The Kill Call

by Stephen Booth

  He looked up at the sound of a car, but it passed him by, and he walked back down the road. He found himself standing in front of Plague Cottage again, where the Black Death had first arrived in Eyam. A massive stone lintel sat over the door of the cottage, pressing down on the frame, as if representing the great weight of history.

  ‘So this is Eyam. Sorry – Eem.’

  Fry was standing on the pavement a few feet away, not looking at him but at the houses. She was regarding them as if they were exhibits in a museum – which, in a way, they were.

  ‘I didn’t think you would come,’ he said.

  ‘It was touch and go. The washing and ironing nearly won.’

  Cooper smiled. He had been amazed when Fry agreed to come. He’d been expecting the usual rejection, the sharp response of someone who had far better things to do with her time than socialize with her colleagues, thank you very much. He didn’t know what had changed in her, to make her accept. But now she was here, he realized he had no proper plan. He’d only suggested Eyam because it seemed to have some relevance, a link to the one aspect of life they had in common.

  ‘And this is the Plague Cottage.’

  Fry looked at the green plaque with its gold lettering.

  Edward Cooper, aged four, died on the 22nd

  September 1665

  Jonathan Cooper, aged twelve, died on the 2nd

  October 1665

  Mary alone survived, but lost thirteen relatives.

  ‘Two brothers, who died within days of each other,’ said Fry.

  ‘They told us in school that the arrival of the Black Death was blamed on a miasma,’ said Cooper. ‘“Evil humours” drifting in the air. Women carried scented posies around to ward off the poisonous fumes, and men smoked pipes, hoping to protect themselves with tobacco smoke.’

  He felt no need of maps or tourist guides to find his way around Eyam now. It had a familiar feel to it already. As they walked, they passed interesting little alleyways, passages into back yards and stone-flagged ginnels. At one point an enormous stone water trough stood by the side of the lane, a trickle of water still issuing from a pipe in the wall, as it must have done for centuries.

  For a few minutes, they ploughed through the usual small talk. Cooper had wanted to prise Fry away from the office, disentangle her from any of her crime scenes, and get her on neutral ground where they could talk about something other than work. Eyam had been the best place he could think of, without sounding too unlikely.

  But he was finding it hard going. Fry constantly steered the conversation back to a safe topic. Of course, the murder of Patrick Rawson had absorbed her attention for the past week. It had opened her eyes to subjects she hadn’t been aware of before, too. It was bound to be in her mind.

  ‘So what about the wife?’ said Cooper, finally giving in to the inevitable. ‘Deborah Rawson?’

  ‘She’ll be charged with conspiracy to murder. She didn’t kill her husband herself, but she arranged it, at least.’

  ‘And it was well planned, too.’

  ‘She’s a woman,’ said Fry. ‘She would have worked it all out in her mind, run through the scenario over and over, imagined what it would be like, and how she would feel afterwards. It wouldn’t have been some spontaneous impulse to violence, with no thought or emotion behind it. That’s a man’s type of crime.’

  ‘You think anyone is capable of murder, don’t you?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Yes.’

  Cooper had parked the Toyota near St Lawrence’s Church, and they strolled through the churchyard as Fry told him the story. St Lawrence’s boasted a large sundial over the chancel door, and a small group of visitors stood in front of it, checking the time and trying to figure out the Roman numerals. At some time, a motto had been inscribed in Latin on the supporting stones. It was almost worn away, but Cooper could just make out in the right light: Ut umbra sic vita – ‘As the shadow passes, so does life’.

  ‘So Deborah Rawson contacted Naomi Widdowson and told her when her husband would be visiting Derbyshire?’ he said.

  Fry nodded. ‘Yes. Naomi had been phoning Sutton Coldfield, trying to get hold of Patrick Rawson to give him a piece of her mind. Deborah got talking to her, and decided to use her. It’s all backed up by the phone records. She gave Miss Widdowson her husband’s mobile phone number, so she could arrange to meet him. It seems Naomi told him she had some horses for sale.’

  ‘Thoroughbreds, ideal for their meat?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Cooper looked at Fry’s face to read her expression. She sounded almost approving of the attention to detail that had gone into Deborah Rawson’s planning. But the satisfaction in her eyes might just have been her contentment at being able to discuss work, when she’d feared some kind of social occasion.

  ‘It all hangs together,’ said Fry. ‘Rawson had told Melvyn Senior that he’d have some horses that would need transporting later in the week, and he’d also phoned Hawley’s abattoir to book them in for slaughter. As far as Rawson was concerned, the deal was all set up.’

  When the tourists had moved on, the only sound in the churchyard was the wind stirring the branches of the trees. Cooper still thought it was strange that the only plague victim buried here was the rector’s wife. The dead bodies were hardly likely to be infectious – they would already have been abandoned by plague-carrying fleas in favour of living hosts. The same sort of thing had gone on everywhere in the Middle Ages, though no amount of corpse-dumping would have saved a doomed town when the plague swept through Europe.

  He realized that Fry was looking at him oddly, a faintly derisive smile suggesting that he was behaving in exactly the way she expected. Cooper wondered if this idea was going to work, or whether she would lose patience with him and walk away. The situation seemed so fragile.

  ‘I don’t understand why Rawson went back to horse dealing when he had his other enterprises,’ he said, desperate to regain her attention.

  ‘Well, he was getting himself into financial difficulties with the new ventures,’ said Fry. ‘He’d stretched himself too far, that was his problem. The house in Sutton Coldfield was fully mortgaged to raise capital for the meat-distribution business. But with the way the housing market has been, the property was worth less and less, and interest rates were going up. That outbreak of trichinosis would have ruined R & G Enterprises. Their hopes of public acceptance of horse meat would have been wiped out in a stroke.’

  ‘I can just imagine the headlines,’ said Cooper. ‘So Rawson was going back to his old living?’

  ‘It had done well for him in the past, and he’d managed to keep just the right side of the law, despite everything. Patrick Rawson was a man confident of his own abilities. And Naomi Widdowson came forward and offered him the perfect deal at exactly the right time. The psychology of it was very clever.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like something Naomi would figure out.’

  ‘No, of course she didn’t.’ Fry sounded exasperated, as if she thought he wasn’t really listening. ‘It was all planned by Deborah Rawson.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ said Cooper.

  They were passing a corner by the Riley Graves, one of Eyam’s macabre little tourist attractions. The majority of plague victims were buried in unknown graves, but here was a memorial to John Hancock, who’d died at the height of the plague. The inscription was just about legible, despite some cracking to the gravestone.

  As I doe now, So must thou lye.

  Remember, man, That thou shalt die.

  ‘But why would Rawson’s wife set him up like that?’ said Cooper.

  ‘She’d convinced herself that her husband was having an affair. She overheard some argument between him and Michael Clay over payments that were going out through one of their business accounts.’

  ‘Rent for the house? Eden View?’

  ‘Yes. Deborah put two and two together, and came up with the conclusion that her husband had a love nest in Derbyshire, and that explained why he was in the h
abit of spending longer away from home than seemed necessary for business purposes.’

  ‘I see.’

  Cooper saw that many of the names on adjacent gravestones to John Hancock’s were members of the Hancock family. The plague had taken old and young, grandparents and children. None had escaped. As a result, John Hancock’s wife Elizabeth had buried almost her whole family here in the course of a week, struggling through the fields every day with a diseased corpse for the protection of the village. Self-sacrifice and the acceptance of suffering weren’t fashionable ideals any more, were they?

  ‘I think that was the first sign I had that she was lying,’ said Fry, breaking into his thoughts again.

  ‘What was?’

  ‘Aren’t you listening, Ben? When Deborah insisted she’d never had any suspicions about Patrick. It didn’t fit with the picture of the man I’d built up.’

  ‘A charming rogue, with a smooth tongue and a casual disregard for the truth.’

  ‘Exactly. Deborah Rawson would have been mad not to wonder occasionally whether she could trust him. But when I asked her, she exaggerated the lie too much. She would have been better telling me a small part of the truth.’

  ‘You’re getting very cynical about people, Diane,’ said Cooper, as they walked on.

  ‘I always was,’ said Fry. ‘Always.’

  She was right that he was having difficulty listening to her. This wasn’t what he’d come to talk about, and her manner was making him nervous. She was freezing up minute by minute.

  ‘The trouble was, Deborah had it completely wrong,’ said Fry. ‘It was Michael Clay who was making the payments, supporting his brother’s illegitimate daughter. That’s the poison of suspicion. Anything you hear can seem like evidence.’

  Cooper nodded as they headed back to the village square. A powerful smell of cooking food hit him. Food. That would make a difference.

  ‘So Patrick Rawson’s death only happened on our turf because of the existence of Eden View and Michael Clay’s niece?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But Naomi Widdowson insisted in interview that Rawson’s death was an accident, didn’t she?’ said Cooper. ‘She said they just wanted to scare him, to pay him back for all the distress he’d caused to her, and scores of people like her.’

  ‘That might have been what Naomi thought,’ said Fry. ‘Her boyfriend Adrian Tarrant is quite a different matter. I knew I recognized him at the hunt meeting, when he was acting as a steward. Just the sort of person the hunting fraternity don’t need if they want to improve their image, Ben.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘And Deborah Rawson made quite a separate deal with him. She paid him three thousand pounds.’

  ‘Three thousand pounds? It’s not much, really.’

  ‘It is, if you think you’re going to get away with it. And Adrian Tarrant thought he would.’

  ‘Just as Patrick Rawson always did.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Cooper thought back to the hunt saboteurs’ report of hearing the kill call on the morning of the hunt. Earlier, there had been the phone call from Naomi Widdowson to Patrick Rawson, the call that had brought him to his death. That was a kind of kill call in its own way. And there had been the call from Deborah Rawson to Adrian Tarrant, too.

  ‘The argument Mr Wakeley heard …’ said Cooper.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I was assuming he’d heard Naomi Widdowson shouting at Patrick Rawson, and perhaps Rawson arguing back. That doesn’t fit with the story, though, does it?’

  ‘Not quite,’ said Fry. ‘Naomi must certainly have shouted at him about Rosie. But Rawson didn’t stand there and argue with her. He ran.’

  ‘Yes. So the rest of the argument must have been between Naomi and Adrian, mustn’t it?’

  Fry nodded. ‘Of course. She didn’t want Tarrant to go back to the hut, she was trying to make him come away with her. I think Naomi was telling the truth on this point – that she only wanted to give Patrick Rawson a scare. But Adrian had another job to do.’

  ‘He wasn’t much of a hit man, though. Too fond of unnecessary showiness – I mean, the business with the hunting horn and all that. The kill call.’

  ‘Well, he enjoyed the work too much,’ said Fry. ‘That was his problem. It doesn’t do to get emotionally involved.’

  ‘So I’ve heard.’

  Then Cooper remembered David Headon’s almost casual reference to Attack Warning Red, the recognized alert to an imminent nuclear attack during the 1960s. Attack Warning Red? That would have been the kill call on a massive scale.

  They had lunch at the Miners’ Arms, a pub boasting that it was old enough to be pre-plague. Fry ate bacon-wrapped chicken breast stuffed with leeks and mushrooms, while Cooper had the home-made venison and orange pie.

  As they ate, Cooper tried to close his ears to the voice of a man at a nearby table, boasting to two women that he kept a loaded pistol on his bedside table, in case of burglars. ‘If I caught a burglar in my house, I’d shoot him. It’s the way I was trained.’

  ‘I heard your cat died,’ said Fry, draining half a glass of the house white.

  As small talk, it wasn’t a brilliant opening. Cooper looked at the rapidly disappearing wine and wondered if Fry could really be as nervous as she seemed, so unaccustomed to a purely social situation.

  ‘How did you hear that?’ asked Cooper, genuinely curious about her sources of information.

  ‘Oh, it was mentioned around the office,’ said Fry vaguely. ‘Becky Hurst said something, I think.’

  Office gossip, then? He didn’t think she ever noticed it, let alone paid any attention to it.

  ‘Yes, it’s true. Though I’m not entirely sure he was mine. He kind of came with the flat, and adopted me.’

  ‘Shame, though.’

  ‘You’re not a cat person, are you?’ said Cooper. ‘I’m sure you can’t be.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

  ‘Well … no, you’re just not, Diane.’

  Fry swallowed some more wine. ‘Can’t stand ’em,’ she admitted. ‘Aren’t you going to get a new one?’

  ‘I’m going to look this afternoon.’

  ‘From a sanctuary?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought it would be.’

  Despite his best intentions, Cooper felt himself bridle at her tone. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Human or animal, it has to be a lost cause with you. You have to be able to ride in like a knight in shining armour and perform the noble rescue. It’s what you get off on. I’ve seen it often enough.’

  Her accusation was so unfair that Cooper didn’t know what to say. How had she known that he would choose a sanctuary? He’d been thinking only the other day of Cats Protection, who had a centre somewhere near Ashbourne. But there was a sanctuary closer than that, just outside Edendale, and he’d decided to give them a try first. That wasn’t wrong, was it? Anyone would do the same, rather than leave all those animals abandoned in cages.

  Fry put down her glass for a moment.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’

  Cooper could feel the mood change, like a cold draught blowing through the bar. He almost looked round to see who’d left the door open.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Did you ever really understand why I came to Derbyshire from Birmingham?’

  ‘Well, there was your sister,’ said Cooper cautiously, remembering a particularly difficult period between them, and reluctant to open up any old wounds. ‘You thought she was living in this part of the world. Sheffield, right?’

  ‘Yes. And?’

  Fry gazed at him challengingly, waiting for a reply. It made Cooper feel as though he was a suspect in an interview room, forced to fill that uncomfortable silence with some confession of his own.

  ‘Well, I heard you had a bad time in Birmingham,’ he said.

  ‘A bad time?’ Fry tossed back the rest of her wine and looked around for another. ‘What does that mean?’
/>
  ‘There was the assault case.’

  ‘Oh, you heard about that? Who told you?’

  Cooper shifted nervously. He recalled mentioning it himself, to Liz Petty.

  ‘I don’t know, Diane. It was a story that went around the office, not long after you arrived.’

  ‘I’d like to know who spread the story.’

  ‘I honestly don’t know. Are you saying it isn’t true?’

  ‘No, it’s quite true.’

  ‘I appreciate it’s something you might not want to talk about.’

  Fry stared at her empty glass. For a moment, Cooper thought she was going to start talking to him about it, that she wanted to tell him about the rape that had blighted her career in the West Midlands and had followed her to Derbyshire, like a shadow.

  But if the thought had crossed her mind, she decided against it. Cooper realized that she wasn’t going to say more. Though he’d barely touched his own drink, he fetched her another glass of wine, and after a while the conversation moved on.

  ‘Lies,’ said Fry. ‘Casual disregard for the truth. Why do people always feel the need to lie, even about the smallest things?’

  ‘It’s an occupational hazard in our business,’ said Cooper, watching her attack her full glass.

  Fry nodded. ‘My sister called me this week.’

  Cooper froze. Not only at the unexpected turn of the conversation, but at Fry’s sudden change of tone. Just when he thought she was about to thaw a little, she produced a knife to stab into his guts.

  ‘Angie?’ he said, knowing that he sounded completely feeble.

  ‘I don’t have any other sisters.’

  ‘Is she …?’ Cooper didn’t know what he meant to ask.

  ‘Much the same as the last time you talked to her,’ said Fry. ‘Probably much the same as the first time, too.’

  ‘Diane, I know we never talked about that –’

  ‘You’re damn right we didn’t.’

  ‘Is there anything I can say that would help?’

  ‘You can tell me why you went to all that trouble to find my sister and plot with her behind my back. It’s something you should have explained to me a long time ago, Ben. A long time.’