Stephen Booth - The kill call

When Cooper explained that he wanted to see the route up to Birchlow that the old man had described, Massey wiped his hands on a rag and led him out of the yard. The farmhouse itself was a typical jumble of extensions and additions cluttering the outline of the original eighteenth-century building. A low profile against the Pennine winds, solid stone walls thick enough to keep out the cold.

‘My father would have been upset that I gave up the dairy herd,’ said the farmer as they passed through a gate and into the first field. ‘He bred some nice Friesian crosses. Wonderful milkers, they were. But not good enough. No cows would have been good enough.’

‘You inherited this farm from your father?’ asked Cooper.

‘Aye. And he took it over from his father. Lord, I was out in this yard helping with the morning milking by the time I was ten years old.’

‘You must have a lot of memories, then.’

Massey’s eyes clouded for a moment. He was gazing at the hillside, rather than at the house and buildings. Perhaps he felt he’d grown up out there in the fields, rather than indoors.

‘You might say that. Yes, I’ve got a lot of my memories bound up in this land. Buried now, some of them.’

They followed the line of the dry-stone wall as it snaked across the contours of the hillside, following the dips and hollows. At a couple of points it was intersected by similar walls running at right angles to it, dividing the fields into long, sloping strips of land. Ahead of him, Cooper could see miles and miles of wall, an endless limestone tracery overlaying the landscape.

Massey stopped, removed his cap and scratched his head. His hair was wispy, and that distinctive sandy colour common among people whose distant ancestors had been Scandinavian settlers. Remarkable how that Viking blood had persisted through the generations.

‘I reckon you must be talking about the bridlepath over there,’ he said. ‘We call it Badger’s Way in these parts. It connects up with Black Harry Lane. You can get up to Black Harry Gate and way over to Longstone without going anywhere near a road, if you have a mind to.’

‘A bridlepath. So it can be used by horse riders, not just walkers?’

‘Aye. It would have been a packhorse road, I suppose, in the old days. It was made for horses. Trouble is, we tend to get motorbikes up here of a weekend. Those things muddy it up for everybody.’

Cooper looked down into the bridlepath, which was sunk a few feet between two grass embankments topped by stone walls. In many places, you could pass unnoticed by anyone in the adjoining fields, even if you were on horseback.

Up the hill, he could see the square Norman tower of the church at Birchlow. Along the edge of the moor, the land in front of him became even bumpier. One area seemed to be raised in a more regular shape, perhaps the site of an Iron Age hill fort or the capped shaft of an ancient lead mine. There were lots of those in the Peak District, archaeological sites that were the bane of farmers keen to plough up or improve their land, or to put up new buildings. This one seemed to share its location with a line of telephone poles, long since disused.

‘Do you allow the Eden Valley Hunt to use your land, Mr Massey?’ asked Cooper.

Massey hesitated, a habit he’d probably developed in the face of repeated questions about fox hunting during the campaign for a ban. He would be weighing up the answer, deciding whether it was wise to come down on one side or the other, or stay on the fence.

‘They’ve got my permission,’ he said finally. ‘But they don’t hunt this way often. We don’t have the copses up here, see.’

‘And perhaps no problem with foxes?’

The farmer straightened his cap. ‘Funny, but the one place I’ve seen foxes regularly is here, in Badger’s Way. They run up the lane at dusk sometimes. They’ve got it figured out, those buggers. They know they won’t be spotted.’

‘Yes, they’re clever enough.’

Massey looked slyly at Cooper, perhaps remembering that he was a police officer.

‘Besides, the Eden Valley don’t hunt foxes any more, they just follow an artificial scent.’

‘Yes, I know that.’

‘So if I let the hunt come on to my land on that understanding, it’s not my responsibility if they decide to go off and chase foxes. The landowner can’t be prosecuted for it. That’s the law.’

Cooper nodded. The hunt had made sure that farmers and landowners were reassured about their legal position after the hunting ban came in. Lots of them had been nervous that they would be targeted for prosecution if the hunt broke the law on their land by letting the pack kill a fox. It might be easier to prove whose land it had happened on, than who had been in charge of the hounds at the time.

But Peter Massey was right. The Hunting Act said that he was safe from prosecution if he had only agreed to allow legal activities on his land by the hunt.

As they walked back, Cooper asked Massey if he’d heard about the body found not a mile away from his farmhouse.

‘Aye, I heard. That’s not my land, though. It’s farmed by someone over Housley way. He gets some crops out of the lower acreage, I believe. That’s the only way to make money in farming these days.’

‘He has some sheep, too.’

Massey sniffed. ‘Ah, well. They keep the grass down, I suppose.’

‘The dead man’s name was Patrick Rawson. Does it mean anything to you?’

‘Not a thing. He wasn’t from around here, though, was he?’

‘No.’

Before he left, Cooper gazed around the yard of Rough Side Farm. Not much money had been spent on maintaining the buildings in recent years. That was a common enough story. Matt was the same at Bridge End — he’d rather spend money on a new tractor than replace a shed roof. He said that if farm buildings were built properly in the first place, they ought to last for ever. In practice, the problem was just passed on to the next generation as part of their inheritance.

Cooper noticed a horseshoe nailed to the door of an old byre. But it was turned with the points up, to catch the luck, the way the old superstition said.

‘Do you ride yourself, Mr Massey?’ he asked.

‘Ride what? A horse, do you mean?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Massey shook his head. ‘Never. That’s for girls, isn’t it?’

‘Not necessarily.’

The farmer politely walked Cooper to his car, as if escorting an important visitor. He even removed his cap and held it in both hands as he watched Cooper negotiate the large, muddy puddles in the farm entrance.

‘What about your family?’ asked Cooper. ‘Any sons ready to take over Rough Side Farm? Or daughters, perhaps?’

Massey shook his head. ‘I’ve got two sons and a daughter, but they’re not interested in farming. They work in computers, and logistics, and human resources. I don’t think any of those things existed when I was at school. I have no idea what my children actually do all day. But I’m happy to live in ignorance.’

Cooper took one last look at the old farmhouse, and the acres of windswept White Peak landscape that Massey had to himself.

‘What does ignorance of those things matter, when you’ve got the freedom of living out here?’

Back at the scene on Longstone Moor, Fry had found officers from the task force plodding wearily back to the rendezvous point in their boiler suits at the conclusion of their fingertip search. She gathered from their complaints about sore backs and wet knees that the search had produced precious little else.

SOCOs were still working at the old huts and on Patrick Rawson’s Mitsubishi — she could see their van parked alongside the field barn, though the Mitsubishi itself was invisible from here. She ought to find a way over there to have a look at the car.