Stephen Booth - The kill call

‘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. You 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.