatient then, and made the mistake of putting his hand on Sutton’s sleeve to get his attention. The old man drew his arm away abruptly and stared at Hitchens in indignation.
‘Just a minute, young man. Take your hands off me, or I’ll get them to send for the police.’
‘Mr Sutton. We have to ask you some questions, I’m afraid, sir. There have been human remains found at Pity Wood this morning. The dead body of a woman. We need to know how this person ended up buried on your farm.’
‘Questions? Well, you can only try. Open the barn door, and you might find a cow.’
Hitchens opened his mouth, but shut it again quickly, as if he’d just found the cow and didn’t want it to escape.
They left Mr Sutton sitting in the lounge on his own, and found the care assistant who’d let them in to The Oaks.
‘I’m sorry if you didn’t have much luck, Inspector,’ she said. ‘Raymond has good days and bad days. You’d be surprised how much he can remember sometimes. His brain is still quite active. But other times, he gets a bit, well… confused, even distressed. It’s perfectly normal for his condition, but you can never quite tell what’s going to upset him. Memories, I suppose.’
‘If he has a good day, would it be possible to bring him out for a couple of hours?’ asked Hitchens. ‘We’d like him to come and see the farm.’
‘His old home? Oh, I’m sure Raymond would love that.’
‘I take it he’s physically fit enough?’
‘Oh, yes. He has no major health problems, considering his age. In fact, the doctor says Raymond is quite a tough old bird. He’ll probably still be around in ten years’ time, when all our other residents have gone. It must come from being a farmer, I suppose.’
‘And the wonderful care he gets here, I’m sure.’
‘Why, thank you, Inspector.’
Hitchens nodded, turning on his most charming smile. Cooper couldn’t help raising an eyebrow. Personally, he didn’t think Raymond Sutton would love a day out at Pity Wood Farm at all, but perhaps he was wrong about that, too.
‘Yes, if the weather is decent, we’ll put a wheelchair into the minibus and Colin will drive Raymond up to Rakedale to visit the farm. But you won’t tire him out, will you?’
‘Not at all. We’ll send him back as soon as he wants to come.’
‘Fine, Inspector. Can we give you a call when we think he’s ready?’
The DI produced his card and handed it over with a gesture almost like a small bow. Cooper felt like gagging. But then, he wasn’t the person the Hitchens charm was being aimed at.
‘Sir,’ said Cooper as they were leaving, ‘do you think Raymond Sutton knows who buried the body at the farm?’
‘Almost certainly.’
‘Could he be in danger? Might someone want to make sure that Mr Sutton doesn’t talk?’
‘They might. But how would they get to him in The Oaks? Their security is pretty good, and the staff know where every resident is twenty-four hours a day.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ said Cooper.
With a weary curse, Nikolai Dudzik tipped his yellow hard hat back from his eyes. ‘Look at these outbuildings. All the roof structures are rotten. Completely rotten. The whole lot will have to be stripped off, you know. We’re talking about a massive amount of new timber for the joists alone.’
Fry could see that Dudzik’s workmen had dug a network of trenches behind the barn for the new drainage and water supply. No pipes had gone in yet – they still lay in heaps at the edge of the field. But the trenches were half full of water, thanks to the rain that continued to fall intermittently on Pity Wood Farm. She could see that the clay must be non-porous. Further north, the limestone would let rain water through like a sieve. It was one of the few geological facts she’d learned since leaving Birmingham for the Peak District.
‘There must be some old drains over that way somewhere,’ said Dudzik, gesturing towards the tumble-down ruins of a cowshed. ‘We haven’t found them, and we’re not looking for them any more. God knows what state they’ll be in. They must be very, very old.’
Inside the outbuildings, someone had started chipping the old plaster off the walls. Layers of dust covered the floor, and the exposed stonework looked inexplicably damp.
‘If it was up to me, the whole thing would come down,’ said Dudzik. ‘Then we could start from scratch and do a proper job. But we have to retain the original features. Original features! Bits of old stone and rotten timbers. What’s the point? I ask you.’
Fry let him talk for a while longer. Then she thought of a question. ‘Why haven’t you dug up the old drains, did you say?’
Dudzik shrugged. ‘There’s no way of knowing where they are exactly. There are no records for these old places, no proper site maps, yes? And the drainage often goes off at odd angles, when it’s so old. It will be sections of clay pipe, you see – useless by now. Useless. Besides, there’s nothing in the new plans for that area. It’ll just be a bit of garden or a paddock, so what’s the point of us digging it up?’
‘And this area where Jamie Ward found the body – there wasn’t supposed to be a wall here at all?’
‘No, no. There was no wall here. It was a job I gave to Jamie, you know – to keep him out of the way.’
‘Can I have a look at the plans, please?’
‘Sure.’
Dudzik pulled a rolled-up plan out of his back pocket and handed it to her.
‘It looks as though this area was going to be left pretty well untouched,’ she said. ‘It’s shown as grass on the drawings.’
Dudzik shrugged. ‘I know. But what a waste. This is the perfect place for a nice patio. Some good paving, you know. A water feature maybe. We could have made it nice.’
‘That’s pretty much what Jamie said too.’
‘That boy. He’s not stupid – just not practical, you know.’
‘He would have noticed soon enough that no wall was being built, wouldn’t he?’
‘I guess so, Detective.’
Fry had been listening to his accent. She knew he was Polish, but it was only the sound of his vowels that gave him away. His command of idiom was very good, and he hadn’t faltered on the use of tenses, which was often a problem for nonnative speakers.
‘Your English is excellent, Mr Dudzik. How long have you been in this country?’
The builder looked wary. ‘Eight years, Sergeant. I learned English back home, when I was a kid at school in Poland. When I came here, I talked English all the time with the people I met. Some of my fellow countrymen, when they come now, they don’t think they have to bother to learn English. It’s too much trouble for them. They think things will be translated into Polish for them, because they are so many. But I was one of the first to come, before my country was a member of the European Union, even. I always wanted to live in England, so I learned English. It’s the only way to fit in, yes?’
‘Yes, of course.’
He looked at her, still uncertain. ‘My papers are in order.’
‘I’m not doubting it,’ said Fry. ‘But you could do one important thing for me. Would you give my colleague, Detective Constable Murfin, a list of the men who have been working on your team here at the farm?’
Raymond Sutton stood to one side of the window and watched the police officers get into their car at the end of the drive. Quietly, he muttered a sentence to himself.
‘And they answered and said unto him, Where, Lord?’
As the car passed out of sight, he let the curtain drop. He turned back to face the room, looked around him for a moment, and finished the quotation.
‘And he said unto them,
Wheresoever the body is, there will the eagles be gathered.’
‘I’m sorry, Raymond? Did you say something?’
Sutton stared at Elaine, confused by her presence. He hadn’t noticed her come into the room. He’d been thinking that he was somewhere else, far away, in another life almost.
‘The Gospel of St Luke,’ he said. ‘Chapter seventeen, verse thirty-seven.’
‘I see, Raymond. Are you ready for your tea yet?’
‘King James version. Obviously.’
‘I’ll fetch it in, shall I?’
‘You can do what you like. It makes no difference now.’
5 (#uf6d6d0cd-8496-5b2a-9e54-a1361606c8cd)
A team from Sheffield University had been unloading equipment – shovels and trowels, wire-mesh screens for sifting bone fragments from the soil, evidence bags, tape measures and orange markers. One of the students was already using a video camera to record the position of the remains from every angle before the team approached it.
Fry knew that digging a dead body out of a grave was never as easy as burying a fresh one. When an unprotected corpse was placed in the ground, it formed an intimate union with the earth. Flesh rotted, fabric disintegrated, the skull, spine and pelvis became embedded in the soil. A casual digger would soon despair of freeing the entire body, even after it had spent a year or so in the ground. If anyone removed a body to bury it elsewhere, they were bound to leave a few bits behind.
‘We’re being allowed to approach for a few minutes’ consultation with the anthropologist,’ said DI Hitchens. ‘But then we have to keep clear. Dr Jamieson says he wants to protect himself from assumptions.’
‘Whose assumptions?’
‘Ours, I think.’
The forensic anthropologist’s task was the recovery of human remains, and the determination of age, sex, stature, ancestry, time since death, and any physical trauma that might indicate manner of death. Beyond that, he was not part of the investigation.
Fry laughed. ‘Are we allowed to speak to him at all?’
‘You could probably wish him a Merry Christmas.’
When he heard the laughter, the anthropologist looked up from the excavation with a suspicious scowl. He had a pale, bald head, almost the same colour as the paper scene suit he was wearing. Water gleamed on his scalp. From rain or sweat, it was impossible to tell.
‘How is it going, Doctor?’ called Hitchens.
‘Mixed fortunes, I’m afraid. A dry soil would have preserved the body better. But this is, well …’ He scooped a handful of mud that seeped through his fingers.
‘Too wet?’
‘Correct. Much too wet.’
‘But there’s some good news, I take it?’
‘Well, you know, there are plenty of opportunities on an isolated farm for disposing of a body. If your aim is to reduce the remains to something unidentifiable, then burial is actually one of the slowest and least successful ways to achieve that.’
‘It’s much quicker just to leave it exposed somewhere, if you can get away with it,’ suggested Cooper.
‘Yes. How do you know that?’
‘Every livestock farmer knows that a dead sheep left out in the open during the summer will be reduced to a skeleton within a month.’
‘Exactly. Burying a corpse just slows the process of decomposition. A deeply buried body can take eight times as long to decompose as one exposed on the surface. In this case, burial and the use of plastic sheeting are the two factors which might enable the victim to be identified.’
Protective clothing was being distributed to the forensics team – coveralls, hair caps, gloves and shoe protectors. Trace evidence was transferred so easily that it could be carried away from a crime scene just as easily as it was carried there.
Next to the grave an area had been provided for the scientists to work in, preventing any more disturbance of the grave itself than was necessary. Soil would be removed by lifting it in layers of about ten inches at a time, then it would be passed through sieves of various mesh sizes to extract evidence. They would be trying to locate fragments of bone, personal items, anything that had been dropped or didn’t belong in the area. Some of the anthropology students had begun cursing when they saw the condition of the soil they were supposed to sieve.
‘Yes, buried bodies can be said to be protected from the elements to a large extent. If the soil is acidic, the body will tend to decompose more rapidly. In temperate zones, or areas with severe winters, the processes of decomposition are slowed. Did you know that fat people skeletalize much faster? It’s because their flesh feeds huge armies of maggots. It’s not a weight-loss programme I’d recommend, but maggots can strip forty pounds of surplus flesh off an obese body in twenty-four hours.’
The remains would have to be exposed completely before they could be lifted from the grave. There was too much risk of losing body parts to the sucking grasp of the wet clay. The excavation team had come equipped with an array of small tools – dental picks, bamboo sticks, paint brushes and hand trowels. Fry could see that this was going to be a long, slow, painstaking job. And even after the remains had been removed, the excavation would continue. The anthropologist had called for a further ten inches of soil to be taken from below the body, in case small bones or other evidence had been left behind.
The whole process was being recorded by video and digital photography, as well as handwritten records at every stage. Items that were discovered with the body which might indicate an identity couldn’t be assumed to belong to the victim. Intentional placing of false documents had been known. Anything to confuse investigators.
Fry leaned forward to get a view of the remains, her shoes slipping on the edge of the duckboard.
‘Some parts of the body look very grey, Doctor.’
‘Saponification. It’s a factor that can affect a body after burial, especially if it’s buried in a moist area or directly exposed to water and kept free of air. The fatty tissues of the body turn into adipocere. That’s the greyish, waxlike substance you can see.’
It was that unnatural greyness that Fry would remember most about the victim at Pity Wood Farm. There was a big difference between a violent death and a natural death, between the killing of another human being and death as part of life. The latter she’d come to accept. The former she never would.
Cooper found himself drawn back into the farmhouse by some irresistible urge. It was if the house was calling to him, coaxing him into its rooms so it could tell him its story.
This time, he noticed that the whole kitchen had a curious yellow tinge. The wallpaper above the table might have been lemon once, and the cupboards were made of that golden pine which never seemed to darken completely. But there was also a sort of patina over the ceiling and the walls, particularly near the armchairs. Cooper guessed the Sutton brothers must have been heavy smokers. He could picture them sitting in those two armchairs in the evening, one either side of the fireplace. They would be puffing away, not talking to each other much, if at all. Thinking their own thoughts, but keeping those thoughts to themselves.
Turning away from the kitchen to look back into the sitting room, Cooper found himself disorientated. With the black range and the dripping tap behind him, and the smell of paint and fresh cement in front of him, he felt as though he was standing on the threshold between two worlds. For a moment, he wasn’t sure whether he was standing in the present, looking back into the vanished past, or somehow occupying a brief second of history, sharing the forgotten warmth of the Suttons’ kitchen while getting a glimpse of the future.
He wished he could pin down his sense of life and the lack of it, why some of the rooms were different from others. He was sure there were no scientific data that would back up his impressions. It was more a question of a feeling in the walls, a faint gleam that reflected the generations who’d survived an uncomplicated existence here, accepting life and death as it came. So why was that feeling lacking in some parts of Pity Wood Farm? Why was the gleam missing from the kitchen, why did the shadows seem blacker and more permanent in that middle bedroom on the first floor?
Outside, it was getting dark quickly. No surprise, since it was almost the shortest day of the year. At this time of year, darkness snuck up on you almost without you noticing, so that suddenly it was pitch black. Cooper could just make out the corrugated-iron roof of the shed and the faint gleam of the cars parked in the yard. The mountain of silage bags seemed to be spreading dark shadows across the farm.
But someone had pulled their fingers out and got the floodlights up. Now, part of Pity Wood Farm was bathed in a yellow glare that turned the muddy ground into a corner of the Somme. Mud and trenches and decomposing bodies.
The anthropology team were still working, but Scenes of Crime had gone home for the night, and only a couple of uniformed officers were left on scene protection duty. Soon, the farm would be settling back into its ancient silence.
When darkness descended totally, all he could see beyond the floodlights were the distant, isolated lights of scattered farmhouses. There were no streetlights out here, not even on the B road down in the valley. There was no upward glow from the lights of a town to reflect off the sky. There were no towns near enough. Soon, the shadows would have taken over the world. Or the whole of Rakedale, at least.
To the south of the farm, Cooper could just see Pity Wood itself, or what was left of it. Dark clumps of trees, their bare branches dripping with rain. And from the direction of the big shed, the only sound he could hear was the incessant scratch, scratch, scratch against the corrugated-iron sides.
As if Fry didn’t have enough on her plate, Ben Cooper was behaving oddly. Well, even more oddly than usual. She could see him stopping periodically, and sniffing. Sometimes he even crouched and sniffed close to the ground. Quietly, she came up behind him, realizing that he was totally absorbed in whatever he was concentrating on. When he stopped to squat on the ground again, she tapped him on the shoulder.
‘Hey, what are you supposed to be? General Custer’s Red Indian guide?’
Cooper almost overbalanced, and had to push a hand palm down in the mud to stop himself falling.
‘Oh, for – Diane, don’t do that.’
She found him a clean tissue in her pocket, noting that he’d been so taken by surprise that he didn’t even bother to correct her inappropriate use of the term ‘Red Indian’.
‘What’s with all the sniffing?’
‘There’s a strange smell in this area,’ said Cooper. ‘I thought at first it was just cat urine, but there’s more to it than that.’
‘It’s a farm,’ said Fry. ‘Farms have smells like dogs have fleas. Haven’t you noticed that before?’
‘Not a livestock kind of smell. It’s a chemical odour. Ammonia, but something else too.’
‘This must have been the machinery shed. There’d be diesel, lubricating oil. Damn it, there must have been fertilizer and herbicides, too. Disinfectant – all kinds of chemicals. What’s one whiff among friends?’
‘Can you actually smell it?’ asked Cooper.
‘No. But, then, I think I’m getting a cold.’ Fry turned her face up to the drizzle that had started while they were speaking. ‘And if I stand out here much longer, it’ll be pneumonia.’
Fry sent Cooper to see if the DI needed anything doing before he went off duty. She shook her head as she watched him go, despairing at her inability to understand him, even now.
There were so many things about Cooper that bothered her. She was aggravated by his tendency to look hot and flustered, as if he’d only just got out of bed. These days, he’d probably been in bed with that SOCO, Liz Petty. Or maybe it was just the stress of running from one obsession to another. At least he didn’t look quite so dishevelled as he used to, so maybe he’d learned to wash and iron for himself since he moved out of the family farm into his little flat at Welbeck Street.
When she first met him, Fry had mostly been struck by that disarray and by his air of innocence, which was lacking in those around him. He looked as though he’d hardly left the sixth form at High Peak College. Now, she wasn’t so sure whether what she saw was innocence any more. For a start, his hair wasn’t quite so untidy. It no longer fell over his forehead, but had been styled. His tie still needed straightening, though, and that scuff mark had been on his leather jacket for months.
She looked up as Cooper’s car passed, catching his profile as he drove by. In retrospect, it was amazing that he’d ever seemed innocent at all.
Fry recalled the day he’d told her about his father, Sergeant Joe Cooper, and his death on the streets of Edendale at the hands of a gang of thugs. ‘Three of them got two years for manslaughter, the others were put on probation for affray. First-time offenders, you see. Of course, they were all drunk too.’ And then there had been his mother, the psychiatric illness and the complications that had taken her life only a few months ago, with Ben at her bedside in the nursing home.
Fry wanted to be fair to him, she really did. In the circumstances, she supposed it was surprising that Cooper still retained a positive outlook on life at all, let alone the concern he so often showed for the problems of other people. He ought to be cynical. He ought to have grown as cynical as she was herself. She wondered how he managed to avoid it.
Before she left Pity Wood, Fry took another look inside the inner cordon to see how work on the remains was progressing. Under the floodlights, the shadows of the diggers against the sides of the PVC tent. The body was emerging bit by bit, but it was a painstaking job.
Something dark and fibrous in the soil caught Fry’s attention. She couldn’t make out what it was at first. Then she realized it was a hank of black hair that had become detached from the head.
In a way, she found it more bearable when a corpse had started to decompose. At least it definitely looked dead. Fresh bodies were more disturbing, because they still had the look of life about them, as if they might spring up at any moment and carry on as normal. At those times, it was hard to be unaffected by the most distinctive things about a dead body – the coldness, the utter stillness, and the knowledge that a human life had just been snuffed out an hour, or even a few minutes, before you arrived.
In other ways, a body left in a shallow grave for years, undiscovered and unidentified, was the saddest sort of case. Somewhere, there must be family and friends, wondering even now what had happened to this woman.
Fry knew that hand would live in her memory for a while. It was bent into a gesture, welcoming, almost inviting. It was as if the dead woman was greeting her visitors, enticing them down into her grave.
She’d waited a long time to have company. And it must have been lonely down there.
6 (#uf6d6d0cd-8496-5b2a-9e54-a1361606c8cd)
Oh, I’m a man from a distant land,
A place where camels roam
It’s hot and flat, and dry as bone
And if they don’t like your face, they’ll cut off your hand
It’s the place that I call home!
The Pedlar turned to the chorus, who joined in with the song. They were all dressed as Chinese peasants – colourful tunics and coolie hats. Within minutes, the scene had shifted to the street outside Widow Twankey’s house, which meant the Emperor Ping Pong would soon arrive with his beautiful daughter.
Edendale’s Royal Theatre was full for the highlight event of the year, the annual Christmas pantomime. Ben Cooper was sitting several rows back from the stage, behind dozens of excited children waiting for the chance to boo and hiss and shout ‘Oh no, you didn’t’ at any opportunity.
There were many variations on the script for Aladdin, but Eden Valley Operatic Society seemed to have opted for one of the more politically incorrect versions. Not that there was such a thing as a politically correct Aladdin, with the characters of Wishy Washy and Inspector Chu of the Chinese Police Force. But he was particularly doubtful about Abdulla O’Reilly, listed in the programme as ‘an Irish half-wit’. And then there was Ugga-Wugga, chief of the cannibal tribe.
Cooper squirmed in his seat. Criminal investigations had been launched for less blatant examples of racist humour. But this was panto, and it was traditional. Surely no one came into the theatre without having a good idea what to expect? Cheap jokes, comic names, a cheerful confusion of racial stereotypes.
In the next seat, Liz nudged him and whispered. ‘Ben, have you had a think about coming to my parents’ on Christmas Day?’
‘No,’ hissed Cooper back.
‘No, you haven’t had a think? Or no, you’re not going to come?’
‘We’ll talk about it later.’
‘Oh, yes. You’re always so busy, though.’
A chorus of boos heralded the first arrival on stage of the wicked wizard, Abanazar. Within seconds, it was clear that he was being played pretty much as an evil Arab who’d accidentally wandered into a Chinese city. It certainly gave an extra edge to the lines of the opening song: ‘Andif they don’t like your face, they’ll cut off your hand.’
Cooper settled a bit lower on his seat, hoping not to be recognized. Some hopes. He’d already been greeted by a dozen acquaintances as he came through the lobby.
Liz nudged him again. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You look shifty.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Aren’t you enjoying it?’
‘Yes, it’s great.’
‘Only, we can’t leave. Not until after my friends have been on for their bit. They’re Chinese policemen, and they don’t appear until halfway through Act Two.’
Oh, God. The Chinese policemen. There were bound to be a few bobby jokes, and people would be looking at him when they laughed.
‘No, I’m fine, I don’t want to leave. Stop talking, or people will get annoyed with us.’
Every panto had its stock characters. There was always a very obvious villain – in this case, Abanazar, who had a large and challenging role, especially if he was going to carry off that turban and scimitar convincingly. And, of course, there was the pantomime dame. This Widow Twankey ran a Chinese laundry in the time-honoured way, allowing for the usual hoary old jokes about being closed for sock-taking, and so on.
Cooper turned to his programme, squinting to read the print in the subdued light of the theatre. Many of the names of the cast were familiar to him. If he didn’t know the performers themselves, he’d often come across their parents. Or, in the case of the children’s chorus, their grandparents. But most of them were individuals he’d made contact with in a positive way. Pantomime seemed to attract the respectable classes.
‘What are you thinking about, Ben?’
‘Nothing,’ he whispered. ‘I’m just looking at the programme.’
‘You’re not thinking about work?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘No “of course” about it. I know you.’
Reading down the list, Cooper found the names of the Chinese police officers. Apart from Inspector Chu, the performers were women. Their names were all local, too – Beeley, Holmes, Wragg, Marsden, Brindley. The latter was probably related to the actor playing Abanazar, since they had the same surname. He wasn’t sure which of them he was supposed to be watching out for.
‘Liz, what are your friends called again?’
‘Cheryl Hague and Harriet Marsden.’
‘Hague? Do I know her?’
‘Probably.’
‘Is she the attractive blonde we met in the pub last week?’
‘Hey. I thought you said not to talk.’
A storm of booing and jeering greeted Abanazar as he grasped the magic lamp triumphantly and rolled an artificial rock across the cave entrance to entomb Aladdin. That meant there would be a genie making his appearance soon.
Cooper glanced at Liz, but she was completely absorbed. And she was right, she was starting to know him. They’d been going out for a few months now, a lot longer than any previous girlfriend had lasted. One of the things he liked was that he discovered new aspects of her character all the time, and glimpsed unsuspected parts of her life. She surprised him constantly. This year, she’d even bought a Christmas present for his cat.
And he hadn’t realized Liz was interested in pantomimes until a few days ago. He supposed he was lucky she wasn’t actually up there on stage in a costume. God forbid, she might even try to persuade him to join the cast.
Cooper shuddered, then pulled his jacket closer, trying to give the impression he was cold rather than filled with revulsion.
‘Are you sure you’re OK, Ben?’
‘Absolutely fine. Loving every minute.’
And here they came, at last – the comedy policemen. A little troop of them, six or seven women of various sizes wearing tunics and tights, and carrying little comic truncheons. Their drooping Fu Manchu moustaches made them unrecognizable, but Liz seemed happy to cheer them indiscriminately.
Well, perhaps they’d actually arrest the villain and Cooper could cheer, too. But in the meantime, they had to get through a few more awful jokes.
When Aladdin was over, they squeezed out of the theatre with the crowds, hoping to find somewhere to eat before all the restaurants filled up. It wasn’t the first Aladdin Cooper had been to. He remembered seeing the same show at the same theatre when he was a teenager. In fact, he thought he’d probably watched slightly different versions of it three or four times.
There were only a handful of traditional pantomimes, and they seemed to come round regularly, as if on a strict rota. Cinderella one year, Mother Goose the next. But he’d sometimes heard of different stories being used. Peter Pan, Sinbad the Sailor, Robinson Crusoe. Robinson Crusoe? A story with only two characters? Maybe he’d have to be a bit adventurous one year and seek out somewhere that was doing the show, to see how they bent the plot to introduce a pantomime dame on to a desert island.
In Victoria Park, the fair was in full swing. Among the fairground rides, a big wheel spun green lights across the park as it turned, and a carousel made the faces of the crowd glow with pink luminescence. Free mince pies and glasses of mulled wine were being handed out to visitors.
This was by far the busiest time of year in Edendale’s social calendar. There was an E Division pub crawl planned for later in the week. Another annual tradition. This year, the officers organizing it had settled on a theme – seasonal ales, which they intended to track down all over town. There were plenty to be found. Every year, the breweries produced beers like Rocking Rudolph, Hark and Black Christmas.
But Cooper wouldn’t get a chance to try them. He wouldn’t be with his colleagues on the pub crawl this week, as he might have been in previous years. His priorities had changed in the last twelve months. He wasn’t quite so single as he used to be.
‘Well, if you won’t come for Christmas with me, at least you won’t forget the baptism service on Sunday, will you?’ said Liz.
‘I’m looking forward to it. Yes, honestly.’
Liz’s best friend had married a gym instructor two years ago, and their first baby was being baptized in Edendale on Sunday. He always thought ‘first baby’ when the subject came up, because he’d met the friend and he sensed she was the sort of woman who intended to have lots of children.
‘It’s church, so everybody will be dressed up, Ben.’
‘Yes?’
‘You do have a suit and tie, don’t you?’
‘Oh, er … absolutely.’
Cooper thought of his brother squeezing into a suit for the first time this year. Now that he was too old to attend the Young Farmers’ Club Christmas Ball, Matt’s only social occasion had been the end-of-term nativity play at Josie’s primary school. Unlike the pantomime, this production had varied the usual plot. There had been no appearances by Mary or Joseph. In fact, there wasn’t even a role for the baby Jesus. Instead, the nativity story had been told from the point of view of the Bethlehem inn keeper and his family, exploring the impact on their lives. Having to deal with a sudden influx of shepherds and wise men, for a start. Well, lots of Peak District landlords would sympathize with the difficulty of mixing tourists with the locals.
Matt hadn’t been impressed by the production, though. He was turning into a real diehard traditionalist as he aged. New ideas upset him.
Later this week, Ben would be singing with the police male voice choir in the Methodist church, a concert for senior citizens, followed by a children’s party. The old folk loved it, though, especially around Christmas time. It was good PR, too.
Cooper recalled when he’d first met Diane Fry on her transfer to Derbyshire from West Midlands Police. She’d been scornful of everything in those days, so prickly that he soon developed the habit of letting her comments go by unnoticed. When he’d told her about singing in the choir, she had been predictably derisive. ‘Do you sing soprano?’ she’d asked. ‘No. Tenor.’ And he hadn’t even seen the barb until much later.
Oh, well. Fry had mellowed a bit since then, hadn’t she? Surely she had. Cooper frowned slightly. There was always the possibility that he’d just become very good at letting everything pass him by.
When he lifted his hand off the gear stick, Liz took his fingers for a moment and held them gently.
‘Thanks for coming to the panto with me, Ben.’
On the road out of town that night, taking Liz home to Bakewell, Cooper felt content. Below him, the sprawling outline of Edendale was marked by a network of lights, but most of the Peak District lay in darkness. After all that had happened in his life, things seemed to be coming right at last. He’d found someone he cared about. And, above all, he was in the only place he’d ever wanted to live in the world.
With a surge of blind rage, Diane Fry grabbed her sister’s arm and dragged her back, pulling her off balance and throwing her on to the bed.
‘Hey!’ gasped Angie, shocked by the sudden violence.
‘Angie, what the hell are you up to?’
Diane could hear her voice coming out in a spiteful hiss. It sounded awful, but she couldn’t have changed it. Her throat was too tightly constricted by the flood of emotions overwhelming her. Anger, bitterness, a sense of betrayal. And other emotions she’d never experienced before, too fleeting to be pinned down and named.
‘Me?’ Angie tried to laugh it off, sitting up on the bed and straightening her sleeve as if it were just a family game, a bit of rough and tumble between siblings. ‘Sis, you know I’m always up to something. The original problem kid, that’s me.’
‘I’m not joking here. I want to know what you think you’re doing.’
‘Come on, Di. Lighten up.’
Diane felt herself flushing angrily. She’d told herself she wouldn’t get angry with her sister. But here it was, all that rage, bubbling just below the surface. Anything could release it, a wrong word or an unguarded expression.
‘Don’t try to get round me, Angie,’ she said. ‘Just don’t try it. It might have worked once, but it doesn’t work on me now. Things have changed between us. I’m not your kid sister any more.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Yes, really. You’ve got to start understanding that, or there’s no future between us.’
‘But that was always true, wasn’t it?’ snapped Angie. ‘We never had any future between us.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We have a past, that’s all. That’s the only thing we share, the one factor we have in common. And that’s all it is – the past. We’d never have stayed together, Di. I know you couldn’t see it at the time, but I was always going to go my own way, and it wasn’t the same as yours. We’d have split up pretty soon, and you’d have gone off to your college and your police training feeling ashamed of your big sister. You ought to thank me for what I did. It was much the best way.’
Diane felt the anger draining from her. It was replaced by a strange chill that crept over her skin, like the first indications of approaching flu.
‘But we’re back together again now. We have to think about what sort of future there’s going to be,’ she said. ‘We have to sort some things out to make that future work.’
Angie got up from the bed, and Diane backed away to put some distance between them.
‘You haven’t been listening, have you?’ said Angie. ‘You just hear whatever you want to. I just said we have no future. Not just back then, but now, too. We have nothing in common, Di. And we never will have. If you imagine any different, you’re fooling yourself.’
‘No, you’re wrong.’
‘Oh dear. It doesn’t fit the image, does it? Had you built up some nice, rosy picture of Angie and Di settling down together, sharing girly chats about boyfriends and babies? Holding each other’s hands when we need a good cry, giggling in bed together over a couple of good books? It ain’t going to happen, Sis. So it’s about time you faced up to the real world.’
‘Look, I know you’ve changed. God knows, I’ve made allowances for that. All those years we were apart, we were bound to go our different ways –’
‘Changed? You’re damn right. Yes, I’m the one who’s grown up. I grew up a long time ago.’
‘Oh, yes? Using heroin isn’t a sign of being grown up, you know.’
‘Fuck off.’
Diane took a step forward. She saw Angie begin to edge towards the door, and realized that her sister was actually scared of her. The physical outburst a few minutes ago had taken Angie by surprise and frightened her a little. She, too, had things to discover about her kid sister that she might not like very much.
‘Come on, we can make this work, Angie. We just have to be honest with each other.’
‘Oh, and you want me to go first, right? Confession time, is it? “Come on, dear, tell the nice police officer everything you know. How about the names and addresses of all your friends for a start?” Di, you’re just not getting it, are you?’
Diane didn’t answer. Second by second, she was watching their relationship turn round, seeing her big sister become more and more uneasy in her presence, like a guilty child. For the first time in her life, Diane felt as though she was the one with the power. In some way, she had the ability to affect Angie’s life, instead of the other way about. She knew this, but she didn’t understand why. And the knowledge didn’t make her feel any better.
Angie looked at her uncertainly, pulling on her jacket. ‘I’m off to work, then.’
‘You can’t escape for ever. We’ll have to sort things out between us some time soon.’
‘Yeah, yeah. Whatever you say.’
As she watched Angie sneak towards the door, Diane found herself torn by conflicting impulses – a desire to bring her sister closer, but the urge to hurt her at the same time.
‘There’s one thing you’re just not getting either, Angie,’ she said.
‘Tell me about it some other time.’
Then her sister had slipped out of the room, and her feet were clattering on the stairs as she ran towards the front door.
Diane stood at the top of the stairs, unable to control something inside her that refused to let go of the argument.
‘And why did you go to Ben Cooper?’ she shouted. ‘Right at the beginning, why did you go to him?’
Angie stopped, but only to shout back. ‘Because he cares about people.’
‘Oh, yes? Well, I care about people, too. I just don’t care about you.’
As soon as the front door slammed, Diane had begun to regret her last words. But it was too late by then.
She glared at one of the students from the next flat, who’d stuck her head round the corner to see what was going on. As the student disappeared, Diane wondered whether she might ever get another chance to tell Angie what it was that she just wasn’t getting.
Diane went back into the flat and began to pick up the cushions that had been knocked on the floor. She was surprised by how much mess there was, almost as if the place had been broken into and ransacked. If it had been a crime scene she was visiting, she would have said there was evidence of a violent altercation.
Was the heroin still the problem with Angie? She didn’t think so, but addicts did need large amounts of money on a regular basis. Many women were out there on the streets to feed their habit, and for no other reason. Heroin or crack cocaine, or both. OK, drugs might not have put them on the street in the first place, but it was heroin that kept them there.
Diane knew that drug dealers from the big cities had moved into smaller towns like Edendale years ago. You could find drugs everywhere, pretty much anything you wanted. They were cheap, too. Perhaps it was some kind of marketing ploy to expand the customer base, but intelligence showed that Edendale was one of the least expensive towns in the country for buying drugs. Last she heard, heroin was going for about twenty pounds a bag.
It had just gradually crept in, that link between heroin and prostitution. Now it was unbreakable. The vicious circle was in play.
Diane was surprised by a sudden taste in her mouth. Dark, bitter, comforting. It was a very familiar taste, so full of memories that it seemed to sum up the whole of her life, all the low points and loneliest moments encapsulated in one brief tingle of the taste buds.
It was the return of her old craving for chocolate, and the familiarity was so intense it was almost shocking. She hadn’t thought about the craving for months, not really. But some residual instinct had leaked into the nerve endings of her mouth, triggered by a moment of stress.
It wasn’t so easy to get rid of an addiction. It could still creep up and surprise you long after you thought you’d beaten it. It lurked in your body and waited for a moment of weakness. But Diane Fry knew she wasn’t weak, not any more.
Addictions were for everyone else, but not for her.
7 (#uf6d6d0cd-8496-5b2a-9e54-a1361606c8cd)
Friday
Jamie Ward woke up late next day. For a while, he lay in bed listening for noises in the house, or in the street outside, not sure what he was expecting to hear. His parents’ semi-detached was in a comfortable suburb of Edendale, close to the best secondary school and the nicest church. There was rarely anything interesting to hear. The sirens were always across town, on the housing estates.
At first, Jamie’s mind shied away from remembering the day before, but gradually the memories crept back. All the details were still there, fresh and vivid. The mud, the police, the argument. The hand.
And then he had a sudden conviction that this couldn’t just be a normal day, not after what had happened at Pity Wood Farm. It was inconceivable that life would go on in its ordinary, routine way. Getting up, having breakfast, going for a jog, phoning his mates for a chat. It just wouldn’t feel right.
Jamie went into the bathroom and found his muddy jeans on top of the laundry basket. The first day he’d turned up for work at the building site, he’d been wearing his trainers. His second best pair, not the cool ones he went out with his friends in. And Nikolai had laughed at him. So had all the other blokes, though not quite so obviously.
‘Little Jamie, do you want to lose your toes?’ Nikolai had said, lighting up a Benson and Hedges and blowing the smoke towards his feet. ‘Boy, you won’t last a day on my site. We’ll find you some proper boots, OK?’
‘OK, Nikolai.’
‘Call me Nik.’
Most of what had gone on at the site was a mystery to Jamie. The brickies and carpenters and plasterers were skilled men who worked quickly and often silently, wielding specialist tools he didn’t even know the names for.
Some of it was obvious – the trenches dug for the new drains, the gravel laid for site access. But a few things had been odd. If he’d felt more comfortable with the other men, he would have asked them the reasons for things they did. Jamie knew that you should ask if you didn’t understand something, and not worry about looking stupid. If you didn’t ask questions, you’d never know the answers, and that was more stupid, wasn’t it?
The only good thing about the way he’d been treated on the site was that Nikolai and the men hadn’t always worried about whether he was hanging around with them, or how hard he was working.
Jamie showered and hunted out some clean clothes. Then he went to find his mother, to see if he could borrow her car to drive over to Rakedale.
Cooper arrived at work that morning to find forty-three new emails in his inbox. No spam, no jokes, no personal emails – in accordance with force policy, the IT department had blocked all those. No, these forty-three were all work-related. Not necessarily related to his own work, of course. Unfortunately, he had to open every one of them and read it all the way through before he could be sure it wasn’t relevant to him.
Today, he’d received a fairly typical batch. There were the usual requests from the Criminal Justice Unit for completed statements and copies of notebook entries. There was a series of directives and advisory notices from the senior management team, many of them related to key performance indicators. He had a couple of emails from the Police Federation, and there were notifications of five entirely new policies and procedures, all with start dates in the next month.
Each new policy had accompanying documents, which he was supposed to study and learn, then apply. He didn’t know where to begin. But some desk jockey would be appointed as a compliance officer to monitor the new policies, so he’d have to get up to speed.
Now and then, Cooper kept some congratulatory emails about the force’s Investors in People and Work Life Balance Awards. Just in case he needed cheering up some time.
‘Happiness is an empty inbox,’ said Murfin.
‘Emails?’
‘Yes. But I never read them.’
‘How do you get away with that, Gavin?’
‘Dunno. I tend to look at them the way I do all the junk mail I get at home, wanting to give me a bigger penis. I reckon they’re meant for someone else, since I obviously don’t need them.’
‘There might be something about a new course for you to go on,’ suggested Cooper.
‘I don’t need one of those, either. Not since I did my sewage training.’
Cooper laughed. Gavin had never recovered from the shock of being sent on a public order training exercise last year. Along with a couple of hundred other officers, he’d been kitted out in riot gear and deployed to the sewage works in Derby. For a couple of hours, he’d faced an angry mob of Severn Trent Water staff and special constables hurling bricks and petrol bombs at him, just to make the exercise as realistic as possible. His PDR said he’d gained valuable experience in policing a major disturbance. Gavin said all he’d learned was that shit stinks.
Still laughing, Cooper glanced at the first email attachment he’d opened. He read it a second time, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. It made a reference to something called the Community Security Policy Compliance Matrix.
The briefing that morning was relatively low-key. Detective Chief Inspector Oliver Kessen was present as crime manager for the division, though he was currently Senior Investigating Officer for a major enquiry in the Matlock area. It wasn’t uncommon for the same senior detective to be SIO for more than one case at a time, but right now Pity Wood hadn’t even been officially classed as a murder enquiry.
‘It’s too early to start combing through the missing persons reports,’ said DI Hitchens when the team had assembled. ‘Not until we have an idea of the age of the victim and the time of death. The list is too long otherwise – we need something to narrow it down. There are no records of incidents at Pity Wood Farm, or any missing persons reports anywhere in Rakedale. We have to cast the net wider. Any suggestions?’
‘We could still start with the owners of the farm. How long has the place been empty?’ asked someone.
‘Nine months. But there were no women recorded in the household. Pity Wood Farm was run by two elderly brothers, Derek and Raymond Sutton. Derek died twelve months ago, and Raymond is in residential care in Edendale, diagnosed as suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Perhaps the farm was sold to pay for his care. He wouldn’t have been able to run it now, anyway.’
‘They must have had some help with the farm work,’ said Fry. ‘The place is pretty run down, but two old men couldn’t have managed on their own, could they?’
‘Have you seen some of these hill farmers?’ said Cooper. ‘They’re a tough bunch. Some of them just keep on going until they wear out.’
‘Even so …’
‘Well, there was clearly some labour employed at Pity Wood from time to time, but there’s no indication so far that any of the help was female. The brothers must have cooked and cleaned for themselves, by the looks of it.’
Cooper remembered the state of the farmhouse, and didn’t answer for a moment. There might have been some cooking going on in that kitchen, but he was pretty sure cleaning wasn’t high on the brothers’ agenda. Maybe squalor would be called a lifestyle choice these days.
‘The trouble with that is, the more workers we trace, the more potential suspects it gives us.’
‘Is there actually evidence of a crime?’
‘Well, illegal disposal of a body, anyway. Someone dug the grave, then filled it in, didn’t they? But as for the cause of death … I can’t tell you. Also, I can’t say whether it was murder, suicide, accident or natural causes. Sorry.’
‘But what facts have we got, Paul?’ asked Kessen. ‘Apart from the presence of a body with an unknown cause of death, do we have any evidence of unlawful killing?’
This was a tough question, but the answer was crucial. If the SIO misinterpreted the scene and set up a murder investigation when it turned out to be a suicide or death from natural causes, he could find himself criticized for wasting resources. On the other hand, if he attributed death to natural causes and a subsequent postmortem contradicted him, then his decision could have serious consequences for the success of any future investigation. The SIO’s assessment had to be made under pressure, so it took judgement to get it right, to make an accurate decision based on limited information.
‘We’re reserving judgement at the moment,’ said Hitchens. ‘There’s no murder enquiry yet.’
Kessen grunted noncommittally. ‘So who’s going to look into the farming background?’
‘DC Cooper. He’s the man with his roots in the soil. All right, Ben?’
Cooper nodded automatically, not having been given any chance to think about it.
‘Meanwhile, I’m hoping the forensics teams can find me some fresh evidence. Fresher than the body, at least.’
‘Fresher than the body – that shouldn’t be difficult,’ said Murfin quietly to Cooper.
‘We’ve got house-to-house in the village today, and that means all hands to the pumps,’ said Hitchens. ‘Rakedale is a small village, so we’ll be hitting every household. And don’t miss the isolated farms. You all know what these places are like – local knowledge could be the key. Some old biddy will provide us with that vital bit of information. So let’s get to it.’
‘Before you go,’ said Kessen, raising his voice above the developing hubbub, ‘the Chief has an announcement to make. He wants to see the CID team in his office, as soon as we’re finished here.’
‘Uh-oh,’ said Murfin. ‘This sounds like bad news.’
In her official photograph, she looked stiff and humourless. She gave the impression of a woman who wouldn’t normally have worn make-up, but had felt obliged to make the effort when she posed for the photographer. Cooper thought someone ought to have given her a bit of cosmetics advice. But perhaps they’d all been too frightened of her to say anything. Instead, she’d applied lipstick and mascara with an unpractised hand, and the result was unnatural. He was beginning to feel nervous of her already.
‘And this is …?’ asked Fry.
Hitchens smiled a grim smile. ‘Our new boss.’
‘What?’
Their divisional commander, Chief Superintendent Jepson, was chairing the meeting of the CID team in his office. He gestured at Hitchens to hush him.
‘Ripley have finally made an appointment to the SMT,’ said Jepson. ‘E Division has a new detective superintendent.’
There was a moment of silence as everyone looked at the photo. The latest addition to the senior management team, another source of motivational emails.
‘DS Hazel Branagh,’ said Hitchens to break the tension. The tone of his voice was difficult to pin down, as if he’d made a particular effort to sound neutral.
‘She’s a ferociously efficient administrator,’ said Jepson. ‘And highly respected by her present team. All the people who work for her say the same thing. With Superintendent Branagh, they know exactly where they stand.’
‘Not within striking range, I imagine,’ whispered Murfin to Cooper.
Jepson frowned at the interruption, though he hadn’t heard what had been said. ‘You know, some managers aren’t able to keep their distance from the troops. They try to be too friendly with their junior officers. I know what a temptation it is to do that – you want to be all mates together, that sort of thing. Bonding, they call it these days. But it doesn’t work, you know – you just lose their respect, in the end.’
He was looking at Hitchens, and kept his gaze fixed in that direction until the DI felt obliged to respond.
‘Yes, sir. Absolutely.’
‘No matter how much you crave popularity, you’ve got to stand apart from the crowd to be a real leader. Now Hazel Branagh, on the other hand – she has tremendous respect from the officers in her team.’
Cooper looked at the photo again. Branagh’s badly applied make-up gave her the appearance of a recently deceased auntie who’d been prepared by the funeral director. In this case, the family had been so impressed that they’d propped Aunt Flo in a chair for one last photo before they buried her.
‘The word is that she won’t be with us very long anyway, sir,’ said Hitchens.
‘In tune with the canteen gossip, are we?’ asked Jepson.
‘Something like that.’ The DI didn’t bother to point out that they weren’t allowed to have a canteen any more, to discourage the formation of a canteen culture. ‘I’ve heard the possibility discussed, that’s all.’
‘Well, you’re right, Paul. Superintendent Branagh has already earned a reputation for herself all around the country. The next force that has an ACC’s job up for grabs, it’s certain somebody will come sniffing around here. You can bet on it.’
* * *
Diane Fry laid back her head and closed her eyes. Gradually, the stiffness began to ease, and the tension drained from her shoulders. For hours, she’d been staring at her computer screen, wading through figures and reports, checking online forms, reading endless emails from the SMT. It would take a while longer for the weariness to clear from her brain.
On this side of the building, they had to keep the lights on all day in December, much to the frustration of the admin officer, who’d found it impossible to deal with the lack of daylight by writing a memo.
For Fry, the quality of the light was further hampered by the strings of glittery tinsel and concertinas of red-and-green decorations spelling out ‘Merry Christmas’ above the desks, as if no one would know what time of year it was otherwise. She was surprised that Christmas decorations were allowed under Health and Safety regulations. This was one occasion when she would have welcomed a memo. She was tempted to write one herself, but knew she’d be nicknamed ‘Scrooge’ for the rest of her career.
There was a desultory display of Christmas cards on top of the filing cabinets. Most of the cards were from other agencies, one from their local MP. Cooper had received a few personal messages from members of the public – ‘Thank you for everything you’ve done for us’, that sort of thing. Tasteless cards with teddy bears and glittery nativities, signed with little hearts. He’d put them among the general collection, but that only made it worse.
Fry sneezed suddenly.
‘Bless you,’ said Cooper. She wondered why he, like everyone else, couldn’t keep the note of surprise from his voice when he said it.
‘Damn it,’ said Fry. ‘I’d better not be getting a cold.’
‘Do you get colds much at this time of year?’
‘I never used to, when I lived somewhere civilized.’
‘Oh, really? So they lace the water with Lemsip in Birmingham, do they?’
Fry gazed out of the window. Well, not out of it exactly. She couldn’t see the outside world at all, only the blur of water running down the glass. Not that it mattered much, since all she could see on a good day was the back of the East Stand at Edendale Football Club.
She always tried to get into the office earlier than anyone else in CID, which in the winter meant when it was still dark. It gave her time to do the jobs she needed solitude for. First thing this morning, she’d been on her computer practising assessment techniques, ready for her first set of PDRs – personal development reviews for her DCs – next spring. PDRs were dealt with by the Human Resources manager, who had been known to return them with advice on improving their quality.
‘It’s this bloody weather,’ she said. ‘There’s no way of avoiding it. I’ve been soaked three times this week. Is it any wonder I’m getting a cold? I’ll probably be off with flu by Monday.’
‘It’s a weakness in the immune system, if you ask me,’ said Cooper. ‘It comes with urban life. You don’t get exposed to nature enough when you’re growing up.’
Fry found a tissue and blew her nose, which was starting to run. Hay fever in summer, and a permanent cold in winter. Welcome to the rural idyll.
There was no clear evidence yet of murder, but it could turn up at any moment. With no obvious offender, it would be a grade B enquiry, an initial maximum of sixteen officers, the DI probably doing the day-today co-ordination, with Kessen as nominal SIO. Fry knew she was second-guessing, but she liked to see if her assessments were accurate, whether she had learned the same grasp of priorities that her senior officers operated on.
Of course, there were other factors to be taken into account. Resources, obviously. A major enquiry would generate a ton of paperwork – statements, messages, telexes, personal descriptive forms, questionnaires, officers’ reports, house-to-house forms, transcripts of interviews.
She sneezed again. ‘Damn.’
‘The trouble is, the winters are too mild,’ said Cooper. ‘Bugs don’t get killed off the way they used to. It’s the same with pests on the crops. At one time, no one had to spray insecticide until the spring. Now, it’s a problem all year round.’
‘What are you on about?’
‘Global warming. I’m saying there are no frosts to kill anything off. We get a warm, wet summer and a mild, wet winter. It’s no good in the long term.’
‘I don’t believe in global warming.’
‘What?’
‘I think it’s all just a big scare, to distract us from more important things.’
‘What’s more important than the destruction of the planet?’ said Cooper.
‘You see? You’re exaggerating. People exaggerate about it all the time.’
‘Are we ready for the off, or what?’ said Murfin. ‘The fleshpots of Rakedale await, boys and girls.’
Fry stood up and brushed some silver glitter off the shoulders of her jacket.
‘Damn tinsel. I’m probably allergic to it.’
8 (#uf6d6d0cd-8496-5b2a-9e54-a1361606c8cd)
The mobile incident room was on site at Pity Wood. A thirty-foot trailer equipped with computers, drop-down screens and video and DVD equipment, and a ‘front office’ open to the public. It had on-board generators and floodlight masts. And, most importantly, it had heating, a fully equipped kitchen and toilet facilities. The cold rain falling steadily on the farm was enough to drive officers into the trailer on any pretext.
The initial body tent had been replaced by a larger crime scene tent to allow more space for working in. The digging team could be heard chatting among themselves sometimes, but they were more often silent and absorbed in their task, oblivious to the presence of the police waiting for them to finish their work.
As Fry and Cooper arrived, there was a burst of laughter from the excavation area, slightly brittle laughter, a release of tension.
‘Anybody want a Pyrex baking dish?’ said someone. ‘It’s still in one piece, just needs a bit of mud cleaning off. I’m giving it away. If you don’t want it, I’ll sell it on eBay.’
‘It might be evidence,’ said a police exhibits officer standing nearby with his clipboard.
The diggers groaned and went back to their task.
‘Hello, what is he doing here?’ said Fry as they reported in at the mobile incident unit.
Cooper looked around, but there were too many people to make out which of them Fry had picked out. ‘Who?’
‘Jamie Ward. The builder’s labourer.’
‘The one who found the body?’
‘That’s him. He’s over there, at the outer cordon.’
‘That’s odd.’
‘Normally, I’d say it was downright suspicious,’ said Fry. ‘Members of the public who find dead bodies shouldn’t still be hanging around the crime scene next day – especially when they live miles away, as Jamie does. It makes you look guilty.’
‘But Jamie can’t be a suspect. Maybe he’s come back with some more information.’
‘We’ll see.’
Fry strode over to the cordon. Jamie looked more relieved than startled when he saw her.
‘I didn’t recognize anyone else. I’ve been waiting to speak to you,’ he said.
‘Go ahead, then, Jamie. I’m here now.’
‘I want to show you something.’
Jamie led her to the back of the farmhouse, skirting the police tape that had been strung from gatepost to gatepost and unrolled across the top of a wall. Fry could only see the large yellow skip, a lot of digging, and a cement mixer and wheelbarrows left by the builders. She made a mental note to chase up that search of the skip. God alone knew what evidence could have been dumped in there.
‘See this area here?’ said Jamie. ‘Some of the crew have been getting ready to connect the new drains up.’
‘Yes, I see.’
‘But next to it there’s a disturbed patch of ground. It’s obvious when ground has been disturbed. The subsoil ends up on top, and it looks different. It’s one thing I’ve learned.’
‘So what do you think happened here?’ asked Fry.
Jamie frowned uncertainly. ‘I don’t really know. I think there must have been a change in the plans some time – there was a trench here, but it’s been filled in.’
‘When would this trench have been dug?’
‘One day last week, I suppose. I didn’t see it being filled in again. I reckon Nikolai must have got somebody else to do it while I was busy round the front.’
‘Well, thanks, Jamie. I’ll make sure it’s noted. Our diggers are a bit busy right now, but we’ll be at the scene for a good while yet.’
* * *
With Cooper at the wheel, they drove towards Rakedale on a dark, jungle-green road bordered by stone walls, muddy cattle and a rushing stream. When they reached the hill into the village, Cooper found water running towards him down the road, streaming into two rivulets under his wheels.
‘Oh, great,’ said Fry when she saw the water. ‘It’s like the village is pissing on us already.’
The road was very narrow, barely wide enough for one vehicle, and the stone walls left no room for error. It wasn’t used much, though – grass was growing down the road in the middle of the tarmac. There was better visibility on these roads in the winter than the summer, because the trees were so bare. But the surfaces were always slippery, especially if you had to pull over on to the verge to let another vehicle pass.
Cooper was taking care to look for any possible passing places as he went. Most of the wider verges and gateways that might have been usable in the summer were too muddy for the average car, which would be certain to get bogged down or slide off into the ditch. It was lucky he had four-wheel drive. Even luckier that Diane Fry had agreed to take his car. Her Peugeot would hardly have made it up the hill.
‘Why are you driving so fast on a road like this?’ asked Fry.
‘There are no passing places. We don’t want to meet anyone coming the other way on these straight stretches, or someone would have to reverse a long way.’
Fry sighed. ‘I suppose that makes sense, of a kind.’
The place everyone referred to as a village was no more than a T-junction where the side road from Pity Wood met the B5012. There were farms either side of the road, the entrance to an old quarry, fenced off and blocked with limestone boulders. On the southwest corner of the junction, a stile provided access to a footpath that snaked off across the fields between the dry-stone walls, probably heading towards High Peak Trail, the old railway line to Buxton. The grass verge had been flattened and worn away here – the signs of an unofficial lay-by made by hikers leaving their cars. They’d be less willing to do that in December, the rutted mud making verges treacherous for parking on.
The main part of the village clung to the hillside just below its brow. But there were many far-flung farms, where a hard living had been scraped from sheep farming for centuries. Three or four farms clustering around a double bend formed the centre of Rakedale. There were more cattle sheds than houses, more trailer ramps and livestock gates than front doors. The only observer as they passed was a black-and-white calf peering from a pen in the corner of a yard. The calf watched them miserably, kicking at its straw.
There were no road markings here – no white lines or yellow lines, no chevrons or rumble strips. Even the edges of the road itself were unclear. At the top of the village, where they had to make a sharp right turn, the junction was pretty much indistinguishable. Every direction looked like a farm track.
Cooper parked in front of the village Methodist chapel and they all got out, pulling on their coats, sorting their interview forms into plastic wallets to keep them dry, and dividing the village up into three sectors. Fry looked at a giant puddle between the car and the road.
‘And now I suppose you’ll tell me that Derbyshire is disappearing under water because sea levels are rising.’
‘No, but parts of Lincolnshire are going to disappear,’ said Cooper. ‘Perhaps not in our lifetime, but –’
‘Oh, give it a rest.’
‘You brought it up.’
Fry walked off, and Murfin nudged Cooper as they watched her go. ‘I think you won that one, Ben.’
‘It’s not a competition, Gavin. People should be thinking about these things.’
Murfin pulled a couple of chocolate bars out of his pocket and handed one to Cooper.
‘Blimey. As long we can still grow food, what does it matter?’
House-to-house. It wasn’t always the most popular job on a major enquiry. Especially when it was raining.
And today, in Rakedale, it was definitely raining. From the state of the roads and the farm entrances, it looked as though it had been raining all year. The village might as well exist under some permanent black cloud that trickled constantly, like a leaky hosepipe.
Cooper crossed the road to a row of four cottages. He knocked on the door of the first house, drew up his collar and readied his clipboard. When you did house-to-house, bad weather was a useful barometer for what sort of people you were dealing with. In parts of Edendale, they’d leave you standing in the rain without a qualm, would rather see you drown in front of their eyes than let you over their threshold. If you were visiting an address on the Devonshire Estate in a downpour, you’d better be carrying a warrant, or an umbrella.
Out here, though, you’d expect members of the public to have a bit of sympathy, and not to watch you dripping on their step without a flicker of concern.
But that was exactly what the first householder did, admitting that she’d heard of the Suttons of Pity Wood Farm, but she knew nothing about them, or anyone who’d ever worked there. At the second house, he got the same response. And at the third.
Cooper paused before calling at the end house, and studied the village. There wasn’t much in the way of Christmas decorations visible in Rakedale, but that was true of many Peak District villages. In Edendale, the streets were strung with lights, and almost every shop had a tree fixed to its upper storey, decorated and ready to be lit when darkness came. The same sort of thing could be found in other places – Castleton or Bakewell, for example.
But there was a difference. Some villages relied on income from tourism for their survival, and went out of their way to bring in visitors. Others had no interest in being tourist spots. Quite the opposite. Those were the places where residents didn’t want members of the public clogging their streets and peering into their gardens. In those villages, there were no visitor centres, no helpful signposts, no tea rooms or picnic sites. You could drive through some of them as often as you liked and find nowhere to park. ‘Keep moving’ was their message.
The last cottage in the row was empty, with green paint peeling off the door. On a side lane, where the woods started, Cooper found a 1950s bungalow strung with Christmas lights, and a chained Alsatian barking in a yard. He thought it looked more promising. But, frustratingly, it was the first property on his list where no one was at home. He made a note on the sheet and turned back towards the Methodist chapel, where he’d left the car.
The chapel was a square, unpretentious building standing between two farms. Primitive Methodist, according to the noticeboard. The name was a bit unsettling, but remarkably apt.
The fact that there was no parish church in Rakedale told Cooper something about the village. He was reminded of the old social division in rural communities – chapel for the workers, church for the squire. These non-conformist chapels were where the working classes had first learned to speak for themselves, to educate themselves, and to organize. They’d been a natural breeding ground for trade unions. Once working people had tasted religious freedom, they wanted political and social freedom, too. In some of these ancient villages, the parish church was still associated with the power wielded by the lord of the manor, a symbol of servitude. The priest took the squire’s money, and he preached what the squire wanted to hear.
But not in Rakedale. The nearest parish church must be in Biggin or Hartington. Villagers here were out of the gaze of any squire or landowner. And if the priest tried to visit, he would have been seen coming for miles.
Fry had made a deduction. Mud must be a perfectly normal occurrence in Rakedale. She had found brushes and scrapers by every front door for visitors with muddy boots. Not that she was allowed across the mat very often, but the possibility was at least hinted at in the provision of a scraper.
In other ways, too, everyone she spoke to seemed unsurprised to see her, as if they’d been warned in advance.
So it was a relief to come across the Dog Inn, a small pub set so far back from the road that it was almost hiding. For once, Fry didn’t have to expect some sour-faced woman in a baggy sweater blocking her way. It was a public house, and she was a member of the public. So she must be welcome, right?
The Dog Inn was entered through a tiny porch, its door at right angles to the main entrance to face away from the prevailing wind. The porch door was red, matching the Russian vine covering the walls and a row of three brick chimneys on the roof, and a horseshoe was nailed to the centre panel.
Inside, Fry found a small L-shaped bar with a settle against one wall, and an open fireplace with real logs burning in it and a stone chimney breast. A tiny side room held a pool table and a battered dartboard. A man with a long, grey beard was rolling cigarettes from a battered tobacco tin and brushing the remains of his tobacco off the racing page of the Daily Mirror. A few other men sat at tables further down the bar, all in complete silence. She felt sure it hadn’t been quite so silent before she walked in.
Fry was faced by a ‘Merry Christmas’ sign hanging from the beer pumps, and a row of Christmas figures over the bar counter – a few motley Santas and a snowman. She’d followed a trail of muddy paw prints into the bar that she guessed must belong to the collie dog lying on the floor.
On the jukebox she could see Now That’s What I Call Music – 1964, a bit of Elvis Presley, and the Eagles’ Greatest Hits. The selections were numbered one to twelve down one side, and fourteen to twenty-five on the other. Twenty-eight choices of naff sixties and seventies pop hits. According to a sign, bed and breakfast at the Dog Inn was only twenty-five pounds a night. She didn’t feel tempted.
For a few minutes, Fry thought it was strange that no one seemed to be looking at her, as if they’d accepted her without curiosity. But then she realized that they were watching her, after all. They were making an elaborate pretence of not noticing her, but they were observing out of the corners of their eyes, letting their gaze sweep casually across her as if she wasn’t there, but registering more and more details about her each time they turned their heads. Bystanders were notoriously poor at remembering descriptions, but these people would be able to draw her accurately from memory, each and every one of them. They were all watching her.
As she waited, a desultory conversation started up about the weather. Wasn’t it wet and cold and windy, they said. Wetter and colder and windier than usual for this time of year. It would probably be even wetter and colder over Christmas, just their luck. Somebody must have stood on an ant.
Fry finally got some attention when a middle-aged man emerged from a door behind the bar. He was wearing an old cardigan and carrying a mug of tea with ‘Number One Dad’ printed on it. He introduced himself as Ned Dain, the licensee.
‘The Suttons?’ he said. ‘I remember the two old men. They’re not still at the farm, surely?’
‘No.’
‘I thought not. We haven’t seen them in here for ages. Died, did they?’
‘Only one of them did.’
‘Damn.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Well, I bet that would be really hard on the other brother,’ said Dain. ‘They were so close they were almost like twins. Spoke the same, had a similar manner. Yet someone told me once they didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of things. They kept it hidden well, if that was the case.’ He took a sip of tea. ‘There were a few years between them in age, I think.’
‘We’ve been told Derek was the youngest by four years.’
‘Is he the one that died?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Damn.’
The men in the bar had moved on to discussing the Middle East problem, and whether anyone had seen the darts on the telly last night.
‘Can you tell me anything else about them?’
‘They always kept themselves pretty much to themselves,’ said Dain. ‘But there’s usually somebody who knows something around here. What did you want to know?’
‘Was either of them married, for example?’
‘Hold on. Hey, Jack!’
The man with the long, grey beard looked up. ‘Aye?’
‘The Sutton brothers at Pity Wood – was one of them married?’
Jack glanced slyly at Fry before answering. ‘I don’t rightly recall. Might have been. It was a long time ago, if so.’
‘You’re right,’ said Dain. ‘I don’t recollect they were married. A set of old bachelors, I’d reckon. We mostly saw the brothers together, if we saw them at all. If there was ever a wife, she must have died, too, or walked out – who knows?’
‘Well, who does?’
Dain seemed not to be able to answer a direct question.
‘Derek,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘And then there was, let’s see … Billy? No, of course not. That’s me getting mixed up. I’m getting a terrible memory for names.’
‘Billy?’ The man called Jack coughed and laughed into his beard. ‘There was never any Billy. You’ve got that wrong, Ned.’
‘Raymond,’ said Fry.
‘Raymond. That’s right. Derek, Raymond …?’
‘Yes, Derek and Raymond. Those are their names.’
Dain gave her a quizzical look. ‘All right, if you say so. Well, Raymond, now – he played the organ at the chapel. You could ask the minister about him. He’s circuit, of course, based in Monyash. Or there’s Ellis Bland – he’s the caretaker.’
Jack spoke up again. ‘Ned, they had a funeral at the chapel, didn’t they? The Suttons.’
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Stephen Booth
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Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Detectives Fry and Cooper return in another supremely atmospheric Peak District thriller, perfect for fans of Peter Robinson and Reginald HillBuilding work at an isolated farm has unearthed more than just the usual remains… two human are discovered, seemingly buried years apart.With little forensic evidence to go on, Detectives Diane Fry and Ben Cooper have to look back into the farm′s history, where they uncover decades of abuse of migrant workers. Is the truth to be found somewhere in this piteous history?Or does the answer lie elsewhere, hidden in the ground, and still waiting to be discovered?