Stephen Booth - The kill call

Now Fry knew what sort of animal Adrian Tarrant was. The sort whose instinct was to kill. Once the scent of blood was in their nostrils, they were likely to attack anything that crossed their path.

‘He’s saying nothing,’ said Hitchens, when she took a break. ‘And I’d anticipate that he doesn’t intend to.’

‘I agree,’ said Fry.

‘No explanation for how his prints came to be on the gate?’

‘None offered.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

Fry did at least have a clearer picture now of what had happened to Patrick Rawson. Earlier, she’d imagined him running across the field in his waxed coat and brown brogues, and had wondered where he’d been running to. But it had been more a question of what he was running away from. Sean Crabbe had just been the final element in deciding Mr Rawson’s fate.

And that reminded her it was Sean’s turn to face his fate now. The CPS would be making a decision early next week on what charges to bring against him. Fry found herself hoping that he’d avoid a custodial sentence. Of all the people prison would do no good for, Sean Crabbe had to be top of the list.

‘So what are we going to do now, sir?’ asked Fry. ‘We don’t have any other evidence against Adrian Tarrant.’

‘I suggest you have another go at Naomi Widdowson,’ said Hitchens.

‘Why?’

Hitchens smiled. ‘Because, according to Tarrant’s colleagues at the haulage company, Naomi is his girlfriend.’

That evening, David Headon needed to take only one glance at the badge found during the search at Eden View.

‘The ROC,’ he said. ‘Where did you get that?’

‘The Royal Observer Corps, right?’ said Cooper.

‘That’s it. Did you know I was a member?’

‘No, I didn’t. You’re just the sort of person I’d expect to know about these things.’

Headon was an old friend of his father’s, a man of about the same age as Joe Cooper. He’d visited Bridge End Farm a few times when Ben was a teenager, and he could remember Headon talking endlessly about annual camps at RAF stations around the country.

‘All the ROC posts were closed in 1991, and we were stood down completely a few years later,’ said Headon. ‘There were quite a few of us, you know. Eighteen thousand observers, until the cutbacks started in the sixties. The Corps did a brilliant job during the Second World War, tracking German air raids. Then, when the Cold War started, the observers were needed again. We had posts all over the country. There was even one at Windsor Castle, in the coal cellar.’

‘What did the ROC do, exactly?’ asked Cooper.

‘What do you think?’

‘Observe, I suppose.’

‘That’s right. Observe and report.’

‘I thought I recognized the logo. I was at the National Arboretum the other day.’

‘Ah, you saw the ROC grove. So how were the trees doing? Still waterlogged?’

‘No. They’re small, but alive.’

‘I’m glad.’

‘The trees had labels with this logo. They said “7 Group Bedford, 8 Group Coventry”. For some reason, the labels stuck in my mind. It’s the emblem, I think. It’s quite distinctive, and not immediately obvious what it’s supposed to be.’

Headon stroked the emblem on the ROC badge. ‘He’s an Elizabethan beacon lighter, who used to warn of Spanish ships approaching the coast.’

‘Yes, I found that on Google.’

‘Well, that’s pretty much the role the observers carried on, though during the Second World War it was German planes they were tracking. A series of observer posts could follow an aircraft’s flight path right across Britain, the way they did when Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland in 1941.’

‘Aircraft recognition, then,’ said Cooper.

‘That was it, for long time. It was what a lot of the blokes that I knew came into the Corps for. But that job went out when aircraft got too fast for us. By the 1960s, it was becoming a bit impractical. A low-flying enemy aircraft could have entered UK airspace, flown to London, dropped its bombs and been on the way home again, all while the observers were still trying to make their minds up whether it was friend or foe. The ROC would have been wound up right then, if it hadn’t been for the Bomb.’

Cooper could tell that Headon pronounced the word ‘bomb’ with a capital ‘B’ this time, and he knew immediately what he meant.

‘The atomic bomb.’

‘That’s the baby. Believe it or not, Ben, when you were a child, me and my mates in the Royal Observer Corps were your first line of defence against a nuclear holocaust. That was the time we went underground.’

Fry knocked on the door of the DI’s office. She was feeling very pleased with herself. Almost smug, some might have said.

‘Get any more out of Naomi Widdowson?’ asked Hitchens.

‘No,’ said Fry. ‘She’s gone “no comment”, like her boyfriend.’

The DI looked at her. ‘But there’s something else. I can tell from your face, Diane.’

‘I decided to get the calls record from the phone network,’ she said.

‘But we already did that. Irvine and Hurst went through all the calls on both of Patrick Rawson’s phones, didn’t they?’

‘Yes.’

‘The only calls we couldn’t identify were to a pay-as-you-go mobile. And that was the one Naomi Widdowson used to set up the false deal.’

‘That’s right.’

‘So?’

Fry shook her head. ‘I didn’t mean Patrick Rawson’s phone records, sir. I meant Deborah’s.’

‘What — Deborah Rawson’s?’

And Fry finally allowed herself to smile. ‘Luckily for us, some people have no idea how to cover up a crime.’

On the edge of the hill, Cooper was able to look back at the town of Edendale, constrained in its hollow by the hills to the north and the sharp cliffs of the edges to the east. The pressure of housing demand might force Edendale to expand some time, if national park planning regulations allowed it. He could foresee a day when those houses would gradually push southwards into the limestone of the White Peak.

‘It wasn’t a popular idea, going underground.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘But it was inevitable. There’s not much point finding yourself standing on a brick tower with a pair of binoculars in your hand when a nuclear bomb goes off.’

Cooper nodded, keeping his eyes on the road. He had David Headon and his friend Keith Falconer in his car, and they were heading out of Edendale, driving west until they’d left the houses behind and there were only the cat’s-eyes in the road and the light rain that drifted across his bonnet.

‘That’s what we were reduced to by then,’ said Headon. ‘Modern aircraft had developed until they were much too fast for us. So it became a question of reporting the size and direction of a blast, monitoring the fallout, observing a nuclear attack without putting yourself in harm’s way. That could only be done underground. It was all very different.’

To Cooper, that sounded like a massive understatement. Watching your world destroyed around you was different from anything he could imagine. But Headon and Falconer talked about it all so calmly, in such a matter-of-fact tone, that they might have been discussing a new type of lawnmower, or the arrival of wheelie bins.

‘In the old days, the main job was to watch out for rats,’ said Headon. ‘That was the code word for hostile aircraft. A lot of men liked that part of the job, distinguishing friend from foe, a bomber from a fighter. Losing that aircraft recognition role was very disappointing. Quite a few observers left the ROC then. But we were still serving our country, weren’t we? Well, that’s what we thought.’

Two miles out of town they turned and headed uphill.