Dying to Sin bcadf-8

by Stephen Booth

  ‘How did it happen, Mel?’

  ‘We were both in the car, in fact,’ she said. ‘We were with our grandparents on a day out. We were going to Sheffield to do some shopping. Granny and Granddad wanted to buy us some new clothes. Our birthdays were quite close together, as it happened.

  ‘Granddad was driving. He made a mistake pulling out on to the A6 near Bakewell. The road was very busy, a lot of heavy lorries. It was near Ashford in the Water. You know the place I mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We had to wait a long time at the junction to pull out. Cars were queuing behind us, drivers were getting irritable. Ian was impatient, too. I remember hearing him say, “Come on — go for it, Granddad.” But Ian was sitting in the back seat, with me. How could he have known whether it was safe to pull out? He couldn’t, could he? But Granddad pulled out anyway. If he’d been a bit quicker on the accelerator pedal, we might have been all right, even then. But there was a lorry — and it couldn’t avoid us.’

  Mel touched the scar on her forehead. It was more noticeable now than it had been before. The memory was making it flare red, like a fresh wound.

  ‘That’s when I got this,’ she said. ‘I hit the back of the headrest on Granny’s seat.’

  ‘And your brother was killed?’

  ‘Yes. Granny and Granddad weren’t badly hurt, but emotionally they were devastated, of course. We were in their care, after all. They never got over the guilt of that, especially Granddad.’

  ‘It’s understandable.’

  ‘But they weren’t as upset as Dad.’

  Cooper waited.

  ‘Mum, Granny, Granddad — they were all grateful for the fact that I survived, and they were so concerned about my recovery. Head injuries can be a lot more serious than they seem at first, you know. But Dad — ’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I think Dad always believed the wrong child died in that crash. He showed no interest in whether I survived or not. His beloved son had been killed. And, somehow, that was my fault.’

  ‘Why did you want to tell me this, Mel?’

  ‘So that you understand a bit more about my granddad. I know how he likes to come across. He thinks he’s still in the police sometimes. He loved that job so much, he can’t accept that he’s retired. It makes him feel lonely and useless. So he gets cross and bad-tempered about it whenever anyone mentions it. I bet you found him like that.’

  ‘To be honest, yes.’

  ‘Also, he always says the modern police have no idea how to do the job that he did. Proper policing, he calls it. I don’t know what he means, exactly, but he’s very disrespectful.’

  ‘Ye-es.’

  Mel laughed at his expression. ‘In fact, I’m surprised he hasn’t tried to solve your case for you by now. Or, at least, told you how to do it.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think Mr Palfreyman has done that,’ said Cooper.

  To be fair, he had no idea what the former PC had got up to after he and Fry left his house. If, by some miracle, Palfreyman actually did solve the case of the two dead women at Pity Wood Farm, he wouldn’t be complaining. But he bet Diane Fry would be.

  ‘Mel, I still don’t really understand why you thought it was so important to come into Edendale and tell us this.’

  Mel Palfreyman pushed back her hair and stroked the tattoo on her neck. Black-painted fingernails followed the shape of a Celtic knot etched in blue ink.

  ‘My granddad thinks you’re trying to set him up as a suspect for these murders at Pity Wood. Are you?’

  Cooper couldn’t hide his surprise. ‘And why would we do that?’

  Mel began to laugh again. ‘You know, Granddad gave me a lecture once, all about how you can tell if a person is lying. He thought it would be useful to me when I started going out with boys. He said one sign to look for is when someone answers a question with another question. It’s an attempt to divert your attention, instead of giving a direct answer. I think that was the gist of what he said.’

  ‘That was pretty good advice,’ admitted Cooper, trying hard to hide the expression in his eyes. He supposed that would show, too. He hoped he wouldn’t blush, or start stammering.

  ‘Yes, I thought so.’

  ‘We don’t set people up, anyway. It’s just not something we would get away with. Not these days.’

  She studied him closely, and seemed to accept what she saw. ‘I don’t know. It’s what Granddad thinks, though. To be honest, I reckon it’s because it was the way things were done in his day. The way he saw things being done.’

  ‘I can promise you it’s not like that any more,’ said Cooper, tempted to cross his fingers behind his back as he said it.

  ‘So you haven’t been digging out people who’ll say things against him? You haven’t been gathering circumstantial evidence that would make a case against him, just because he’s a convenient suspect?’

  ‘No, of course not. Though there are certain circumstances that …’

  ‘That what?’

  ‘Well, that might need a bit of explaining.’

  ‘So Granddad will be questioned again?’

  ‘Almost certainly, I should think.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘But that doesn’t mean he has anything to worry about. He won’t necessarily be arrested.’

  ‘Necessarily?’

  ‘I don’t make these decisions,’ said Cooper apologetically. ‘It’ll be decided at a higher level, by a senior officer in discussion with the CPS.’

  ‘Will you be there when it happens, at least?’

  ‘I can’t say. I’m sorry.’

  Cooper knew that he’d failed to reassure her. But there was nothing else he could say, without going into details of the evidence, which was against all the rules. Of course, he didn’t feel confident enough in the outcome himself, and he couldn’t tell her things he didn’t believe in, could he?

  He showed her back to reception and watched her leave the station, pulling up the collar of her jacket when she got outside. Thankfully, there was one thing that Mel Palfreyman hadn’t asked him at all — whether she was likely to be questioned herself.

  DI Hitchens caught Cooper as he arrived back upstairs. Cooper could sense that something was up, from the DI’s manner.

  ‘Oh, Ben, you’ll want to know this. I realize you’ve been involved quite heavily with this aspect of the enquiry.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘We’ve decided to stop pussy-footing around, and we’ve brought Raymond Sutton in for questioning.’

  ‘Here? You’ve put that old man in a cell?’

  ‘No, he’s not under arrest. We’ve put him in an interview room,’ said Hitchens defensively.

  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.’

  31

  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 tha
t 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.’

  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.