Stephen Booth - Dying to Sin

‘You’re right,’ said Dain. ‘I don’t recollect they were married. A set of old bachelors, I’d reckon. We mostly saw the brothers together, if we saw them at all. If there was ever a wife, she must have died, too, or walked out — who knows?’

‘Well, who does?’

Dain seemed not to be able to answer a direct question.

‘Derek,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘And then there was, let’s see … Billy? No, of course not. That’s me getting mixed up. I’m getting a terrible memory for names.’

‘Billy?’ The man called Jack coughed and laughed into his beard. ‘There was never any Billy. You’ve got that wrong, Ned.’

‘Raymond,’ said Fry.

‘Raymond. That’s right. Derek, Raymond …?’

‘Yes, Derek and Raymond. Those are their names.’

Dain gave her a quizzical look. ‘All right, if you say so. Well, Raymond, now — he played the organ at the chapel. You could ask the minister about him. He’s circuit, of course, based in Monyash. Or there’s Ellis Bland — he’s the caretaker.’

Jack spoke up again. ‘Ned, they had a funeral at the chapel, didn’t they? The Suttons.’

‘That would have been Derek, then,’ said Fry.

‘Aye, Derek. Funny bugger — superstitious as all get out. Magpies, black cats, I don’t know what. He thought everything he saw was going to bring bad luck.’

‘He’s dead now, so he must have been right,’ said Dain.

‘Well, we hope he was dead, since they buried him.’

Jack cackled and went back to his tobacco. Fry tried to regain the attention.

‘Apart from the Suttons themselves, were there any farmworkers that used to come in the pub?’ she asked.

‘No, but perhaps my Dad would remember them, if they came in here.’

‘Was your father the licensee before you?’

‘Not him,’ said Dain with a laugh. ‘Well, his name was over the door, but running a pub would be too much like hard work for that drunken old bastard. No, you’d have found him sitting on that side of the bar most nights. He knew everyone around here, though. If strangers came in, he’d be giving them the once-over as they walked to the bar, and he’d know everything about them by the time they left the pub again. You could do with blokes like my old dad on the police force, if you want information.’

‘I suppose he’s not still around,’ said Fry.

‘Well, not around here, thank God,’ said Dain. ‘We put him in a home when he got too bad. Cracked as a tin bucket he was, by the end. Too much drink wrecked his brain. But it was his liver that did for him in the end.’

‘Oh.’

‘Me, I won’t go that way. I’m as fit as a fiddle, and twice as tuneful.’

Dain rubbed a hand on the bar counter, as if finding a blemish on the polished wood.

‘Come to think of it,’ he said, ‘I think the police did use my dad as a source of information from time to time. The local bobby would come in here himself in those days, in uniform and all. And he’d expect free drinks. Those were different times, I suppose. He even brought his sergeant in sometimes.’

Picturing the scene, Fry suddenly had a bad feeling about the answer to her next question. ‘Can you remember the name of that sergeant?’

Dain shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think so. It’s too long ago.’

‘Shame.’

Dain ran a cloth across the bar counter. ‘Wait, though … it was a fairly common name. Oh, that’s annoying. It’s right on the tip of my tongue.’

Fry waited as patiently as she could while he fumbled through his memories, but nothing seemed to be emerging.

‘Cooper?’ she suggested. ‘Sergeant Joe Cooper, perhaps?’

‘Who?’ said Dain. ‘Nah, that’s not it. Cooper? Where did you get that from?’ Then his face broke into a broken-toothed smile. ‘Nothing like it. Williams, that was his name. Big Welsh bloke. We called him Taffy.’

‘And the local bobby himself?’

‘Oh, Dave Palfreyman? He’s still around, all right. You won’t be able to miss him .’

Outside the Dog Inn, Fry stood for a moment in the rain. Something about the conversation in the pub was worrying her. Not the barely concealed hostility, or Ned Dain’s infuriatingly poor memory — if that’s what it was. No, it was a faint ambiguity that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Not anything that had been said, but something that had been missing.

Fry stepped over a pothole in the car park that was slowly filling with water, and found herself thinking about the patch of disturbed ground that Jamie Ward had pointed out at Pity Wood Farm. It had been nagging at the back of her mind the way things did when she’d overlooked them, or not acted when she should have done.

She took out her phone and called DI Hitchens, who was still at the farm.

‘Yes, I feel we should try to make it a priority,’ she said. ‘As soon as possible. Yes, I understand, sir. Resources … Well, Jamie Ward believed it was important enough, and I think I agree with him.’

Apart from the pub, the village’s facilities seemed to consist solely of a small post-box lashed to a fence post. When he’d finished his calls, Cooper sat in the car and watched the rain soaking the walls of the chapel.

‘There’s no post office,’ he said, when the others returned. ‘That would be the place to go.’

‘So?’

‘The next village has one.’

‘We could give it a try.’

He saw there was a Town Head Farm at one end of the village, and Town End Farm at the other. He supposed it helped visitors to Rakedale to know whether they were coming or going.

Most of the farms along this road were well kept. Of course, they were fully functioning enterprises, with neat signs displayed at the roadside — the name of the farm, the family who owned it, the type of cattle they bred. Friesians and Holsteins mostly, with the appropriate illustration of a proud beast under the family name. There had been no such sign at Pity Wood.

The post office in the next village was open for business only from eleven a.m. to one p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Like so many rural post offices, it was operating what were officially called ‘satellite hours’. Villagers here were lucky — many areas had lost their facilities altogether. But, since this was Friday, it was no less closed.

Most of the buildings seemed to be either holiday cottages or offering B amp;B. They were deserted in mid-winter, dormant and empty, awaiting an influx of tourists in the spring, their owners praying there wouldn’t be a repeat of 2001, when the foot and mouth outbreak had destroyed their business.

The only other notable feature in the village was a farming heritage centre, which looked quite a new development. An interesting avenue of diversification, preserving the heritage instead of farming.

‘Any other suggestions?’ asked Murfin.

Cooper unfolded a map of the Rakedale area. ‘There’s another farm up the road, away from the village. We oughtn’t to miss that.’

‘I’ve been given the name of a retired bobby who lives near here,’ said Fry. ‘Palfreyman, he’s called. Now, if he’s an old-style copper, he could be a very good bet to know all about the Suttons. Well, as much as anyone here does.’

‘Where does he live?’

‘Hollowbrook Cottage, the landlord of the pub said. It should be up this same road.’

‘I see it,’ said Cooper, with his finger on the map. ‘We can do both together quite easily.’

‘You know what? I think you can take the ex-bobby, Ben,’ said Fry.

‘Oh, thanks. Is that because you think I’m the best person for the job, then?’

‘Yes. Well … that, and the length of the drive up to his house. Someone is going to get wet.’