08.Dying to Sin

by Stephen Booth

  Fry and Cooper stood looking at the bodies, knowing that they shouldn’t touch anything, wondering how they’d managed to survive. They looked up when more headlights swung across the mine buildings and lit up the engine house. They were ready to run again. But they saw the blue flash, and they knew it was finally their back-up.

  After that, they were surrounded by a familiar chaos. More and more vehicles arrived with their lights flashing – paramedics, armed response, the duty inspector, the whole circus.

  To Fry and Cooper, trying to recover from the adrenalin still surging through their bodies, it all seemed to be going on around them in a dream. DI Hitchens appeared, and Cooper thought he saw Superintendent Branagh in the fog, but she didn’t speak to either of them.

  From conversations he overheard, Cooper gathered that at least one of the nine-millimetre pistols had been fired. He didn’t recall hearing the shot, but maybe it had been drowned out by the simultaneous discharge of Palfreyman’s shotgun. Cooper knew that someone was bound to ask him later which had come first. He was going to make a bad witness.

  Within an hour or so, news came in that David Palfreyman had been picked up, and he was claiming self-defence. He wouldn’t say where he’d obtained the shotgun – but then, he didn’t know that Fry and Cooper had been following Jack Elder.

  ‘They’ve got Elder in custody, too,’ said Fry. ‘I said he should never have been released in the first place.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have led us here then, would he?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Is that a bad thing?’

  The second gunman with Alex Brindley was unfamiliar to Cooper. But he felt sure that he’d turn out to be on record, a bit of hired muscle available for the dirty work. There was plenty to be had, if you knew where to ask and you’d got the money. And Alex Brindley had the money, all right. It just didn’t come from the kind of source you might have expected from his nice house and nice family. Dealing in Class A drugs was a lucrative business.

  ‘No doubt they’ll match the nine millimetres with the Farnham shooting,’ said Cooper.

  ‘I’d give odds on it. Brindley took Tom Farnham out before he gave away too much information, and he came here to meet Palfreyman, intending to do the same with him.’

  Cooper nodded. But David Palfreyman had called in his favours and dealt out his own form of justice for the last time. The manufacture of Class A drugs on his patch had been an insult. The fact that he hadn’t known about it, unforgivable.

  They’d been told to sit in a car and wait until they were interviewed. But Cooper got bored and slipped out to watch the activity around Magpie Mine. The floodlights that were going up had turned the scene into a strange underwater world, figures moving around in a yellow murk as if they were swimming. Voices boomed and echoed between the stone walls.

  As he stood in the fog, Cooper heard another sound drifting on the night air. It came from way over in the direction of Monyash, or one of the villages to the north. The air was so still that the sound might have been travelling for miles before it reached him. It could have been a message crossing the light years from another planet, for all the sense he made of it.

  Then some combination of notes, or a recognizable snatch of syllables, struck a chord in his memory. Carol singers. That’s what he could hear – carol singers. If he wasn’t mistaken, they were performing ‘Once in Royal David’s City’. He pictured a group of singers from a local church, probably performing outside a pub. ‘Stood a lowly cattle shed’ came clear through the fog. It reminded him of Pity Wood Farm, in a strange kind of way. Lowly, all right.

  Somebody had once told him that Christmas had been stolen from the pagans. The twenty-fifth of December was supposed to be the birthday of Mithras, the god of blood, worshipped by Romans. Mithraic ceremonies had been held in caves, with the smell of smoke, a long knife plunged into the throat of a sacrificial bullock, and blood that fell hissing on an altar stone. Fire and blood, and the entrails of beasts. It must have been tradition.

  Cooper found it unsettling to think about such things out here in the darkness, on a cold night in December, with two bodies lying almost at his feet and pools of fresh blood forming on the ground in the lingering scent of gunpowder. It was as if the singing he heard in the distance might not be carol singers at all, but the chanting of the worshippers of Mithras, deep in their caves.

  Well, things went back a tidy way in these parts. Two thousand years? That was just middlin’ old.

  Fry had followed him from the car. Cooper looked at her, huddling in her coat against the cold, but still shivering as though she would never stop.

  ‘Diane,’ he said. ‘Is it too early to wish you happy birthday?’

  37

  Thursday

  Superintendent Branagh leaned forward across her desk, folding her hands as she regarded the two detectives.

  ‘And did you see what happened next? What did Mr Palfreyman do?’

  ‘I was confused for a few minutes,’ said Fry. ‘It was dark, and very foggy.’

  ‘You couldn’t see anything, DS Fry? You don’t know who fired the first shot?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘DC Cooper?’

  ‘No, ma’am. Sorry.’

  Branagh gave them both a hard stare. ‘I sincerely hope there are no misplaced loyalties here. Just because an individual has been in the job previously doesn’t make them immune to the law, you know.’

  ‘No, ma’am,’ said Fry.

  ‘We understand.’

  The Superintendent didn’t look as though she believed them, though they were both trying hard not to give away any of the signs. Maintain normal eye contact, no fidgeting, no turning away from your questioner.

  Branagh looked from Fry to Cooper. Then her gaze returned to Fry and stayed there, ominous and thoughtful.

  ‘DS Fry, you were the senior officer in this situation. Are you confident that your actions were appropriate and lawful throughout?’

  Even Cooper thought he detected a slight hesitation before the reply. Fry was quick to cover it, but it might have been too late.

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  The superintendent looked grim. She turned to the notes on her desk and wrote a couple of sentences in small, tight, angry letters that were impossible to read, especially upside down and from this distance.

  Branagh glanced up again. ‘Were you aware that Mr David Palfreyman’s granddaughter Melanie had formed a relationship with the Brindleys’ son, Evan?’ she said. ‘A relationship that was disapproved of on both sides?’

  There was no need to worry about looking truthful now. The news came out of the blue.

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘We had no idea.’

  Branagh nodded slowly. ‘There was no love lost between Palfreyman and the Brindleys, by all accounts. Our information is that Alex Brindley came across Mr Palfreyman in the village pub and told him in no uncertain terms to get his granddaughter away from their son. Insults were uttered, angry words were exchanged. We’re treating that as a possible motive for Mr Palfreyman’s actions.’

  The two detectives sat silently, having nothing to say. The superintendent scowled in irritation.

  ‘Would either of you like to comment on that scenario?’

  They shook their heads.

  ‘No, ma’am,’ said Fry.

  ‘Then you’d better leave, DS Fry. We’re finished here.’

  A team of detectives had broken out their stabbies for the raid. They were piling into vehicles to meet the armed support unit at a rendezvous point close to the site of the meth lab in Staveley. Fry and Cooper walked straight into the CID room to join them, and no one objected. They’d been part of the enquiry from the beginning.

  Cooper fell into step alongside Fry as they followed DI Hitchens out to the car park.

  ‘Diane, why were you protecting David Palfreyman back there?’ he said quietly.

  ‘Why?’ Fry secured her stab vest with a final, violent jerk. ‘Why? How the hell do I know?’r />
  Cooper wondered if she really did know. Not only had David Palfreyman carried out his own form of justice. But it seemed to Cooper that he had also saved their lives.

  The location of the raid was a small, run-down industrial estate on the outskirts of the former pit town. A single unit had been identified as the target, rented by a man named and confirmed as a known suspect in the Sheffield drugs trade. The unit was sited towards the back of the estate, but the service road ran straight up to its rear entrance, where a white van stood parked in front of sliding steel doors.

  The CID team and Scenes of Crime waited at a distance for their chance to go in. On a signal from the operational commander, the armed officers roared up the roadway in their unmarked vehicles and jumped out, shouting orders that could be heard from the street. Within a few minutes, they had contained the scene, and four suspects were on the ground with plastic cuffs on their wrists, being searched for weapons.

  ‘Well, that was easy enough,’ said DI Hitchens when the detectives moved in. ‘I like it when things go well. If we find what we’re looking for in this place, I’ll buy you all a drink down at the pub to celebrate. Two drinks, since it’s Christmas.’

  They watched the SOCOs climb into their protective suits and breathing apparatus, and enter the premises. Before long, the doors of the unit slid open and they could all see inside. Long benches were filled with equipment – rubber tubing, glass jars, a row of electric cookers. Even from outside the building, the whiff of fumes was enough to make officers begin coughing and backing away towards cleaner air.

  Cooper scented the stench of ammonia, much more powerful than it had been at Pity Wood Farm. He knew better now, and he didn’t look around for any cats.

  Hitchens gave his detectives a thumbs up, then replaced it with a two-fingered salute. Victory? Or just two drinks down at the pub?

  The clear-up and removal of evidence from the industrial unit at Staveley would be a long business. Fry and Cooper left after a couple of hours’ talking to the neighbouring tenants and drove back towards Edendale.

  The suspects from the operation would have been processed by now and would be residing in the custody suite. But interviews wouldn’t be taking place until senior officers were happy that all the facts were in place, and that might not be for twenty-four hours yet. Drinks were definitely looking a possibility.

  Cooper took a hands-free call on his mobile as they were heading out of Staveley into heavy traffic through Brimington. It was the officer on con obs duty at the hospital, keeping a constant watch on Raymond Sutton in case he made another attempt on his own life.

  Sutton had begun talking again, and the officer had made detailed notes. Con obs was a really boring duty.

  ‘Raymond Sutton is claiming that his brother Alan died falling downstairs during an argument,’ Cooper explained to Fry when he finished the call. ‘He says he and Derek set off to put their brother into a car to take him to hospital, because it takes so long for an ambulance to get to Pity Wood. But before they got him in the car, they realized he was dead.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, then they panicked, because they thought they’d be accused of murdering their brother. Their fingerprints would be on his body, his blood would be on their clothes. Raymond says they knew they wouldn’t have much chance if they told the true story to the police.’

  ‘So they buried their brother?’ said Fry.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘On the principle of “out of sight, out of mind”, I suppose.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Fry glared at the traffic lights that had brought them to a halt near the crematorium.

  ‘But they didn’t bury him on the farm,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, no. Not on their own patch.’

  ‘You don’t shit on your own doorstep, do you? That’s a good rule.’

  ‘Besides, it would have been too much of a reminder,’ said Cooper. ‘Instead, they had to find somewhere remote, and safe from being dug up.’

  ‘Like a protected heritage site.’

  ‘Ideal.’

  ‘And yet it also had to be somewhere where there was already a lot of disturbed ground, where no one would notice a grave.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cooper. ‘Those spoil heaps at Magpie Mine were perfect for them.’

  ‘Has Raymond said that’s where they buried the body?’

  ‘He’s given directions for the search team. They’re sending a human remains dog in.’

  ‘But, Ben, did nobody in Rakedale notice Alan was missing?’

  ‘Raymond says they made up a story about him going off to make his living some other way, because he couldn’t stand farming any more. Nobody questioned it at the time. Alan himself had said as much in the village. So it was accepted as the truth, whether anyone had any private doubts or not.’

  ‘Just another one of those beliefs without any substance in reality,’ said Fry. ‘If you accept one totally improbable thing, why not another? Especially if everyone else around you seems to take it as fact.’

  ‘Yes. I suspect everyone in Rakedale more or less forgot about Alan Sutton after a while.’

  ‘Except his brothers.’

  ‘Oh, the brothers never forgot,’ said Cooper. ‘They lived with his ghost. I think even Raymond felt his presence, and he wasn’t the superstitious one. What a nightmare.’

  Cooper thought they probably couldn’t even begin to appreciate the depth of the nightmare at this distance. What went on inside the closed circles of families was often incomprehensible to outsiders.

  ‘The Sutton brothers were so closely bound together that they reacted against each other constantly. Raymond became more and more disapproving and censorious, and Derek’s behaviour became increasingly bizarre and superstitious.’

  ‘Was Derek being deliberately provocative?’

  ‘I’m sure there must have been an element of that, on both sides. And once they were trapped in the cycle, it was bound to escalate.’

  Cooper was steering the Toyota round the Chesterfield bypass, using the twisted spire of the parish church as a landmark while he headed for the A619.

  In fact, the Sutton brothers must have spent years tormenting and annoying each other. There had been no need for words. The brothers had understood each other fully, and they had probably abandoned any hope of ever winning an argument. But, even in their silence, they would have enraged each other. A soundless, continuous friction.

  ‘It was their way of trying to get a response from each other,’ said Cooper. ‘These were two old men who didn’t know how to communicate in any other way. They must have loved one another very much, underneath all that.’

  ‘Families, eh?’

  ‘Yes, families. What a good thing they didn’t have children in that household.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Fry. ‘Loving and hating someone at the same time is a good lesson for future life.’

  Fry had touched a nerve there, whether she was aware of it or not. Loving and hating someone at the same time. Cooper saw that in himself, whenever he dared to peek into the darker corners of his mind. There was no denying or suppressing that stuff, not completely. It might be possible to control the conscious actions, like a really good liar. But there was nothing you could do to change what was in your heart and in your mind. There were some memories and instincts that clung too close to the soul to be shrugged off and walked away from.

  ‘You know, there’s just one thing missing still,’ said Cooper as they crested the hill before the descent into Edendale.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Just one little thing, Diane. But we still can’t get a confirmed ID on one of our victims from Pity Wood Farm without it.’

  ‘What’s that, Ben?’

  ‘Orla Doyle’s head.’

  The Dog Inn was in festive mood, decorated with streamers and balloons. The lights on the tree were twinkling, an illuminated Santa flickered behind the counter. There just weren’t any customers to help Mr
s Dain celebrate.

  ‘This is suspiciously like an intuition, Diane,’ said Cooper, as they stood in the middle of the bar.

  ‘Just bear with me for a while.’

  ‘I don’t know where to start looking.’

  Fry smiled. ‘That’s because you’re not from the Black Country, Ben.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘And you missed the signs of superstition – the horseshoe on the door, the number thirteen absent from the jukebox. I bet that’s old Mrs Dain.’

  ‘What has Mrs Dain got to do with it?’

  ‘I think she shared some beliefs with Derek Sutton,’ said Fry. ‘Maybe they shared more than that when they were younger.’

  ‘Well, the old lady did say she had a soft spot for him – and Raymond, too.’

  ‘It’s Derek I’m interested in at the moment. You see, I’m betting he had a gift for Mrs Dain. The Dog Inn needs a bit of help staying in business, by the look of it. And you don’t need two of the things, do you?’

  Cooper stared at her. ‘Two? You mean …?’

  A couple of officers entered the pub wearing blue boiler suits and carrying a set of tools – chisels, hammers, wrecking bars. They spread plastic sheets on the floor in front of the central fireplace.

  ‘It’s a good job the fire is out,’ said Fry. ‘But then, I left instructions beforehand.’

  It didn’t take long for the officers to remove enough bricks from the chimney breast to uncover a cavity. One of them reached in a hand and carefully eased out a package.

  The skull was black and sooty. Empty eye sockets stared from between the hands of the police officer, a few fragments of teeth grinned crookedly in the jaw. Two or three years of smoke had turned the white bone to an object that was almost unrecognizable.

  Fry took the skull in a gloved hand, then she held it up to the twinkling red and green lights of the Dog Inn’s Christmas tree.

  ‘Meet Orla Doyle.’

  38

  That afternoon, Pity Wood Farm looked more desolate than ever, surrounded by abandoned excavations and the partially dismantled buildings, tape fluttering at a safe distance from the contaminated areas.