Stephen Booth - Dying to Sin

‘I lived near the Suttons before I came in here, you know,’ she said.

‘Did you? At Rakedale?’

‘One of the cottages on Main Street is mine. The one with the green door.’

‘I think I know it.’

Cooper decided not to tell her that the cottage was standing empty and the paintwork of the door could barely be called green any more. He guessed she hadn’t been home for a long time.

‘I know them all in that village. Have you met the family at the pub, the Dains?’

‘Yes, I have.’

‘Ada Dain is a friend of mine.’

‘It’s the Suttons I’m really interested in,’ said Cooper. ‘The Suttons of Pity Wood Farm.’

‘Pity Wood. Oh, aye.’

The old lady glanced to one side and clutched his arm a bit more tightly. ‘I could tell you a few things about the Suttons,’ she said.

‘Could you?’ said Cooper. ‘Could you really? Shall we have a sit down in the sun lounge for a moment?’

Fry hadn’t been in a theatre for a long time. She thought it had probably been the Birmingham Rep, and it was a smart new theatre then, all glass and white walls. Nothing like the Royal Theatre, Edendale. This place looked as though it had hardly been designed to accommodate the public at all. The access was via narrow corridors, and flight after flight of shallow, plush-covered steps.

She found Jo Brindley in a makeshift dressing room, waiting for her call to go on stage for a rehearsal. There were four or five other women there, but they left when Fry arrived and stood outside in the corridor, chattering.

‘We thought we had it all off perfectly, but the director and choreographer decided to make some changes after the first couple of nights,’ said Mrs Brindley. ‘It’s putting all the girls into a bit of a tizz. They’ll be nervous when we go on again. Sometimes it’s better just to leave things alone, don’t you think?’

‘I couldn’t really comment,’ said Fry, staring at the woman’s outfit and make-up. ‘So you’re a dancer, rather than an actress?’

‘Well, a bit of everything. The little group of us are a sort of comic turn, you see. We don’t dance exactly, but we do things together, so we have to be choreographed.’

‘I see. I came to ask you about the information you and your husband gave to the mobile police unit in Rakedale. About a Mr Jack Elder.’

‘Yes, Alex phoned to say that you’d called at the house. I don’t know what I can tell you that you don’t already know from my husband. It was Alex who spoke to this man, not me.’

Over their heads, music began. Feet thumped on wooden boards. Fry had to raise her voice over the noise.

‘Mrs Brindley, I know you’ve been in Rakedale longer than your husband — you inherited the house from an aunt, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘So you must know more about the sort of beliefs and superstitions people in a place like Rakedale have. I’ve heard talk of something called the “Old Religion”.’

‘Oh, I remember the old people talking about things like that. I mean, the people who were already old when I was a child — my grandmothers, and their generation. But it doesn’t still go on now, does it? I’m sure it can’t do, Sergeant. Not in this age of TV and computers and mobile phones. I can’t credit that people still believe in those things.’

‘But there was an incident when you first moved to Rakedale, wasn’t there? A rather unpleasant incident, involving you personally.’

‘Oh. So someone has been talking, have they?’ Mrs Brindley gave a brittle laugh, causing the stage make-up on her face to crack and fall in a small shower on her costume. ‘I wonder who that could have been? As if I didn’t know.’

‘PC Palfreyman dealt with it at the time, in his own way. But you must have been disturbed by it.’

‘Yes, of course. To be honest, I’ve never forgotten it. It wasn’t the birds so much as the few minutes when I thought there was an intruder in my house. A real, human intruder.’

‘Well, there must have been a real intruder in the first place. Did Mr Palfreyman ever tell you who he suspected?’

‘No. And I agreed with him that it was best not to know. I would have found it difficult to behave normally with them, if I’d found out. And then it would have been me who was being odd and refusing to be friendly.’

Fry knew from PC Palfreyman’s story that Joanne Stubbs, as she then was, had already been considered odd in the extreme by the villagers of Rakedale. But there were subtle and peculiar dynamics in rural relationships that had to be respected. There was certainly some kind of unspoken code that she didn’t understand. Probably that was why she had never been accepted the way that Joanne Stubbs finally had. It was because she refused to acknowledge the code.

‘A bit of a Catch-22 situation, Mrs Brindley.’

Joanne tugged at her costume. It was only a short tunic, and she was wearing nothing but tights below it.

‘I got over it. There’s no need to drag it all up again now. It’s in the past, as far as I’m concerned.’

‘Do you think the person responsible might have been Jack Elder?’

She sighed. ‘Yes, it’s possible.’

‘Have you mentioned this to your husband?’

‘As I said, it’s in the past.’

In Fry’s experience, the people who said ‘ It’s in the past ’ most often were those who couldn’t wipe out the memory of a traumatic experience. Repeating the mantra seemed to give them some degree of reassurance, like licking an open wound. They used the words as a defence against recollection.

Yes, those bad memories could be a killer.

Cooper had left Liz waiting in the car for him while he talked to Raymond Sutton. She was very tolerant, but by the time he came out of The Oaks, she was starting to sulk a bit. Understandably. He was neglecting her badly.

Cooper apologized as best he could. ‘I came to the reception after the baptism,’ he said. ‘I ate some sandwiches and sausage rolls, because you said you had to stay for a while. Now this was something I had to do.’

‘All right. It’s the job. And did you speak to the old man?’

‘Briefly. They were having a Christmas party.’

‘I hope you stayed away from the mistletoe.’

‘I tried.’

‘So what’s next, Ben?’

He hesitated, conscious of dangerous ground in front of him, but too late to avoid putting his foot right in it.

‘I’ve got to phone Diane Fry.’

Liz was silent for a few moments, staring out of the window. Cooper watched her, fingering his mobile phone, wondering when it would be safe to start dialling. Though her face was turned away from him, he could practically see the conflict going on in Liz’s mind. It was visible in the tenseness of her shoulders, in the way she fiddled with the buttons of her coat, in the ragged breaths that steamed up the damp window. She knew it was the job, and she was aware of its importance to him. But even so …

Finally, she turned back to him.

‘As long as we can go and sit in the pub while you do it, Ben,’ she said. ‘Then at least I won’t have to sit here twiddling my thumbs.’

Fry was back in the office when she took Cooper’s call. While picking mince pie crumbs from the carpet next to her desk, she listened carefully to his account of his visit to The Oaks.

‘And what was it that made you go there this morning, Ben? I didn’t quite understand that part.’

‘It was the baptism service, Diane. “ To follow Christ means dying to sin .”’

‘I’m not big on the Bible, Ben. I’ve read it, of course. But I always tended to skip the miracles and go for the begetting, and the killing of the first born.’