The kill call bcadf-9

by Stephen Booth

  ‘Oh. They were trying to find restaurants to serve their horse meat, weren’t they?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Fry. She took another long gulp of her drink. ‘But they already had wind of the trichinosis outbreak. The restaurant must have been desperate to avoid any suggestion they were serving horse meat. Reputation is everything in that business. Neil Connelly was already trying to distance Le Chien Noir from the bad publicity.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Suggest that Environmental Health pay a visit to Le Chien Noir.’

  Cooper noticed that she was having a bit of difficulty saying the name of the restaurant. The third time it had definitely come out wrong.

  ‘Diane, are you all right?’

  ‘Why does everyone keep asking me if I’m all right?’

  ‘Well… I don’t know why everyone else does,’ said Cooper. ‘But I just noticed you seemed to be drinking quite fast. For a lunchtime, anyway. I didn’t know you were a day-time drinker.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Except in exceptional circumstances.’

  Cooper laughed uneasily. ‘You almost managed to say that without slurring.’

  ‘I don’t slur. I’ve never slurred in my life. I’m a positively slur-free zone.’

  Overwhelmed with relief that the moment had passed, Cooper began to feel giddy with the idea that had come into his head.

  ‘You know what?’ he said. ‘I think we should go for a walk. A bit of fresh air will do us good. Did you bring your boots?’

  ‘It’s raining,’ protested Fry.

  ‘No, it’s stopped. It’s nice and fresh out there.’

  38

  They crossed the road at Middleton Dale, then walked up through the Tarmac site at Darlton Quarry, its sides terraced like a huge amphitheatre. Excavators were loading dumper trucks in the bottom of the quarry. A hydraulic drill probed at the rubble, splitting the larger stones. Nearer by, a giant shovel sculpted the edges of the worked-out areas.

  Black Harry Lane was marked with wooden sign posts etched with horseshoe symbols. A bridlepath, then. Fields would be separated by gates, not stiles. But Cooper could see that this wouldn’t be easy going for a horse. One section of bridleway was so split and crevassed that it looked as though it had been involved in the same earthquake that had left those giant gashes on Longstone Edge.

  It struck Cooper that Naomi Widdowson and her boyfriend had been almost a modern equivalent to Black Harry as they waylaid the unsuspecting Patrick Rawson, though the actual robbery had been left to Sean Crabbe.

  Along the edge of the lane were a few skeletal hawthorn trees shattered by the wind, their branches broken, their buds blotched with leprous patches of lichen. They passed a dried-up watering hole, where sheep had stepped into the mud in search of the last inch of water. The concrete lining must have cracked, so that no amount of rain would ever fill it up again.

  ‘Deborah Rawson says she believed her husband was having an affair,’ said Fry, ‘and that might be true. But I think Patrick Rawson did something quite unforgivable in Deborah’s eyes, and it wasn’t to do with another woman.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He proved that Erin Lacey was right about him. At heart, he was just a dodgy Irish horse dealer. That must have been the killer for Deborah Rawson.’

  ‘What — the fact that he’d gone back to horse dealing when she thought he was becoming a respectable businessman? Or the fact that Erin Lacey had been proved right?’

  Fry nodded. ‘Both. There was certainly no love lost between those two women. So it was a double whammy. Can’t you just hear Mrs Lacey’s reaction?’

  ‘“ Blood will out ” — that sort of thing.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So if he hadn’t been tempted by the call that Naomi Widdowson made…’

  ‘He might still be alive now. Yes, that was what sealed his fate, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘But Deborah would rather let people think that he was having an affair, betraying her with another woman.’

  ‘Image,’ said Fry breathlessly. ‘It’s all about image.’

  From Black Harry Gate, a path ran eastwards through a steep-sided dale that squirmed its way towards Calver. But Cooper continued to lead the way towards the rakes on Longstone Moor, where the sheep were still playing chicken with the quarry lorries. Who would be the last to get out of the way? From the stubborn expressions on their faces, these sheep didn’t realize how unequal the confrontation was.

  Finally, he stopped to allow Fry to get her breath, and looked out over the patchwork of fields. The sun was breaking sporadically through the clouds, highlighting one field and then another, changing the colours in the landscape as it went, catching a white-painted farmhouse, casting faint shadows from a copse of trees.

  The tracery of white limestone walls was spread out before him like a map laid over the landscape. Cooper sometimes thought that if you just followed the right lines in that map, you could discover any story you were looking for, find the right clues to any mystery. All the answers seemed to lie in this gleaming web, so painstakingly constructed that they almost held the countryside together.

  And there was still a question to be answered. The charges against Naomi Widdowson and Adrian Tarrant ought to feel like a conclusion. But instead, it was quite the opposite. The death of Patrick Rawson now felt like a distraction. The real mystery was what had happened to his partner.

  Officers in blue boiler suits were still working their way along the edge of Longstone Moor, trying to pick up traces of Michael Clay.

  ‘Hey, look,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s Sitz, Platz, Holen and Bissen.’

  He looked at Fry, to see if she’d heard the joke around the office. Derbyshire Constabulary had recently been buying German-speaking police dogs, which meant that dog handlers had to learn the German commands to make their dogs work properly. Some wag had named the dog handlers after the German commands for sit, stay, fetch and bite: Sitz, Platz, Holen and Bissen.

  ‘Somewhere there ought to be an “Aus”,’ said Fry. ‘Let go.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cooper, searching for clues to whether he should be laughing or not. He marvelled at the change that had taken place in her. For a short while this afternoon, he thought he’d got close to the real Diane Fry. But she’d slipped away from him and he’d lost the scent. And that was wrong, because this was his territory, not hers.

  Cooper gazed around. You could see Longstone Moor quite clearly from here. On these moors there were still traces of the old packhorse ways that had once been used by travellers such as pedlars, tinkers and badgers. The inhabitants of one valley often knew nothing of the neighbouring dale, because they were separated by inhospitable moorland. For directions, they had only rock formations with descriptive names, or ancient man-made features. Head for the Eagle Stone, turn left at Hob Hurst’s House.

  And the biggest problem was the weather, which changed so suddenly on the moors. Low cloud, heavy rain, fog, snow — they could all reduce visibility so much that travellers often lost their way during the winter, and that meant losing their lives. Just as Philip Worsley had on Wednesday.

  The landscape was scattered with the small white dots of sheep, a typical White Peak sight. But here and there among them, like alien giants, were much larger objects, bright yellow, their long necks swinging as they hunted backwards and forwards, the scream of their alarms reaching him on the wind. Quarrying machines, hacking out more limestone to fill the dumper trucks. Soon, this landscape would be gone for ever.

  ‘And what about Michael Clay?’ asked Cooper. ‘Is there a woman involved there, too?’

  Fry frowned. ‘Well, not his niece, Pauline Outram. And not his daughter, either.’

  ‘Could there be some other local connection then, apart from Pauline? What if there’s a real significance in the Royal Observer Corps stuff?’

  ‘But Michael Clay didn’t serve in the Observer Corps,’ said Fry.

 
; ‘No.’

  Cooper recalled the photo of the ROC members. Their blue battledress tunics, their berets at rakish and unflattering angles, their cap badges glinting. It had been a colour photo, so he’d guessed the date to have been the sixties. In the photo, the ROC crew were standing in front of a small brick tower with no roof and a set of steps up the outside wall. An aircraft-monitoring post. According to David Headon, the last overground structures had been abandoned when the RAF no longer required the ROC for that purpose.

  Then he realized what he’d been missing. When he’d first spoken to Headon about the ROC, he’d mentioned cutbacks in the Corps. But he hadn’t been talking about the final stand down in 1991. That was Cooper’s own mistake, a wrong assumption.

  So what was it that David Headon had said, exactly? ‘ There were thousands of us, until the cutbacks started in the sixties.’

  The sixties, of course. But if there had been a big reduction in the number of observers four decades ago, then there must also have been a cut in the number of posts. Cooper pictured the map again, with that imaginary line running across Derbyshire and South Yorkshire. It was a big area for a cluster of observation posts to cover. And it wouldn’t be the way you planned it, if you were creating the network from scratch. It was more the sort of arrangement you’d end up with if some of your posts had been closed. The result of cutbacks.

  The other clusters in the county all formed triangles. That made sense. So why wasn’t it the case in the north of the county? Well, he suspected it had been, once. A trio of posts — one at Buxton, and a couple of others around, say, Hope and Eyam.

  So, if he was right, where was that closed post?

  Cooper found himself standing above Birchlow, looking down on some of the land belonging to Rough Side Farm. Near the top of the slope was that strange hump that he’d taken for the remains of an Iron Age hill fort, or the capped shaft of an ancient lead mine.

  Then he saw the line of truncated telegraph poles next to the site, and realized he’d been wrong. History was all around him in this area, yes. Thousands of years of it, dating all the way from the Romans and the Neolithic stone circle builders. But not all of its history went back quite so far.

  He looked round for Fry. ‘Diane, will you come with me to see an old friend?’ he asked.

  She automatically looked at her watch. ‘Well…’

  ‘Unless you’ve got something better to do, of course.’

  David Headon nodded over his glass of beer in the pub. ‘Yes, a lot of ROC posts closed in 1968. Late in the year, it was. October. The cutbacks, like I said. It was 1968, after all. A Labour government, Harold Wilson — you remember?’

  ‘Well, no, I don’t.’

  Headon squinted at him. ‘You can’t remember what the sixties were like. You’re not old enough. I forget that you young people weren’t even around then. You missed something, you know.’

  ‘Music, drugs and sex, right? The Beatles, LSD and miniskirts.’

  ‘Bollocks. That’s just the PR. The sixties always had a lot of good public relations men, I’ll say that for them. They have a much better image than the fifties or seventies. Well, it wasn’t like that.’

  ‘That’s a bit disappointing.’

  ‘Look at this place,’ said Headon. ‘Do you think it was all sex and drugs and rock’n’roll here in the sixties?’

  ‘Well — ’

  ‘Was it buggery. If you wanted all that stuff, you had to go to London. The Clappergate bus shelter wasn’t exactly Carnaby Street.’

  ‘The Clappergate — ?’

  ‘That’s where we kids used to hang about. It had a shelter, you see — so it was the only place to get out of the rain, if you didn’t fancy the youth club. And the only drug we ever saw in that bus shelter was the nub end of a Woodbine.’

  ‘I bet your dad had a Ford Anglia, too,’ said Fry.

  Headon glowered at her. ‘No, he had a brand-new Mark II Cortina. But it was about more than that, a lot more. And not all of it was good. Not everything about the sixties was swinging.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘It’s hard to explain if you didn’t experience it. But some of us who were youngsters at the time grew up with the idea that we could die at any moment. Blown to bits in a fireball and a mushroom cloud. We genuinely believed that World War Three could start at any time. It was worst around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, of course, a few years earlier. That was when — ’

  ‘Yes, I did study a bit of Modern History at school. The Cold War, and all that.’

  ‘History? Well, I suppose it is history, now. No, the sixties were the Berlin Wall, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the Six-Day War in the Middle East. The Soviet Union and China were both testing atomic bombs. And everyone talked about the four-minute warning we’d get of a nuclear attack. At school, we didn’t discuss whether there’d be a nuclear war but what we’d do in those last four minutes.’

  Fry laughed. ‘Among schoolboys? I bet there was a reasonable consensus.’

  ‘So what happened to the ROC when the cuts happened?’ insisted Cooper.

  ‘About half the Derbyshire posts were closed. We lost Baslow, Chinley, Hope, and several others. The strength was reduced by fifty per cent in 1968, each post was limited to a maximum of ten observers.’

  Cooper nodded. When you came to think about the events of the 1960s, the world must have seemed a pretty unstable place. Student revolutionaries on the streets. Civil rights, women’s lib. A time when anything seemed possible. And, if you’d asked his mother at the time, the biggest sign that the world was coming to an end would have been the introduction of decimal coins, those strange new ten-pence pieces that were making their way into her purse.

  ‘Yes, it was a very weird time,’ said Headon. ‘All around us, people spent their time talking about pop music and fashion, as if they were the only things that were important. But we knew the apocalypse was a real possibility. You know the nuclear strategy of the super powers was called MAD — Mutually Assured Destruction? It was commonplace to fear the end of the world. Now no one knows what an air-raid siren sounds like, or a fallout warning. I’ve even heard sirens going off by mistake, and no one takes a blind bit of notice.’

  ‘So the posts must have been re-organized. Including 8 Group?’

  ‘Of course. In fact, it was only after the re-organization that we became part of 8 Group. Until 1968, we were 18 Group here. Based in Leeds, that was.’

  ‘Really?’

  Headon laughed. ‘It’s a long way from Leeds, I know — but that’s just the way they divided the country. Edendale was Post 18/R5 back then. We were part of the 18 Group R- Cluster, along with Buxton and Baslow, and Hope. And Birchlow, too.’

  Fry and Cooper looked at each other. ‘Birchlow?’

  ‘Yes, Post 4. That was one they closed. The clusters became bigger, and this area was moved into Coventry district instead of Leeds. Those earlier posts were just handed back to the landowners. And you know how much care some farmers take of historic sites on their land.’

  ‘Why didn’t you mention the Birchlow post before?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Because of its history. It’s best to let sleeping dogs lie, isn’t it? People in Birchlow don’t like anyone poking their noses into old trouble.’

  Cooper sighed. The old man with the clock, Mr Wakeley, had almost told him this when Cooper visited his home in Eyam on Wednesday. Skeletons in the cupboard, that was what he’d said. Was there some kind of family feud here that went back over the decades? The sort of story that everyone knew about, and no one ever mentioned. In a small community, people who hated each other had no chance of avoiding contact, as they might in a city. So they did the next best thing, and kept their mouth shut. He should have pushed Mr Wakeley to explain what he meant, but at the time he’d put it down to an old man just wanting someone to talk to.

  ‘I think you’d better tell us about it, David,’ said Cooper. ‘We’re going to find out now, one
way or another.’

  Headon stared into his glass. ‘Someone died. A boy got killed.’

  39

  ‘I don’t really understand this, Ben,’ said Fry. ‘But we need to know more about these deaths. You’re right — there is some connection, isn’t there?’

  ‘I think so, Diane. But I just can’t see why, or what the link is.’

  ‘I’ll make a few calls. It should all be on record.’

  ‘What about Pauline Outram? Do you think she knows more than she told us?’

  Fry thought for a moment. ‘No. She was genuine. Don’t forget, she never knew her mother, or her father either. She has no memories of her own from that time, and none that have been passed down to her, either.’

  ‘And everyone else in Birchlow seems to have decided not to talk about it.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  The archives took a lot of tracking down on a Sunday. Without the internet and digital archiving, they would have had to wait another day. But, over the course of the afternoon, they dug out newspaper reports of the original incident, an inquest report, photographs of some of the individuals involved. Bit by bit, they managed to piece together the story. The story of the Birchlow observer post.

  ‘June 1968,’ said Cooper. ‘They were dismantling at the end of an exercise. Three observers on a shift, as usual. The young man who died was Jimmy Hind.’

  Fry had brought a drink of water to her desk. Archives made her mouth feel dry, even when they were digital. She could practically feel the dust on the back of her throat. But it was such a relief to be back at work properly. She felt much more at ease now, restored to her own environment, with Cooper back in his chair, head bent over a file. Enough socializing for now.

  ‘The other two people involved were…?’ she said.

  ‘The first was Leslie Michael Clay — he was leading observer, the number one in charge of the post during the shift.’

  ‘Leslie Michael Clay? But that can’t be the same Clay we’re looking for. He’d be well into his eighties by now.’