Stephen Booth - Dying to Sin

The second gunman with Alex Brindley was unfamiliar to Cooper. But he felt sure that he’d turn out to be on record, a bit of hired muscle available for the dirty work. There was plenty to be had, if you knew where to ask and you’d got the money. And Alex Brindley had the money, all right. It just didn’t come from the kind of source you might have expected from his nice house and nice family. Dealing in Class A drugs was a lucrative business.

‘No doubt they’ll match the nine millimetres with the Farnham shooting,’ said Cooper.

‘I’d give odds on it. Brindley took Tom Farnham out before he gave away too much information, and he came here to meet Palfreyman, intending to do the same with him.’

Cooper nodded. But David Palfreyman had called in his favours and dealt out his own form of justice for the last time. The manufacture of Class A drugs on his patch had been an insult. The fact that he hadn’t known about it, unforgivable.

They’d been told to sit in a car and wait until they were interviewed. But Cooper got bored and slipped out to watch the activity around Magpie Mine. The floodlights that were going up had turned the scene into a strange underwater world, figures moving around in a yellow murk as if they were swimming. Voices boomed and echoed between the stone walls.

As he stood in the fog, Cooper heard another sound drifting on the night air. It came from way over in the direction of Monyash, or one of the villages to the north. The air was so still that the sound might have been travelling for miles before it reached him. It could have been a message crossing the light years from another planet, for all the sense he made of it.

Then some combination of notes, or a recognizable snatch of syllables, struck a chord in his memory. Carol singers. That’s what he could hear — carol singers. If he wasn’t mistaken, they were performing ‘Once in Royal David’s City’. He pictured a group of singers from a local church, probably performing outside a pub. ‘Stood a lowly cattle shed’ came clear through the fog. It reminded him of Pity Wood Farm, in a strange kind of way. Lowly, all right.

Somebody had once told him that Christmas had been stolen from the pagans. The twenty-fifth of December was supposed to be the birthday of Mithras, the god of blood, worshipped by Romans. Mithraic ceremonies had been held in caves, with the smell of smoke, a long knife plunged into the throat of a sacrificial bullock, and blood that fell hissing on an altar stone. Fire and blood, and the entrails of beasts. It must have been tradition.

Cooper found it unsettling to think about such things out here in the darkness, on a cold night in December, with two bodies lying almost at his feet and pools of fresh blood forming on the ground in the lingering scent of gunpowder. It was as if the singing he heard in the distance might not be carol singers at all, but the chanting of the worshippers of Mithras, deep in their caves.

Well, things went back a tidy way in these parts. Two thousand years? That was just middlin’ old.

Fry had followed him from the car. Cooper looked at her, huddling in her coat against the cold, but still shivering as though she would never stop.

‘Diane,’ he said. ‘Is it too early to wish you happy birthday?’

Thursday

Superintendent Branagh leaned forward across her desk, folding her hands as she regarded the two detectives.

‘And did you see what happened next? What did Mr Palfreyman do?’

‘I was confused for a few minutes,’ said Fry. ‘It was dark, and very foggy.’

‘You couldn’t see anything, DS Fry? You don’t know who fired the first shot?’

‘No.’

‘DC Cooper?’

‘No, ma’am. Sorry.’

Branagh gave them both a hard stare. ‘I sincerely hope there are no misplaced loyalties here. Just because an individual has been in the job previously doesn’t make them immune to the law, you know.’

‘No, ma’am,’ said Fry.

‘We understand.’

The Superintendent didn’t look as though she believed them, though they were both trying hard not to give away any of the signs. Maintain normal eye contact, no fidgeting, no turning away from your questioner.

Branagh looked from Fry to Cooper. Then her gaze returned to Fry and stayed there, ominous and thoughtful.

‘DS Fry, you were the senior officer in this situation. Are you confident that your actions were appropriate and lawful throughout?’

Even Cooper thought he detected a slight hesitation before the reply. Fry was quick to cover it, but it might have been too late.

‘Yes, ma’am.’

The superintendent looked grim. She turned to the notes on her desk and wrote a couple of sentences in small, tight, angry letters that were impossible to read, especially upside down and from this distance.

Branagh glanced up again. ‘Were you aware that Mr David Palfreyman’s granddaughter Melanie had formed a relationship with the Brindleys’ son, Evan?’ she said. ‘A relationship that was disapproved of on both sides?’

There was no need to worry about looking truthful now. The news came out of the blue.

‘No, ma’am.’

‘We had no idea.’

Branagh nodded slowly. ‘There was no love lost between Palfreyman and the Brindleys, by all accounts. Our information is that Alex Brindley came across Mr Palfreyman in the village pub and told him in no uncertain terms to get his granddaughter away from their son. Insults were uttered, angry words were exchanged. We’re treating that as a possible motive for Mr Palfreyman’s actions.’

The two detectives sat silently, having nothing to say. The superintendent scowled in irritation.

‘Would either of you like to comment on that scenario?’

They shook their heads.

‘No, ma’am,’ said Fry.

‘Then you’d better leave, DS Fry. We’re finished here.’

A team of detectives had broken out their stabbies for the raid. They were piling into vehicles to meet the armed support unit at a rendezvous point close to the site of the meth lab in Staveley. Fry and Cooper walked straight into the CID room to join them, and no one objected. They’d been part of the enquiry from the beginning.

Cooper fell into step alongside Fry as they followed DI Hitchens out to the car park.

‘Diane, why were you protecting David Palfreyman back there?’ he said quietly.

‘Why?’ Fry secured her stab vest with a final, violent jerk. ‘Why? How the hell do I know?’

Cooper wondered if she really did know. Not only had David Palfreyman carried out his own form of justice. But it seemed to Cooper that he had also saved their lives.

The location of the raid was a small, run-down industrial estate on the outskirts of the former pit town. A single unit had been identified as the target, rented by a man named and confirmed as a known suspect in the Sheffield drugs trade. The unit was sited towards the back of the estate, but the service road ran straight up to its rear entrance, where a white van stood parked in front of sliding steel doors.

The CID team and Scenes of Crime waited at a distance for their chance to go in. On a signal from the operational commander, the armed officers roared up the roadway in their unmarked vehicles and jumped out, shouting orders that could be heard from the street. Within a few minutes, they had contained the scene, and four suspects were on the ground with plastic cuffs on their wrists, being searched for weapons.

‘Well, that was easy enough,’ said DI Hitchens when the detectives moved in. ‘I like it when things go well. If we find what we’re looking for in this place, I’ll buy you all a drink down at the pub to celebrate. Two drinks, since it’s Christmas.’

They watched the SOCOs climb into their protective suits and breathing apparatus, and enter the premises. Before long, the doors of the unit slid open and they could all see inside. Long benches were filled with equipment — rubber tubing, glass jars, a row of electric cookers. Even from outside the building, the whiff of fumes was enough to make officers begin coughing and backing away towards cleaner air.