The Kill Call

by Stephen Booth

  ‘It might have been anyone – a customer, a seller… who knows?’

  Hitchens looked thoughtful. ‘I’m still not clear how the operation works. How do horses end up as meat when they’re not supposed to?’

  ‘It’s not clear to me, either. I suppose we could mount an undercover operation.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘We send someone in as a horse owner with an animal to sell.’

  ‘Who could we use for that?’

  ‘I’d be willing to give it a go, sir,’ said Fry.

  But Hitchens shook his head. ‘We have specially trained officers for undercover work, Diane. Operational Support will provide someone, if necessary.’

  ‘I hope they’ve got someone who can pass as an expert on livestock.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  They looked at each other for a moment, then they both looked at Cooper. Oh, yes. The officer everyone thought of when there was an expert needed. Fry could have kicked herself for the reaction.

  But Cooper didn’t respond. And it wasn’t like him to be reluctant to jump forward and volunteer.

  ‘We’ll think about it,’ said Hitchens after a moment. ‘There’s no rush. Let’s check out the horse market first. See if we can pick up any useful leads.’

  ‘By the way,’ said Cooper, ‘this restaurant …’

  ‘Which restaurant?’

  ‘Le Chien Noir.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I had hopes that the head waiter would remember more about Patrick Rawson’s visit, but he’s never called me.’

  ‘A French restaurant, is it?’

  ‘In principle,’ said Fry. ‘I doubt any of the staff are actually French.’

  ‘Did you happen to get a copy of the menu?’

  ‘No. Why? Are you thinking of taking your girlfriend there?’

  ‘Well … we know France is one of the biggest markets for horse meat. And the guy at R & G Enterprises told you they were trying to introduce horse meat to the British market gradually –’

  ‘– through a small number of select restaurants. You think Le Chien Noir could be one of them?’

  ‘It might just be a coincidence. But if Patrick Rawson was known there …’

  ‘The manager said not.’

  ‘And did he seem reliable?’

  ‘He was very helpful,’ said Fry. Then she thought back to her conversation with Connelly. ‘Well, up to a point.’

  ‘Let me guess. He clammed up about Rawson?’

  ‘No, about the man Rawson was with. Mr Connelly said he was much too ordinary a middle-aged businessman for anybody to be expected to remember what he even looked like.’

  ‘That’s a good one.’

  ‘Yes. Yet he was so good on his impressions of Rawson.’ Fry sighed. ‘Never mind. We should find out who Le Chien Noir is actually owned by.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  Fry looked at him. ‘You really think horse meat might be on the menu?’

  ‘I’ve never heard of anything like it in Edendale,’ he said. ‘But it could be presented as something else. Is the menu in French?’

  Fry sighed. ‘I didn’t even look.’

  When he got back to Welbeck Street, the first thing Cooper always did was check his answering machine. Nothing, of course. He thought Liz might have called, but perhaps she was waiting for him to do it. Besides, she would have called his mobile. Hardly anybody used the answering machine any more, if they had his mobile number.

  The second thing he did was feed the cat. But Randy had no appetite tonight. Cooper sat with him for a while, stroking his fur until he got the familiar deep purr, willing the cat not to give up just yet.

  When he straightened up, his back twinged slightly from being in the same position for too long. He got himself a beer from the fridge – some Czech brand that had been on special offer at Somerfield’s.

  Last night, before he went to bed, he’d been reading a novel, a fantasy epic. It still lay on the table – closed, but with a bookmark stuck into the pages to show where he’d got up to. About a third of the way through, he judged.

  But wait. It wasn’t really a bookmark at all. When he’d closed the book last night, too tired to keep the lines of text from blurring in front of his eyes, he’d picked up the first thing that came to hand. It was a habit he’d developed as a child, and had never got rid of. In fact, he didn’t think he’d ever owned a proper bookmark – not one with leather fringes and gold-blocked lettering, the sort that other people had. He just used anything that would fit between the pages.

  Cooper opened the book. He saw that last night he’d used the postcard he brought back from Eyam. Plague Cottage and the memorial plaque to the Cooper boys. Like most of the other plague victims, their graves had never been found, but their names still lived on.

  He drank only half the beer and put it down reluctantly, remembering that he was driving tonight. He thought about what Gavin Murfin had said about Eyam. Personally, he couldn’t see why the village should be considered creepy. In spite of the tourists, it seemed a peaceful kind of place. Perhaps that was because its memories weren’t locked away in the dark, as they were in other places. In Eyam, they were out on display, for everyone to see.

  Fry had watched Ben Cooper leave the office. It had been another bad day, and Cooper always seemed to be involved somehow. Perhaps he didn’t actually intend to show up her failings. But he did it so effortlessly.

  She so hated to admit that Cooper was right. That he was ever right. In retrospect, she much preferred the old Ben Cooper, the one who’d been careful not to say anything, had tried not to rub it in, even when he’d turned out to be right in the end. These days, he seemed to be proving that he knew better at every turn. The bastard.

  When she got into her car to leave West Street, Fry sat for a moment in a kind of dull apathy. She didn’t really want to go home to her flat in Grosvenor Avenue. But she couldn’t think of anywhere she did want to go. It wasn’t as if there was anything to look forward to, except more bad days.

  Half an hour later, Cooper drove down the track to Bridge End Farm. At one time, his nieces would have run out to meet him when they heard his car coming down the lane. Now, there was no sign of them. Busy doing their homework? Well, perhaps. More likely, they couldn’t even hear his engine above the music playing on their iPods.

  He pulled up in the farm yard, and got out of the car. Then he stood for a moment, doing nothing. Just listening to the familiar sounds, and smelling the familiar smells. And he realized Claire was right – he’d stayed away from home far too long.

  24

  Journal of 1968

  Well, it was quite a year, 1968. It was all Dr Strangelove and the Prague Spring – Soviet tanks crushing Czechoslovakia, the USA getting a kick up the arse by the Viet Cong, and Enoch Powell making his Rivers of Blood speech. In Londonderry, it was the start of The Troubles. In Paris, students thought they were starting a revolution. That summer, the two best-known people in the world were Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray. Famous because they’d killed the right people.

  But most of the time, we were too busy listening to the Beatles’ White Album, and watching Hawaii Five-O on TV. Trying to shut out reality, some might say. And that wasn’t the same after 1968, either.

  Some people talk about the sixties as if it was nothing but sex and drugs, and love and peace, the decade of liberation. Well, that’s a pretty bad joke. It might have been all free love and Carnaby Street down there in London, but things take a bit longer to change in these parts. Here, we still had narrow minds and twitching curtains. There was no Technicolor in Birchlow back then, just the same old black-and-white grimness, the dyed-in-the-wool, stuck-in-a-rut, holier-than-thou hypocrites whose disapproval ruined people’s lives. If you took one wrong step, then everyone knew it. The Swinging Sixties? Here, it was still the fifties. In some ways, it was still the Dark Ages.

  But if you were young in 1968, you could sense the world changing. Every day, you felt things shifting under your feet
, as if the whole of existence could tip in one direction or the other at any moment. We might shake off the old ways, or we might all be destroyed. It was hard to tell. We didn’t know what the future looked like, but we knew it would be different.

  It’s strange how the mind works. For me, bits of music used to pop into my head all the time, as if every thought and feeling I had was connected to a tune playing somewhere, like a soundtrack of my life. In 1968, you never knew where you stood with pop music. One week it was the Rolling Stones at the top of the charts, the next week it was bloody Des O’Connor.

  Just thinking about threes reminded me of the Three Degrees, even though I never really liked them. They would have been one of Jimmy’s favourite groups, if he’d lived a bit longer. He was mad on the Supremes and the Four Tops, all that Tamla stuff. I thought of him often in the months after it happened, the fact that he never heard the Supremes sing ‘Love Child’, and completely missed ‘I Heard it through the Grapevine’. He died too young. We heard that a lot, in those days.

  No, me and Jimmy saw eye to eye on a lot of things, but I never got into Motown myself. Give me the Stones any day of the week. ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ had come out just about then. Now, that was music. With half a chance, I’d like to have turned it up loud in that hole, let it bounce off those bloody concrete walls until my ears ached. It’s a gas, gas, gas.

  But not down there, not while the mad people ran the world. And Les would never have let me do it, anyway. Because Les was number one.

  For hours on end, it seemed my world revolved around the pee pot and the pump. Bloody strange way to save the world, I always thought. The stink of Elsan and Glitto, the bad air you had to breathe until you got back up into the daylight. Why some blokes put up with it, I couldn’t tell you.

  Me, I just reckoned I was doing something for my family, and for my village. But, you know what? I was never too sure what I would have done, if the call had ever come for real.

  And I was never sure – not really sure – whether I was capable of killing a man.

  25

  Friday

  When she arrived at West Street next morning, Fry found Murfin motionless at his desk, staring into space.

  ‘Watch it, Gavin. If you’re not careful, they’ll replace you with one of those cardboard policemen.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘And it might even be an improvement.’

  Fry knew she didn’t need to explain what she meant. A few months ago, life-size cardboard police officers had been placed at businesses across the division in a bid to deter shoplifters. Ten cardboard cut-outs of a beat officer. According to the subsequent press releases, the cut-outs had reduced the number of reported thefts from stores, thieves thinking at first glance that the image was a real officer. It had become part of office lore that it was so easy to be confused.

  Cooper laughed. ‘I think you’re safe, Gavin. You know the Chief Super said cardboard cut-outs can never replace real officers.’

  ‘Well, that’s what he told the press.’

  Fry recalled that the senior management team were in a meeting again this morning. She imagined them talking about optimizing performance outcomes at the point of delivery. There must be something about becoming a senior manager that destroyed your sense of irony. That was the only reason Gavin Murfin got away with what he did.

  She turned to the files on her desk. Still no news of Michael Clay’s whereabouts. He certainly hadn’t returned her calls, but that would have been too much to hope for. It was probably time to step up the efforts to find him. Her elusive witness was starting to look downright suspicious.

  So what else was there? Horse Watch had sent a list of the latest horse thefts in their area. The thefts went back a few weeks, but there weren’t too many of them. Lucky, because all the owners would have to be spoken to.

  Fry surveyed her team. Come to think of it, Murfin had some of the characteristics of a horse, like falling asleep standing up.

  And then there was the envelope full of enhanced photographs from the lab. These should be the shots of the depressed fracture to Patrick Rawson’s head.

  Fry took the photographs out of their envelope and glanced at the first one. Patrick Rawson’s skull, shaved and cleaned under bright laboratory lighting. The flash had cast just the right amount of shadow and perspective on the head injury, outlining the depression in the bone as if it had been a crater on the Moon.

  Apart from one obliterated and smashed end, the bloodied sides of the depression formed a distinct pattern, an almost perfectly preserved shape. There was no medical knowledge necessary. Fry recognized it immediately.

  ‘It’s a horseshoe,’ she said. ‘His skull was crushed by a horseshoe.’

  Fry called Dermot Walsh at Trading Standards, and was struck by how different he sounded on the phone. She would never have pictured him the way he actually looked.

  ‘Thank you for the briefing yesterday,’ she said.

  ‘I was glad to share what we have. I hope it was useful. There are a lot of upset victims out there who never got justice. Not against Patrick Rawson, anyway.’

  ‘We’re particularly sensitive to crimes involving animals in this country aren’t we?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Joyce. ‘We learn a lot of things from the USA. Horse thefts have been rising dramatically in the States. There are substantial dollars to be made in the legitimate market, and virtually nothing to lose in the black market. A horse can be stolen, slaughtered, packaged, shipped to Europe, and served up on a plate before a ranch owner realizes the animal is missing. That’s fast cash. And any method of earning fast money makes its way here sooner or later.’

  ‘Are the Americans as fond of their horses as we are?’

  ‘A few years ago there was a scandal involving a group of individuals running a charity that was supposed to be “adopting” horses rescued from inhumane conditions. It turned out they were then shipping the horses off to Japan to be slaughtered for food. A lot of people were horrified that they’d contributed money to a charity fighting animal abuse, only for the animals to be sent off to be killed. Cue much outcry, little girls walking in protest lines and so on. Fines and prison sentences for the perps. That hasn’t happened here yet, so far as we know.’

  ‘I wanted to ask you – can any horse be sold for human consumption?’

  ‘No, it depends whether the owner has made a Section Nine declaration.’

  ‘In the horse passport?’

  ‘That’s right. The trouble is, once you’ve signed “not intended for human consumption”, a Section Nine declaration can’t be changed. Of course, what I mean is – it can’t be changed legally.’

  ‘And if a horse doesn’t have a passport?’

  ‘It’s stolen. You should treat a horse passport like the log book of a car. Never buy a horse without one and always check it’s in order before you pay.’

  ‘Frankly, I’m amazed that people can still be duped when all these regulations are in place,’ said Fry.

  ‘Oh, you’d be surprised how many people don’t bother to check in the excitement of the moment. You want to look at your new horse, not at boring old paperwork. Just like you want to get in your new car and take it for a drive. You’re more interested in what’s under the bonnet than what’s in the log book. It’s the same with a horse.’

  ‘What’s the penalty for not having a passport?’

  ‘A maximum five thousand pounds fine,’ said Walsh, ‘or imprisonment for up to three months, or both.’

  Had she heard that right? Five thousand pounds? It was more than many thieves and other petty criminals were fined, even after repeated appearances in Edendale magistrates’ court. Fry wrote it down just to be sure that she remembered it properly.

  ‘I wanted to ask you about something you said yesterday,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You mentioned that Patrick Rawson had tried to blame the allegations against him on rival dealers.’

 
‘That’s right, he did.’

  ‘I’m wondering if there were any particular rivals who might have had a grudge against him.’

  ‘Of course you are,’ said Walsh. ‘That makes sense. Well, I’m sure there must have been a few over the years. We didn’t really go into that as a serious possibility, you know. It was just Rawson trying to weasel his way out.’

  ‘I understand that. But if there was any chance …?’

  ‘I’ll have a trawl through the intelligence, and send you any names I come up with.’

  ‘Thanks. It’s appreciated.’

  ‘Can I ask how Patrick Rawson died?’ said Walsh.

  ‘It seems his head was kicked in by a horse.’

  ‘That’s the rumour I heard. Poetic justice, if you ask me.’

  ‘So the results from the postmortem suggest that Patrick Rawson’s head injury was caused by a blow from a horse’s hoof. The impression of the steel shoe is quite clear in his skull.’

  ‘He was kicked in the head by a horse?’

  ‘Or trodden on, while he was already on the ground.’

  ‘An accident, then,’ said Cooper. ‘An accident, after all.’

  But Fry didn’t look too sure. ‘We can’t assume that. We won’t know for certain until we’ve established the sequence of events. And that means tracing the people who were present when he was killed. I’d be very interested to hear their account of the incident. And their explanation of why they rode off and left him to die, if it really was an accident. Even if there was no intention to kill, they could still find themselves facing manslaughter charges.’

  Cooper was flicking through the list provided by Horse Watch. Brief details of missing and stolen horses, with phone numbers for the owners. No names, which was a pain. It made you look inefficient from the start when you had to ask an IP’s name.

  A 14.2 hh chestnut mare of unknown breed, fifteen years old, suffers from arthritis. Very friendly. Taken from a farm near Buxton.

  Dutch Warmblood mare, grey, 15.2 hh, thoroughbred in appearance, very well mannered and friendly. Stolen from a field in Derbyshire.