Stephen Booth - The kill call

Fry tried to stay calm. ‘We’re trying to help, you know.’

‘Oh, yeah? It’s not the first time we’ve had trouble, and I don’t suppose it will be the last. Sometimes, it makes you feel like giving up.’

‘You still have horses, though.’

Naomi’s face softened when she looked at the heads hanging over the loose-box doors.

‘Yes, three. We had a bit of luck, actually. We bought a nice piebald filly, about thirteen hands. Halter broken and completely adorable. The owners said they were having to sell Bonny because they’d lost their land to flooding. We paid twelve hundred pounds for her.’

Murfin whistled quietly. But Fry still wasn’t surprised. These horse people were so far out of her orbit that nothing they did was going to make sense. She might as well just accept it.

‘Where did you buy him?’ asked Fry.

Naomi looked at her contemptuously. ‘I just said she was a filly.’

‘Oh. She, then?’

‘At Derby. We got her at the horse sales.’

Fry looked along the line of loose boxes. She remembered Gavin Murfin doing that in Sutton Coldfield. Here, she wasn’t sure what it was supposed to tell her, except that horses ate hay, which she thought she probably knew already.

‘I see you have one empty stall.’

‘We had a nice old gelding, but he got bad with arthritis. I really cried when he was PTS.’

‘PTS?’

The woman sneered again. Fry was getting tired of that expression now.

‘Put to sleep,’ said Naomi.

‘Oh, you mean killed.’

Her face froze. ‘We have our horses put to sleep humanely, when it has to be done at all.’

‘I’m not suggesting you don’t do it humanely, Miss Widdowson. But, let’s face it — whatever way you do it, they’re still dead, not asleep.’

Somewhere, a tune started up. A loud, irritating noise, high-pitched and tinny. It was a familiar tune, but it seemed to be coming from one of the stables, and it took Fry a moment to recognize it. Then the noise stopped just before the zap of laser guns came in. The Star Wars theme. It conjured up images of Han Solo and that big, hairy Wookiee — what was his name?

‘Yes, that’s my brother,’ said Naomi, as a heavily muscled young man peered over the half-door, clutching his mobile phone to his ear. ‘That’s Rick.’

‘Good morning, sir,’ said Fry.

Rick Widdowson merely nodded, and went back to whatever he’d been doing in the depths of the stable. Perhaps it was uncharitable to think that he’d only been keeping his head down until it became clear he wasn’t the subject of the visit.

Murfin had walked over towards the horses and was clicking his tongue at them. The animals stared at him as if he was mad. He clearly wasn’t carrying anything edible. Or was he?

‘What are their names?’ he called.

Fry winced. It was the way you’d ask a doting mother the names of her triplets. These were just animals, after all, weren’t they? Yet Naomi Widdowson didn’t bat an eyelid.

‘That’s Bonny at the end. Baby is the one in the middle. And the gelding is called Monty.’

‘Thank you.’

Taking the cue that Murfin had given her, Fry looked at Naomi again.

‘Does the name Rosie mean anything to you?’

‘No.’

‘I mean a horse, not a person.’

‘Still no.’

‘What about the horse that was fraudulently traded?’

Naomi shook her head empathically. ‘She was called Star. What is this about, anyway? Is there a reason for you being here, or did the police just have some time to spare in between harassing motorists?’

Fry smiled. ‘How would you describe Patrick Rawson? Was he a plausible sort of man? What did he look like?’

Naomi opened her mouth, then shut it again. She glowered at Fry, angry now. ‘I told you, I never met him. What sort of trick are you trying to pull?’

‘Are you a member of the Eden Valley Hunt?’

‘Me? Are you kidding?’

‘Could you tell me where you were on Tuesday morning, then?’ asked Fry.

‘What are you saying?’

‘It was a simple question.’

‘If it’s any of your business, I was here, on my own. I work part-time at the Devonshire Hotel in Edendale, but Tuesday was my day off this week.’

She said it in the tone of somebody accustomed to being asked for an alibi. If you told the police you were on your own at the time, then nobody could be asked to back up your story and get the details wrong. It was difficult to prove a negative.

‘And I think I’ve heard enough now,’ said Naomi. ‘If that’s all you have to say, I’d like you to go.’

Fry turned to leave. Then she stopped, as if to ask one more question.

‘Widdowson is quite an unusual name. Are you related to the huntsman of the Eden Valley Hunt?’

‘John? He’s my cousin.’

‘I see.’

‘What?’ said Naomi. ‘Is that a crime as well?’

Murfin sniffed dismissively as they got back to the car. ‘If you ask me, that woman has spent far too much time talking to her horses, and not enough time learning how to make conversation with other human beings.’

‘She was certainly a bit lacking in social graces,’ said Fry.

‘She smelled, too,’ said Murfin bluntly.

‘I’ve got so used to that smell in the last few days that I didn’t really notice, Gavin.’

‘Well, don’t forget to check the soles of your shoes before you go back into the office.’

‘Oh, God,’ said Fry, recalling her interview with Superintendent Branagh. ‘You’re right.’

‘And did you notice her fingernails?’

That was something Fry had noticed. Black, every one of them. That was due to too much mucking out, or too much time spent running her fingers lovingly through the coats of horses.

‘Gavin, did we ever get results from forensics on the prints from that gate on Longstone Moor?’

‘No, we didn’t. I’ll give the lab a nudge.’

‘Yes, with a cattle prod.’

Meanwhile, Cooper had found himself working backwards and forwards between calls to the horse owners on his list, and the conversation going on around him in the office. They were two worlds, existing alongside each other in the same place. The voices of strangers in his ear, speaking of their anger and loss. And the background sound of his colleagues in the CID team, familiar and somehow prosaic, just doing their day to day job.

‘… I thought those wretched horse passports we all had to buy at great expense were supposed to stop this sort of thing. Mind you, have you seen some of those passports? Mine looks like an A4 school project. It would only take a photocopier and a cheap binding machine, and a small child could forge one.’

‘Did you know the penalty for not having a horse passport is a maximum five thousand pounds fine, or imprisonment for up to three months, or both?’ said Becky Hurst.

‘Prison? For not having the right bit of paperwork for your horse?’

‘You offend the bureaucrats at your peril.’

‘God, I’m beginning to think Matt and Claire were right about easy targets,’ said Cooper, dialling his next call.

‘What, Ben?’

‘Oh, nothing.’

‘… I guarantee, if the gypsies have your horse and you don’t have a passport for it, the police will not take it off the gypsies. Possession is nine-tenths of the law. So off to Appleby they go. I tell people to get the feet post-coded if they breed their own.’

‘What’s a flesh mark?’ asked Luke Irvine, in between calls of his own.

‘A patch of pink skin on the horse’s face. It’s hairless in summer, so it shows up as a distinctive mark.’

‘Thanks.’

‘… I suppose she’s gone for pet food, or glue.’

‘And what the heck’s a Prophet’s Thumb?’