Stephen Booth - Dying to Sin

It might be unfair, but ‘ I don’t know what you mean ’ was another of those phrases that he’d heard so often during interviews. Every police officer had heard it, many times. It was a diversionary phrase, a way of avoiding answering a difficult question that had just been put.

As he watched Sutton being wheeled towards the house, Cooper was distracted by the noises around him. Everyone seemed to be sneezing and coughing at Pity Wood that morning. It sounded like the ward of an isolation hospital.

‘Have you been passing your cold on, Diane?’ he said.

‘It’s this bloody weather. The only wonder is that we haven’t all got pneumonia.’

Cooper didn’t suffer much from winter colds himself. He put it down to his upbringing. Being brought up in a house where there was no heating in the bedrooms or in the bathroom, and the snow sometimes lay on the inside of the window ledges. Bad weather had never kept Matt and himself indoors when they were growing up. Rain, wind, snow, fog — they had been outside in everything, and it made you hardy.

But he had to admit that he was starting to feel a bit wheezy himself. There was an irritation at the back of his throat, and a tendency for his eyes to water in the cold wind.

A police photographer hovered a few yards away, video recording Raymond Sutton’s visit. It wasn’t clear what DI Hitchens hoped to glean from Sutton’s reactions, but they would be recorded for detailed evaluation later.

First they steered his wheelchair gingerly over the duckboards towards the tent covering the area where Jamie Ward had discovered the first body. Sutton looked around with bemused eyes. Cooper could see that he barely recognized the place. And why would he? Even before the police arrived with their vehicles and tents and began to dig up the farmyard, Nikolai Dudzik’s builders had already made a start on transforming Pity Wood into that gentleman’s residence.

‘Yes, we had a shed that stood here,’ he said, after the first question had been repeated to him. ‘But it’s long gone, twenty years or more. We broke up the foundations for hardcore. Is that what you want to know? No, I know nowt of any woman.’

Fry nodded, and one of the care assistants released the brake and pushed Sutton towards the back of the house. He physically flinched at the sight of the yellow skip and the trenches dug across his former property. He began to tremble and become agitated.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s all wrong. There’s no point in asking me these questions. You should be asking Farnham.’

‘If only we could, sir,’ said Fry.

‘Those people who worked here, they were brought by Farnham and the other bloke, the Irishman.’

‘Mr Rourke?’

‘Yes. They brought people here, they worked, they went away again. I never knew who they were, or where they went. I didn’t ask. I left it to Farnham. Was that wrong?’

‘Who can say, sir?’

‘The old caravan behind the house,’ said Cooper, as the wheelchair was turned round. ‘Was that used for housing some of the migrant workers?’

‘Aye, now and then. Farnham and Rourke used it for themselves, too.’

‘Did they? What for?’

‘Nay, I don’t know. And I didn’t — ’

‘You didn’t ask. Of course.’

Despite Sutton’s words, his expression was tight with anxiety, his eyes close to tears, as if he was remembering more than he was telling, suffering pangs of guilt for things he’d done, or hadn’t done. Or maybe for what he’d never asked.

Sutton gazed around the farm, like a man saying a last goodbye.

‘When I die, this place will still be here, these hills and valleys, choose how.’

Fry looked at Cooper for a translation. ‘Choose how?’

‘He means “come what may”.’

‘Aye,’ said Sutton. ‘Choose how. Come what may. The hills and valleys, but not the farm. There are some cousins of ours over in Stoke — they can have whatever money there is when I’m gone, and welcome to it. I would never have given anyone the farm.’

‘This farm must have been here for centuries, Mr Sutton.’

‘Aye,’ agreed Sutton. ‘It’s middlin’ old.’

Cooper watched the old man until he seemed to be calmer.

‘Mr Sutton, we found Screaming Billy,’ he said.

‘Billy? Aye, where is he?’

‘Right now, he’s in a laboratory in Sheffield.’

‘Derek would have said it won’t do ’em any good. It was bad luck ever to move him, Derek said.’

‘But you didn’t believe in that, sir?’

‘No. Complete rubbish. The Lord has your fate in his hands, not some dirty old bit of bone.’

‘And was Derek trying to preserve a hand?’

‘A hand? I don’t know of any hand.’

But Sutton looked troubled, as if it was a possibility that seemed only too likely.

‘We found the materials in your kitchen for preserving a hand in saltpetre. It’s an old recipe. Your brother could have learned it from the museum in Edendale.’

‘I never knew what he was up to,’ muttered Sutton. ‘And never cared to ask, either. It would always end up in a row, and he knew it. Superstitious bastard, he was. I could never talk any sense into him.’

Cooper recalled Palfreyman’s description of the two brothers sitting silently in their kitchen, failing to exchange a word all evening. He wondered when exactly Raymond had tried talking sense to his brother. It would have been much easier just to let him get on with his odd ways, wouldn’t it? That was usually the way in families. Familiarity bred acceptance, and all kinds of bizarre and strange behaviour would be treated as normal within the family, no matter how likely it was to attract the men in white coats if it was seen on the outside.

‘Did he have any particular superstitions that bothered you, sir?’

‘Bothered me? Nowt bothers me,’ said Sutton. ‘Nowt.’

Wrong word. Try again. ‘There were some things he believed in that you disagreed with?’

‘Damn well all of them. Oh, he went to chapel, but he never followed the way. He was tainted, corrupted. Right from a child, he was. Our dad showed us the right way to do things, but Derek had to be different. He took after our mother, I reckon. Folk always said she was fey.’

Fey. It was many years since Cooper had heard that word. His mother had used it of one of their neighbours at one time. It had been meant in a disparaging way, he was sure. Disapproving, certainly. But he’d always felt there was a degree of admiration in the word, too. A sense of the awe and respect that had traditionally been accorded to the wise woman, the healer, the widow people surreptitiously visited at dusk to ask for advice, or a special herbal preparation. She’s a bit fey . Attuned to the supernatural world — he supposed that would be the nearest translation. In touch with the fairies, perhaps. Blessed with visionary or clairvoyant ability, if you really wanted to be kind. But Cooper had an inkling there was another meaning, too.

‘And what about Alan?’

Sutton was suddenly silent. The tears that had been threatening to appear since he arrived at the farm started to trickle down his cheeks. Cooper immediately regretted being so blunt. And he prayed he never reached the stage in his own life where he could be made to weep so easily.

‘Alan is long gone, too,’ said Sutton.

‘What happened to him, Mr Sutton?’

‘He left. He couldn’t stand living here any more.’

‘Where is he now?’

Sutton gave a long, unsteady sigh. ‘I don’t know. Alan’s gone, Derek’s gone, the farm is gone. What else matters?’

Fry stood over his wheelchair. ‘Is Alan still alive?’ she asked.

Sutton turned away, refusing to look at her.

‘We haven’t heard from him for years. Eight years or more, it must be.’