Stephen Booth - The kill call

‘You know,’ he said, ‘if something’s bothering you, you should talk about it.’

Fry looked at him, a cool expression on her face that he couldn’t read. Sometimes, it seemed to be an expression that she put on entirely for his benefit, a mask that he wasn’t supposed to penetrate.

‘Ben,’ she said, ‘if I was going to talk to someone about what’s bothering me — it certainly wouldn’t be you.’

Cooper sat back, feeling the physical force of her rebuff.

‘OK. It’s up to you.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘I’m being serious, Diane.’

‘No, you’re being ludicrous. There’s a difference.’

‘I’m sorry you feel like that,’ said Cooper. ‘Because I wanted to ask you something.’

Just then, Gavin Murfin came into the office with a report in his hand.

‘Fingerprint section have got their, er… fingers out at last,’ he said, with a grin. ‘They’ve got us a result on the prints lifted from the gate in that field where Patrick Rawson died.’

‘And…?’ said Fry, completely forgetting Cooper.

Murfin scanned the report. ‘Adrian Tarrant, aged thirty- two. HGV driver, with an address in Eyam.’

‘He has a record? If his prints were on file, they should have made the match long before now. Days ago.’

Murfin shook his head. ‘They weren’t on file until today,’ he said. ‘He was arrested this morning, during a meeting of the Eden Valley Hunt.’

‘What?’ said Cooper. ‘We were there.’

‘Well, you must have missed it. It seems Mr Tarrant was identified by a female hunt saboteur as the person who assaulted her during an incident on Tuesday. He was arrested and brought here for processing. DNA sample and fingerprints taken, as per routine.’

‘And when they put his prints into the system, they got a match.’

‘Bingo,’ smiled Murfin.

‘Adrian Tarrant,’ said Fry. ‘I knew it was him.’

Adrian Tarrant had been employed by one of the haulage companies whose lorries rumbled constantly backwards and forwards to the opencast quarries on Longstone Edge. Fry reflected that he might well have seen her as he passed along the haulage road in a cloud of dust. But she wondered whether his job might not give an alibi for eight thirty on Tuesday morning, when Patrick Rawson was killed.

That was, until she discovered Tarrant had been sacked by his employers the previous week, for turning up over the alcohol limit once too often.

The house in Eyam was already guarded by uniformed officers standing at the gate. It was a small, stone-faced council house, not much more than a two-up, two-down, with a tiny kitchen and bathroom. According to the neighbours, Adrian Tarrant shared the house with another man, possibly a cousin, who worked as a long-distance lorry driver and was currently away on a job.

Fry could see from the state of the house that this was likely to be true. A couple of days’ washing-up stood on the kitchen drainer, newspapers and empty beer cans decorated the carpet in the sitting room. The TV remote looked much better used than the vacuum cleaner.

The team moved through the house systematically, not entirely sure what they were looking for, so looking that bit more carefully.

‘Apparently, it was Tarrant’s fellow hunt stewards who pointed the finger initially,’ said Cooper. ‘Then, when he was pulled in, the girl he injured made a positive identification. So it just shows — ’

‘Not all hunting people are bad, I know,’ said Fry.

‘They can’t risk someone like him giving them a bad reputation. Not any more.’

In the sitting room, Fry began to open the drawers of a small dresser, her gloved fingers moving through the contents. Some CDs, spare batteries, a pair of gloves. Luke Irvine was examining a desktop PC on a table in the corner. Was Tarrant the type to send a lot of emails? She doubted it, but you had to check. Just as Cooper came into the room from the kitchen, she touched something solid in the drawer. Her fingers closed around an unusual shape.

‘That’s odd.’

Cooper came over to her. ‘What have you found, Diane?’

‘I’m not sure.’

Fry showed him the object she’d found in the drawer — a small, flared brass and copper tube, no more than nine inches long.

‘Those things aren’t easy to use,’ said Cooper. ‘It takes a lot of practice to get it right.’

‘What is it?’

‘A hunting horn, of course.’

Carefully, Fry bagged the horn for evidence.

‘Adrian Tarrant must have had it,’ she said. ‘So it looks as though the kill call was real, after all — and Tarrant was the one who blew it. For a while, I thought the sabs were making it up.’

‘Rather a theatrical gesture, wasn’t it?’ said Cooper.

‘Theatrical?’ Fry thought of all the gleaming horses and red coats, the panting hounds and glossy boots, all the centuries of ritual and tradition. ‘Well, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? A bit of theatre.’

‘The kill call?’ said Irvine, straightening up from the PC when he overheard their conversation.

‘It’s a hunting term,’ explained Cooper. ‘Three long notes, calling the hounds in to kill the fox.’

‘Oh, I see. It has another meaning, too.’

‘Of course. Something to do with computer programming, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, it’s used in multi-tasking. The kill call lets one process terminate another.’

Fry looked around Adrian Tarrant’s home, sniffing at the beer cans and unwashed plates. ‘Well, let’s see if we’ve found enough to terminate Mr Tarrant’s activities.’

That afternoon, Fry spent a long time sitting across the table from Adrian Tarrant in an interview room, watching him as if he was an animal at the zoo. She wasn’t sure what sort of animal he would be. He might as well have been a hibernating bear, for all the communication that was going on between them.

Tarrant was silent, stubbornly so. He didn’t even need the presence of the duty solicitor to encourage him to go ‘no comment’. But now and then he raised his head and stared back at her. Fry remembered his eyes — those eyes that had stared at her as he ran past her near Birchlow on Tuesday, and again in the woods on Saturday.

‘Why did you kill Patrick Rawson?’ she asked. ‘Was it for money? We know you lost your job. Or perhaps you’ve got yourself into some kind of trouble? Do you owe a lot of cash? Is it for drugs?’

He remained silent, denying the tapes any response. These were facts that might come out some other way, and other members of the team were already at work in the CID room, phoning his ex-employers, former colleagues, members of his family. SOCOs and a search team were about to pull apart his house. But Tarrant wasn’t going to help. Why should he save the police time?

‘What did you use to finish Patrick Rawson off when the horse didn’t kill him?’

Fry really wanted to know the answer to that one. Her money was on the pickaxe handle that he’d been carrying when she saw him in the woods. She hoped the search would turn it up. Bloodstains were preserved well on a wooden handle. Patrick Rawson’s DNA would clinch it, even if Adrian Tarrant stayed permanently dumb.

‘How well do you ride a horse? Not well, I bet. You’re not the type.’

He didn’t rise to it. She hadn’t expected him to. In a way, he had only been doing what everyone else did, making a living by exploiting his natural talents. In Tarrant’s case, his talent was a capacity for violence.

After interviewing the other hunt stewards, Fry had two witnesses to the fact that Tarrant had been absent from steward duty until later, around the time that she’d seen him on the road. She thought of the protestor who had been injured during the hunt and had identified Adrian Tarrant as her assailant. Tarrant had come fresh from killing Patrick Rawson, and the assault had probably come all too easily to him.