08.Dying to Sin

by Stephen Booth

  ‘Was owned?’

  ‘Well, the place has been bought for development – hence the presence of all these builders in their hard hats. Development, or conversion. I’m not quite clear what they’re telling me.’

  ‘So who’s the present owner?’

  ‘A Mr Goodwin. He’s a lawyer, lives in Manchester. Mr Goodwin is the man employing the builders. I’ve got his contact details from the site foreman. But that seems to be all the bloke knows.’

  ‘Get on the phone, Gavin, and find out everything you can about the previous owners,’ said Fry. ‘We need names, dates, relationships. We need to know who else was in the household. Dig out anything that’s on record about them. Get some help, if you need it.’

  ‘If?’ said Murfin. ‘If?’

  ‘The body has been here for a year at least, according to the pathologist.’

  ‘That puts the victim in situ before Mr Goodwin took ownership, then. The sale went through only three months ago, I gather. The farm has been empty for about nine months, after the surviving owner went into care.’

  Fry looked at their surroundings in more detail, the farm buildings beyond the stretch of mud and the track and the parked vehicles.

  ‘Does that explain the state of the place? How could it get like this in nine months?’

  Ben Cooper would probably tell her that all this was evidence of the evolution of the farm over the centuries, as its owners adapted to new ways of working, changed the use of their buildings from cattle to sheep, from hay storage to machinery shed. Or whatever. To Fry, it looked like dereliction and chaos, pure and simple. Not an ounce of design or planning had gone into the farm, not even in the newer buildings.

  Of course, farmers were a law unto themselves in so many ways. They were even allowed to create these shanty towns, reminiscent of the slums of some Third World country where there was no running water or drainage, and rubbish was dumped in the streets. In Rio de Janeiro, you might expect it. But not in Middle England.

  ‘What a place,’ she said, unable to avoid voicing her feelings for once.

  ‘The builders have hardly started on the house or outbuildings yet,’ said Murfin. ‘The foreman tells me they’ve been doing some work on the foundations and building an approach road. Then they have to tackle some of the exterior walls where they’re unsound. And of course there’s the roof. Not much point in trying to do any work on the interior until you’ve sorted out the roof, is there?’

  ‘What is it going to be when they’ve finished?’ asked Fry.

  ‘The foreman says a gentleman’s residence. Office suite, swimming pool, guest annexe.’

  ‘They’ve got a hell of a job on.’

  Unrepaired splits in the iron guttering had allowed rainwater to run down the walls, dragging long grey stains across the stone. Wires sagged from the telegraph pole. Two black crows swayed on the wire in the wind, flicking their wings to keep their balance.

  Fry noticed a large shed behind the house. A very large shed indeed, with a convex roof. Wheel tracks led from one end of the shed towards the stretch of ground where the body had been found. Old tracks that had been made when the ground was soft, but whose ruts had hardened and survived until the recent rain. That was the sort of building where anything could go on, out of sight of the public. Out of earshot, out of mind.

  The rain was getting heavier. That could be a problem.

  But then Fry corrected herself. There were never any problems, only challenges. No obstacles that couldn’t be overcome.

  At least the FOAs had been right on the ball, getting that body tent over the makeshift grave as soon as they saw the conditions. By now, this rain could have washed away the evidence if they hadn’t acted quickly. Lucky they’d had one in the boot of their car. In these circumstances, there was an evens chance that they would have had to sit and wait for one to arrive.

  According to their advertising, these tents were supposed to go up in ten seconds, but she bet it had taken a good bit longer than that. The peg-down eyelets looked none too secure in the soft ground, and the guy ropes were slippery with mud.

  ‘Duckboards,’ someone was saying into a radio. ‘We need duckboards here. Lots of duckboards.’

  Fry turned back to Murfin again. ‘So where’s this builder who found the body?’

  ‘Waiting in the van over there. Ward is his name – Jamie Ward, aged twenty. I’d hardly call him your typical builder, actually.’

  Fry looked at him. ‘So what would you call him, Gavin?’

  Murfin closed his notebook. ‘Terrified,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’d call him – a terrified kid.’

  Matt Cooper had loaded some sheep into a trailer and was doing the paperwork in the Land Rover when his brother arrived. Ben could see a sheaf of forms resting on a clipboard. Pink copy for the destination, blue for the haulier, yellow for the holding of departure.

  Matt opened the door, the usual frown caused by paperwork clearing from his face.

  ‘Hello, little brother. How was Amy? Did she have a good time?’

  ‘Oh, yes. She was fascinated by the recipe for preserving a severed hand.’

  ‘That sounds about right. She’s been in a funny mood recently.’

  Matt was still putting on weight. That was a new set of overalls he was wearing, and they were a size larger than the last ones. He was only in his mid-thirties, so he still had middle-aged spread to look forward to.

  ‘Amy talks in quite a grown-up way sometimes, doesn’t she?’ said Ben.

  ‘Oh, you noticed that. Yes, it’s a bit of a new thing. I think it’s some influence at school – she must have some new friends, or something.’

  ‘Or a new teacher she’s got a crush on?’

  ‘Do girls have crushes on teachers?’

  ‘Yes, I believe so, Matt.’

  ‘I mean … well, I think they’re mostly female teachers that she has at that school.’

  ‘Even so.’

  Matt was silent for a moment. ‘I’ll ask Kate to have a quiet word,’ he said.

  Ben turned to look at the farmhouse, conscious of its presence behind him, the old family home. Now that he no longer lived here, he noticed that Bridge End Farm was starting to look middle-aged, too. The house hadn’t been painted for a while, and he could see that some work needed doing on the roof of the barn. He supposed there wasn’t much money in the bank to spare for repairs these days.

  ‘It’ll just be a phase Amy is going through, won’t it?’ he said.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘It could be a lot worse, Matt. She’s a sensible girl.’

  Matt put his paperwork aside. ‘Ben, how come you know so much more about pubescent girls than I do? I’m the dad around here.’

  ‘You see all sorts of things in the job.’

  ‘I suppose you do. And of course, you don’t always talk about it, do you, Ben? Especially these days. Whenever you come to the farm now, you seem to have changed a little bit more.’

  Ben watched Amy coming across the field, walking with exaggerated care, instead of running in an uninhibited way, as she once would have done.

  ‘Perhaps some of us are maturing faster than others,’ he said.

  Ben couldn’t deny that he was losing his sense of connection to Bridge End Farm. The ties were no longer quite so binding since he’d moved out and rented his own flat in Edendale. Memories of his childhood at the farm were objects in the far distance, unless he stopped to think about them. And then the details could spring at him with unexpected ferocity, like wild animals that hated to be stared at.

  ‘Nothing much happening, then?’ asked Matt. ‘No urgent crime on the streets of Edendale to take you away from us? If you’re at a loose end, you could help me batten down for the weather. It’s not looking too good.’

  Ben turned and looked at the hills in the east, where the bad weather came from. A bank of cloud was building up, dark and ominous. Those easterly winds had been a feature of his early years. At Bridge End, when the wi
nd blew from the east it made all the shutters bang and the doors of the loose boxes rattle against their latches. The trees on the eastern ridge would be bent over at unnatural angles, their bare branches flailing helplessly against the power of the gale. At night, animals would stir uneasily in the barns as the young Ben lay listening to the banging and the moaning of the wind, jumping at the crash of a bucket hurled across the yard or a tile dislodged from the roof.

  Just when Cooper was thinking that nothing would ever make him jump with alarm like that any more, the phone in his pocket began to ring.

  Jamie Ward was shivering miserably in the front seat of the crew bus that had brought the builders to Pity Wood Farm. It was a converted Transit, smelling powerfully of cigarettes and muddy clothes. The seats were worn thin, the floor scuffed by dozens of work boots. Fry moved a hard hat aside, slid in next to him, and wound the window down to prevent the interior steaming up. Rain covered the windscreen, blocking out the view of the farm.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll be OK.’

  He didn’t sound very sure, but Fry let it pass. The sooner she finished with him, the better it would be. If he went into shock, he’d be useless.

  Murfin had been right about Jamie Ward. He was younger than any of the other men she’d seen standing around the site, and he had an entirely different look about him. His hair was streaked blond, and was gelled up at the front – hardly the typical builder’s style. But he was a well-built lad, six feet tall at least, a good build for a rugby player. His hands were powerful and broad, just as suitable for hard physical work as for playing rugby.

  ‘I’m studying Microbiology at Sheffield University,’ said Jamie when she asked him. ‘But I need to find work whenever I can, you know – to get some dosh.’

  ‘You work as a builder’s labourer? That’s a bit of an unusual vacation job for a student,’ suggested Fry.

  Jamie shrugged. ‘It suits me. It beats working in McDonald’s, anyway. I like to be outside in the open air, doing a bit of physical work. I’d go mad otherwise. I don’t have any skills or training, but I can use a spade and push a wheelbarrow about.’

  ‘And carry a hod full of bricks?’

  ‘We’re not allowed to use hods any more,’ said Jamie. ‘Health and Safety – you could do your back in, or drop bricks on someone’s head.’

  ‘Really?’

  He nodded. ‘Besides, we’re not using bricks on this site. It’s going to be entirely stone on the outside, to match the original walls. Breeze block on the inside, of course.’ Jamie wiped off a few inches of condensation and looked at the figures moving about in the rain. ‘Funny, really, when there’s all this clay lying about. But stone is much more fashionable. That’s what the owner wants.’

  Fry saw him relaxing a little, now that he had managed to get off the painful subject of the body he’d found.

  ‘So you like to be outside in the open air?’ she asked, thinking that Jamie Ward reminded her a little of Ben Cooper. ‘Are you from a farming family, by any chance?’

  ‘Well, I used to help my grandfather around his place when I was a teenager. Just at weekends and during the school holidays. He doesn’t have the farm any more, though – Granddad sold up when it stopped making money.’

  ‘Sensible man.’

  ‘Right. Well, I wouldn’t have wanted to spend my life doing the job that Granddad did. He was at it twenty-four seven. There was no let-up from looking after the animals. Livestock farming is for losers, don’t you think? Anyone with any sense is getting out as fast as they can.’

  They both sat for a moment peering through the patch of cleared glass at the buildings of Pity Wood Farm, like divers examining a deep sea wreck.

  ‘I mean,’ said Jamie, ‘look at this place, for example.’

  ‘You’re right there.’

  Ward glanced sideways at her. ‘But you want me to tell you what happened, don’t you? How I came to find the … well …’

  ‘I know you’ll have gone through it before, but it would help me if you could describe the incident in your own words, Jamie.’

  ‘The incident, yes. I suppose that’s what it was.’

  ‘Take your time. I’m not going anywhere for a while.’

  ‘Nik had me digging this trench, see. To put in some footings for a new wall, he said.’

  ‘And Nik is …?’

  ‘Nikolai. He’s the gaffer, the foreman. Polish, of course, but he’s OK. He leaves me pretty much to myself most of the time. I don’t get the best jobs, obviously – I’m just a labourer. In fact, they sometimes send me up to the village for cigarettes, if they run out. Anyway… I’d been digging this trench for a couple of days. It was hard work – that soil is so heavy, especially when it’s wet. You can see how wet it is.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve seen how wet it is,’ said Fry, becoming aware of the dampness soaking into her feet where the mud had overflowed her shoes.

  ‘And there’s all kinds of stuff in the ground here. You wouldn’t believe the rubbish I’ve turned up. Nothing that’d interest an archaeologist, but I’ve thought once or twice of asking the Time Team to come and give me a hand.’

  There was silence for a moment as the full deadliness of his joke drifted through the van like a bad smell. Fry saw him go pale, and thought she was going to lose him.

  ‘Are you all right, Jamie?’

  He gulped. ‘Yeah. Thanks. It was mentioning the hand. Not that I meant that hand, but … Shit, I’m not making any sense. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’re doing just fine. You were telling me about the rubbish you had to dig out for the trench. What kind of thing do you mean?’

  ‘A lot of it was rusty lumps of metal, half-bricks, nails, broken buckets. It looked as though the farmers had used that area for a tip. I cursed Nik a few times, I can tell you. There were even some of those glass jars that people use for making pickles, with lids that have an airtight seal. Do you know what I mean?’

  Jamie was making gestures with his hands to indicate the size of the containers he’d found.

  ‘Mason jars?’ said Fry.

  ‘That’s it. Oh, and an old, broken cross on a chain, some Coke bottles, and a packet of coffee filters. The things people chuck out. Why don’t they use their wheelie bins – some of that stuff ought to be recycled.’

  ‘Where did you put all these items you dug out of the trench?’

  ‘In a barrow, then they went into the big skip round the back of the house.’ Jamie paused. ‘Why are you asking questions about the rubbish?’

  ‘Because some of the items you dug out might have belonged to the victim,’ said Fry as gently as she could.

  ‘Oh, God. I never thought of that.’

  ‘An old, broken cross, you said.’

  ‘It was nothing. Just a cheap crucifix on a chain, with part of the base chipped away. A bit of worthless tat.’

  ‘You didn’t notice any personal items, did you?’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘A purse, jewellery, coins,’ said Fry. ‘Items of clothing.’

  An entire handbag would be nice, she was thinking. A driving licence, credit cards, a letter from an embittered ex-lover?

  ‘No, nothing like that,’ said Jamie.

  ‘I don’t know if anyone has mentioned that the body is that of a female, fairly young?’

  Jamie swallowed again. ‘Well, some of the blokes have been listening in, you know. Word got around.’

  ‘I mention it because there might have been items you were unfamiliar with.’

  Jamie shook his head. ‘Only the – what do you call them? Mason jars.’

  So she might have been making pickles when she was buried, thought Fry. That helps. But she knew she was being unfair on the young labourer. Why should he have taken any notice of what he was tossing away in his wheelbarrow? It would be up to the SOCOs to go through the contents of the skip. Who was going to tell them about that job? Mrs Popularity, she supposed.

  ‘All right
. Let’s move on. How far down had you dug before you noticed anything wrong?’

  ‘Nearly three feet. I was shifting a big lump of stone out of the clay. It was heavy, and I was thinking of calling one of the other blokes over to give me … I mean, to help me lift it. But they laugh at me if I ask for help, so I tried to manage on my own. I’d climbed down into the trench, and I managed to get both hands round the stone and hoist it up. I remember it came out with a sort of sucking sound, and it left a big, round impression in the clay where it had been lying. I must have stood there like an idiot for I don’t know how long, watching the water slowly fill in the hole where the stone had been. And there it was – the hand.’

  Fry kept quiet. She could see that he was in the moment now, living the experience. This was the time he might remember the little details best.

  ‘I shouted then, I think,’ said Jamie. ‘And I dropped the stone, too – I’ve just remembered that, I dropped the stone. Somebody came running over straight away, one of the other blokes working nearby. They thought I’d hurt myself, of course. I could already hear Nik swearing in Polish and calling me an English cretin.’

  Jamie finished with a laugh. ‘And he’s right – that’s what I am. What an idiot for making all this fuss.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Fry. ‘You did exactly the right thing.’

  Jamie didn’t look convinced. He rubbed his own hands together, as if trying to remove the mud he’d seen on the thing he’d uncovered.

  ‘So you could hear Nik cursing. Was it him who came running over when you shouted?’

  ‘No, someone else. Nik turned up a bit later. I can’t remember who it was who came first. I didn’t take any notice at the time.’

  ‘But it must have been somebody working nearby.’

  ‘Yes. Well, it must have been.’ Jamie shrugged apologetically. ‘But I don’t know who. It was a bit of a blank by then.’

  ‘Don’t worry. You’ve done really well, Jamie.’

  ‘You know what I’m thinking now?’ he said. ‘Thank God that woman’s hand was under that stone. If I’d been digging and hit it with my spade, I’d have sliced right through it. Well, I would, wouldn’t I?’