Kill Call (40 page)

‘It had done well for him in the past, and he’d managed to keep just the right side of the law, despite everything. Patrick Rawson was a man confident of his own abilities. And Naomi Widdowson came forward and offered him the perfect deal at exactly the right time. The psychology of it was very clever.’

‘That doesn’t sound like something Naomi would figure out.’

‘No, of course she didn’t.’ Fry sounded exasperated, as if she thought he wasn’t really listening. ‘It was all planned by Deborah Rawson.’

‘Oh, right,’ said Cooper.

They were passing a corner by the Riley Graves, one of Eyam’s macabre little tourist attractions. The majority of plague victims were buried in unknown graves, but here was a memorial to John Hancock, who’d died at the height of the plague. The inscription was just about legible, despite some cracking to the gravestone.

As I doe now, So must thou lye. Remember, man, That thou shalt die.

‘But why would Rawson’s wife set him up like that?’ said Cooper.

‘She’d convinced herself that her husband was having an affair. She overheard some argument between him and Michael Clay over payments that were going out through one of their business accounts.’

‘Rent for the house? Eden View?’

‘Yes. Deborah put two and two together, and came up with the conclusion that her husband had a love nest in Derbyshire, and that explained why he was in the habit of spending longer away from home than seemed necessary for business purposes.’

‘I see.’

Cooper saw that many of the names on adjacent gravestones to John Hancock’s were members of the Hancock family. The plague had taken old and young, grandparents and children. None had escaped. As a result, John Hancock’s wife Elizabeth had buried almost her whole family here in the course of a week, struggling through the fields every day with a diseased corpse for the protection of the village. Self-sacrifice and the acceptance of suffering weren’t fashionable ideals any more, were they?

‘I think that was the first sign I had that she was lying,’ said Fry, breaking into his thoughts again.

‘What was?’

‘Aren’t you listening, Ben? When Deborah insisted she’d never had any suspicions about Patrick. It didn’t fit with the picture of the man I’d built up.’

‘A charming rogue, with a smooth tongue and a casual disregard for the truth.’

‘Exactly. Deborah Rawson would have been mad not to wonder occasionally whether she could trust him. But when I asked her, she exaggerated the lie too much. She would have been better telling me a small part of the truth.’

‘You’re getting very cynical about people, Diane,’ said Cooper, as they walked on.

‘I always was,’ said Fry. ‘Always.’

She was right that he was having difficulty listening to her. This wasn’t what he’d come to talk about, and her manner was making him nervous. She was freezing up minute by minute.

‘The trouble was, Deborah had it completely wrong,’ said Fry. ‘It was Michael Clay who was making the payments, supporting his brother’s illegitimate daughter. That’s the poison of suspicion. Anything you hear can seem like evidence.’

Cooper nodded as they headed back to the village square. A powerful smell of cooking food hit him. Food. That would make a difference.

‘So Patrick Rawson’s death only happened on our turf because of the existence of Eden View and Michael Clay’s niece?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘But Naomi Widdowson insisted in interview that Rawson’s death was an accident, didn’t she?’ said Cooper. ‘She said they just wanted to scare him, to pay him back for all the distress he’d caused to her, and scores of people like her.’

‘That might have been what Naomi thought,’ said Fry. ‘Her boyfriend Adrian Tarrant is quite a different matter. I knew I recognized him at the hunt meeting, when he was acting as a steward. Just the sort of person the hunting fraternity don’t need if they want to improve their image, Ben.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘And Deborah Rawson made quite a separate deal with him. She paid him three thousand pounds.’

‘Three thousand pounds? It’s not much, really.’

‘It is, if you think you’re going to get away with it. And Adrian Tarrant thought he would.’

‘Just as Patrick Rawson always did.’

‘I suppose so.’

Cooper thought back to the hunt saboteurs’ report of hearing the kill call on the morning of the hunt. Earlier, there had been the phone call from Naomi Widdowson to Patrick Rawson, the call that had brought him to his death. That was a kind of kill call in its own way. And there had been the call from Deborah Rawson to Adrian Tarrant, too.

‘The argument Mr Wakeley heard …’ said Cooper.

‘Yes?’

‘I was assuming he’d heard Naomi Widdowson shouting at Patrick Rawson, and perhaps Rawson arguing back. That doesn’t fit with the story, though, does it?’

‘Not quite,’ said Fry. ‘Naomi must certainly have shouted at him about Rosie. But Rawson didn’t stand there and argue with her. He ran.’

‘Yes. So the rest of the argument must have been between Naomi and Adrian, mustn’t it?’

Fry nodded. ‘Of course. She didn’t want Tarrant to go back to the hut, she was trying to make him come away with her. I think Naomi was telling the truth on this point – that she only wanted to give Patrick Rawson a scare. But Adrian had another job to do.’

‘He wasn’t much of a hit man, though. Too fond of unnecessary showiness – I mean, the business with the hunting horn and all that. The kill call.’

‘Well, he enjoyed the work too much,’ said Fry. ‘That was his problem. It doesn’t do to get emotionally involved.’

‘So I’ve heard.’

Then Cooper remembered David Headon’s almost casual reference to Attack Warning Red, the recognized alert to an imminent nuclear attack during the 1960s. Attack Warning Red? That would have been the kill call on a massive scale.

They had lunch at the Miners’ Arms, a pub boasting that it was old enough to be pre-plague. Fry ate bacon-wrapped chicken breast stuffed with leeks and mushrooms, while Cooper had the home-made venison and orange pie.

As they ate, Cooper tried to close his ears to the voice of a man at a nearby table, boasting to two women that he kept a loaded pistol on his bedside table, in case of burglars. ‘If I caught a burglar in my house, I’d shoot him. It’s the way I was trained.’

‘I heard your cat died,’ said Fry, draining half a glass of the house white.

As small talk, it wasn’t a brilliant opening. Cooper looked at the rapidly disappearing wine and wondered if Fry could really be as nervous as she seemed, so unaccustomed to a purely social situation.

‘How did you hear that?’ asked Cooper, genuinely curious about her sources of information.

‘Oh, it was mentioned around the office,’ said Fry vaguely. ‘Becky Hurst said something, I think.’

Office gossip, then? He didn’t think she ever noticed it, let alone paid any attention to it.

‘Yes, it’s true. Though I’m not entirely sure he was mine. He kind of came with the flat, and adopted me.’

‘Shame, though.’

‘You’re not a cat person, are you?’ said Cooper. ‘I’m sure you can’t be.’

‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

‘Well … no, you’re just not, Diane.’

Fry swallowed some more wine. ‘Can’t stand ’em,’ she admitted. ‘Aren’t you going to get a new one?’

‘I’m going to look this afternoon.’

‘From a sanctuary?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought it would be.’

Despite his best intentions, Cooper felt himself bridle at her tone. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Human or animal, it has to be a lost cause with you. You have to be able to ride in like a knight in shining armour and perform the noble rescue. It’s what you get off on. I’ve seen it often enough.’

Her accusation was so unfair that Cooper didn’t know what to say. How had she known that he would choose a sanctuary? He’d been thinking only the other day of Cats Protection, who had a centre somewhere near Ashbourne. But there was a sanctuary closer than that, just outside Edendale, and he’d decided to give them a try first. That wasn’t wrong, was it? Anyone would do the same, rather than leave all those animals abandoned in cages.

Fry put down her glass for a moment.

‘Can I ask you something?’

Cooper could feel the mood change, like a cold draught blowing through the bar. He almost looked round to see who’d left the door open.

‘Go ahead.’

‘Did you ever really understand why I came to Derbyshire from Birmingham?’

‘Well, there was your sister,’ said Cooper cautiously, remembering a particularly difficult period between them, and reluctant to open up any old wounds. ‘You thought she was living in this part of the world. Sheffield, right?’

‘Yes. And?’

Fry gazed at him challengingly, waiting for a reply. It made Cooper feel as though he was a suspect in an interview room, forced to fill that uncomfortable silence with some confession of his own.

‘Well, I heard you had a bad time in Birmingham,’ he said.

‘A bad time?’ Fry tossed back the rest of her wine and looked around for another. ‘What does that mean?’

‘There was the assault case.’

‘Oh, you heard about that? Who told you?’

Cooper shifted nervously. He recalled mentioning it himself, to Liz Petty.

‘I don’t know, Diane. It was a story that went around the office, not long after you arrived.’

‘I’d like to know who spread the story.’

‘I honestly don’t know. Are you saying it isn’t true?’

‘No, it’s quite true.’

‘I appreciate it’s something you might not want to talk about.’

Fry stared at her empty glass. For a moment, Cooper thought she was going to start talking to him about it, that she wanted to tell him about the rape that had blighted her career in the West Midlands and had followed her to Derbyshire, like a shadow.

But if the thought had crossed her mind, she decided against it. Cooper realized that she wasn’t going to say more. Though he’d barely touched his own drink, he fetched her another glass of wine, and after a while the conversation moved on.

‘Lies,’ said Fry. ‘Casual disregard for the truth. Why do people always feel the need to lie, even about the smallest things?’

‘It’s an occupational hazard in our business,’ said Cooper, watching her attack her full glass.

Fry nodded. ‘My sister called me this week.’

Cooper froze. Not only at the unexpected turn of the conversation, but at Fry’s sudden change of tone. Just when he thought she was about to thaw a little, she produced a knife to stab into his guts.

‘Angie?’ he said, knowing that he sounded completely feeble.

‘I don’t have any other sisters.’

‘Is she …?’ Cooper didn’t know what he meant to ask.

‘Much the same as the last time you talked to her,’ said Fry. ‘Probably much the same as the first time, too.’

‘Diane, I know we never talked about that –’

‘You’re damn right we didn’t.’

‘Is there anything I can say that would help?’

‘You can tell me why you went to all that trouble to find my sister and plot with her behind my back. It’s something you should have explained to me a long time ago, Ben. A long time.’

‘I didn’t,’ said Cooper.

‘What?’

‘I didn’t find her. She found me.’

He was starting to feel a bit more confident now. None of it had been his fault, really. He knew that. But Diane was right – he’d never explained it to her. He’d been afraid to.

Fry stared at him. ‘Are you saying it was all Angie’s idea?’

‘Yes.’

That didn’t make her look any happier. Cooper searched for the right words to use that would get him past this moment. But Fry was too impatient, and she couldn’t wait for him to make his mind up.

‘More lies,’ she said. ‘It gets depressing.’

‘Diane –’

She held up a hand. ‘No, that’s enough. I shouldn’t have asked. I ought to have known better.’

There was an awkward silence. Cooper fidgeted, wishing for an excuse to get up and move away. He exchanged glances with the people at the other table, who’d been staring at Fry. They turned away in embarrassment.

To his immense relief, it was Fry who broke the silence. She seemed to have two distinct halves to her brain, the way she could switch from one to the other so easily. But there was no doubt about it, thought Cooper – the professional part of her brain was the one that assumed dominance most easily.

‘Lies,’ she said again, and took a long breath, as if inhaling the fumes from her wine. ‘You know, the first person to deceive us in the Rawson enquiry was the manager at Le Chien Noir,’ she said.

‘How is that?’ said Cooper, eager to encourage this time.

‘He was so vague about the man that Patrick Rawson was having dinner with that Monday night. He couldn’t give a completely misleading description, in case we asked anyone else and their version contradicted his. So he was deliberately vague. He knew perfectly well who the other man was – Maurice Gains, Rawson’s partner in R & G Enterprises.’

‘Oh. They were trying to find restaurants to serve their horse meat, weren’t they?’

‘Of course,’ said Fry. She took another long gulp of her drink. ‘But they already had wind of the trichinosis outbreak. The restaurant must have been desperate to avoid any suggestion they were serving horse meat. Reputation is everything in that business. Neil Connelly was already trying to distance Le Chien Noir from the bad publicity.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Suggest that Environmental Health pay a visit to Le Chien Noir.’

Cooper noticed that she was having a bit of difficulty saying the name of the restaurant. The third time it had definitely come out wrong.

‘Diane, are you all right?’

‘Why does everyone keep asking me if I’m all right?’

‘Well … I don’t know why everyone else does,’ said Cooper. ‘But I just noticed you seemed to be drinking quite fast. For a lunchtime, anyway. I didn’t know you were a day-time drinker.’

‘I’m not.’

‘OK.’

‘Except in exceptional circumstances.’

Cooper laughed uneasily. ‘You almost managed to say that without slurring.’

‘I don’t slur. I’ve never slurred in my life. I’m a positively slur-free zone.’