Stephen Booth - Dying to Sin

It was only when he heard the crash of his garage door thrown back and the thump of boots on concrete that Farnham began to rise. He had barely straightened up when the first of the dark figures burst into the light, meeting the turn of his shoulder with the impact of a baseball bat.

Fry was a good driver, trained in the West Midlands force driving school to handle pursuit cars. But she spent most of the drive home distracted from the road. She was trying to avoid Christmas songs on the radio, flicking from station to station until she found something unseasonal. She ended up listening to ‘Crosstown Traffic’ from Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland — the only rock song she could think of that featured a kazoo. Nothing Christmassy about that.

For the past few hours, Fry had been trying to keep the conversation with DI Hitchens out of her mind. But that was only possible during the day, when she was working. The Pity Wood Farm enquiry provided enough to occupy her mind and take her full concentration. It wasn’t the case when she left the station in West Street and headed out towards her flat in Grosvenor Avenue. The concentration started to slip, despite her best efforts.

Fry knew that she ought to have gone south, to London. They always needed officers in the Met, and it would have suited her much better in a big city where nobody cared who you were or what you did with your life. By now, she would have been well established, fast-tracking to promotion, instead of dickering about in this rural force.

Turning her Peugeot into Castleton Road, Fry stopped at the little corner shop run by an Asian family. The young couple had always been pleasant to her, even when she hadn’t been in a mood to reciprocate. A friendly greeting could be welcome at times.

She wasn’t really hungry, but she bought enough supplies to keep body and soul together for another twenty-four hours. Cheese and toast would satisfy her. Anything else would sit uncomfortably on that tight, anxious knot in her stomach. She passed over the cakes and chocolate displays, and instead picked up a yogurt. And not just any yogurt, but an organic bio-live luscious low-fat fruit yogurt, raspberry and cranberry flavour. She felt strangely virtuous.

Groups of young men and women tottered or staggered around the pubs on the corner of Grosvenor Avenue, some of them with tinsel in their hair or reindeer antlers on their heads. It was Saturday night, of course. She’d forgotten that. At weekends, some of her fellow flat-dwellers lived dangerous and unpredictable private lives. Not her concern when she was off duty, though.

‘Just stay out of my way, or I’ll run you over,’ she muttered at a drunk who stumbled off the kerb into the path of her car. What difference would another dead body make?

But a fresh body was a different matter from aged remains. Pity Wood Farm was a classic historical case. Fry knew that most of the evidence in any historical investigation was found in the form of layers. It didn’t matter whether you were researching your family history, or hunting for a serial killer. There would be layers on top of each other — different levels of meaning and significance. Over the years, meanings distorted and accumulated irrelevant associations. An enquiry had to dig down to the lowest level to find the one that was most accurate, the most free of irrelevant material. A good bit of digging, that was what she needed. But psychological digging, not the knee-deep-in-mud type.

She was aware that the lorry driver, Jack Elder, might turn out to be a complete red herring. But it was comforting to have someone in custody. Anyone. At least there would be charges at some point.

But somewhere, waiting to be dug up, were the identities of the two victims at Pity Wood Farm. They couldn’t remain Victim A and Victim B, a couple of reference numbers in the anthropologist’s report, and a Forensic Science Service casework enquiries code. They had been human beings once, and they were owed a proper identity.

The body that Jamie Ward discovered had made the message clear. Fry wouldn’t forget that grey hand, bent in a pathetic summons, coaxing her towards the grave, and ensuring that she could never turn her back on it.

Of course, once an ID was established, that was really only the beginning. These young women had families — partners, parents, perhaps even children — who were wondering where they’d gone, and waiting to hear from them.

There was an astonishing statistic that Fry had once been given. Something like ninety-eight per cent of couples who lost a son or daughter through murder would separate within a couple of years of the crime. It was because the loss of a child was an experience that destroyed your life, and put such a strain on a relationship that the damage might never be repaired.

Ninety-eight per cent. That was a really bad statistic. When a victim had been a teenager or young woman when she went missing, the parents would no longer be together, almost certainly. She would be looking for people whose lives had already been wrecked. She’d be turning up on their doorstep to tell them a body had been discovered, and she thought it was probably their daughter. Could they come along and confirm that? Oh, and Merry Christmas, by the way.

Fry finally pulled up at number twelve and walked up to her flat on the first floor. Angie was out, of course, but her clothes were still here. Outside, the noise of drunken revellers would go on for hours yet, and the rain wouldn’t stop them. It had been dark since before she called at the museum to see the hand of glory. But that was the nature of late December.

Rain and dark nights. Ideal for festive jollity.

Farnham’s clothes were soaking wet now, and his shoes slithered in the mud as he dodged from tree to tree, stumbling over roots. His breath was ragged against the sound of rain and the whip of branches hitting his face. The noise of his breathing went ahead of him through the woods. But it was the sound of a man whose life was already over.

For a second, he stopped and leaned against the trunk of an oak tree. He shook his head, spraying rain, sweat and mud from his face. His jacket was streaked with dirt, and fragments of vegetation clung to his jeans where he had charged through the undergrowth. Ahead of him were more trees, and the bank of a fast-running stream, brown water surging noisily in the night.

His wheezing concealed any noises from behind him, except for one soft footstep. There was a moment of silence. Birds rustled their damp wings in the branches, and a small shower of water fell on his face. As his breath blew out painfully into the air, he knew it might be his last.

‘You don’t want to do this,’ he called. ‘Stop it, now.’

He heard his own voice shaking with fear, and became angry at the humiliation he was being forced to suffer.

‘You’re making a mistake. You know that? A big mistake.’

A bullet whistled over his head and shredded a branch before burying itself in the trunk of a tree. It was no more than a bit of foreplay, though. Farnham heard the cocking of a hammer.

He began to run again, dodging left and right, slithering in the mud between the trees. He was almost back at his house, desperately trying to reach a phone, when the second bullet entered the back of his thigh, just above the knee. It snapped a tendon, punched a hole out of the femur and pierced the full thickness of his thigh muscle. The bullet emerged from a rip in his jeans and buried itself in the earth as he fell forward on to his face.

Farnham tried to get up again, but found his right leg refused to support his weight. He was crying as he flopped helplessly on the ground, terrified of the footsteps moving slowly towards him — a deliberate, skating tread which barely disturbed the wet leaves. He heard a rustling, and then a voice, quiet and low.