Stephen Booth - The kill call

‘Thoroughbreds, ideal for their meat?’

‘Exactly.’

Cooper looked at Fry’s face to read her expression. She sounded almost approving of the attention to detail that had gone into Deborah Rawson’s planning. But the satisfaction in her eyes might just have been her contentment at being able to discuss work, when she’d feared some kind of social occasion.

‘It all hangs together,’ said Fry. ‘Rawson had told Melvyn Senior that he’d have some horses that would need transporting later in the week, and he’d also phoned Hawley’s abattoir to book them in for slaughter. As far as Rawson was concerned, the deal was all set up.’

When the tourists had moved on, the only sound in the churchyard was the wind stirring the branches of the trees. Cooper still thought it was strange that the only plague victim buried here was the rector’s wife. The dead bodies were hardly likely to be infectious — they would already have been abandoned by plague-carrying fleas in favour of living hosts. The same sort of thing had gone on everywhere in the Middle Ages, though no amount of corpse-dumping would have saved a doomed town when the plague swept through Europe.

He realized that Fry was looking at him oddly, a faintly derisive smile suggesting that he was behaving in exactly the way she expected. Cooper wondered if this idea was going to work, or whether she would lose patience with him and walk away. The situation seemed so fragile.

‘I don’t understand why Rawson went back to horse dealing when he had his other enterprises,’ he said, desperate to regain her attention.

‘Well, he was getting himself into financial difficulties with the new ventures,’ said Fry. ‘He’d stretched himself too far, that was his problem. The house in Sutton Coldfield was fully mortgaged to raise capital for the meat-distribution business. But with the way the housing market has been, the property was worth less and less, and interest rates were going up. That outbreak of trichinosis would have ruined R amp; G Enterprises. Their hopes of public acceptance of horse meat would have been wiped out in a stroke.’

‘I can just imagine the headlines,’ said Cooper. ‘So Rawson was going back to his old living?’

‘It had done well for him in the past, and he’d managed to keep just the right side of the law, despite everything. Patrick Rawson was a man confident of his own abilities. And Naomi Widdowson came forward and offered him the perfect deal at exactly the right time. The psychology of it was very clever.’

‘That doesn’t sound like something Naomi would figure out.’

‘No, of course she didn’t.’ Fry sounded exasperated, as if she thought he wasn’t really listening. ‘It was all planned by Deborah Rawson.’

‘Oh, right,’ said Cooper.

They were passing a corner by the Riley Graves, one of Eyam’s macabre little tourist attractions. The majority of plague victims were buried in unknown graves, but here was a memorial to John Hancock, who’d died at the height of the plague. The inscription was just about legible, despite some cracking to the gravestone.

As I doe now, So must thou lye.

Remember, man, That thou shalt die.

‘But why would Rawson’s wife set him up like that?’ said Cooper.

‘She’d convinced herself that her husband was having an affair. She overheard some argument between him and Michael Clay over payments that were going out through one of their business accounts.’

‘Rent for the house? Eden View?’

‘Yes. Deborah put two and two together, and came up with the conclusion that her husband had a love nest in Derbyshire, and that explained why he was in the habit of spending longer away from home than seemed necessary for business purposes.’

‘I see.’

Cooper saw that many of the names on adjacent gravestones to John Hancock’s were members of the Hancock family. The plague had taken old and young, grandparents and children. None had escaped. As a result, John Hancock’s wife Elizabeth had buried almost her whole family here in the course of a week, struggling through the fields every day with a diseased corpse for the protection of the village. Self-sacrifice and the acceptance of suffering weren’t fashionable ideals any more, were they?

‘I think that was the first sign I had that she was lying,’ said Fry, breaking into his thoughts again.

‘What was?’

‘Aren’t you listening, Ben? When Deborah insisted she’d never had any suspicions about Patrick. It didn’t fit with the picture of the man I’d built up.’

‘A charming rogue, with a smooth tongue and a casual disregard for the truth.’

‘Exactly. Deborah Rawson would have been mad not to wonder occasionally whether she could trust him. But when I asked her, she exaggerated the lie too much. She would have been better telling me a small part of the truth.’

‘You’re getting very cynical about people, Diane,’ said Cooper, as they walked on.

‘I always was,’ said Fry. ‘Always.’

She was right that he was having difficulty listening to her. This wasn’t what he’d come to talk about, and her manner was making him nervous. She was freezing up minute by minute.

‘The trouble was, Deborah had it completely wrong,’ said Fry. ‘It was Michael Clay who was making the payments, supporting his brother’s illegitimate daughter. That’s the poison of suspicion. Anything you hear can seem like evidence.’

Cooper nodded as they headed back to the village square. A powerful smell of cooking food hit him. Food. That would make a difference.

‘So Patrick Rawson’s death only happened on our turf because of the existence of Eden View and Michael Clay’s niece?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘But Naomi Widdowson insisted in interview that Rawson’s death was an accident, didn’t she?’ said Cooper. ‘She said they just wanted to scare him, to pay him back for all the distress he’d caused to her, and scores of people like her.’

‘That might have been what Naomi thought,’ said Fry. ‘Her boyfriend Adrian Tarrant is quite a different matter. I knew I recognized him at the hunt meeting, when he was acting as a steward. Just the sort of person the hunting fraternity don’t need if they want to improve their image, Ben.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘And Deborah Rawson made quite a separate deal with him. She paid him three thousand pounds.’

‘Three thousand pounds? It’s not much, really.’

‘It is, if you think you’re going to get away with it. And Adrian Tarrant thought he would.’

‘Just as Patrick Rawson always did.’

‘I suppose so.’

Cooper thought back to the hunt saboteurs’ report of hearing the kill call on the morning of the hunt. Earlier, there had been the phone call from Naomi Widdowson to Patrick Rawson, the call that had brought him to his death. That was a kind of kill call in its own way. And there had been the call from Deborah Rawson to Adrian Tarrant, too.

‘The argument Mr Wakeley heard…’ said Cooper.

‘Yes?’

‘I was assuming he’d heard Naomi Widdowson shouting at Patrick Rawson, and perhaps Rawson arguing back. That doesn’t fit with the story, though, does it?’

‘Not quite,’ said Fry. ‘Naomi must certainly have shouted at him about Rosie. But Rawson didn’t stand there and argue with her. He ran.’

‘Yes. So the rest of the argument must have been between Naomi and Adrian, mustn’t it?’

Fry nodded. ‘Of course. She didn’t want Tarrant to go back to the hut, she was trying to make him come away with her. I think Naomi was telling the truth on this point — that she only wanted to give Patrick Rawson a scare. But Adrian had another job to do.’

‘He wasn’t much of a hit man, though. Too fond of unnecessary showiness — I mean, the business with the hunting horn and all that. The kill call.’