Stephen Booth - The kill call

‘Of course,’ said Fry. She took another long gulp of her drink. ‘But they already had wind of the trichinosis outbreak. The restaurant must have been desperate to avoid any suggestion they were serving horse meat. Reputation is everything in that business. Neil Connelly was already trying to distance Le Chien Noir from the bad publicity.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Suggest that Environmental Health pay a visit to Le Chien Noir.’

Cooper noticed that she was having a bit of difficulty saying the name of the restaurant. The third time it had definitely come out wrong.

‘Diane, are you all right?’

‘Why does everyone keep asking me if I’m all right?’

‘Well… I don’t know why everyone else does,’ said Cooper. ‘But I just noticed you seemed to be drinking quite fast. For a lunchtime, anyway. I didn’t know you were a day-time drinker.’

‘I’m not.’

‘OK.’

‘Except in exceptional circumstances.’

Cooper laughed uneasily. ‘You almost managed to say that without slurring.’

‘I don’t slur. I’ve never slurred in my life. I’m a positively slur-free zone.’

Overwhelmed with relief that the moment had passed, Cooper began to feel giddy with the idea that had come into his head.

‘You know what?’ he said. ‘I think we should go for a walk. A bit of fresh air will do us good. Did you bring your boots?’

‘It’s raining,’ protested Fry.

‘No, it’s stopped. It’s nice and fresh out there.’

They crossed the road at Middleton Dale, then walked up through the Tarmac site at Darlton Quarry, its sides terraced like a huge amphitheatre. Excavators were loading dumper trucks in the bottom of the quarry. A hydraulic drill probed at the rubble, splitting the larger stones. Nearer by, a giant shovel sculpted the edges of the worked-out areas.

Black Harry Lane was marked with wooden sign posts etched with horseshoe symbols. A bridlepath, then. Fields would be separated by gates, not stiles. But Cooper could see that this wouldn’t be easy going for a horse. One section of bridleway was so split and crevassed that it looked as though it had been involved in the same earthquake that had left those giant gashes on Longstone Edge.

It struck Cooper that Naomi Widdowson and her boyfriend had been almost a modern equivalent to Black Harry as they waylaid the unsuspecting Patrick Rawson, though the actual robbery had been left to Sean Crabbe.

Along the edge of the lane were a few skeletal hawthorn trees shattered by the wind, their branches broken, their buds blotched with leprous patches of lichen. They passed a dried-up watering hole, where sheep had stepped into the mud in search of the last inch of water. The concrete lining must have cracked, so that no amount of rain would ever fill it up again.

‘Deborah Rawson says she believed her husband was having an affair,’ said Fry, ‘and that might be true. But I think Patrick Rawson did something quite unforgivable in Deborah’s eyes, and it wasn’t to do with another woman.’

‘What?’

‘He proved that Erin Lacey was right about him. At heart, he was just a dodgy Irish horse dealer. That must have been the killer for Deborah Rawson.’

‘What — the fact that he’d gone back to horse dealing when she thought he was becoming a respectable businessman? Or the fact that Erin Lacey had been proved right?’

Fry nodded. ‘Both. There was certainly no love lost between those two women. So it was a double whammy. Can’t you just hear Mrs Lacey’s reaction?’

‘“ Blood will out ” — that sort of thing.’

‘Exactly.’

‘So if he hadn’t been tempted by the call that Naomi Widdowson made…’

‘He might still be alive now. Yes, that was what sealed his fate, I’m sure of it.’

‘But Deborah would rather let people think that he was having an affair, betraying her with another woman.’

‘Image,’ said Fry breathlessly. ‘It’s all about image.’

From Black Harry Gate, a path ran eastwards through a steep-sided dale that squirmed its way towards Calver. But Cooper continued to lead the way towards the rakes on Longstone Moor, where the sheep were still playing chicken with the quarry lorries. Who would be the last to get out of the way? From the stubborn expressions on their faces, these sheep didn’t realize how unequal the confrontation was.

Finally, he stopped to allow Fry to get her breath, and looked out over the patchwork of fields. The sun was breaking sporadically through the clouds, highlighting one field and then another, changing the colours in the landscape as it went, catching a white-painted farmhouse, casting faint shadows from a copse of trees.

The tracery of white limestone walls was spread out before him like a map laid over the landscape. Cooper sometimes thought that if you just followed the right lines in that map, you could discover any story you were looking for, find the right clues to any mystery. All the answers seemed to lie in this gleaming web, so painstakingly constructed that they almost held the countryside together.

And there was still a question to be answered. The charges against Naomi Widdowson and Adrian Tarrant ought to feel like a conclusion. But instead, it was quite the opposite. The death of Patrick Rawson now felt like a distraction. The real mystery was what had happened to his partner.

Officers in blue boiler suits were still working their way along the edge of Longstone Moor, trying to pick up traces of Michael Clay.

‘Hey, look,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s Sitz, Platz, Holen and Bissen.’

He looked at Fry, to see if she’d heard the joke around the office. Derbyshire Constabulary had recently been buying German-speaking police dogs, which meant that dog handlers had to learn the German commands to make their dogs work properly. Some wag had named the dog handlers after the German commands for sit, stay, fetch and bite: Sitz, Platz, Holen and Bissen.

‘Somewhere there ought to be an “Aus”,’ said Fry. ‘Let go.’

‘Yes,’ said Cooper, searching for clues to whether he should be laughing or not. He marvelled at the change that had taken place in her. For a short while this afternoon, he thought he’d got close to the real Diane Fry. But she’d slipped away from him and he’d lost the scent. And that was wrong, because this was his territory, not hers.

Cooper gazed around. You could see Longstone Moor quite clearly from here. On these moors there were still traces of the old packhorse ways that had once been used by travellers such as pedlars, tinkers and badgers. The inhabitants of one valley often knew nothing of the neighbouring dale, because they were separated by inhospitable moorland. For directions, they had only rock formations with descriptive names, or ancient man-made features. Head for the Eagle Stone, turn left at Hob Hurst’s House.

And the biggest problem was the weather, which changed so suddenly on the moors. Low cloud, heavy rain, fog, snow — they could all reduce visibility so much that travellers often lost their way during the winter, and that meant losing their lives. Just as Philip Worsley had on Wednesday.

The landscape was scattered with the small white dots of sheep, a typical White Peak sight. But here and there among them, like alien giants, were much larger objects, bright yellow, their long necks swinging as they hunted backwards and forwards, the scream of their alarms reaching him on the wind. Quarrying machines, hacking out more limestone to fill the dumper trucks. Soon, this landscape would be gone for ever.

‘And what about Michael Clay?’ asked Cooper. ‘Is there a woman involved there, too?’

Fry frowned. ‘Well, not his niece, Pauline Outram. And not his daughter, either.’