Stephen Booth - Dying to Sin

Cooper remembered the kitchen at Pity Wood Farm, the dripping sink and the unidentifiable jars in the fridge sitting next to the builders’ milk. There had certainly been a stink that he might never forget. Whether it was the stink of evil he supposed was open to interpretation.

‘I don’t know what you want,’ said Sutton, suddenly agitated. ‘What is it you want?’

‘Mr Sutton, it was the head, wasn’t it? It had nothing to do with a Hand of Glory. After you threw Billy out, your brother wanted a head.’

Sutton focused on him nervously, his eyes watering now, and Cooper thought he would lose him altogether in the next few moments.

‘I believe in what I believe. But Derek’s faith lay elsewhere. If you believe in something — really believe it — you’re prepared to take your belief to the extreme.’

‘What are you saying, sir?’

‘She was dead already. Dead as can be. Derek said it wouldn’t hurt her. The body is only the shell, when the soul has moved on to a better place.’

‘And so you dug her up and removed her head?’ said Hitchens, aghast. ‘I can’t believe it.’

‘No, no. Well, it was already … detached, more or less.’

Cooper recalled stories of riots at gallows sites, when the families of hanged criminals fought the anatomists’ men for corpses. People had different reasons for wanting possession of a body, or parts of it.

‘Derek said we needed another one,’ said the old man finally. ‘But he was wrong. It never worked, did it?’

And Cooper sat back, suddenly exhausted. He hadn’t realized how tense he’d been, the amount of nervous energy he’d been expending on willing the old man to speak, to stay aware for the amount of time he needed him to.

‘No, Mr Sutton,’ he said wearily. ‘It didn’t work.’

Raymond Sutton looked around the room, his eyes becoming vague as they met the light from the window. Tears glinted in his lashes and settled slowly on to his cheeks.

‘I want you to go away now,’ he said. ‘I want everyone to go away.’

Cooper caught himself shaking uncontrollably by the time he left the interview room. He couldn’t face the idea of crossing the car park from the custody suite and walking back up to the CID room to transcribe his notes, as if everything was perfectly normal. So he sat for a few minutes in his car instead.

He couldn’t conceal the fact that he’d found the interview with Raymond Sutton unbearably upsetting. But at least he knew why — and it wasn’t just some pathetic tendency to sympathize with the underdog, as Diane Fry would have suggested. Raymond Sutton’s rambling about his home being cursed had reminded him too strongly of his own mother at the height of her illness.

Specifically, it reminded him of one traumatic incident that had taken place just before the family had faced up to the fact that Isabel Cooper had deteriorated to the point where they could no longer keep her at home.

Above all, Cooper found that he was remembering the smell. It was as if it had seeped into his car silently and rapidly, like a lethal leak from his exhaust.

There had been a stink in the room worse than anything he had ever smelt on a farm. No cesspit, no slurry tank, no innards from a freshly gutted rabbit or pheasant had ever smelt as bad as the entirely human stench that filled the room. There was excrement daubed across the wallpaper, and on the bedclothes piled on the floor. A pool of urine was drying into a sticky pool on the carpet near to where similar puddles had been scrubbed clean with disinfectant, leaving pale patches like the remnantsof some virulent skin disease. A chair lay on the rug with one leg missing. A curtain had been torn off its rail, and the pages of books and magazines were scattered like dead leaves on every surface. A pink slipper sat ludicrously in a wooden fruit bowl on the chest of drawers, and a thin trickle of blood ran across the top drawer, splitting into two forks across the wooden handle. The drawers and the wardrobe had been emptied of their contents, which were heaped at random on the bed .

It was from beneath the heap of clothes that the noise came, monotonous and inhuman, a low, desperate wailing. When he moved towards the bed, the mound stirred and the keening turned to a fearful whimper. Cooper knew that the crisis was over, for now. But this had been the worst so far, no doubt about it. The evidence was all around him .

He leaned closer to a coat with an imitation fur collar, but was careful not to touch the bed, for fear of sparking off a violent reaction. The coat was drenched in a familiar scent that brought a painful lump to his throat. A white hand was visible briefly as it clutched for a sleeve and the edge of a skirt to pull them closer for concealment. The fingers withdrew again into the darkness like a crab retreating into its shell. The whimpering stopped .

‘ It was the Devil,’ said a small voice from deep in the pile of clothes. ‘The Devil made me do it .’

The mingled odours of stale scent, sweat and excrement and urine made Cooper feel he was aboutto be sick. He swallowed and forced himself to keep his voice steady .

‘ The Devil’s gone away. You can come out now, Mum. The Devil’s gone away .’

When Fry went back in to interview Martin Rourke for a second time, he’d been allowed to consult a lawyer. She was expecting a string of ‘no comments’, and a frustrating end to her trip to Dublin. But maybe things were different here.

‘Of course I remember her,’ said Rourke straight away. ‘I want to be honest with you.’

‘Remember who?’

‘Nadezda, the Slovak. She couldn’t resist trying out the crank herself. Stupid bitch. It made her careless. She was bound to kill herself sooner or later.’

‘Kill herself? You’re suggesting that Nadezda Halak died in an accident?’

‘That’s exactly what happened. It was accidental death, brought on by her own carelessness. That would be a factor, all right.’

Fry glanced at Lenaghan, who gave her a nod to go ahead.

‘Mr Rourke, tell us exactly what happened, in your own words.’

‘Well, there’s nothing much to tell. There was an explosion in the shed one day. None of us knew the chemicals were so dangerous. Nada had been standing closest to the equipment when it blew up.’

‘Nada is …?’

‘The woman you said. Halak. Nada is what we called her, for short.’

‘And she was killed by the explosion?’

‘Dead as you like. It was lucky she was the only one so near. There were other folk about, but they only got a few cuts, one or two acid burns. Nothing serious.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘Some of the workers started to panic, but Tom Farnham quietened them down. He said there was plenty of room on the farm to dispose of a body where no one would ever find it. And who would come looking for her? Like I said, those people move on all the time. They want to be untraceable.’

‘So you buried her on the farm?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the Sutton brothers didn’t object to this?’

Rourke snorted. ‘How could they? They’d done exactly the same thing themselves, three years before.’

Cooper had never felt so bad about questioning a witness. Though they’d achieved what they set out to do, there was no sense of satisfaction in getting Raymond Sutton to confirm what he suspected. It had been a knowledge that he didn’t really want to have to share, but now he couldn’t keep it to himself any longer.

In a way, he supposed he’d been hoping, deep down, that Sutton would deny it, that he’d be able to prove somehow that it had never happened. Well, it might have been better if he’d never asked. But then he would have had to live with the doubt. Cooper knew there had been no way of winning in this situation.