Stephen Booth - The kill call

It was the longest speech Deborah Rawson had made during Fry’s visit, by quite a long way. In relative terms, it amounted to an emotional outburst.

‘We have to keep our minds open to all the possibilities,’ said Fry. ‘In this case, it might not have been a business contact he was meeting. The Derby horse sale isn’t until Saturday, yet he went up a few days early. What he was planning to do, we don’t know. You never asked your husband who he was meeting, and he never felt the need to tell you, did he?’

‘No.’

Deborah regarded her stonily as she waited for Fry to explain further.

‘So the possibility is there. He definitely had the opportunity. In fact, you practically gave him free rein, if you showed so little interest in his movements. Are you really telling me that you never once had the slightest suspicion about those days away here and there, the trips he took to Paris…?’

‘I wouldn’t be human if it hadn’t crossed my mind.’

‘Of course. And I imagine you must have checked up on him at some time?’

The woman sighed and stubbed out her cigarette. ‘I can’t deny it, I suppose.’

‘What made you think your husband might be in trouble?’

‘Patrick? Anyone with such a short fuse was bound to end up in trouble one day.’

‘And he did.’

‘It seems so.’

Fry let a few moments pass in silence as she read her notes, allowing Deborah Rawson to wonder what question was coming next.

‘As a matter of fact,’ she said, ‘we’ve talked to Naomi Widdowson and Adrian Tarrant this afternoon. They’ve told us about the arrangement you had with them.’

Now it was Deborah’s turn to be silent. Fry could see the mental calculation going on. It was written all over her face. Deborah was running a few scenarios through her head, deciding how much Fry knew, what the best response would be, deciding on the least incriminating thing to say. The woman wasn’t a very good actress.

‘They were only supposed to give Patrick a scare,’ she said finally. ‘To teach him a lesson. There was never any intention of hurting him.’

But Fry shook her head at that. ‘No, Mrs Rawson, that won’t do. I know all about the payment you made to Adrian Tarrant. Three thousand pounds. That wasn’t just to teach your husband a lesson. That money was to make sure he died.’

The Edendale ROC post had been located in a field off a back lane running between Edendale and Calver. It didn’t look much on the surface. A square concrete structure about three feet high, green paint flaking from its surface. A few feet away stood a smaller ventilation turret with a louvred opening. And there were a few smaller protrusions here and there, whose purpose wasn’t clear. Cooper staggered as his foot hit something like a green steel mushroom lurking in the rough grass.

‘That’s the top of the blast pipe for the bomb power indicator,’ said Headon. ‘A lot of people trip over that.’

‘Thanks.’

‘These bunkers are still quite common — there were over fifteen hundred of them originally, all over the country, built in the late fifties and early sixties. When we were stood down in 1991, most of them were just abandoned, and a lot have been demolished. You’d never know some of them were there. Often, the only evidence you’ll see of an underground post is a couple of redundant telegraph poles on a field boundary.’

‘I never knew any of them were there,’ said Cooper. ‘Do people visit them?’

‘Sometimes. There are a few enthusiasts, or old observers. You have to be careful, though. You should always go with someone.’

Headon pointed to a fenced section of ground with a small gate. There certainly wasn’t much to see.

‘On the surface, there’s the shaft, of course,’ he said. ‘That’s where the ground-zero indicator was mounted. Over there is the ventilator turret, and the mounting point for the fixed survey meter, with the top of the blast pipe near it.’

‘What’s left inside the bunker?’

‘This one still contains the bunk beds, mattresses, chairs, kettles, a few other odds and ends. We had to be self-sufficient, you know. If fallout did occur near a post, the observers could hardly pack up and go home. It could have taken a couple of weeks for the air outside to clear enough for the crew to be relieved. These posts were designed to close hatches to the outside world until the danger passed.’

Headon stood by the hatch at the entrance to the shaft and patted the concrete with a gesture of fondness.

‘I was number three observer,’ he said. ‘It was one of my jobs to climb up through the hatch and sound the siren when Attack Warning Red was received.’

‘Attack Warning Red?’

‘The warning of an imminent nuclear attack. Attack Warning Black was the fallout alert. Strike command would pass a warning to the carrier control points in police stations, then it was transmitted across the network to activate the sirens.’

‘If the receiver hadn’t been accidentally left on and flattened the battery,’ said Falconer.

‘Yes, provided the circuits hadn’t been knocked out by a thunderstorm. There was absolutely no EMP protection.’

They both laughed, sharing their hilarious memories of British incompetence in the face of a nuclear holocaust.

‘As number three, I also had to look after the ground-zero indicator,’ said Headon, ‘which was a sort of bread bin with four pinhole cameras. That meant coming upstairs. It would have been the most dangerous job of all, if the balloon had ever gone up.’

‘Upstairs?’

‘On to the surface.’

‘We were part of 8 Group, based in Coventry,’ added Falconer. ‘But posts were organized in clusters. Edendale was post 8/A5. We had Buxton to the west, but the other two posts in ‘A’ cluster were out at Beauchief and Wickersley.’

‘Those are in South Yorkshire,’ said Cooper. ‘So each cluster covered a pretty big area, then.’

‘Yes.’

Cooper thought he detected a momentary exchange of glances between the two men. But it was very brief, and he didn’t have a clue what it could mean. He’d probably imagined it, anyway.

‘Were there other local clusters?’

‘Of course. B-Cluster covered the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire border — Ashover, Whitwell, Farnsfield. There were two more clusters in the south of the county.’

Cooper located the places mentioned on his map. Each of those other clusters had a post not too far away, but their coverage spread outwards to the east, west and south. A-Cluster looked odd, though — the three posts were pretty much in a straight line from Buxton across the southern outskirts of Sheffield and Rotherham. The line ran right through Eyam.

‘Just four posts in A-Cluster?’ he asked.

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Was there anyone called Clay in your post crew?’

They both shook their heads. ‘No, not here,’ said Headon.

‘Or Outram?’

‘No, sorry.’

Finally, Cooper showed them a copy of the photograph taken from Michael Clay’s laptop case.

‘Not our crew,’ said Headon.

‘No,’ agreed Falconer. ‘The big chap looks familiar, though.’ But then he shook his head. ‘I probably saw him at an annual camp somewhere.’

‘You don’t recognize the building?’ asked Cooper.

‘Those Orlit posts are long gone. They were for aircraft recognition.’

Disappointed, Cooper looked down at the green-painted hatch cover on top of the shaft, and the ventilator turret close beside it.

‘Is it possible to take a look inside the bunker?’

There was that glance again. He was sure of it this time. Something they didn’t want him to see down there? A locked underground bunker in the middle of nowhere presented all kinds of opportunities. He was just starting to run through them in his head when Falconer nodded.