The Kill Call

by Stephen Booth

  Hitchens looked at her, surprised. ‘These Widdowson people carried out their own sting operation. Having got Mr Rawson into the area, they then intended to kill him. Isn’t that what you mean?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘You think Naomi Widdowson is telling the truth? It was an accident?’

  ‘I don’t think Miss Widdowson intended to kill Patrick Rawson,’ said Fry carefully.

  Hitchens unlocked his fingers. ‘Let me get this straight. She admits that she made a phone call to Mr Rawson, arranging to meet him at the field barn on Longstone Moor that morning at eight thirty.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She gave a false name, and claimed to have a number of horses for sale. Unfit horses, unsuitable for riding. But Thoroughbreds, to tempt him.’

  ‘Thoroughbreds that had clean passports. No Section Nine declaration.’

  ‘So they could go for human consumption.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Hitchens looked at her interview notes, as if he thought he might be missing something. ‘And her story is that she went to the meeting alone, on horseback.’

  ‘Because it was more anonymous, and easier to make a getaway.’

  ‘Right. And all she intended was to give Mr Rawson a scare. In her own words, “to teach him a lesson”. But when she galloped her horse at him, Mr Rawson tripped and fell. The horse spooked and reared, and he got kicked in the head. That’s it?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ agreed Fry.

  ‘In her account, there were no witnesses.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And without a witness, it would be difficult to prove that it happened any differently. It could have been an accident.’

  Fry nodded. ‘It’s funny,’ she said. ‘We started off with the assumption that Patrick Rawson’s killing was the result of some human relationship that had gone wrong.’

  ‘Well, that’s usually the case, Diane.’

  ‘Yes. But, in the end, it turns out that Rawson died because of the nature of someone’s relationship with an animal. That’s a new one on me.’

  ‘And me.’

  ‘The trouble is,’ said Fry, ‘Naomi Widdowson obviously knows nothing at all about what happened to Michael Clay.’

  ‘So are we accepting Miss Widdowson’s account?’ asked Hitchens.

  ‘No, we’re not,’ said Fry. ‘Because we know that she wasn’t on her own.’

  ‘She’s shielding someone, then. Her brother?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Fry took the postmortem photos of Patrick Rawson’s head injury from her case file and lay them on Hitchens’ desk.

  ‘Mrs van Doon has completed her analysis of the injury pattern,’ she said. ‘As we can see, the depression in the skull is basically the shape of a horseshoe, which would substantiate Naomi Widdowson’s story. But this area here, where the pattern has been obliterated – that was caused by a later injury. Mrs van Doon thinks a blunt-ended weapon.’

  Hitchens examined the photos closely. ‘Interesting. So someone finished Patrick Rawson off.’

  ‘That’s our murderer,’ said Fry. ‘It’s whoever the second person was who went to that meeting with Naomi Widdowson. It’s the person she’s shielding. And it’s someone who had a reason for making sure that Patrick Rawson was dead.’

  Cooper knew only too well how an overnight resolve could dissipate completely by morning. You went to bed with your mind full of determination, and by the time you got up your willpower was as mushy as the muesli in your breakfast bowl. Things seemed so much less important in the cold light of day. Easier, surely, to let it all go by and get on with life.

  But that morning, a couple of hours before dawn, he had already been wide awake and planning how he would carry out his intention.

  ‘You’re getting really good at these interviews,’ said Cooper in the CID room.

  ‘I always was good,’ said Fry.

  ‘No, I mean – you really knew how to handle the Widdowsons. They’re going to give more away about what happened at any moment.’

  ‘If they have anything more to give away.’

  Cooper turned. ‘What? Do you think they might be genuine?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, Ben.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Cooper wasn’t quite sure how Fry had managed to make him feel in the wrong when all he had tried to do was pay her a professional compliment.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘if something’s bothering you, you should talk about it.’

  Fry looked at him, a cool expression on her face that he couldn’t read. Sometimes, it seemed to be an expression that she put on entirely for his benefit, a mask that he wasn’t supposed to penetrate.

  ‘Ben,’ she said, ‘if I was going to talk to someone about what’s bothering me – it certainly wouldn’t be you.’

  Cooper sat back, feeling the physical force of her rebuff.

  ‘OK. It’s up to you.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘I’m being serious, Diane.’

  ‘No, you’re being ludicrous. There’s a difference.’

  ‘I’m sorry you feel like that,’ said Cooper. ‘Because I wanted to ask you something.’

  Just then, Gavin Murfin came into the office with a report in his hand.

  ‘Fingerprint section have got their, er … fingers out at last,’ he said, with a grin. ‘They’ve got us a result on the prints lifted from the gate in that field where Patrick Rawson died.’

  ‘And …?’ said Fry, completely forgetting Cooper.

  Murfin scanned the report. ‘Adrian Tarrant, aged thirty- two. HGV driver, with an address in Eyam.’

  ‘He has a record? If his prints were on file, they should have made the match long before now. Days ago.’

  Murfin shook his head. ‘They weren’t on file until today,’ he said. ‘He was arrested this morning, during a meeting of the Eden Valley Hunt.’

  ‘What?’ said Cooper. ‘We were there.’

  ‘Well, you must have missed it. It seems Mr Tarrant was identified by a female hunt saboteur as the person who assaulted her during an incident on Tuesday. He was arrested and brought here for processing. DNA sample and fingerprints taken, as per routine.’

  ‘And when they put his prints into the system, they got a match.’

  ‘Bingo,’ smiled Murfin.

  ‘Adrian Tarrant,’ said Fry. ‘I knew it was him.’

  Adrian Tarrant had been employed by one of the haulage companies whose lorries rumbled constantly backwards and forwards to the opencast quarries on Longstone Edge. Fry reflected that he might well have seen her as he passed along the haulage road in a cloud of dust. But she wondered whether his job might not give an alibi for eight thirty on Tuesday morning, when Patrick Rawson was killed.

  That was, until she discovered Tarrant had been sacked by his employers the previous week, for turning up over the alcohol limit once too often.

  The house in Eyam was already guarded by uniformed officers standing at the gate. It was a small, stone-faced council house, not much more than a two-up, two-down, with a tiny kitchen and bathroom. According to the neighbours, Adrian Tarrant shared the house with another man, possibly a cousin, who worked as a long-distance lorry driver and was currently away on a job.

  Fry could see from the state of the house that this was likely to be true. A couple of days’ washing-up stood on the kitchen drainer, newspapers and empty beer cans decorated the carpet in the sitting room. The TV remote looked much better used than the vacuum cleaner.

  The team moved through the house systematically, not entirely sure what they were looking for, so looking that bit more carefully.

  ‘Apparently, it was Tarrant’s fellow hunt stewards who pointed the finger initially,’ said Cooper. ‘Then, when he was pulled in, the girl he injured made a positive identification. So it just shows –’

  ‘Not all hunting people are bad, I know,’ said Fry.

  ‘They can’t risk someone like him giving them a bad reputation. Not
any more.’

  In the sitting room, Fry began to open the drawers of a small dresser, her gloved fingers moving through the contents. Some CDs, spare batteries, a pair of gloves. Luke Irvine was examining a desktop PC on a table in the corner. Was Tarrant the type to send a lot of emails? She doubted it, but you had to check. Just as Cooper came into the room from the kitchen, she touched something solid in the drawer. Her fingers closed around an unusual shape.

  ‘That’s odd.’

  Cooper came over to her. ‘What have you found, Diane?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  Fry showed him the object she’d found in the drawer – a small, flared brass and copper tube, no more than nine inches long.

  ‘Those things aren’t easy to use,’ said Cooper. ‘It takes a lot of practice to get it right.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A hunting horn, of course.’

  Carefully, Fry bagged the horn for evidence.

  ‘Adrian Tarrant must have had it,’ she said. ‘So it looks as though the kill call was real, after all – and Tarrant was the one who blew it. For a while, I thought the sabs were making it up.’

  ‘Rather a theatrical gesture, wasn’t it?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Theatrical?’ Fry thought of all the gleaming horses and red coats, the panting hounds and glossy boots, all the centuries of ritual and tradition. ‘Well, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? A bit of theatre.’

  ‘The kill call?’ said Irvine, straightening up from the PC when he overheard their conversation.

  ‘It’s a hunting term,’ explained Cooper. ‘Three long notes, calling the hounds in to kill the fox.’

  ‘Oh, I see. It has another meaning, too.’

  ‘Of course. Something to do with computer programming, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it’s used in multi-tasking. The kill call lets one process terminate another.’

  Fry looked around Adrian Tarrant’s home, sniffing at the beer cans and unwashed plates. ‘Well, let’s see if we’ve found enough to terminate Mr Tarrant’s activities.’

  That afternoon, Fry spent a long time sitting across the table from Adrian Tarrant in an interview room, watching him as if he was an animal at the zoo. She wasn’t sure what sort of animal he would be. He might as well have been a hibernating bear, for all the communication that was going on between them.

  Tarrant was silent, stubbornly so. He didn’t even need the presence of the duty solicitor to encourage him to go ‘no comment’. But now and then he raised his head and stared back at her. Fry remembered his eyes – those eyes that had stared at her as he ran past her near Birchlow on Tuesday, and again in the woods on Saturday.

  ‘Why did you kill Patrick Rawson?’ she asked. ‘Was it for money? We know you lost your job. Or perhaps you’ve got yourself into some kind of trouble? Do you owe a lot of cash? Is it for drugs?’

  He remained silent, denying the tapes any response. These were facts that might come out some other way, and other members of the team were already at work in the CID room, phoning his ex-employers, former colleagues, members of his family. SOCOs and a search team were about to pull apart his house. But Tarrant wasn’t going to help. Why should he save the police time?

  ‘What did you use to finish Patrick Rawson off when the horse didn’t kill him?’

  Fry really wanted to know the answer to that one. Her money was on the pickaxe handle that he’d been carrying when she saw him in the woods. She hoped the search would turn it up. Bloodstains were preserved well on a wooden handle. Patrick Rawson’s DNA would clinch it, even if Adrian Tarrant stayed permanently dumb.

  ‘How well do you ride a horse? Not well, I bet. You’re not the type.’

  He didn’t rise to it. She hadn’t expected him to. In a way, he had only been doing what everyone else did, making a living by exploiting his natural talents. In Tarrant’s case, his talent was a capacity for violence.

  After interviewing the other hunt stewards, Fry had two witnesses to the fact that Tarrant had been absent from steward duty until later, around the time that she’d seen him on the road. She thought of the protestor who had been injured during the hunt and had identified Adrian Tarrant as her assailant. Tarrant had come fresh from killing Patrick Rawson, and the assault had probably come all too easily to him.

  Now Fry knew what sort of animal Adrian Tarrant was. The sort whose instinct was to kill. Once the scent of blood was in their nostrils, they were likely to attack anything that crossed their path.

  ‘He’s saying nothing,’ said Hitchens, when she took a break. ‘And I’d anticipate that he doesn’t intend to.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Fry.

  ‘No explanation for how his prints came to be on the gate?’

  ‘None offered.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  Fry did at least have a clearer picture now of what had happened to Patrick Rawson. Earlier, she’d imagined him running across the field in his waxed coat and brown brogues, and had wondered where he’d been running to. But it had been more a question of what he was running away from. Sean Crabbe had just been the final element in deciding Mr Rawson’s fate.

  And that reminded her it was Sean’s turn to face his fate now. The CPS would be making a decision early next week on what charges to bring against him. Fry found herself hoping that he’d avoid a custodial sentence. Of all the people prison would do no good for, Sean Crabbe had to be top of the list.

  ‘So what are we going to do now, sir?’ asked Fry. ‘We don’t have any other evidence against Adrian Tarrant.’

  ‘I suggest you have another go at Naomi Widdowson,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘Why?’

  Hitchens smiled. ‘Because, according to Tarrant’s colleagues at the haulage company, Naomi is his girlfriend.’

  34

  That evening, David Headon needed to take only one glance at the badge found during the search at Eden View.

  ‘The ROC,’ he said. ‘Where did you get that?’

  ‘The Royal Observer Corps, right?’ said Cooper.

  ‘That’s it. Did you know I was a member?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. You’re just the sort of person I’d expect to know about these things.’

  Headon was an old friend of his father’s, a man of about the same age as Joe Cooper. He’d visited Bridge End Farm a few times when Ben was a teenager, and he could remember Headon talking endlessly about annual camps at RAF stations around the country.

  ‘All the ROC posts were closed in 1991, and we were stood down completely a few years later,’ said Headon. ‘There were quite a few of us, you know. Eighteen thousand observers, until the cutbacks started in the sixties. The Corps did a brilliant job during the Second World War, tracking German air raids. Then, when the Cold War started, the observers were needed again. We had posts all over the country. There was even one at Windsor Castle, in the coal cellar.’

  ‘What did the ROC do, exactly?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Observe, I suppose.’

  ‘That’s right. Observe and report.’

  ‘I thought I recognized the logo. I was at the National Arboretum the other day.’

  ‘Ah, you saw the ROC grove. So how were the trees doing? Still waterlogged?’

  ‘No. They’re small, but alive.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘The trees had labels with this logo. They said “7 Group Bedford, 8 Group Coventry”. For some reason, the labels stuck in my mind. It’s the emblem, I think. It’s quite distinctive, and not immediately obvious what it’s supposed to be.’

  Headon stroked the emblem on the ROC badge. ‘He’s an Elizabethan beacon lighter, who used to warn of Spanish ships approaching the coast.’

  ‘Yes, I found that on Google.’

  ‘Well, that’s pretty much the role the observers carried on, though during the Second World War it was German planes they were tracking. A series of observer posts could follow an aircraft’s flight path right acr
oss Britain, the way they did when Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland in 1941.’

  ‘Aircraft recognition, then,’ said Cooper.

  ‘That was it, for long time. It was what a lot of the blokes that I knew came into the Corps for. But that job went out when aircraft got too fast for us. By the 1960s, it was becoming a bit impractical. A low-flying enemy aircraft could have entered UK airspace, flown to London, dropped its bombs and been on the way home again, all while the observers were still trying to make their minds up whether it was friend or foe. The ROC would have been wound up right then, if it hadn’t been for the Bomb.’

  Cooper could tell that Headon pronounced the word ‘bomb’ with a capital ‘B’ this time, and he knew immediately what he meant.

  ‘The atomic bomb.’

  ‘That’s the baby. Believe it or not, Ben, when you were a child, me and my mates in the Royal Observer Corps were your first line of defence against a nuclear holocaust. That was the time we went underground.’

  Fry knocked on the door of the DI’s office. She was feeling very pleased with herself. Almost smug, some might have said.

  ‘Get any more out of Naomi Widdowson?’ asked Hitchens.

  ‘No,’ said Fry. ‘She’s gone “no comment”, like her boyfriend.’

  The DI looked at her. ‘But there’s something else. I can tell from your face, Diane.’

  ‘I decided to get the calls record from the phone network,’ she said.

  ‘But we already did that. Irvine and Hurst went through all the calls on both of Patrick Rawson’s phones, didn’t they?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The only calls we couldn’t identify were to a pay-as-you-go mobile. And that was the one Naomi Widdowson used to set up the false deal.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So?’

  Fry shook her head. ‘I didn’t mean Patrick Rawson’s phone records, sir. I meant Deborah’s.’

  ‘What – Deborah Rawson’s?’

  And Fry finally allowed herself to smile. ‘Luckily for us, some people have no idea how to cover up a crime.’

  On the edge of the hill, Cooper was able to look back at the town of Edendale, constrained in its hollow by the hills to the north and the sharp cliffs of the edges to the east. The pressure of housing demand might force Edendale to expand some time, if national park planning regulations allowed it. He could foresee a day when those houses would gradually push southwards into the limestone of the White Peak.