The kill call bcadf-9

by Stephen Booth

  Watching the two of them in cautious conversation, Cooper tried to analyse his feelings. Sometimes he seriously doubted his ability to pick the right woman. He’d been going out with Liz Petty longer than anyone else he’d ever known. They’d even gone through a Christmas together, and he’d met her parents. Boxing Day lunch at their house in Bakewell. A subtle barrage of questions over the mince pies about his background, his family, his prospects in the police. Old-fashioned parents who desperately wanted to feel that their approval was needed.

  But he hadn’t minded that. It would have been the same the other way round, if he’d been able to take Liz home to meet his father and mother. But that would have to have been years ago, before Dad was killed, before Mum became so ill. He tried to imagine Boxing Day lunch with all of his family there — Dad at the top of the table, upright and solemn like an Old Testament prophet as he carved the joint, Mum fussing about, backwards and forwards to the kitchen, until she’d crammed the huge table to capacity and plates of vegetables threatened to tip off the edge. And there would have been Matt and Kate, of course, and the girls. And maybe Claire, too — though she usually managed to avoid those huge meals and call at less demanding times, when only the sherry and chocolates were on offer.

  Could he imagine introducing Liz into that gathering, subjecting her to the third degree, the iron-jawed interrogation by his father, the more discreet insinuations of his mother, the candid curiosity of Matt, and Kate’s well meaning attempts at intimacy? Would he even have wanted to?

  He couldn’t really explain to himself why the question was important. But it had been preying on his mind ever since that Boxing Day visit. He thought he had probably passed the test with Mr and Mrs Petty. But would Liz have survived the same ordeal among the Coopers at Bridge End Farm?

  And what was it that Claire had been about to tell him people said? Could it be that when you chose a partner in life, you were subconsciously looking for someone who was just like your mother?

  Ben was used to being told that he was trying too hard to emulate his father, that he would be forever standing in the shadow of Sergeant Joe Cooper, the model copper who’d died in the course of his duty, kicked to death on the streets of Edendale. The last thing he needed was a mother figure. That definitely wasn’t what he was looking for in Liz.

  It was a funny thing, though. It actually seemed to be Claire who was starting to turn into his mother.

  That night, Claire had emailed copies of the photos she’d taken at the National Memorial Arboretum. While Cooper waited for them to download on to his PC, he spooned some tuna-flavoured Whiskas into a bowl for Randy, hoping the cat might be tempted by his favourite food.

  He smiled to himself as he recalled the scene at Watersaw House stables, with the horse passing its opinion on Fry in a way that the owners had been a little too polite to do. He’d never seen Fry quite so angry before. Her nostrils had flared wider than the horse’s.

  Alicia Forbes had been all right, though, hadn’t she? Well, for a pony girl. He wasn’t sure what she’d meant about giving the wrong impression, though. Lots of men his age weren’t married — either because they hadn’t decided to settle down yet, or because marriage just wasn’t regarded as the social obligation it once was. Perhaps it was different in the circles that the Forbes moved in. But what had owning a cat got to do with it?

  Then Cooper looked at the cat, and the cat stared back at him in disgust. The wrong impression?

  ‘Sorry, Randy,’ he said. ‘But I’m afraid she thinks you’re gay.’

  He went back to his computer screen, recalling another interesting fact about the black rat that he could have mentioned to Fry. The one group of people who had never been affected by bubonic plague were the nomadic tribes of central Asia, where the bacteria had first originated. Those nomads lived close to their companions, the wild horses of the arid Asian plains. And the one thing that rat fleas really hated was the smell of horses.

  When the photos from Claire had finished downloading, Cooper clicked on the first attachment and opened the jpeg file with a strange feeling of reluctance.

  He’d never really been keen on photos of himself, particularly in family snapshots. Now, they reminded him too much of his mother, who had always loved showing off the family albums, pages and pages recording the growth of her children from new-born horrors through the adolescent monster stage and into adulthood. Mum would have loved a snap of her sons together, treasured it as a testament of her crowning achievement in life. But without her being there to appreciate the photo, it was just one more embarrassment to suffer.

  In this case, the picture was also too recent. It reminded him too much of the visit to the police memorial on Sunday. The comments made by Matt and Claire were fresh in his mind, and they weren’t what he wanted to be thinking about right now. ‘ Persecuting law-abiding people instead of going after the real criminals.’ ‘Police officers standing around doing risk assessments while someone is dying.’ Dad would never have done that. No, of course he wouldn’t.

  And when Ben saw the picture full-size on the screen of his laptop, he realized something he hadn’t noticed at the time. He’d been too busy staring at the camera, wondering if he should try to hold a smile, or look serious because of the occasion. And wondering, too, whether he looked ridiculously windswept from being outside, those little bits of spiky hair sticking out like devil’s horns. When someone pointed a camera at you, your attention was automatically focused on yourself and the lens, it was such a peculiar moment of intimacy. You forgot completely about what might be around and behind you. Even the photographer did that. It was an error that had caught a lot of people out.

  But in this case, what he hadn’t noticed was that he and Matt, gazing solemnly out of the screen, were standing right in front of the giant policeman in the main building of the arboretum. The bobby loomed over them, vast and ominous, blocking out the light from the windows like a monstrous ghost.

  He’d also been much too tall for the lens of Claire’s digital camera. The head and helmet of the giant policeman were neatly sliced off.

  Philip Worsley had finally admitted to himself that he was lost. The fog had come down so quickly on Longstone Moor that it had confused him totally.

  When he’d set off to walk from Stoney Middleton, the weather had been clear, and he’d taken advantage of a spell without rain for his late afternoon walk. He couldn’t believe that it was so different up here — so different that he could barely see his hand in front of his face. This didn’t happen back home in Essex.

  At one point, Philip thought he’d reached the path that led downwards to the crossroads. There was supposed to be a farmhouse not far from the junction, though he couldn’t tell which direction it lay in. He’d been here before, years ago, and it was a pity that his memory wasn’t clearer. He’d have to hope for a distant light visible when he got nearer.

  He had a map in his rucksack, of course, but none of the landmarks seemed to fit. Nothing was where it was supposed to be. A slope where it should be flat, water where there should be land. It was as if he’d stepped out of the real world into some parallel universe.

  He shivered in the damp fog. And for the first time, Philip started to feel concerned. Apart from his map, he had a waterproof, a bottle of water, a spare pair of socks in case he got his feet wet. But nothing to eat, except a roll of his favourite sweets, the perfumed Parma Violets that he’d remembered from his school days. There might be some sugar in them, but they wouldn’t provide him with extra energy for long.

  Philip kept walking, but without recognizing any signs or gateways. Twenty minutes later, when his foot slipped into a hole and his ankle doubled up underneath him, he knew he wasn’t on the path at all. For the last few hundred yards, the slope of the land had been tending upwards, not down. The ache in his calf muscles was enough to tell him that fact, but he’d been trying not to notice it.

  As he nursed his painful ankle and wiped a bloodied scratch on his hand
, he knew that he was now in difficulties. He had no idea what direction he’d been walking in, or whether he’d even set off from the place he thought he had twenty minutes ago. His ankle wasn’t actually sprained, and he could still walk on it, if he was careful. But the fog was as thick as ever, and there were no lights visible, no sound of traffic from any direction. His senses detected nothing around him except muffled rustlings and coughs in the heather, sounds that he took for the presence of sheep.

  Then he reached a point where the terrain sloped towards him on all sides, rough ground calloused with rocks and grimy with dead bracken. It seemed to him that the landscape had caught him up, and now held him in its grubby palm, like an insect it meant to crush.

  On the ridge of the slope above him, a single hawthorn seemed to writhe in the fog drifting past its branches. For a few moments, Philip could do nothing but listen to the silence, his senses baffled by the absence of noise. It was as if he’d gone suddenly deaf, or someone had turned off the sound in the world around him.

  Trying to make some contact with his senses, he held his hands up to his face. The smell of Parma Violets, and a single drop of blood.

  He came to a low fence and decided to step over it, rather than casting backwards and forwards to find a gate or stile. A moment later, he was falling.

  16

  Journal of 1968

  Living underground could have its advantages, I suppose. You’re away from the wind and rain, which is something to be thankful for up here in the hills. But the drawbacks can be fairly serious.

  I remember there was always a musty smell, as if something had died in there already. No matter what we tried, there wasn’t a thing we could do about the smell. Well, the ventilation was bad — just this shutter thing in the end wall, and another in the toilet. Precious little air to breathe.

  And the smell was all my fault, according to Les. Mister high-and-mighty Number One never took the damp as an excuse, or bad ventilation, or the fact I had nothing to use except what I could carry on my back.

  It was my job to haul up the bucket, too, with bright blue Elsan slopping about over my head, terrified every second that the thing would tip in the shaft and come right down on top of me. Les wouldn’t even let Jimmy help me with the bucket. He said there were three jobs, and the sanitary arrangements were my responsibility, since I was the youngest. ‘Sanitary arrangements’ — that’s the way he talked. Jimmy and me, we called it something quite different.

  Les had more important things to do, of course. He was saving the world, was Les. A big bloody hero in a hole in the ground.

  Well, we were all fighting for freedom, in our own way. It was the age of liberation, after all. Or so we were told. There wasn’t much liberation in our part of the world. Just the same old attitudes, the same instinct to condemn, the implacable willingness to destroy other people’s lives. Whatever happened to ‘ He that is without sin…?’

  I suppose those cold, damp walls were supposed to protect us. But really, they could just as easily have been a prison. And, you know what? If I’d been in prison, I might have had more luck with my cell mates.

  Even now, I always see Jimmy’s face. I see it as clear as my own reflection when I look in the mirror. There were the three of us, up on top in the daylight. And him, down there in the dark, alone. Just a single shaft of light, falling on his face, gleaming on his glasses.

  And then the falling, falling… It seemed to take so long, yet it must have been over in a second. His skull cracked like an egg.

  One down. Two to go.

  17

  Thursday

  Diane Fry had never quite got used to stepping out of the real world, a world full of living, breathing people, into the cold, sterile environment of the mortuary. The postmortem room was all stainless steel and grey tiles, the smell of disinfectant barely even competing with the odour of carved flesh and exposed internal organs. Whenever she entered these doors, it was the smell that entered her soul.

  The Home Office pathologist, Dr Juliana van Doon, was a cool customer herself. Fry supposed you had to be that way, to work in a place like this. For a while, there had been rumours that she was in a relationship with one of the senior CID officers in E Division, but the talk had died down. These days, Mrs van Doon was starting to look tired, perhaps slightly worn around the edges. The skin of her arms looked a little dry, the hair tucked behind her ears was in need of a colour rinse.

  ‘We have here a well-nourished Caucasian male; physical condition matches the given age of forty-four,’ said the pathologist briskly, when Fry called in on her way to West Street that morning. ‘Height one hundred and eighty-nine centimetres. That’s a fraction over six feet, for the metrically challenged.’

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ said Fry. ‘That’s a help.’

  The pathologist’s tone made her tense up. It sounded like a challenge, and there was nothing wrong with that to start the day, in Fry’s book. For some reason, she and Mrs van Doon had never really hit it off. Maybe it was something Fry had done herself when she first arrived in E Division, but the hostility had never been far below the surface. Fine, if that was the way she wanted it.

  ‘His weight is eighty-eight kilos.’

  ‘Mmm. Fourteen stone?’

  ‘Very good, DS Fry.’

  ‘Actually, I was educated entirely in metres and kilograms. But I’ve learned to do the conversion the other way.’

  ‘A triumph of our modern education system,’ said the pathologist.

  Fry gritted her teeth, but stayed calm. She tried to concentrate on the individual whose postmortem she was attending. The important person in all of this — the victim. A glance at the body on the stainless-steel table showed her that he was carrying a bit of surplus body fat, but his muscles were reasonably well toned. He had a fading tan that stopped at the waistband line. A holiday abroad not too long ago. His hair was dark, with hardly a speck of grey to be seen. Now that the area had been shaved and cleaned, the damage to the skull was very evident.

  ‘Strictly speaking, eighty-eight kilos for a man measuring six feet in height is classed as overweight,’ said the pathologist. ‘But he didn’t seem to have had any problems. The heart is sound. An active occupation, perhaps?’

  ‘He was a businessman,’ said Fry. ‘A company director.’

  Dr van Doon shrugged. ‘A sport would have helped to keep him fit.’

  Fry thought of how far Rawson had managed to sprint over rough ground when the need arose. It was said that fear gave you wings, but a lot of men of his age would have been doubled up with stomach cramp after fifty yards.

  ‘I imagine he didn’t smoke either,’ said the pathologist. ‘We can usually tell that pretty quickly when they arrive in here.’

  ‘Do we have a cause of death?’ asked Fry.

  ‘Oh, that.’ With a click of her fingers, Dr van Doon moved to the head of the table. ‘For once, Detective Sergeant, your first guess is almost certainly the correct one.’

  ‘His head was smashed in.’

  ‘If you want to be technical. I’ve also heard it referred to as an open compound fracture of the skull. Also present are severe scalp lacerations, some loose bone fragments, and part of the skull has been depressed into the brain, causing a cerebral contusion and serious haemorrhaging.’

  ‘There was quite a lot of blood at the scene,’ said Fry.

  The pathologist looked up. ‘That would be the scalp. It bleeds like a swamp, even from a minor laceration. Lots of nice, thick blood vessels in the scalp. No, the fatal damage is internal.’

  ‘How quickly would he have died?’

  ‘Very quickly, if he was unlucky. But you can survive for a surprisingly long time with an injury of this kind. Prompt medical attention would have made a big difference.’

  ‘It appears that he might have collapsed after the initial attack, then come round and run a few hundred yards across a field before he finally died.’

  ‘Perfectly possible. Though I would imagine he
was staggering rather than running. The human body does have a surprising capacity for physical activity when the brain is fatally damaged.’

  Fry was starting to feel a need for fresh air.

  ‘Can we get an idea of what caused the damage?’

  ‘Well, we’ve pieced the shattered bone back together, and the area has been photographed under a range of lighting sources. I think you might have a chance of identifying the weapon from the pattern of the depression.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  ‘I hoped you might think so.’

  Fry looked at the body again. She was still no nearer to knowing what Patrick Rawson had been doing at the barn on Longstone Moor when he met his killers.

  ‘Is there any sign of sexual intercourse prior to death?’

  The pathologist gave her a look of distaste. ‘You have all the best ideas, don’t you, Sergeant?’

  Fry returned her stare. ‘That’s something we have in common, then.’

  ‘Well, the answer is “no”.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Cooper sat at his desk in the CID room, watching Gavin Murfin studying himself in a hand mirror, rubbing his fingers over his cheeks.

  ‘What are you doing, Gavin?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘Wondering whether I should grow a beard,’ said Murfin. ‘It’s such a pain, shaving in the morning, and it’s getting quite fashionable again. What do you think? Would it suit me?’

  Cooper looked at him critically. He had some sympathy with the idea. His own electric shaver always seemed to leave a dark shadow that had turned into stubble by evening. If he left off shaving for a day, he looked like a dosser within twenty-four hours. Great for going undercover.

  ‘Gavin, you’d look like Vincent van Gogh,’ he said. ‘Except your hair’s the wrong colour and you’ve got too many ears.’

  Murfin sighed and put the mirror away. ‘Thanks for the advice.’

  Fry came through the door briskly, like a woman who had already started the day with a series of minor triumphs.