Stephen Booth - Dying to Sin

Cooper didn’t need to ask, he could guess whose decision this had been. Superintendent Branagh was making her presence felt.

‘Are you sure he’s well enough to be interviewed?’ said Cooper. ‘Sir?’

‘We’ve had him checked over by a doctor, of course. But he’s been passed fit, so we’re about to start questioning.’

‘I’m not happy about it.’

‘Tell you what, Ben,’ said Hitchens, with a placatory gesture. ‘You can sit in, and make sure you’re comfortable with it.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

But as soon as he’d said it, Cooper wondered whether he should really be thanking Hitchens. Who was going to take the blame if this all went wrong?

Raymond Sutton looked at the two detectives with resignation as they sat down at the table in the interview room.

‘You’re going to be asking me about the woman,’ he said directly.

‘The woman?’ said Cooper. ‘Do you mean Nadezda Halak, sir?’

‘I had no connection with her at all,’ said Sutton. ‘Except that I witnessed her death.’

Martin Rourke was one of the least attractive men Fry had ever seen, and that was saying something. His head was badly shaved, leaving a short, patchy fuzz all over his skull, like an old tennis ball that had been chewed by the dog.

‘But I know nothing about those women,’ he said.

‘We have evidence that you knew them, Mr Rourke. You can’t deny it.’

‘I don’t mean that. I’m not trying to deny that I knew them. Of course, they were around a lot. But I don’t know what happened to them. I had nothing to do with that. As far as I was concerned, they just disappeared.’

‘We’ll see what the Crown Prosecution Service has to say. If they think there’s enough evidence, you’ll be charged with two murders.’

‘That won’t happen. It can’t.’

Rourke stared at her, his face suggesting that he might have said the wrong thing already.

‘What was the involvement of the Sutton brothers in your operation?’

‘The two old guys? We kept them out of the way as much as possible. Tom Farnham had them under his influence well enough. He could twist them round his little finger, could Farnham. He’d got himself well in there, all neat and tidy.’

‘Were you laundering red diesel at any point during this time?’

‘No. That was what we told the old guys,’ said Rourke. ‘They never questioned it, the idiots. Well, why should they? They were already implicated, because they’d used it themselves as a way of saving money. They were guilty before I ever got to work on them. In fact, Tom Farnham got a guy he knew to process a few gallons for them to use, so they’d have no trouble persuading themselves to believe it. But the bottom had gone out of the diesel business by then. Farmers got too scared of the Excise.’

‘But why there? Why Pity Wood Farm?’

‘Farnham was the man who came up with the idea. And, I have to give him his due, Pity Wood was a perfect set-up for what we wanted. A remote farm, where no one would notice the smell. Lots of smells on a farm, eh? And plenty of empty sheds, plus space to bury the waste. Perfect. All we needed was labour. Well, labour that didn’t ask any questions. That was where Martin Rourke came in. It was my speciality. I had the contacts with people in the import business.’ He grinned. ‘Human imports, I mean. Obviously.’

‘Cheap imported labour.’

‘But so what? It’s only like getting your telly from China, or your clothes made in India. The whole world runs on cheap labour now. It’s a fact of twenty-first-century economics. The only difference is that people don’t care as long as they can’t see it happening. Sweat shops in Asia are fine, but let someone like me employ a few economic migrants and the law comes down on me like a ton of bricks.’

‘I think the correct term would be illegal immigrant.’

‘Whatever. It’s the same, no matter what you call them. But if it happens here, some entrepreneur like me taking advantage of cheap labour to run a going concern, then people get all outraged. What a scandal, they say. It’s practically slavery. All that sort of crap. But those workers live a lot better here than they do in Bangladesh, you know.’

‘Or Slovakia.’

‘Slovakia?’

‘Don’t you remember a woman called Nadezda Halak? She was from Slovakia.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t remember their names, for heaven’s sake. They got their wages in cash, and we provided accommodation, but that’s as far as our obligations went. They didn’t stay around for long, any of them. They’d get a toe-hold in this country, or in the UK, and off they’d go to work in a sandwich factory or something. We were providing a service, really. The government ought to have been giving us a grant.’

‘You were using these people to manufacture illegal drugs, at great risk to themselves,’ pointed out Fry. ‘There’s no way you can even attempt to justify that.’

‘We all take risks in life,’ said Rourke. ‘If we think it’s worth it. Don’t you take risks, in your job?’

‘The difference,’ said Fry, ‘is that I know what risks I’m taking.’

With the tapes turning slowly, Raymond Sutton talked. He didn’t appear to be talking to Hitchens and Cooper, or even to the tape recorder, but to some voice inside his own head — a voice which seemed to be answering him at times.

‘When you’re young, you don’t think you’re ever going to die,’ he said. ‘But sometimes, when you’re old, it can’t come too soon.’

Cooper leaned towards Sutton. ‘Your brother, Derek — you remember we talked about his superstitions?’

‘Eh?’

‘Derek had some funny beliefs, didn’t he? You said he was a bit fey , like your mother.’

‘You never knew our mother.’

‘You told me, Mr Sutton. Remember?’

Cooper wanted to take hold of his arm and shake it until the old man remembered. Though he held himself under tight control, Sutton seemed to read the shadow of a threat in his face and flinched away.

‘All kinds of bad luck came along. But it was only to be expected. It was what I warned them all about.’

‘What do you mean?’

Sutton stared at him. ‘The bad luck. All those disasters. Derek said there would be bad luck when Billy left the farm. He said it had been known for generations. There was a terrible row when I chucked Billy out.’

‘You got rid of the skull?’

‘Yes. Damned thing. It was damning us all. I told Derek, it was an evil thing, and it had to go. The house was cursed, cursed by the Devil, and my brother was one of his dupes. It had to go.’

‘There must have been arguments.’

‘Arguments, aye. Blazing rows. Derek wouldn’t hear of it, and we stopped speaking of the thing altogether after a while. One night, when he was asleep, I took it out of the wall, and I smashed it up and I burned it in the incinerator, and I scraped out the ash and I drove out to Carsington Reservoir, and I tipped it in the water. And Billy was gone. For he that is dead is freed from sin .’

‘How did your brother respond when he found out?’

‘He was raving. He was never stable, Derek. Never followed God. He’d strayed off the path. God rest his soul, but he was a lost cause.’

‘We found traces of potassium nitrate in your kitchen — that’s saltpetre. And other ingredients used in a recipe for a Hand of Glory. Have you heard of it?’

‘Ah, he was always on with his messing. Meddling with things he knew nothing about. Tempting the Devil, I called it. I wouldn’t have none of it. I threw his stuff out if I found it, or chucked it down the sink. He started trying to hide things from me, but I smelled him out. The stink of evil is never forgotten.’