Stephen Booth - The kill call

‘Like people?’ suggested Fry.

‘Yes, people. He knew me, but he wouldn’t be able to describe my face. When he saw Michael Clay, his memories were of a voice, an outline, a way of walking, a series of gestures or mannerisms. The sort of thing that brothers have in common, or fathers and sons. People say that Matt and I have a lot of similar mannerisms, though we don’t really look alike.’

Fry seemed distant and detached this morning, as if a great weight was on her mind that prevented her from focusing properly.

‘I don’t understand why Peter Massey did it,’ she said.

‘I don’t think he understands either,’ said Cooper.

‘Well, that’s not good enough.’

Her tone was suddenly sharp, almost vicious. But Cooper could understand her annoyance. He just didn’t know quite how much of it was directed at himself.

Cooper had wanted to see Fry bring her case to a successful conclusion. But somehow he’d managed to take the credit for himself, without intending to. This morning, a congratulatory memo had been emailed to everyone in CID from Superintendent Branagh, singling out the actions of DC Cooper for particular praise. That would do his hopes for promotion no harm at all. The trouble was, he didn’t know whether Fry had read the memo yet, since she’d come straight from the mortuary to the interview with Massey. Certainly, no one had dared to mention it in front of her so far.

‘I suppose it’s in the nature of the job that we always want motives,’ he said. ‘But people often do things they can’t explain the reasons for, even to themselves. We’re wasting our time trying to make them give a reason for it, something neat and logical that we can write down and present to a judge and jury.’

‘I don’t agree,’ said Fry. ‘Being obliged to explain to another person why you did something can clarify the reasons in your own mind. It’s the same principle that lies behind a lot of psychotherapy. If you’re never forced to explain yourself, you can just carry on wallowing in denial.’

Cooper thought of some of the real killers he’d seen — the social predators, people with the glint of cruelty in their eyes. But Peter Massey wasn’t one of those. In his own way, he probably thought of himself as being just as noble as William Mompesson, sacrificing his own future to rid the world of a pestilence. A large number of murderers were convinced they were doing the right thing at the time. It often came as a surprise that society didn’t agree with them.

Whose motto had been ‘ Hate and wait ’? Was it one of the de Medicis? Well, Peter Massey had certainly done that. He’d waited more than forty years, nursing his hatred. You’d think that emotions might fade over four decades, but sometimes they just grew stronger.

Cooper realized that Michael Clay’s death had taken a hold on his mind. How could it not, when he’d been there himself, in the darkness of the flooded ROC bunker, feeling the debris of the past floating up around him, sensing the presence of death in the water.

This was the sort of thing he would think about at night when he went to bed. His memories would resurface from the mud of his subconscious. The invisible creatures that had swum about his feet; the rough, fibrous thing that had flapped towards the floor. And, most of all, the white face that had turned slowly towards him. A floating, blank-eyed face, staring and staring…

Yes, those images he’d created for himself would swirl through his brain, moving in endless spirals until he drifted to sleep. He prayed they wouldn’t stay there for ever, haunting his dreams, too.

That morning, Environmental Health officers had visited Le Chien Noir in Edendale. They called Fry to tell her that they had obtained an ELISA kit for detecting animal species content in cooked meat. ELISA wasn’t in the police handbook of acronyms, so Fry had to ask for an explanation. Enzyme-Linked Immuno Sorbent Assay. She was none the wiser.

‘The testing method is based on antibodies raised to heat-resistant species-specific, muscle-related glycol-proteins. On your information, we used the cooked-horse species kit. They’re made in the USA, and we don’t use very many that are species specific.’

‘And the result?’ asked Fry.

‘No horse.’

‘No horse?’

‘Not at Le Chien Noir.’

When Fry put the phone down, she reflected that the people who hadn’t put a foot wrong all week were those she’d had the strongest personal reaction against. The Eden Valley Hunt had been above suspicion, apart from one rogue steward. C.J. Hawleys abattoir in Yorkshire was also operating according to all the regulations, so far as she could tell. And R amp; G Enterprises were a very respectable, forward-looking company, whatever you might think of the purple slabs of meat coming off their packing line.

No, the trouble had been caused by all those individuals with their personal needs and desires, their troubled emotions and hunger for revenge. Peter Massey just happened to have waited a lot longer for his vengeance, for the day when he could finally achieve a form of justice.

As her phone rang again, some instinct made Fry glance up at the other members of the CID team. At least two people looked hastily away. What were they waiting for? What had they been expecting her to do? She was only answering the phone.

‘Hello, DS Fry.’

‘Diane.’

She recognized the smooth tones immediately, of course. The caller was Gareth Blake. Just the sound of her name from his lips brought back all the feelings she’d been trying to suppress since yesterday. All the activity, the need to respond to Cooper’s call from Birchlow, the visit to the mortuary, the interview with Massey… it had all served the same purpose: to avoid the moment that she knew was coming. And to suppress the memories that would now forever bubble up in her mind.

‘Obviously, I don’t want to put any pressure on you, Diane,’ said Blake.

‘No. I — ’

‘But it would be good to talk to you again fairly soon. You know there’s a decision to be made.’

To distract herself, Fry stared at her computer screen, saw that she had some emails, and automatically clicked on them to see what they were. It was an instinctive action, with no real thought of finding anything of interest. But she noticed a message from Superintendent Branagh, and opened it.

Blake was continuing to talk, pouring a meaningless noise in her ear, as Fry read the memo from Branagh for the first time.

Cooper had been asked to check through a copy of a statement that Peter Massey had made before his interview. It was a curious document, reading like an extract from the journal that they’d found at Rough Side Farm after his arrest. An odd glimpse into the world of 1968 and the memories that Massey had lived with for the past forty years.

Cooper thought the words were sad and thoughtful, with no apparent attempt at self-justification. It must have been a relief for him to get it all down on paper. There was even a sense of fatalism about Massey’s conclusion:

‘ I thought that what they said must be wrong. At the start, Jimmy and Les and Shirley were all dead. Three of them, just the way it was bound to be. When they told me Stuart was dead, and his brother too, that was all wrong.

‘ But it seems there’s a third, after all. A man I never knew, or even heard of until he was dead. But I suppose he had to die. It’s fate, and you can’t escape that. Everything happens in threes.’

Cooper wasn’t so sure about fate himself. He’d never felt that sense of an inescapable destiny waiting for him, making everything he did completely futile. Perhaps he was too young yet. It was possible that you had to reach Mr Massey’s age, before you were able to stop and look back on your life, and get that sudden terrifying perspective that convinced you it had all been in vain.