The Kill Call

by Stephen Booth

  ‘So how did he get from dinner at Le Chien Noir to a field near Birchlow?’

  Fry looked down at the victim again. Rain still glinted on his face from the lights set up inside the tent. Blood was darkening rapidly in his hair, smears drying on the sleeve of his nice waxed coat.

  Despite the difficulties presented by the location and the weather conditions, the crime-scene examiners would have followed all the protocols for evidence collection. Trace hairs and fibres first, then bloodstains, any possible tool or weapon marks, visible fingerprints or footwear patterns. Finally, latent patterns that required powder or chemical enhancement. Not much chance of some of those in the monsoon season.

  Although Fry had been given an estimate by the ME, she knew that time of death should be based on witness reports and not on physical evidence. Measuring body temperature was prone to error, and the degree of rigor mortis wasn’t as accurate as it was sometimes cracked up to be. But in this case, her stiff was, well … hardly stiff at all. The corpse had been pretty fresh when it was first spotted.

  She looked across the moor. Somewhere over there were the remains of the agricultural research station. Although units had been despatched in response to the 999 call some time ago, the airwaves had been ominously quiet since then.

  ‘Let’s see what we’ve got across the way then,’ she said. ‘With luck, body number two might explain everything.’

  * * *

  It took Fry so long to find her way to the collection of derelict buildings on the hill above Birchlow, the site had already been searched by uniformed officers, and Wayne Abbott had moved on from the field to supervise the scene.

  Most of the site consisted of little more than cracked foundations, weed-grown concrete yards and broken fencing. The surrounding bracken and gorse were gradually encroaching on to the site, and weeds had burst holes through the tarmac road.

  She stepped through a door sagging from its hinges and gazed at the scene of dereliction inside. The buildings hadn’t been occupied for many years, of course, and the site had reverted to the landowner. Health and Safety might have something to say about the lack of security, though. No locks, no warning signs, no measures to prevent anyone from suffering injuries through collapsing roofs or broken shards of glass.

  ‘There’s no body here, Sergeant,’ said an officer who had been searching the building. ‘But we’ve found what look like bloodstains on the concrete in the largest hut.’

  Fry turned to gaze back across the fields in the direction from which she’d come. The white body tent was clearly visible from here.

  ‘Well, unless we’ve got a dead man walking, this call wasn’t to a body at all. Our victim was still alive when he came in here – and then he made it across at least two fields before he gave up the ghost.’

  ‘Why would someone phone in and give this location for the body, then? It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Fry, ‘whoever else was here believed the victim was already dead.’

  Murfin came up alongside her, shaking himself like a dog. ‘It seems the 999 call was made from a mobile,’ he said. ‘The caller refused to give a name, but we’ve traced the number, and the phone is registered to a Mr Patrick Rawson, with an address in the West Midlands. Control have tried calling the number back, but it just goes to voicemail. The phone is switched off, probably.’

  ‘Has anyone checked the barn over there?’

  At that moment, the sight of Wayne Abbott making his way towards her again through the rain came as a relief to Fry.

  ‘No drier up here, is it?’ he said.

  ‘Who’d live in England?’ said Fry.

  ‘It rains in other countries, you know. I went to Texas for a conference once, and it rained the whole week.’

  ‘Somehow, that doesn’t sound too bad.’

  Fry was wondering how CSMs managed to get sent to conferences in Texas. Perhaps she’d been in the wrong job all this time. No one had ever suggested sending her to Swindon for a conference, let alone the USA.

  ‘Have you found something?’ she said.

  Abbott pushed back the hood of his scene suit. The last time Fry had seen him at an incident, he’d had a shaved head. Now, his hair had begun to grow back in ragged patches, so that his skull looked like an old tennis ball that had been chewed by the dog.

  ‘Well, we’ve got a series of impressions in the soil within a two hundred-yard radius of the hut,’ he said. ‘Quite a lot of impressions, actually.’

  ‘Shoe marks?’

  ‘Well, sort of.’

  ‘I thought the rain would have obliterated them by now.’

  ‘In the usual way of things, yes – that’s what I would have expected, too. Light prints on soft soil like this would have deteriorated beyond use. But these prints are a bit different.’

  ‘Different how?’

  ‘The amount of weight behind the shoe marks has imprinted them deep enough into the ground to preserve them in the drier subsoil, where the rain hasn’t affected them so much.’

  ‘Weight? That makes such a difference?’

  Abbott nodded, a knowing smile on his face. ‘This amount of weight does. That, and the fact the shoes in question were made of steel.’

  Fry found herself starting to get irritated. She was too wet and uncomfortable to tolerate people playing games.

  ‘Steel? What on earth are you talking about, Wayne?’

  ‘Horses,’ said Abbott. ‘I’m talking about horses.’

  4

  There was still a lot of processing to do, of course. With his prisoner safely in the hands of the custody sergeant at E Division headquarters in West Street, Cooper made his way reluctantly from the custody suite, dodging the rain to reach the walkway that led into the main building.

  In the CID room, the rest of the team were hard at work over their paperwork. DC Luke Irvine and DC Becky Hurst had been given the desks closest to his. They were the newest members of E Division CID, and they made him feel almost like a veteran now that he was in his thirties. They were eager to impress, too – anxious to get every last detail right in their reports and case files before their supervisor saw them. He had to give credit to Diane Fry for that. She had the new DCs with their noses to the grindstone. No one wanted to get on the wrong side of her.

  ‘Hi, Ben. How did it go?’ called Irvine.

  ‘Great. A good result.’

  ‘Wish I’d been there.’

  Irvine was a bit too eager, his face still reflecting his excitement in the job, even when he was buried under paperwork. That wouldn’t last.

  As he stripped off his stab vest, Cooper felt the last of the tension fall away. Suddenly, he felt bored again. He stared out of the window at the rooftops of Edendale, dark with continuous rain. His mind drifted back two days to the previous Sunday, and he realized the source of his restlessness.

  There was a moment when he had been sitting in his brother Matt’s new Nissan 4x4 on the way back from Staffordshire. He recalled the sound of Phil Collins suddenly filling the car. ‘Another Day in Paradise’. The music had broken a painful silence that had lasted since he and Matt, and their sister Claire, had left the National Memorial Arboretum, near Lichfield.

  As always, Matt had been gripping the steering wheel as if he was at the controls of a tractor, pushing the John Deere 6030 across a ploughed slope on a Derbyshire hillside, muscles tensed in his forearms as though power-assisted steering had never been invented. He was getting so big now that he could probably pull the plough himself, like a shire horse.

  ‘We’re not late,’ said Ben. ‘We don’t have an appointment to meet. Personally, I’d rather get home alive.’

  ‘Oh, am I driving too fast?’

  ‘Just a bit.’

  ‘Sorry. I forgot the KGB were in the car.’

  Matt had insisted on driving them down from Edendale that morning, because he desperately wanted to show off the new 4x4. In the visitor centre at the arboretum, the first thing Ben had noticed was a h
uge, carved police officer standing just inside the entrance. It must have been about twelve feet high, like a giant totem pole. A bobby complete with tunic and helmet, but made out of some sort of copper-coloured wood.

  After picking up a guide book, they had taken advantage of a break in the rain to cross Millennium Avenue to the plinth marking the start of The Beat, a long avenue of chestnuts. At the top of it was their destination, the Police Memorial Garden.

  As they walked down The Beat, it had seemed to Ben that the entire history of Britain’s armed forces must be recorded here, in one way or another. There was a memorial to the Rats of Tobruk, the Iraq and Afghanistan willows, and trees planted for the First Army Veterans. Everyone from the Kenya Police to the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force was remembered.

  The guide book said that chestnuts had been chosen for The Beat because the first police truncheons were made from their wood, chestnut being particularly durable – not to say hard, if you were cracked across the skull with it. Several of the trees had been grown from conkers taken from Drayton Manor, the home of Sir Robert Peel himself. Who knew that the founder of the police service had grown his own chestnut trees?

  Ben saw that Matt and Claire had reached the Memorial Garden before him. He supposed he must have been dawdling, subconsciously delaying the moment. Yet he’d promised himself he’d face up to everything he had to deal with from now on. Nothing was to be gained from shutting his memories away and slamming the lid down tight.

  Startled by a sound behind him in the office, Cooper looked around guiltily, remembering where he was. For the first time, he became aware of the atmosphere in the office, a little bit more relaxed than usual.

  ‘So where’s DS Fry?’ he asked Irvine.

  ‘Call-out to a body.’

  ‘Suspicious?’

  ‘Sounds like it.’

  ‘Have we got some details?’

  ‘Here somewhere,’ said Irvine.

  Cooper read quickly through a copy of the incident log. The Eden Valley Hunt? What were they doing with the hunt? Saboteurs? That could be tricky. Fry would be totally out of her depth.

  Without even bothering to sit down at his desk, he made a call to a familiar mobile number, but only got the recorded voicemail message. Irvine and Hurst watched him in amazement as he headed back out of the office.

  ‘Diane? I think you’ll need me. I’m on my way.’

  ‘Don’t forget,’ said the uniformed inspector, surveying the small group of officers he’d been allocated that morning, ‘it’s perfectly OK for them to be killed – as long as they’re shot.’

  Standing on a roadside near Birchlow, Diane Fry watched the inspector at work. Like a practised mind reader, she could tell what he was thinking. With luck, they wouldn’t be called on to do very much today, except watch.

  Officers nodded and shuffled their feet. They adjusted their high-vis jackets and tucked in the scarves they hoped would stop the rain from trickling down their necks. Fry thought some of them looked bored already. With luck, they’d be even more fed up before the morning was over. Their presence was supposed to be a deterrent, rather than anything else. It was policing as a spectator sport.

  The inspector’s name was Redfearn, a grey-haired veteran approaching his thirty years’ service, twelve of which had been spent in the Met before he returned to Derbyshire. Fry always wondered how he’d managed to maintain an unruffled, pragmatic manner all that time. It was great for dealing with young bobbies, but there had been times when she’d wanted to prod him into some kind of response. Being in CID, she didn’t have too much contact with him, but today was going to be different.

  ‘They can even use dogs, provided it’s no more than two,’ said Redfearn. ‘But the actual killing has to be done by shooting. Or by a bird of prey, if there happens to be one present. That’s legal.’

  The inspector paused, glancing at the vehicles already gathered in a field and along the grass verges as far as the eye could see. No doubt he was thinking that the rain might keep the numbers down. But it was late in the season, and intelligence had suggested a confrontation could be expected.

  ‘From past experience, it’s probably the sabs you’ll have to watch out for,’ he said. ‘But we don’t take sides, all right? We’re here to uphold the law, but mostly to prevent public order offences and ensure all parties can go about their lawful activities. So keep your eyes open, and your wits about you. Oh, and try to keep your feet dry.’

  As the officers dispersed, Fry introduced herself to the inspector. She didn’t envy him his job. Keeping public order was often a thankless task, especially when you found yourself thrust between two groups who each had the right to go about their peaceful activities. Hunt duty wasn’t an assignment that many would want.

  The Eden Valley Hunt met twice a week, and Fry felt it was surely no coincidence that today’s meet was so close to her potential murder scene. In fact, she realized now that the air support unit’s surveillance task was connected with the hunt. The helicopter was visible hovering over a copse a couple of fields away.

  ‘You think one of the hunt supporters might know something about your body?’ said Redfearn when she explained.

  ‘Someone left hoofprints all over my crime scene, Inspector. In fact, it looks like more than one horse to me. Your operation here is less than half a mile away – I could see you from the scene down there. It seems to me you might have some potential witnesses for me.’

  ‘There are quite a lot of them, you know. There are horse boxes and trailers parked all the way back from here to Birchlow.’

  ‘We’re going to have to talk to them, and find out who was here first this morning.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Around eight thirty a. m., the ME says.’

  ‘You want the huntsman, or one of the whippers-in, then. They’d be here with the hound van, early doors. Oh, and a couple of hunt followers would have been out laying the artificial scent.’

  ‘Where are they now?’

  Redfearn looked around. ‘God knows, Sergeant. In one of these fields somewhere. They’ll turn up later on.’

  ‘I need to grab them as soon as poss.’

  ‘Understood.’

  The inspector used his radio, asking for someone whose name she couldn’t catch to come to the control point and speak to Inspector Redfearn. Well, they would do for a start. Impatient though she was to get on with the job, Fry was well aware that she didn’t yet have the manpower to start interviewing dozens of hunt supporters. She glanced at the lines of horse boxes. Was it dozens, or scores? Or even hundreds?

  ‘And what about your saboteurs, Inspector?’ she said, when he’d finished with his radio.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘I’m wondering if one of them might be missing. It would be useful to talk to them.’

  He shook his head. ‘Well, the sabs aren’t very forthcoming, you know. It’s difficult enough getting their own names and addresses out of them. Understandably, because if their identities get known, they can be subject to repercussions. But we’ll try to rope in a couple for you, if you like.’

  ‘I’d appreciate it.’

  Fry turned at a clatter of hooves and saw a bunch of riders rounding the corner. Red coats, black coats, mud-spattered boots, gleaming horses. They trotted towards her as if they’d just fallen out of a time warp. Because surely those scarlet coats charging across the landscape were a throwback to a world of pub prints and Victorian Christmas cards. Hard to believe that it still went on, so far into the twenty-first century, and after all that fuss about the legislation to ban it.

  ‘Are you expecting much trouble?’ she asked the inspector as the riders passed.

  ‘Hard to tell. There’s a cyclical pattern to these things, though. Tension builds up over the hunting season between September and March. Niggling resentments from the start of the season can lead up to minor assaults and scuffles around Christmas, then more serious incidents tend to happen at the end of the season. Both
sides get a cooling-off period during the summer, you see.’

  Seasons and cooling-off periods; it all sounded like one big game to Fry. She wondered what constituted a goal for either side. A fox killed, or a fox saved. A black eye or a successful prosecution. Then they all went home with their stories to tell, and met up again next September. Amazing.

  They stepped to one side of the road to allow another a horse box to pass. A late-comer, since the rest of the hunt had already assembled and scattered across the fields.

  ‘Before the Hunting Act, we did have a lot of violent confrontations between sabs and hunt supporters,’ said Inspector Redfearn. ‘More than we do now. The Eden Valley Hunt was unpopular, and it attracted a lot of protests. Sabs travelled hundreds of miles to be here.’

  ‘Have you always been on hunt duty?’

  ‘No, but it comes round regularly. Ironically, the turn-out for the hunt has increased since the ban. Their support is booming. On the other hand, the anti-hunt groups lost a lot of members, people who thought the battle was over when the act came in. Now there’s just the hardcore left, and they have to try that much harder to make their presence felt.’

  ‘And are the saboteurs local?’ asked Fry.

  ‘We think we’ve got three different groups today. Our own local group we see quite regularly, and they’re generally peaceful. The trouble makers seem to come from other parts of the country, and they’re of a rather more aggressive nature. It generally starts with the foot followers being given grief, then someone gets spat at, a girl’s pony gets sprayed with an unidentified substance. It can take less aggro than that for incidents to kick off big time.’

  ‘The Eden Valley don’t hunt foxes now, though,’ said Fry.

  ‘Their official policy is to observe the law. But you know there are exemptions under the Act.’

  ‘Of course. I heard your briefing.’

  ‘Well, even if they don’t catch foxes any more, their opposition still turn out. Only now some of them call themselves “hunt monitors” and they’re armed with video cameras, aiming to catch infringements of the law. We never condone vigilante groups, no matter what their cause, so we watch the sabs carefully.’