Stephen Booth - Dying to Sin

‘Did you find anything?’

‘No. The bosses turned up — and your lot, CID. They decided she was a genuine case of suspicious circumstances. They pulled out all the stops for a while.’

Cooper looked at him. ‘You didn’t agree with that assessment?’

‘It didn’t matter what I thought. I was just a young response bobby, wet behind the ears.’ Palfreyman shrugged. ‘I had no evidence anyway, just a bit of an odd feeling about the parents. The way they reacted seemed off, somehow. They were bothered about the wrong things — asking where we were going to look, when we’d be coming back to talk to them again, that sort of thing. Do you know what I mean?’

‘You had a gut instinct,’ said Cooper.

‘Right.’

‘And what happened to the child?’

‘Oh, they found her, six months later. She was unrecognizable by then, though. The father thought he’d suffocated her in her sleep, and they both panicked. So they waited until we’d gone, and they buried her under the garden shed. I always wondered if she might still have been alive when we first arrived.’

‘There’s no way you could tell that.’

Palfreyman watched his visitors for some reaction, and seemed disappointed. ‘A gut instinct doesn’t count for much these days, does it? Some of the old school might have listened to me back then, but not the SIO who was put on the case. He was too full of himself. Done all the courses, got all the certificates. If I’d said anything to him, I’d just have made a fool of myself. I still had hopes of promotion then, you see.’

‘I understand,’ said Cooper.

Palfreyman laughed. ‘Sad, isn’t it?’

‘No.’

‘Yes it is. Those are the decisions that come back to haunt you years later, you know. The ones where you chickened out, bottled it, or betrayed your own beliefs.’ He looked more closely at Cooper. ‘Has it happened to you yet, lad? Don’t let it, if it’s not too late already. Be true to yourself. Say what you think.’ He nodded at Hitchens. ‘Don’t play their game. You’ll regret it later, if you do.’

‘I’ll remember that,’ said Cooper.

But Palfreyman leaned across and gripped his arm. ‘It’s important. You know there are lots of coppers who feel like I do. They just daren’t say so.’

As they were leaving Hollowbrook Cottage, Palfreyman held Cooper back for a moment until he was out of earshot of his DI.

‘You know, back then, if you’d visited Rakedale, you could have depended on finding people with a bit of self-reliance — they were known across Derbyshire for a streak of independence. It was an independent spirit forged by hardship, all right. But that made them all the better as people, I reckon.’

‘I think I know what you mean,’ said Cooper.

‘Well, you’ve met some of the people who live in Rakedale now. Would you say that describes them?’

‘Perhaps not, sir.’

‘Don’t be so namby-pamby, lad. You can see perfectly well they’re not like that any more. They’re defeated. Their spirit has gone.’

Cooper wasn’t sure about Palfreyman’s verdict on the people of Rakedale. His contempt had sounded more like a judgement on himself.

There seemed to be building going on everywhere in Dublin — new offices, new housing estates, new roads. Fry saw signs claiming that some of the projects had been funded by the European Union. So that’s where her taxes had been going. She’d often wondered.

Detective Garda Tony Lenaghan had greeted her in the arrivals hall at the crowded airport. He was a cheerful-looking man in his thirties, relaxed and talkative. He gave Fry such a genuine smile of welcome that she almost hugged him on the spot. She hadn’t felt like doing that to anyone for years.

‘Sergeant Fry, welcome to An Garda Siochana.’

He loaded her bag into his car and asked where she was staying. It was only a short drive from the airport at Swords to Coolock, which turned out to be an area of north Dublin, lying somewhere between the M1 urban motorway and the northern arc of Dublin Bay.

‘Croke Park is just down the road here,’ said Lenaghan. ‘We were all on duty at Croke, back in February. The rugby, you know? England versus Ireland. Your boys had never been allowed to play at Croke before, for obvious reasons.’

Fry frowned, thinking she was missing some arcane fact about the game of rugby.

‘Obvious?’

‘Because of the Black and Tans.’

After a few seconds, Lenaghan rightly interpreted her silence.

‘You do know about the Black and Tans? The massacre in 1920?’

‘Sorry.’

Lenaghan stared at her in amazement. In fact, he stared for so long that Fry started to worry about his car drifting dangerously across the carriageway.

‘Thirteen spectators and one player were killed during the match between Dublin and Tipperary. Shot by the Black and Tans. It was the original Bloody Sunday massacre. Surely they teach you about that at school in England, Sergeant?’

‘No. These Black and Tans — were they English, then?’

Lenaghan shook his head in despair. ‘Eight hundred years of suppression, and you just forget.’

They’d booked her a room in a place called the Flyover B amp;B, a place with pine dressers and cast-iron fireplaces. Its name exactly described its location, right under Junction 1 of the motorway, where it met the Upper Drumcondra Road.

Fry made arrangements to meet up with Lenaghan in the morning, and she unpacked in her room. Then she switched on the TV, more for some background noise than because she wanted to watch anything.

Finally, she got out her phone. It had switched automatically to a local service provider in Ireland, but there were no messages that she’d missed. She put it on the table by the bed. But for the rest of the evening, her phone did not ring.

Cooper was sitting in his flat in Welbeck Street. He was watching the news on the telly, with his cat Randy purring on his knee and his mobile phone pressed to his ear.

‘So what do you want to do tonight?’ he asked.

‘I want to go shopping,’ said Liz. ‘I’ve still got some last-minute stuff to buy.’

‘Really? I thought you were more organized than that. I imagined you were the sort of person who had everything put away months ago. Drawers full of carefully wrapped and labelled presents for everybody you could think of.’

‘Presents, yes. But there are a few other things I need to take home with me for Christmas Day.’

‘And you want to do it tonight?’

‘Yes, Ben.’

Cooper exchanged glances with his cat, Randy. He’d never understood the appeal of shopping, but shopping on a Monday night seemed downright perverse.

‘OK, then. Where do you want to go?’

‘Meadowhall. We can be there in half an hour or so, and it’s open until nine o’clock tonight.’

‘Meadowhall? A week before Christmas? You’re kidding. Think of the crowds — it’ll be bedlam.’

‘It’s all right if you don’t want to come, Ben.’

Cooper sighed. ‘No. I’m sure it’ll be an experience.’

David Palfreyman opened the cupboard and took out the bottle of whisky. Glenfiddich, and it was still half full. He smiled for the first time that day.

‘There is a God, after all.’

It had been quite a day, and he deserved a drink. The police asking him more questions, a visit from Mel. It had been quite a week, actually, with the news from Pity Wood Farm that had gone round the village like wildfire, and the murder of Tom Farnham. But he’d resisted the bottle until now, hadn’t even peeped in the cupboard. But a large whisky was called for. A very large whisky, why not?

He poured a good-sized tumbler and held it up to the light, admiring the colour of the Glenfiddich. Peaty brown, with a hint of gold. Gorgeous. He could look at it for hours.