The Kill Call

by Stephen Booth

  Fry looked around the yard, with the stone house to one side and the stables on the other, the horses peering out at her from around their hay racks. Bonny and Baby, but no sign of Monty. She could picture the three of them practically mugging Gavin Murfin for some kind of tidbit. It was obviously what they had come to expect from visitors. So what could be of more interest to a horse than a stranger walking up to their stables?

  Stepping carefully, Fry came nearer to the end loose box and edged along the wall. The top half of the door stood open, like all the others. If it hadn’t, she would have noticed something out of place sooner. She could hear faint stirrings from inside now, the sounds of an animal breathing noisily and pawing at the straw.

  That was when Fry made her mistake. She flicked up the latch and flung the door open, bursting into the stable, her mouth open to start shouting the commands. For a second, she heard the two uniformed officers running towards her. But then the whole of her world was suddenly taken up by the huge, rearing animal in front of her, its eyes rolling in alarm, its nostrils flaring, its steel-shod hooves lashing out at the intruder. How could she have forgotten how big these animals were, how easily the impact of a steel shoe could crush a man’s skull?

  Frantically, Fry tried to dive clear of the flying hooves. The last two things she remembered for a while were the thud of those hooves hitting the concrete wall, and the overpowering smell of wet horse.

  Cooper and Murfin were on the A6 approaching Bakewell. As they passed Haddon Hall, still closed to visitors for the winter, they were held up at the turning to the huge car park for the agricultural business centre. Bakewell was always busy on a Saturday, no matter what the time of year.

  Cooper tapped his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel as a coach manoeuvred off Haddon Road, splashing through the water that sometimes closed the access to the car park completely in bad weather.

  ‘It’s frustrating not knowing what’s going on,’ he said.

  ‘Me, I never know what’s going on,’ said Murfin. ‘It’s the best way to be.’

  They were already in the centre of the small town, waiting for traffic to clear on the roundabout in front of the Rutland Arms, when they got the first indication of what was happening at Long Acres Farm.

  ‘We’ve got Naomi Widdowson in custody,’ Fry told Cooper when she called.

  ‘Great. What about –’

  ‘Her brother Rick? No, he got away.’

  She sounded so disgusted that Cooper didn’t ask her how it had happened. If it was her own fault somehow, she would be blaming herself enough by now.

  ‘He made it to his Land Rover while we were dealing with his sister,’ said Fry. ‘There was a horse that proved a bit of a distraction.’

  ‘Didn’t you have the entrance sealed off?’ asked Cooper, though he knew it was too obvious.

  Fry sighed. ‘Yes, of course. But there was another way out: a track across the fields. His Land Rover made it, but there was no way we could follow.’

  ‘Which way is he heading?’

  ‘He should come out near the stone mill. Who knows which direction he’ll take when he gets back on the road, though. Too many tracks and unmade roads in this area.’

  Cooper mentally pictured the map. ‘We’re not far away. We’ll take a chance and head up through Great Longstone on to the Longstone Edge road.’

  ‘Thanks, Ben. I’ll catch up with you somewhere.’

  Her voice sounded a little shaky. No way to conceal that, except by not saying very much. Cooper wondered what had frightened her.

  ‘Diane, are you –?’

  ‘Just don’t,’ said Fry. ‘Just don’t ask me if I’m all right.’

  With his foot down on the Toyota’s accelerator, Cooper left Bakewell behind on the A6 and turned up the hill in Ashford in the Water. He slowed through Great Longstone, watching for Rick Widdowson’s blue Land Rover as they passed the two pubs, the White Lion and the Crispin, but in Great Longstone, you were more likely to see a well-known former cabinet minister walking his equally well-known dog.

  Moor Lane took them up to the Edge. It was quiet up here today. Saturday was the day for shopping in Bakewell, and tomorrow would be the time for enjoying the view. A sharp left-hand bend marked the point where the haulage road from High Rake and Black Harry Lane both met the public road.

  Cooper stopped the car for a moment, surveying the landscape for a cloud of dust, or a flock of sheep scattering across a field. The Toyota had four-wheel drive, but he was reluctant to find himself drawn in to a pursuit across open country.

  ‘What’s that up ahead in the road?’ said Murfin, pointing straight on.

  Cooper let in the clutch again, and drove on slowly.

  ‘It’s a dead sheep.’

  ‘And look, in the ditch – a blue Land Rover.’

  They were on the edge of the last surviving stretch of genuine moorland on Longstone Moor. To the east, Cooper could see the glint of the flash, the water-filled quarry workings, edged by a screen of trees. To the west, the moor itself was a sea of heather, black in the rain, a dark ocean stirred fitfully by the wind.

  He drew the car into the side of the road, and parked on the rough grass verge. They peered into the Land Rover to make sure Rick Widdowson wasn’t lying injured inside it. But the driver’s door stood open, and it was clear what had happened.

  As Cooper straightened up, he saw Fry’s black Peugeot coming the other way. She pulled a face at the sight of the dead sheep lying bloodied in the middle of the carriageway.

  ‘Better help me drag this out of the way, Gavin,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s a bit of a hazard.’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ said Murfin. ‘What a great day this is turning into.’

  Fry got out of her car and pulled up the collar of her coat as the wind across the moor caught her hair.

  ‘He’s abandoned his vehicle and legged it, then,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. But we can only have been a few minutes behind him. So where is he?’

  In this landscape, there was only one answer. Widdowson must have gone to ground somewhere on the moor, and was lying flat to the earth in the heather. As long as he remained still, they would need an awful lot of time and luck to stumble across him.

  Cooper walked as far as the first turn in a track that snaked across the moor towards the distant opencast rakes. Nothing moved anywhere, not even a rabbit.

  ‘We’ll need to get the helicopter unit to guide us in with their infra-red camera,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll put in the request.’

  Then a noise broke the silence of the moor. A tuneless warble, no skylark or curlew. Cooper turned his head to listen and focused in on the noise before it stopped. He fixed his eye on a patch of heather close to one of the capped mine shafts.

  ‘No need for the helicopter, after all,’ said Fry.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘The Star Wars theme, I believe. Mobile phones are a great way of locating people, even out there.’

  Rick Widdowson heard them coming, and stood up from the heather, clutching his phone in his hand as if about to hurl it from him in a fit of anger. But it was far too late for that.

  ‘You should remember to switch it to vibrate next time,’ said Fry, as she read him his rights.

  33

  Most suspects who ended up in an interview room weren’t bright enough to maintain a consistent lie. Their stories were easily undermined by the use of logic, their memories too short to survive a few hours’ wait in the cells between interviews. And a change of interviewers usually seemed to unsettle them.

  It was always a source of amazement to Fry that anyone thought they could get away with telling a different story to a different interviewer. Did they think that no one compared notes? Did they not notice the tapes running? Yet it was true what they taught you about interviewing techniques: Suspects seemed to feel they had to try harder to impress one or the other.

  In Interview Room One, Naomi Widdowson had been waiting for a while.
She was pacing restlessly, muttering to herself, fidgeting like a junkie suffering from withdrawal symptoms.

  ‘Get close enough to smell her breath, to see if she’s been drinking,’ suggested Hitchens, before Fry went in.

  ‘You think she might be drunk?’

  ‘That, or mad. But when they’re mad, you can usually tell it from their eyes.’

  Fry entered the interview room and persuaded Naomi to sit down. The woman kept flicking her fingers, and shuddering as if she was cold.

  ‘Yes, Rosie was my horse,’ she said. ‘I never denied that.’

  ‘When I asked you, you said the name meant nothing to you,’ said Fry.

  Naomi looked at Fry as if she couldn’t really see her, the way someone might look at a ghost, not quite able to focus properly on the figure in front of them.

  ‘She was stolen and went for meat, I’m sure of it. Rosie died the same way as all those other horses. It was horrible to think about – I’ve never been able to get it out of my mind since. Patrick Rawson did that to me. He did the same to so many people. He deserved to be punished.’

  ‘He didn’t deserve to be murdered.’

  ‘You know what? A lot of people would consider Patrick Rawson to be guilty of murder. But we never meant to kill him.’

  ‘Who made the arrangement to meet on Longstone Moor?’ asked Fry.

  ‘I did. I phoned him and set up the appointment. Told him we had a lot of horses for sale. Thoroughbreds, for meat. He fell for it completely. Greedy people always do.’

  ‘You deliberately used an unregistered pay-as-you-go mobile to make this call to Mr Rawson, didn’t you?’

  Naomi frowned. ‘A what? Yes, my phone is pay-as-you-go. What does that have to do with it?’

  Fry looked at her, registering her puzzlement. So Naomi Widdowson hadn’t planned that, didn’t know that a call from an unregistered phone would be almost impossible to trace. Her phone just happened to be pay-as-you-go. This wasn’t turning out to be a clever criminal mind at work, was it?

  ‘Is this your mobile number?’ asked Fry, showing her a copy of the phone record.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You went to the meeting on horseback, Miss Widdowson. Why did you do that?’

  ‘It was the easiest way to get there, and get away again quickly. We pulled scarves over our faces, so he couldn’t identify us. He might have remembered a car. Besides …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It just seemed, well … right. In the circumstances.’

  Fry nodded. It was just what Dermot Walsh had said: poetic justice. But there hadn’t really been anything poetic in the crushed skull, in the fatally injured man trying desperately to run from his attackers, even as his blood drained away into the ground and his brain swelled against the shattered bone.

  ‘And your brother went with you on this meeting, didn’t he?’

  Naomi pushed herself up on to her feet, her fingers tense and trembling on the edge of the table.

  ‘No. You can’t fix any of this on Rick.’

  ‘Please sit down, Miss Widdowson.’

  ‘I need to make you understand that it had nothing to do with Rick.’

  ‘He does have a record. Several previous offences of violence.’

  Naomi slowly sank into the chair again, as if deflated. ‘What does that have to do with it? You’re all the same, once a person gets into trouble. Isn’t it supposed to be innocent until proved guilty?’

  ‘And you still say you didn’t intend to kill Patrick Rawson?’ asked Fry.

  ‘No. It was an accident.’

  Her tone carried a hint of regret. And it was probably that which finally convinced Fry she was telling the truth.

  Rick Widdowson had recovered from the humiliation of his arrest very quickly. He walked into Interview Room Two with a strut, swinging his shoulders, his head tilted to spread a smirk around the room.

  ‘Have you been informed of your rights?’ asked Fry. ‘Offered facilities and refreshments while you’ve been waiting?’

  ‘Good cop, bad cop – never goes out of fashion, does it?’ he said.

  ‘This is good cop, good cop. You haven’t even seen the bad one yet.’

  ‘You don’t have anything on me,’ said Widdowson, sitting confidently at the table opposite Fry. ‘If you did, there’d be a solicitor here, and the tape recorders running.’

  That was the trouble with regular customers – they knew too much. Rick was right, of course. She had no evidence to implicate him in the death of Patrick Rawson. Not yet.

  ‘So why did you try to escape when we visited your home?’ said Fry.

  He smiled. ‘I was going for help. I thought we had burglars.’

  Fry sighed. ‘You know your sister is in trouble. Wouldn’t you like to help her?’

  ‘’Course I would. Only too keen to help.’

  If that was so, his loyalty might only be one way, thought Fry.

  ‘You can start by telling me where you were on Tuesday morning.’

  ‘I don’t have anything to say.’

  ‘You might as well go, then.’

  Widdowson made a move to get up, then froze. Fry could see the calculation going through his mind, and she guessed what he was thinking.

  ‘Yes, you’re free to leave at any time, Mr Widdowson. You can get up and walk out. But that would be a strange thing to do if, as you claim, you want to help your sister. “Only too keen to help” – wasn’t that your phrase? And I believe you, of course.’

  Widdowson continued to hesitate, glancing at the door instead of at Fry.

  ‘But if you walk out now, sir, I’d probably have to stop believing you.’

  With a deep sigh, Widdowson sat back down and stared at his hands.

  ‘I do want to help her.’ He paused, seeming to realize that what he’d said didn’t sound enough. ‘I’m her brother, after all.’

  ‘That’s good. I was starting to get the opposite impression.’

  ‘It’s just … Well, I know what you lot are like. If you haven’t got anyone else in your sights, you’ll fix it on the nearest person you can find.’

  Fry raised an eyebrow. A little too dramatically, perhaps. But an interview room was a stage of a kind. You had to make your gestures understood by the dimmest suspect sitting at the back of the intellectual stalls.

  ‘You’re suggesting that we were going to accuse you of being involved in Patrick Rawson’s death? Where did you get that idea from, Mr Widdowson? I’m sure I didn’t say anything to give you that impression, did I?’

  ‘Well, not exactly.’

  ‘Was it something one of my colleagues said? Did they give you that impression?’

  Widdowson frowned. ‘I don’t know what made me think that,’ he said. ‘It was nothing.’

  ‘Oh, well.’ Fry gave a hint of a shrug, and smiled. ‘Perhaps it was just something in your own mind, sir? It happens sometimes, doesn’t it? We hear what we’re expecting to hear, rather than what someone actually says.’

  With an effort, Widdowson squared his shoulders and met Fry’s stare. ‘I’m here to help. Like I said. If you tell me what you want from me, I’ll do my best. Otherwise, we’re all wasting our time, aren’t we?’

  Fry looked down at her notes. Her scrawl was illegible, even to her. To Widdowson, it must have looked like an indecipherable code.

  ‘It would be helpful, sir, if you could just go over the events of Tuesday morning. Who knows what it might produce?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘It could be something really useful,’ said Fry. ‘Something that might help us –’

  ‘Yes, I know: Help you to catch the killer.’

  ‘Right. I’m glad we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet at last, Mr Widdowson.’

  He looked at her with a puzzled frown. ‘Tuesday morning, I was at home doing a bit of rip and burn on some CDs I’d borrowed.’

  ‘Any witnesses who can confirm that?’

  ‘Not unless Bill Gates has managed to sneak
some spyware into Windows Media Player.’

  ‘You didn’t make or receive any phone calls?’

  ‘No. Besides, how would that tell you where I was? I use my mobile all the time. I don’t even have a land-line at home.’

  Fry shrugged. She wasn’t going to get drawn into a discussion on that one. The less that certain members of the public knew about what was possible and not possible, the better. The cleverer ones already knew too much about fingerprints and DNA from watching re-runs of CSI.

  ‘You didn’t watch any daytime TV?’

  ‘Nah. I don’t watch much these days, except the football. There’s too much else to do.’

  ‘So no one else was at home with you?’ said Fry.

  Widdowson hesitated, suspecting that he might have detected a trap. ‘Mum, of course. She’s practically housebound.’

  ‘Your sister was out, then.’

  ‘I suppose she must have been.’

  ‘You help her with the horses, don’t you?’

  He didn’t like the change of subject. But that was fine.

  ‘Yes, sometimes.’

  ‘So you must ride, too. Which horse is yours? Bonny or Baby?’

  He laughed scornfully. ‘No way. You wouldn’t get me on one of those things. I do a bit of work to help out, that’s all.’

  ‘So your sister must have been out riding on her own that morning.’

  Widdowson stared at her.

  ‘I don’t have anything else to say.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Fry. ‘That’s all I wanted to know.’

  DI Hitchens listened to Fry’s theory carefully. She could tell that he wanted to believe her, and didn’t want to see some huge hole in her case.

  ‘So Patrick Rawson and Michael Clay were drawn to Derbyshire deliberately, for the purpose of revenge,’ he said, knitting his fingers together, which in him was a gesture of satisfaction.

  ‘Patrick Rawson, certainly,’ said Fry.