The Kill Call

by Stephen Booth

  But wait. Was that what they wanted her to do? Were they hoping that she would lose confidence, that she would prove herself incapable of taking responsibility, devoid of initiative, unable to take the smallest decision on her own? Hitchens couldn’t have planned that, it was too clever for him, too devious. But Branagh …

  On the other hand, she could just be getting paranoid. And, if she was, did that mean that they weren’t all out to get her?

  Fry sat at her desk, watching everyone else leave the office to go home, back to their families, off to meet their girlfriends, get drunk, or watch TV. They all sounded like alien activities that she was excluded from.

  What the hell was going on? Right now, her week couldn’t get any worse than it already was.

  When Fry finally got back to her flat in Grosvenor Road later that evening, her answering machine was blinking. When she pressed the ‘play’ button, there was the briefest of messages. And from that moment, things did get worse, after all.

  ‘Di – call me as soon as you can. It’s important.’

  The caller didn’t need to leave a name. It was Angie.

  There was no mistaking death when you saw it. Cooper had seen two dead bodies already this week, but it was so much worse when it was personal.

  The cat had curled up in his usual spot by the central heating boiler in the conservatory. He looked so relaxed and peaceful that he could have been asleep, at first glance. But the stillness was too unnatural, the lack of even the slightest stirring of the fur as he breathed.

  And, of course, Cooper had never arrived home before without Randy running to greet him. He didn’t even need to go to the conservatory to know that something was badly wrong.

  He knelt and stroked the long black fur. The cat was stiff. He’d died some time during the day, while Cooper was at work. He’d died alone, which was the worst thing he could imagine. It was what he dreaded for himself, dying alone and in the dark.

  ‘Sorry, Randy,’ he said, barely able to get out the words as a rush of guilt overcame him. He should have been here.

  Though the light had gone, Cooper found a spade and dug a hole in the garden behind the conservatory, underneath a beech tree. Randy had spent a lot of time here. Not hunting much lately, just sitting and watching the birds, enjoying the sun. Giving him a permanent place here was the least he could do.

  Somewhere in the darkness, among the beeches, a male tawny owl called. It was the eerie full-volume hoot, hu … hu-hooooo, made only by the male. The owl must be establishing a territory here, at the start of the new breeding season.

  As he straightened up from the grave and knocked the last of the soil off his spade, Cooper thought he glimpsed a dim shape, winging silently into the trees.

  Fry was discovering that there were some things you couldn’t keep buried. Her sister had been a sort of talisman in her life, a symbol of the high points and low points. Well, no. Mostly the low points, it had to be said.

  Since Angie had walked out of their foster home in the Black Country as a teenager, Diane had spent years trying to track her down. It had been her reason for coming to Derbyshire in the first place. Yet when they had finally been reunited, the taste of success had been a sour one. Diane had found that her sister was no longer a person she could trust.

  ‘You must have realized that I got mixed up in some things that I didn’t mean to,’ said Angie on the phone that night.

  ‘Obviously. The drugs –’

  ‘I don’t mean the drugs. Well, not the drugs on their own. There’s a whole world that heroin gets you into. You’ve no idea, Diane.’

  And Diane had to accept that she really didn’t have any idea. She’d never thought of herself as naïve. How could she be? But there were things about her sister that she didn’t understand. She supposed that she never had understood them, really. It was probably that mystery, the constant hint of wickedness and the unknown, that had led her to worship Angie as a teenager. Not just sisterly love, after all. She had been drawn to the scent of danger like a moth to a flame. And Angie had, too. In that way, they were the same.

  For a moment, Diane wondered whether her sister was involved in some gigantic conspiracy against her. Had she been seething with jealousy and hatred all these years? Was she determined to bring Diane down, one way or another? If she was, she was doing a damned good job, and Diane felt helpless to fight her intentions.

  ‘I was recruited,’ said Angie. ‘First by the bad guys, then by the good guys. It’s not always easy to tell the difference, though. Funny, that.’

  ‘You’ve been working for the drugs squad?’ said Diane. ‘As an informant.’

  She realized it had been a suspicion that she’d been suppressing. She could easily have believed anything of her sister, but not that. The evidence had been there, in front of her nose, but she’d refused to believe it, had never even tried to confront it.

  ‘SOCA,’ said Angie. ‘The Serious and Organized Crime Agency.’

  ‘I know who SOCA are.’

  ‘You were very slow, Di. Your nice Constable Cooper figured it out long ago.’

  Diane gritted her teeth. She was realizing another truth that she ought to have accepted a long time ago. Not only was her sister someone she couldn’t trust; worse, Angie had become someone she no longer knew.

  ‘How did Ben Cooper come into it? I never understood that.’

  ‘Oh, don’t take it out on him,’ said Angie, sounding faintly less sardonic. ‘He was only trying to help. It’s what he does. You must have noticed.’

  Fry was within a second of putting the phone down. But she knew that she couldn’t leave a question hanging. It would torment her for days.

  ‘Angie, what is it you want?’ she said.

  ‘I want you to come back, Diane.’

  ‘Back? Back where?’

  ‘To Birmingham, of course. You know it’s where you belong.’

  ‘Damn it, Angie, you know perfectly well why I left Birmingham.’

  ‘’Course I do. But that doesn’t stop it being the place where you belong.’

  That night, Fry couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t the first night it had happened, and it wouldn’t be the last. But tonight, as soon as she was alone in her bedroom, the darkness began to close in around her. That darkness was full of her memories. It moved in on her from every side, dropping like a heavy blanket, pressing against her body and smothering her with its warm, sticky embrace. Around her, the night murmured and her flesh squirmed.

  She’d always known the old memories were still powerful and raw, ready to rise up and grab at her mind from the darkness. Tonight, once again, dark forms seemed to loom around her, mere smudges of silhouettes that crept ever nearer, reaching out towards her.

  And then she seemed to hear a voice in the darkness. A familiar voice, coarse and slurring in a Birmingham accent. ‘It’s a copper,’ it said. Taunting laughter moving in the shadows. ‘A copper. She’s a copper.’

  The reality of the horror was years behind her now, and the only wounds still raw were those in her mind, where they were exposed to the cold winds of memory.

  She breathed deeply, forcing her heartbeat to slow down. Control and concentration. Yet she could feel the sweat break out on her forehead. She cursed silently, knowing what was about to come.

  These were memories too powerful to be buried completely, too deeply etched into her soul to be forgotten. They merely writhed in the depths, waiting for the chance to re-emerge.

  Bodies could be sensed, further back in the darkness, watching, laughing, waiting eagerly for what they knew would happen next. Voices murmured and coughed. ‘It’s a copper,’ the voices said. ‘She’s a copper.’

  She remembered movements that crept and rustled closer, fragmented glimpses of figures carved into segments by the streetlights, the reek of booze and violence. And then she seemed to hear the one particular voice – that rough, slurring Brummie voice that slithered out of the darkness. ‘How do you like this, copper?’ And the taunting
laughter moving in the shadows.

  Then she was falling, flailing forward into the darkness. Nothing could stop the flood of remembered sensations now. ‘How do you like this, copper?’

  Then suddenly it was all over. Until the next time.

  30

  Journal of 1968

  And that’s the thing about memories. They come back to you in the darkness or in the daylight. They arrive like strangers at night, they appear out of the shadows in the heat of the sun. Or they walk up to you, smiling, in the rain.

  No matter how guilty you feel, you know the truth when you come face to face with it. You know it by its eyes, and its voice. You know it so well that you don’t need to ask its name.

  And then what do you do? What would you do? No one knows until it happens, until the call comes and you do whatever is needed.

  1968. A year of revolution? Well, maybe. But every spasm of rebellion was ruthlessly crushed. Russian tanks rolling into Prague, students facing riot squads outside the Sorbonne, Boss Daley’s police clubbing hippies on the streets of Chicago.

  But that was the 1960s to me. The world on a knife edge. It was the U2 incident, the Bay of Pigs, the Six Days War, the building of the Berlin Wall. American B-52s circling constantly just outside Soviet airspace, ready for the first strike.

  But the one thing I remember most about events in the outside world is something that everyone else seems to have forgotten. That January, a B-52 Stratofortress crashed in Greenland, spilling its load of nuclear warheads across the snowy wastes. When I read about that, I imagined the aircraft coming down a few miles to the east, in Soviet territory. US bombs falling on Kamchatka. And it could have happened so easily. Across the world, fingers were on the button, and World War Three hung on a hair trigger.

  Often, when I was out there in the fields, I could feel Jimmy alongside me, walking in the midst of a shadow, even on the sunniest day. And we’d talk about this subject a lot, the way that things worked out. I’d tell him about the feeling of guilt. The guilt of being the one who survived.

  Of course, a lot of people have died since Jimmy. But it’s different when you’ve seen them die, when you know their last sight of the world was your own face, that your reflection was caught in their eyes as they took their last breath.

  And worse, when you wonder every day if they believed it was you that killed them.

  You know, it took me a while to be sure that it wasn’t me. But I remember the exact moment. It was the night I saw them on the street, the two of them, just leaving the Bird in Hand. I could see straight away that they’d forgotten Jimmy. They’d managed to put his death in the past, the way I never did.

  Arm in arm, they were. A laugh, a kiss, and something more than that. There was a terrible anger that came up inside me then. It burned like a flame, and it never went out. It blazed inside me like a nuclear core, scorching through my heart and my blood, contaminating a part of my brain with its fallout.

  They had made me guilty. I could never forgive them for that. They had made me feel responsible for Jimmy’s death, and they made me tell lies. Why had I listened to Les, just because he was number one? Why had I thought that life was too short, that we could all die tomorrow, so none of it mattered?

  That was the moment I changed. In that one, bright, devastating flash, I realized what I had to do. No matter how long I had to wait, I knew who the person was that I needed to kill.

  31

  Saturday

  A series of gritstone buildings stood at the end of a long drive, guarded by a locked gate. Fry could see nothing grand about any of the buildings, nothing to justify their secluded position. This was hardly Chatsworth House, or any other stately home.

  ‘Take a closer look,’ said Cooper, passing her the binoculars.

  ‘What is this place?’

  ‘The hunt kennels.’

  ‘The Eden Valley Hunt?’

  ‘Right,’ said Cooper. ‘This is where the hounds are kennelled.’

  Many of the structures were single storey, their slate roofs darkened by rain. A couple of vans with muddy wheel arches stood in the yard. Fry could hear the distant sound of barking dogs.

  ‘The huntsman and kennel man live on the premises,’ said Cooper. ‘The building to the right is the flesh house.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Well, you know about the flesh run?’

  ‘Jesus, do I want to?’

  ‘Like a lot of hunts, the Eden Valley provides a service for farmers,’ said Cooper. ‘It collects fallen stock – dead and sick animals, or ones that just don’t happen to have any value. They pick the dead ones up from the farm, or put live animals down humanely, if necessary. It’s a real boon for farmers. Fallen stock would cost them the earth to dispose of, otherwise. The regulations make incineration expensive, and you can’t bury animals on your own property, the way a lot of farmers used to.’

  ‘But what do the hunt want with dead livestock?’ asked Fry. She turned her head to listen to the sound of high-pitched barking drifting from the kennels – a wild, haunting sound that must have struck terror into the heart of many a fox. ‘Oh God, I think I know already.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘There are about forty damn big dogs in there.’

  ‘Hounds. Eden Valley Hunt have sixteen and a half couple – thirty-three hounds.’

  ‘And big dogs take a lot of feeding, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ said Cooper.

  Fry felt sick to her stomach. She couldn’t bear to look at the innocuous grey stone buildings any more, couldn’t stand to hear the barking any longer. The images in her mind were too vivid, and too bloody.

  ‘Can we get away from here, please?’

  She knew what Cooper was doing – he was trying to make her see the hunt differently, to convey a picture of some kind of essential cog in rural life, regrettable but necessary. So far, it wasn’t working.

  But Cooper hadn’t finished yet.

  ‘The kennel man does the flesh run, collects the fallen stock from farms all across the hunt’s area. He uses a captive bolt pistol to kill any animals that need putting down. Then he skins them, guts them, and feeds the carcasses to the hounds. A pack like the Eden Valley’s can get through a lot of raw meat in a day.’

  ‘This place is no better than the abattoir,’ said Fry.

  ‘Well, they’re serving a similar purpose.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  Fry lowered the binoculars. The hunt was gathering again for the second time this week. Something called a lawn meet, she was told. It sounded ridiculous, and created images in her mind of people playing croquet on horseback.

  ‘Let’s get this straight,’ said Cooper. ‘The Eden Valley Hunt aren’t doing anything illegal. Neither are the owners of the abattoir where horses are slaughtered. So anyone who tries to interfere with their legal activities by obstruction or intimidation is committing a crime, and is liable to be arrested. Right, Diane?’

  Fry could feel her jaw tighten. Strange, but she’d thought this would be a safe subject, a way of keeping Cooper off more personal topics. So why was it that he seemed able to make any subject unsettling?

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘We could never condone vigilantism, by animal rights activists or anyone else.’

  ‘I’m glad about that.’

  ‘But it’s still disgusting.’

  Cooper looked at her, but she couldn’t meet his eye.

  ‘Everything ends the same way, Diane,’ he said. ‘Animals don’t live for ever. Farm livestock are there for a purpose.’

  Everything ends the same way. She supposed that was right – for humans, as well as animals. It was just a question of how much pain you had to go through first.

  Cooper suddenly seemed to lose interest in the direction of the conversation. He pointed beyond the kennels.

  ‘See down there, on the road?’ he said. ‘About a hundred yards short of the gate to the kennel drive.’

  ‘Yes. There
’s an old Bedford van parked up on the verge.’

  ‘That’s the sabs’ van. They’re on kennel watch. They’re waiting for the hounds to leave, so they can follow them to this morning’s meet. Sometimes, if the hunt expects to be sabbed, they try to change the location at the last minute from the one listed on the meet card.’

  ‘If the van is there, that means the animal rights activists are due back in the area today.’

  ‘Right,’ said Cooper. ‘Well, it’s the last hunt of the season. They’ll want to go out on a high note.’

  ‘Speaking of which,’ said Fry, ‘I’d really like to follow up the hunt saboteurs’ claim to have heard the kill call before the hunt on Tuesday morning.’

  ‘You think the kill call was real, Diane?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fry. ‘I believe in the kill call.’

  They went back to the car, and Cooper drove up the road two miles from the kennels to where the hunt was gathering at the home of a member.

  Cooper surveyed a scene that he had once thought would be a vanishing tradition, no more than a memory in the British countryside. Everyone was in correct hunting dress this morning, of course – gentlemen in three-button red coats with brass buttons, white breeches, and top boots. The traditional bowlers and top hats had disappeared now, though, in favour of protective hunting caps to meet safety standards.

  ‘See, no one in tweed jackets, except for the small child there,’ he said. ‘It’s not acceptable dress. And there are the hunt staff – the huntsman and kennel man. The joint masters, and then the mounted hunt followers. Plus all the foot and car supporters. It’s quite a crowd, isn’t it?’