Stephen Booth - The kill call

‘What? You expect me to stand by him? Act the loyal girlfriend for the newspapers? No way. Absolutely no bloody way. He took some money to do this, didn’t he? And he never even told me. Bastard.’

‘Did you want a share?’

‘It’s got nothing to do with me, do you hear? As far as I was concerned, it was all an accident.’

‘An accident?’

‘I had no idea what he meant to do. He let me think he was just going along with the plan. In fact, he seemed to be really into it. Like that thing with the hunting horn. He said it would be a laugh.’ Naomi shook her head. ‘He was pretty useless at it, though. He’d only learned the one call.’

‘The kill call,’ said Fry.

‘If that’s what it was. I wouldn’t know.’

Fry and Murfin watched in amazement as Naomi Widdowson walked away towards the van, accompanied by a prison escort officer.

‘Well, I’ve heard about women who care more for their horses than they do for people,’ said Murfin. ‘And I’ve just seen one.’

‘I’m not a big fan of horses,’ said Fry. ‘But, even so, I know how she feels.’

That evening, in the CID room, Fry stood by the window. It was only a few minutes after six, but darkness was falling rapidly. Heavy clouds gathered in the sky to the west. More rain was on the way.

She had been watching the pedestrians passing by on the pavement. There was nothing unusual about any of them. They were perfectly ordinary members of the public. A young woman in a smart grey business suit, talking on her mobile; a young couple carrying rucksacks, probably early tourists; a man with a dark beard and stained jeans; two girls with magenta hair and nose studs. Ordinary, innocent passers-by.

But were they all so innocent? How many potential murderers were out there, walking the streets of Edendale? Well, wasn’t everyone a potential murderer, in the right circumstances? Or the wrong circumstances. Push any average person into a corner and most of them would cross the line, wouldn’t they?

Fry thought so. The vast majority of these people hurrying by her now probably couldn’t imagine what those circumstances would be. But some of them would. A few might have a specific victim in mind right now. Who knew what fantasies were going on in their heads; violent scenarios playing out, involving a partner, a boss, or a motorist who had just given them the V-sign. Only a tiny minority of them would ever follow through on their fantasies, or act out a violent thought. But there was no way of telling who those individuals were. It might be the man with the beard. But it could just as easily be the young businesswoman, who might be plotting bloody vengeance as she chatted on her phone.

Naomi Widdowson might, or might not, have intended Patrick Rawson to die. But she certainly had no regrets that it had happened. She had badly wanted a person’s death. Deborah Rawson had gone further than that.

Fry knew there were individuals in prison right now, serving life sentences for murder, who were every bit as ordinary as these passers-by on the streets of Edendale. She’d met some of them, and talked with them. They were people who had found themselves in the wrong circumstances, people who had crossed the line.

She thought about what Angie had told her last night. In a smaller way, her sister had crossed a line at some time, too. But was it ever possible to cross back again?

Cooper dropped David Headon and Keith Falconer back at the pub and bought them a drink for their time. He knew they’d enjoyed themselves, because it had been impossible to stop them talking all the way back to Edendale.

When he left them, Cooper drove home in the dark, remembering that there would be no Randy to welcome him, and never would be again. Was that why he had subconsciously been seeking something to distract himself, an excuse to avoid going home? It was the sort of thing that he suspected of Diane Fry. But it was definitely disheartening to think that the flat would be so dark and silent, with Randy lying in his grave.

He’d heard nothing from Fry since he left West Street, but he hoped for her sake that her interviews had led to a successful conclusion. His own interest in the Rawson enquiry had waned, and he wasn’t sure why. It was something to do with the ROC badge he’d found at Eden View, and with Michael Clay’s local connection. If Clay hadn’t been a member of the Edendale ROC post’s crew, why did he have the badge?

As he crossed the lights and turned into Welbeck Street, Cooper thought about the stories Headon and Falconer had been telling him about the 1960s and the start of the Cold War. It was hard for him to imagine what people had gone through in those strange times. The 1960s weren’t so far in the past, yet they might as well be a chapter in a history book, for all he could understand of the world those young ROC observers had lived in.

Come to think of it, he didn’t think it had even been covered in his Modern History lessons at school. The Cold War did get a mention, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War. But the preparations in Britain for life after a nuclear apocalypse? That had gone unremarked.

Yet for many thousands of ordinary people it had been something right at the forefront of their lives. Any day, any night, they could have heard that rising and falling wail of the siren, following an Attack Warning Red, and know that they had only four minutes. Four minutes — to do what? To find some way to live, and to decide the way they wanted to die.

When he thought about the present enquiry, Cooper felt as though they’d all been drawn off on a false trail, misled by a powerfully laid artificial scent. It seemed as though he and Fry had almost physically been following a trail of meat across the country, their noses close to the ground, sniffing the scent like a pack of hounds. But, like all hounds, they were easily mis-directed by a clever and experienced saboteur.

For a moment, Cooper wondered what those big, purple steaks of horse meat that Fry had described actually smelled like.

But he knew, of course. Like all meat, they would smell of blood.

In their underground bunkers, the ROC observers would have been able to lock down the hatch and protect themselves against nuclear blasts and radioactive fallout. But there were some things you couldn’t close your door against. Time, death, the plague.

The people of Eyam had done much the same thing when the Black Death hit their village, hadn’t they? Battened down the hatches, stayed indoors waiting out the storm, until the fallout cleared, emerging only to bury their dead. He imagined Mompesson’s parishioners peering out of their cottage windows, praying that it was safe, that the holocaust was finally over. But wondering, all the same, whose turn it was to die today.

Journal of 1968

Well, then came the time for Les to die. He might have been number one, but he had to take his turn. Nature stepped in, struck him down with a heart attack. And I couldn’t say I was sorry.

Since then, there have been some days when I would just go down there and think. For a while, we still had the folding chairs, the wooden cupboard, a set of drawers that came out of Les’s kitchen. Now and then, I would light one of the tommy cookers at the bottom of the shaft, though it would take twenty minutes to boil a kettle, the way it always did.

For a few minutes, I’d sit and remember the foul air, the cold of the concrete that crept into flesh and bone. We wore two of everything back then, because once the cold got into your bones, you would never get warm again. There was always an icy draught across your feet as you sat there waiting for the messages, filling in the log, baling out the sump. The only thing you could do was go for a walk or run round upstairs. We were pretty numb by the end of the night.