Dying to Sin

10

Cooper dropped Fry and Murfin off at Pity Wood Farm and consulted the Ordnance Survey map again for his next call. To the south of Rakedale were the remains of Pity Wood itself, and a mound shown on the map as Soldier’s Knoll. Some of the fields and hillsides had evocative names, too — Godfrey’s Rough, Limbersitch, Biggin Hey, Callow Gore. They included a lot of leas, royds and haggs, all names for clearings in the woods. There must have been many more trees here at one time.

Tom Farnham lived near to the village of Newhaven, on the other side of the wood. There was no direct route, so Cooper turned the Toyota towards the A515.

He passed a farm called Organ Ground, where there was an even larger mountain of silage bags than at Pity Wood, though these were mostly white. Was there some significance to the different colours? Cooper searched his memory of farming practices, as he’d picked them up piecemeal during the last thirty years, but found he hadn’t the faintest idea. If he’d ever known, it was gone now. He’d have to ask Matt some time.

A little red Bowers bus turned the corner ahead of him. On the way towards Newhaven, he remembered that there was no mobile phone signal in this area. The display on his phone read ‘SOS calls only’. What a joke.

The transition between limestone and clay was obvious in the houses that you passed on this road. In the south of the county, the main building material was red brick, with clay tile roofs instead of stone. Many of the farms had converted their old buildings into holiday cottages. No farmworkers lived on the premises any more, and at some times of the year, temporary visitors would far outnumber the resident population.

Near the Newhaven brickworks, a small herd of black-and-white cattle bunched together round their water trough, standing in a sea of mud. Where a tractor had entered the field, the ground was completely liquefied. When one of the cows moved, its hooves splashed with a noise like a fish leaping in a river, and the legs and bellies of the animals were thick with semi-dried mud. The ubiquitous mire made Cooper long for the clean swell of the scree-scattered hills further north.

Here, the air was full of the hot smell of kilns. The clay and sand for the brickworks had all been quarried locally at one time. Even the ganister for making silica bricks had come from a quarry fifteen miles across the county at Wessington. But now all the materials used at Newhaven were imported.

Farnham’s house was sheltered from the road by a belt of trees, and Cooper might have driven past without seeing it, but for a curl of smoke from the chimney and a glint of rain on a steel cattle grid protecting Mr Farnham’s gateway from marauding livestock.

He found the owner of the house in a garage workshop, where he had a petrol-driven lawnmower in pieces on the concrete floor. Other lawn-mowers stood against the breeze-block wall awaiting attention, along with a strimmer and a chain saw. The smell of petrol and oil was almost overpowering, but Farnham had left the garage door open to disperse the fumes. The first few feet inside the door were wet with the rain that blew in, but it was better than suffocating in petrol fumes.

‘Yes, I worked with the Sutton brothers for a few years,’ said Farnham, wiping a small component with grease. ‘Until the business started going to pieces, that is. No one with any sense stays in a failing enterprise unless they’re really tied to it, like the Suttons were. I knew when it was time to get out.’

‘It sounds a bit like a rat leaving a sinking ship, if you don’t mind me saying so, sir.’

Farnham was unruffled. ‘Well, I wasn’t the captain, so I wasn’t about to go down with my vessel, if you know what I mean. I looked around for the nearest lifeboat. Tom Farnham is no fool.’

‘You say you worked “with” the Suttons,’ said Cooper. ‘What was your role at Pity Wood, exactly?’

‘I was a sort of farm manager, you might say. But one of my main tasks was to introduce new ventures, diversify, anything to keep the business going. It never worked, though. Nothing I tried worked, in the end.’

Racks of tools lined the wall of the garage, and the work bench was scarred and stained with oil from previous jobs. It looked as though Mr Farnham was the practical type, handy to have around a farm when machinery needed running repairs.

‘So you were employed by the Suttons, sir?’

‘Mmm. Not quite. The thing is, I actually put some of my own money into Pity Wood, so I was more in the nature of a partner than an employee.’

‘You must have had confidence in your ability to turn the fortunes of the business round, if you invested your own money.’

‘Oh, I did. And it could have worked. It ought to have worked.’

‘What sort of diversification schemes did you try?’

Farnham pulled a sour expression. ‘All kinds of things. Some of them were my projects, but others … well, Raymond and Derek had their own ideas. To be honest with you, one or two of them were plain mad.’

Cooper’s ears had pricked up when he heard the phrase ‘to be honest’. It was almost invariably an indication that a person was about to lie. He wondered whether the really mad ideas had actually been Farnham’s own. No harm in passing the blame to the brothers now, was there? One of them was dead, and the other in a home.

It was the second signal he’d picked up from Tom Farnham. Referring to yourself in the third person was a sure sign of evasion. Tom Farnham is no fool.

‘The body we’ve found was buried on a bit of spare ground in the eastern corner of the property,’ said Cooper. ‘Not far from the house.’

‘Spare ground?’ Farnham frowned. ‘Can you show me where you mean?’

Cooper took the piece of paper offered to him and drew a rough map. He was no Leonardo, but it would do for the job.

‘We used to park trailers and other pieces of equipment on that bit of land,’ said Farnham. ‘I can’t imagine how anybody would dig a grave there, even if they wanted to. The soil must have been pretty solidly compacted.’

‘It wasn’t easy to dig out again either, by all accounts.’

‘Well, the grave must have been there a long time, then. Since before I went in with Raymond and Derek. The old boys must have used that patch of land for something else, back in the past.’

Cooper didn’t respond to Farnham’s invitation to put the body well outside his own time at Pity Wood. Instead, he looked at his map, noticing how the swirls he’d made looked more like a lake than a farmyard. And very appropriate it was, too, in the present weather.

‘Wasn’t this one of the areas considered for a reservoir some years ago?’ he asked.

‘Oh, that would be way back in the sixties or early seventies,’ said Farnham.

‘If there was a possibility this valley would be flooded, the value of properties must have crashed.’

‘Yes, for a while. Blighted by the spectre of compulsory purchase, eh? The fate of the little man steamrollered by governments and local authorities.’

‘So there would have been no chance of selling Pity Wood Farm during that time. If the Suttons had wanted to move on, they couldn’t have done. They must have thought they were cursed.’

‘But it didn’t last for ever. Carsington was chosen for the reservoir instead.’ Farnham laughed. ‘The curse moved on to someone else, then.’

‘There were protests, I think?’ asked Cooper.

‘Small-scale stuff. A bunch of farmers from the Carsington area got together. They never stood much chance, in my opinion.’

Cooper had sympathy for protesters, provided they stayed within the law. If it hadn’t been for vigorous campaigning, there’d have been housing and industrial developments in Winnats Pass and a motor-racing circuit in the dales around Hartington. The Peak District would have been cut in half by a motorway.

He imagined the feelings of the Sutton family, watching the fate of farmers across the hill as they fought in vain to save their land. Schadenfreude. That would have been the only word for it. There but for the grace of God.

Cooper watched Farnham working on the lawnmower for a moment. Strong, capable hands slotted a rotor blade back into place.

‘Can you think who the victim might be, Mr Farnham?’

‘Victim?’

‘The body we found at Pity Wood. The body of a woman.’

‘No, I can’t.’

‘Please think carefully. Anything you can remember might help us with an identification. A woman who disappeared around twelve months ago?’

Farnham didn’t even look up from his task. ‘No, sorry.’

‘I understand there were a number of itinerant workers employed at Pity Wood Farm. Would that be during your time, sir?’

This was a fact that could be checked, so a lie would soon be caught. Cooper saw Farnham working that out for himself before answering. He took a little too long fitting parts of the motor back together.

‘Yes, it would. Like I said, we tried out quite a few diversification schemes. Horticulture, poultry … Some of them needed labour at certain times of the year. Often casual labour. So, yes — we had itinerant workers, if you want to call them that.’

‘Well, we’ll need records. Details of the workers employed at Pity Wood during the last couple of years. You were a sort of farm manager, so …?’

‘Ah, well. Records.’ Farnham straightened up, wiping his hands on a rag. ‘Those will be at the farm, such as they are. I left the farm accounts with Raymond. They weren’t the best at record keeping, you know. They didn’t believe all the bureaucracy and paperwork was necessary. But anything there is, you’ll find it at Pity Wood.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Oh, if the builders haven’t thrown them out already,’ said Farnham, as if the possibility had just occurred to him. But his air of innocence wasn’t convincing Cooper.

It was cold in the workshop. And where it wasn’t wet, it was oily. Farnham had a battered white Subaru pick-up with mud-caked hub caps, but it stood outside on the drive to provide more room in the garage.

‘Do you spend much time out here?’ asked Cooper.

‘As much time as I like,’ said Farnham. ‘I’m a widower, you see.’

As he drove away from Farnham’s house, Cooper looked afresh at the landscape. An ideal reservoir site should have a ring of hills to reduce the amount of dam building required. Rakedale had that. It also had the necessary clay soil, which stopped the water seeping through and provided material for dam construction. That was why the limestone areas had avoided reservoir building. Much too porous, limestone. If they’d built the reservoirs a few miles further north, Manchester would be suffering a permanent drought.

Inside the mobile incident unit, a cluster of bodies was building up a warm fug. Every time someone opened the door, they were met with a barrage of complaints about letting the draught in. The inner step was a mass of muddy footprints, and more mud had been tracked through the compartments.

‘Any progress towards an ID yet?’ called Hitchens from the office.

‘We’re hoping for some results from the forensics search team, sir.’

‘Oh, the forensics search team. That would be the blokes scavenging through the skip.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Hitchens saw Fry, and shook his head. ‘As you can see, Diane, it’s organized chaos here, as usual. I’ve just had word on the pathologist’s preliminary examination of the body. No signs of major trauma.’

‘Is that it?’

‘Yes, until Mrs van Doon gets a closer look. She’s doing the full PM this afternoon. You can chase her up on that, if you like.’

‘Oh, thanks.’

‘We’ve managed to pull in some more diggers, though,’ said Hitchens. ‘They’re on site now.’

‘That’s good news. Can they …?’

‘Yes, I’ve told them to make a start on the disturbed ground your young builder was bothered about.’

‘Excellent.’

Official-issue packed lunches had been delivered for the team at the scene, one of the few perks of an otherwise tedious and unrewarding job. But even that was causing grumbles inside the trailer.

‘Somebody’s had all the chocolate bars out of our packed lunches,’ said someone.

‘OK, where’s Gavin Murfin?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Fry as she opened the door. ‘But he’s probably got several alibis lined up.’

Outside the trailer, Fry looked at the mud. Her shoes hadn’t recovered from the day before. The clay had caked dry by the time she got round to cleaning them. It was an unforgiving sort of dirt, and practically unmoveable, too.

‘Diane.’

‘Yes?’

One of the SOCOs, Liz Petty, was standing at her elbow, holding a pair of rubber boots.

‘I brought these from the van. Thought you might be able to use them.’

‘Oh, thanks.’

She took them automatically, and Petty walked away. Fry was left holding the boots uncertainly, looking at the mud and wondering how silly she looked.

As soon as Cooper arrived back at the farm, he searched out Fry to report the outcome of his interview.

‘So what was your assessment of Mr Farnham?’ she asked.

‘I think he’d sell his own grandmother, organ by organ.’

Fry laughed. ‘You didn’t believe what he was telling you?’

‘It sounded much too pat, too moulded to show himself in the best light. He’d done his best, put his own money into the farm, but it had gone wrong through no fault of his own, and regretfully he’d had to pull out. If you were inclined to believe him, he’s practically a saint. But he came across more like a used car salesman to me.’

‘An awkward customer?’

‘I’d say so.’

‘Stay on him,’ said Fry. ‘And let me know if you want to try a different approach.’

There were accepted strategies for dealing with awkward customers. They didn’t have to speak to the police, but different officers and different approaches could be tried. In some circumstances, they might decide to take an interest in another issue, such as whether his car was legally taxed and licensed. No undue pressure, obviously.

As a last resort, there was always the option of arresting someone so they could be questioned and searched. Without justification, they were open to the subject deciding to sue, and might have to pay a couple of grand out of court. But financially it was preferable to deploying expensive resources on long, fruitless enquiries when a line of investigation was blocked.

‘We should try to find these farm records,’ said Cooper. ‘I think Farnham was right about that, at least. If the records are anywhere, they’ll be inside the house.’

‘Well, I’ll help you later. At least it’s dry inside the house, if none too clean.’

But Cooper wasn’t paying attention now. He was looking at his feet.

‘You know, I don’t remember ever seeing mud this red before — not in this area. The real clay soils are further south.’

Murfin came trudging through the mud to hand Fry a list of the items that the forensics team had recovered from the skip. It was a very long list, but most of the material she could discount. She was only interested in what had come out of the hole, and the SOCOs had helpfully grouped some items together. These had been tipped on top of the skip in one corner, where a couple of planks had been laid as a runway to get a wheelbarrow up to the right height. There were stones here, some unidentifiable bits of rusty metal, a broken bucket, a packet of coffee filters, and some brown mason jars.

She read through the list again, more carefully, then turned to the rest of the material that had been felt less significant. The SOCOs had been right — they’d picked out the relevant items. They couldn’t list what wasn’t there.

Fry stared across the site at the body tent, where a forensic botanist was using a teaspoon to tease out plant fragments. She had a clear picture of Jamie Ward, squatting in the wet mud, staring in shock at the object he’d found in the trench. When he shouted, someone had run up to him, thinking he’d hurt himself, while Nikolai, the foreman, had been cursing in the background. All perfectly clear, but for one thing.

‘Gavin, have you got the list of builders’ names and addresses?’

‘I hope you don’t want them in English.’

Fry flicked through the list she was given. She could see what Gavin meant — most of the names sounded East European. She wasn’t familiar enough with the different nationalities in that part of the world to tell where exactly they might be from, but the officers taking details had helpfully filled in the nationalities, too. Polish, Czech, Slovakian. Apart from two, who were Irish nationals, none of the construction crew would have English as a first language.

Then Fry corrected herself. Gaelic was being restored to Ireland these days. The two Irishmen might not consider English their first language, either. It was advisable to tread carefully on these issues. She didn’t want to be sent on diversity training.

‘Several of these men give the same address in Macclesfield,’ she said.

‘Yes, it’s some kind of workmen’s hostel or B amp;B,’ said Murfin. ‘According to the foreman, most of them are employed by an agency and they move around the country, wherever the work happens to be. Just at the moment, they’re living in Macclesfield. Tomorrow, the moon.’

‘Gavin, round up a couple of uniforms and speak to all these men again. I want to know which of them was working near Jamie Ward when he uncovered that body. Jamie says that one of them ran up to him when he shouted, but he can’t remember who. I’d like to find out.’

‘OK, I can do that.’

Murfin trudged away again, looking miserable. Fry seemed not to notice.

‘This woman is worrying me,’ she said to Cooper. ‘Not knowing anything about her is very frustrating. It means we can’t piece together any relationships she had, or formulate any theories about how she died. It’s possible she committed suicide, or died accidentally. And then somebody buried her.’

‘Deliberately?’ asked Cooper.

Fry laughed. ‘Is it possible to bury a person accidentally?’

‘On a farm? Well, yes. Somebody might be standing in the wrong spot and get in the way of a trailer load of silage, or the slurry hose. People get killed on farms all the time. But you’d generally know you’d done it. Even if you were looking the wrong way, or you didn’t hear them scream over the noise of your tractor engine, you’d soon notice they were missing. Well, wouldn’t you?’

Fry stared at the ground. ‘It might depend on who it was that got buried. Nobody seems to have noticed this woman missing, did they?’

Cooper nodded. ‘You know, despite what they say, I think everyone in Rakedale knows everyone else.’

‘Yes, I agree. At least it means there’s no need to spend our time looking for connections with the Suttons. An individual who didn’t have a connection would be the one to stand out.’

‘Which means they all have a potential connection to the victim, too. All of the people we’ve talked to could have visited Pity Wood Farm at some time.’

‘But we have a whole different set of people, too,’ said Fry. ‘These itinerant workers have been in and out of Pity Wood Farm for years, apparently. No one seems to know who they were.’

‘How do we go about tracing itinerant farmworkers?’

‘It depends on the quality of the records, Ben.’

‘Poor to non-existent, I would guess.’

‘They could have been illegals, then,’ said Fry. ‘Derbyshire has had its share of refugees over the last few years. Mostly from Bosnia, Croatia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia … There was a reception centre for Kosovans at Alfreton, wasn’t there?’

‘Yes, but the numbers are quite small. At least this isn’t East Anglia. We don’t have seventy thousand casual workers coming through every year to work in the horticultural industries. There’s nothing in this area that’s labour intensive enough to create a demand for large amounts of cheap labour at short notice.’

‘It sounds bad enough to me.’

Cooper shook his head. ‘Go to somewhere like King’s Lynn, and you’ll see the difference. According to a contact I have on the force there, their illegal immigrants run into thousands, sleeping in sheds and garages. They have to keep working to pay off the money they owe for a false passport and a trip to Britain. Organized crime is entrenched in the casual labour market. I don’t mean foreign students taking part in some seasonal agricultural workers scheme — those are pretty well regulated. I mean the poor bloody Chinese peasants trying to work to send money home to pay off their debts. It takes them years to work their way out of slavery.’

‘Slavery? That’s a bit strong.’

‘It’s exactly what it is, Diane. Gang masters are sometimes unscrupulous operators, but criminals have been moving in. Triad or Snakehead gangs. You see Chinese people standing outside a station with bundles of possessions. They’re very suspicious of police, too scared to report anything. Very few speak English, either — and while police are arranging an interpreter, they disappear.’

‘Can you talk to your friend and get some more information? It would be interesting to hear whether Norfolk have any intelligence about gangs operating in this area.’

‘Of course. I should have thought of that.’

‘It still gives us a lot of suspects,’ said Fry. ‘Too many.’

A weary voice broke in. Suddenly, DI Hitchens was standing behind them, mud ruining the casual look of his jeans.

‘Did I hear someone worrying about the potential number of suspects?’ he said.

‘Yes, sir. Why?’

Hitchens sighed. ‘Well, I don’t know if this makes it any better, or worse. But the digging teams have just found a second body.’