The kill call bcadf-9

by Stephen Booth

  Fry couldn’t quite believe Rodney Senior’s appearance. No one still had sideburns like that, surely? They must be a joke. He was probably wearing false ones for a fancy-dress party later that day. Some event with a Dickensian theme. He was going as Mr Micawber, or Bumble the Beadle.

  To find him, Fry had picked her way carefully across a muddy concrete yard where several livestock transporters were parked, following the sound of hissing water. Then she saw a cloud of spray rising from one of the vehicles, and found a man in boots and blue overalls at work. She had to call his name twice over the noise to get his attention.

  ‘Aye, Rawson rang on Monday and said he might need some stock transporting later in the week,’ said Senior, turning off a power hose he’d been using to wash out a wagon. ‘I never heard from him again.’

  He had broad, rough hands, which dangled aimlessly at his sides when they had nothing to do. The backs of those hands were astonishingly hairy, and a thatch of hair burst from the top of his open-necked shirt, like the down from an overstuffed mattress. Of course, the sideboards were real, too. Fry had no doubt about it when she got a bit closer to him.

  ‘Did you think that was odd?’ she asked.

  ‘Odd? No.’

  ‘Didn’t you hear that he got killed?’

  ‘It was on the news.’

  ‘So?’

  Senior just looked at her, as if she was speaking a different language. He didn’t bother to ask what she meant.

  ‘So you still didn’t think it was odd?’

  ‘I just thought that whatever deal he was doing must have fallen through. It happens.’

  ‘But what about the timing? You lost some business through his death, Mr Senior.’

  Streams of filthy water ran out of the sides of the transporter and down a steel ramp. Senior gestured at Fry with a yard brush.

  ‘We’ve had business from Rawson for years, but I wasn’t sorry to hear we won’t be doing his transporting again. I never liked the bloke myself, and I don’t mind admitting it.’

  Well, that was some form of communication, at least.

  ‘What did you object to about him?’ asked Fry.

  ‘He was a bit too smooth for my liking. Fancy talker, always trying to get one over on you, if you know what I mean. I prefer plain speaking, myself. I gave him a bit of plain speaking once or twice, too.’

  ‘You had disagreements? Why?’

  ‘Disagreements? That’s a big word for it. I told him to bugger off a couple of times. He was forever trying to knock us down on price, or put off paying for a few months. That’s no good for a business like ours. If he’d tried it again, I would have told him where to stick it.’

  Senior loped up the ramp with his brush, moving in a stooped kind of way as his feet pushed against the ridges in the ramp. Fry supposed they were designed for the hooves of livestock to grip on, but Senior seemed equally at home in his work boots.

  ‘When he phoned on Monday, he must have told you what he wanted transported?’ said Fry.

  ‘Oh, aye. Horses. It was always horses with Rawson.’

  ‘Did he say where you were to pick them up from?’

  Senior thought for a moment. She had obviously asked him a tough one, because his brow wrinkled ferociously. With his hairiness, large dangling hands and that slight stoop as he walked, there was a simian look about him. Fry was reminded of an illustration from a textbook on the theory of human evolution. Senior came from somewhere halfway along the scale, just after Homo erectus had stood upright for the first time and lost the sloping forehead.

  ‘Now then,’ he said, as if that was somehow an answer.

  ‘Perhaps you wrote it down,’ prompted Fry impatiently.

  But Senior shook his head. ‘Nay. I’ll remember. He didn’t give an exact address, just said it was Eyam way. He was supposed to give us the details when he called back. But he never did, you see.’

  ‘And the horses were supposed to go to…?’

  ‘Hawleys. Like always.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got this next wagon to do.’

  As she watched him lope away, Fry recalled that Homo erectus had borne a fair resemblance to a modern human. The main difference was, its brain was only about three-quarters the size.

  As Fry left Senior Brothers’ yard, she wondered what the other brother was like. Probably Rodney was the brains of the outfit.

  Though she was picking up bits and pieces about Patrick Rawson’s business activities, she needed to know much more. And she felt sure the man who could give her the information she needed was Michael Clay. A man who was rivalling the Scarlet Pimpernel for elusiveness.

  Before she got into her car, she tried his number again. Still on voicemail. What a surprise.

  Then, as soon as she ended the call, her phone rang. It was Gavin Murfin, of course. Fry hesitated before she answered it. Lately, Murfin had started to develop the habit of delivering bad news every time he called. It was getting so that she hardly dared to leave the office.

  ‘Yes, Gavin?’

  ‘Hey up, boss. Having a good time at Lowbridge?’

  ‘No,’ said Fry. ‘What have you called me about?’

  ‘Michael Clay.’

  ‘Excellent. He’s the man we most need to speak to right now.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I’m sorry, but it seems that Erin Lacey has changed her mind about her father’s whereabouts.’

  ‘His what?’

  ‘His whereabouts. Remember she told us Michael Clay was away on a business trip? Well, she’s telling a different story now. Mr Clay has officially been reported MFH.’

  ‘Missing From Home?’ Fry sighed. ‘He’s done a runner. That’s a very stupid thing for him to do.’

  ‘And strange, too, when there’s no evidence against him.’

  ‘No evidence that we’ve found yet, Gavin.’

  ‘It could just be a clever ploy,’ suggested Murfin.

  ‘Oh, right. A clever ploy to cast suspicion on himself.’

  ‘What do you want to do, Diane?’

  ‘We’ll talk about it when I get back.’

  On her way back to Edendale, news came in that a horse had been badly injured in an RTC somewhere outside the town. Fry had barely managed to calculate that it was directly on her route, before she saw the flashing lights ahead. That was going to mean another hold-up, unless she could find a way round.

  Like dogs and sheep, horses came within the definition of ‘animal’ in the Road Traffic Act. That meant you had to report it to the police, if you ran over one. If it was a cat, a badger or a fox, you didn’t. It was strange how some laws stuck in your mind, while more recent legislation had to be looked up and puzzled over for a sensible interpretation every time it came up.

  Fry caught a glimpse of the body in the roadway. A dead horse must be an incredible weight. This one looked to weigh as much as a small car, and there was no way it was going to be shifted easily. They’d need a flatbed truck and a winch to get it off the road.

  She reversed the Peugeot into a field entrance, and turned round. Then she began to search for a way to get back on track.

  27

  The machinery was soon swinging into action. A stop on Michael Clay’s Mercedes, a description issued of the man they were looking for. But it was always the same in these cases. The moment a man’s description was circulated, people would start to see him everywhere.

  ‘So Michael Clay has suddenly become our number one suspect?’ asked Cooper. ‘Because he’s gone to ground?’

  ‘Well, perhaps he wasn’t directly involved,’ said Fry. ‘He doesn’t seem to have been in Derbyshire at the time that Patrick Rawson was killed.’

  ‘Well, no…’

  ‘I think there must be something in their business affairs that will cast a light on the motive for Rawson’s death, though. The trouble is, that could take time for us to figure out now.’

  ‘You know we were looking for a rival dealer who might hav
e had a feud with Patrick Rawson?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What about the relationship between Patrick Rawson and Michael Clay? Partnerships like that can easily go wrong, especially where there’s criminality involved.’

  ‘You’re right, Ben. And even more so if it’s just one of the partners who happens to have criminal tendencies. I can imagine Rawson filling his own pockets, and Clay catching him out.’

  ‘Do you think it could it have been Clay who shopped his partner to Trading Standards?’ said Cooper.

  ‘He might not have gone that far in the first instance. But it’s possible he provided evidence against Rawson when the investigation started.’

  ‘To save his own skin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Trading Standards never mentioned that, though, did they?’ said Cooper.

  ‘No. They might have been able to put a case together without Michael Clay, once they’d got the information they needed. That would have allowed Clay to look clean.’

  Cooper eased back in his chair, teasing out the theory. ‘But perhaps Rawson found out what he’d done, that Clay was the informant. That would cause a problem between them, all right. But then it would have been Rawson who came after Clay. What do you think?’

  ‘Well, it’s a possibility,’ said Fry. ‘What have you got on at the moment, Ben?’

  ‘Still a few calls on the Horse Watch file,’ said Cooper, looking at the items checked off his list. ‘I couldn’t get a reply from the owner of the Dutch Warmblood.’

  ‘Leave it for now. This is more important.’

  ‘OK.’

  They spent the rest of the afternoon concentrating on trying to piece together Michael Clay’s movements since he left his home in Great Barr. If his daughter was telling the truth now, he had set off on Tuesday afternoon, and must have arrived in Derbyshire early in the evening. Did Patrick Rawson’s death prompt the journey? But how could Clay possibly have known about it by then?

  A quick phone call established that he hadn’t booked in at the Birch Hall Country Hotel, where Patrick Rawson had stayed. Why was that? Well, maybe Clay was more careful with the company’s money, and had found somewhere less expensive. Perhaps he just wasn’t interested in golf.

  That raised the question of Michael Clay’s relationship with Deborah Rawson. Fry thought back to the one occasion she’d seen them together, in the reception area downstairs. Had there been any hint of a closer liaison between them than was suggested on the surface? Could she have read a suggestion in their body language that they were having an affair?

  Fry set Beck Hurst and Luke Irvine to phoning other hotels in the area. There were plenty of them, but at least it wasn’t the height of the tourist season in the Peak District, when strangers passing through for a night or two were so common that they might hardly be noticed.

  ‘And once you’ve covered the hotels, start on the B amp;Bs,’ she said.

  Unlike Patrick Rawson, Clay hadn’t used his credit card everywhere, or his movements would have been traced by now. Here was a man who had learned the lesson about dropping out of sight, then.

  Normally, Fry would have had hopes of tracking his movements by his mobile phone. When a mobile phone was turned on, it was constantly transmitting its position to the nearest tower, identifying itself to the network by its electronic serial number. Phone companies were required to keep records to assist criminal investigations. But in a rural area like the Peak District, the region covered by a tower could be pretty large. Another bit of technology that was more useful for catching criminals in a city.

  In this case, the disappearance of Patrick Rawson’s phone, and the fact that Clay’s had already been turned off when she’d tried to call him herself that morning, convinced her that she was dealing with someone who was aware of the technology.

  ‘Have we got anything from the mobile phone company yet?’ she called. ‘When did Clay’s phone log off the network?’

  ‘Wednesday afternoon, about two thirty. But they say they can’t narrow down the position of the handset better than a radius of a mile or two. And since then he could have gone anywhere, with his phone switched off.’

  ‘It’s Friday now,’ said Fry. ‘He could have reached Australia since Wednesday afternoon, for heaven’s sake. Erin Lacey has a bit of explaining to do, when I get to speak to her.’

  ‘I wonder what she thought her father was up to,’ said Murfin.

  ‘Well, what’s the betting she suspected that he was involved in Patrick Rawson’s death?’

  ‘And she was giving him a chance to get away?’

  ‘That, or a chance to come home and give an account of himself.’

  Fry felt sure that Michael Clay was no longer in Derbyshire. Why should he be? If Clay was involved in Patrick Rawson’s death in some way, he’d had at least one accomplice. Someone local, too, with access to horses.

  Clay hadn’t been in Derbyshire for very long, but long enough to make his mark. No one had yet been found who admitted seeing him, which was predictable at this stage. Even his own daughter had been reluctant to talk. Yet someone must certainly have crossed his path. They needed to get more public appeals out in the media, but that was a slow process. Time lost again. It was so frustrating.

  ‘What sort of area are we looking at from the mobile phone signal?’

  ‘Let’s work it out.’

  They pored over the map. Even with masts sited at Sir William Hill and Calver Peak, the potential area for Michael Clay’s last-known location covered the whole of Eyam, Birchlow and Foolow, as well as Longstone Moor and eastwards towards Calver.

  ‘We’re looking for a car again, aren’t we?’ said Hurst. ‘Mr Clay drives a blue Mercedes.’

  ‘The details have already been circulated.’

  ‘Just a minute,’ said Cooper. ‘Does this mean that Michael Clay wasn’t the second man having dinner at Le Chien Noir on Monday night?’

  Fry shook her head. ‘He can’t have been, if the daughter is telling the truth now. Erin Lacey says he drove up to Derbyshire on Tuesday.’

  ‘Didn’t the description fit?’

  ‘The manager at the restaurant was very vague in his description of the second man. Very vague. It could have been almost anyone — one of the other contacts in Patrick Rawson’s phone book, perhaps.’

  Murfin put the phone down from a call to Clay’s bank.

  ‘Well, that could explain why Mr Clay wasn’t registered at any of the hotels. It seems he’s been paying rent on another property. Right here on our patch, too.’

  ‘Well, well. Have you got the address, Gavin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Let’s go, then.’

  ‘Wait just a second.’ Cooper held up a hand. ‘Diane, I can see you’re convinced that Michael Clay is implicated in Rawson’s death somehow. And you think you’re going to go chasing off and arrest him. But stop for a minute. Isn’t it also possible that we have two victims now? Two victims, but only one body.’

  Eden View was a nice double-fronted stone property on the edge of Birchlow, with farmland to the rear and views over the village itself to the front. ‘For Sale’ signs stood outside the house, and an estate agent arrived, breathless and worried, to let them in.

  ‘The property belongs to a local farmer, who had it built for his son,’ he explained. ‘But the son has left the area. He moved to Leeds to try a career as a teacher.’

  ‘So you found a tenant for him while the house was empty?’ said Fry. ‘Isn’t that unusual?’

  The agent fiddled with a set of keys to find the right one for the front door.

  ‘We knew the property would be vacant for a long period,’ he said. ‘It’s been on the market for two years already.’

  ‘Why haven’t you been able to sell it?’

  ‘It has an occupancy restriction.’

  Cooper nodded. ‘Oh, the five-year permanent residence rule?’

  ‘That, or a strong local connection and essential need. Yo
u know the way it goes.’

  ‘Yes, that must make it difficult.’

  In some areas, the national park planning authority had taken steps to prevent villages from being taken over by incomers and second-home owners, restricting ownership of new properties to people with a minimum of five years permanent residence in the parish or adjoining parishes living in unsatisfactory accommodation or setting up a household for the first time. The only exceptions were those who had an essential need to live close to their work, or to care for an elderly or sick relative.

  ‘It reduces the market value by a vast amount,’ said the agent. ‘Unrestricted, this property might have fetched the best part of three hundred thousand, but we’re marketing Eden View for just below two hundred. Even so, it’s going to be difficult finding the right buyer.’

  Cooper looked at the house. That seemed a shame. But then, there were lots of people who were having difficulty selling their houses. He remembered Fry telling him once about the young migrant workers who had been replacing the students in her part of town. Poles, Czechs, Romanians. It was odd that the country should be so open to European migrants on the one hand, while here in some of the villages, properties could only be bought by someone from the very same parish, by a person who belonged here, in the old-fashioned, traditional sense. They were two distinct worlds, existing alongside each other.

  Finally the agent let them into the house. The interior seemed incongruous, hardly fitting for a house worth half a million pounds on the open market. No one was taking much care about cleaning and maintenance. That might be common for a rented property, but the feeling of the place didn’t fit the image of Michael Clay, the businessman and certified accountant.

  In the sitting room, a pile of celebrity gossip magazines lay on the table by an armchair. They all seemed to have headlines like Chanelle spills the beanz. Not what he would have imagined as Mr Clay’s choice of reading.

  ‘Perhaps I was right about there being a woman involved,’ said Fry. ‘But I just had the wrong man.’