Dying to Sin

16

In Cooper’s copy of the forensic anthropologist’s report, the dead woman had been assigned a reference number. This was her biological identity, all that was officially known about the person she’d once been. A Caucasian female aged twenty to twenty-five years, about five feet three inches tall, with dark brown hair. The condition of her teeth was the only peculiarity. There might be useful dental records, if she’d ever called on a dentist in the UK.

‘Diane, we’re going to have to talk to the neighbours in Rakedale again, aren’t we?’

‘The Three Wise Monkeys, you mean? They not only heard, saw and spoke no evil, they couldn’t believe anyone else would either.’

‘That’s touching.’

‘Touching? I asked one woman whether she’d ever invited the Suttons round when she was having her garden parties and barbecues in the summer. Do you know what she said? “That lot? They never accepted invitations, except to funerals.”’

‘We really need to dig out their memories, Diane.’

‘Well, we’d better requisition an excavator. That place isn’t a village — just a series of stone walls. Literally and metaphorically. They clammed up like traps as soon as they knew we were from the police. And I mean every one of them, young and old. Mr Brindley was right. I don’t know how news of our arrival got around so fast — they must use thought transference. Does that come with in-breeding?’

Cooper didn’t answer. It was true that there was only a narrow range of names on the electoral register for Rakedale, the same ones cropping up several times over. Blands, Tinsleys and Dains seemed to be everywhere.

‘Anyway, they probably know each other inside out,’ said Fry. ‘But these people we’re asking about were itinerant workers. They were passing through, not planning to settle down and raise families. I don’t suppose there were any women for them to marry, anyway. Not in this place.’

Cooper nodded thoughtfully. ‘So they would probably never mix in, never visit anyone, and never join anything.’

‘Not if they were familiar with village life. These men would know only too well that they were incomers — and always would be, for as long as they were likely to stay here.’

‘Well, there’s one part of village life I can almost guarantee they took part in,’ said Cooper. ‘I bet they went to the pub.’

‘Do you mean the Dog Inn? The pub at the end of the universe?’

‘It’s the only place to go.’

‘All right,’ conceded Fry. ‘But you can try it this time. When I went in there, I felt as though I was in a scene from Deliverance.’

Following the minimal success of house-to-house on Friday morning, someone had decided to try parking the mobile police office in Rakedale for a few days, to encourage people to come forward with information. Intelligence-led policing at its finest.

When Cooper arrived, he waved to a couple of officers who sat in lonely isolation in a corner of the Dog Inn car park, watching customers come and go to the pub. They looked miserable and could hardly raise the enthusiasm to wave back. Rakedale did that to you.

Some of the pub’s exterior decorations had blown off in the wind, and the hanging baskets were definitely not at their best. Rendering was coming away where the down spouts met the wall. Here, too, the porch had been added later. Cooper wondered whether people in this area had become less tough over the years, less able to withstand the Pennine gales without those little stone extensions to deflect the weather. He didn’t think the weather had got worse over the centuries, but maybe these buildings let in the wind more as they grew ancient and their stones cracked and separated.

Yes, the Dog Inn was unprepossessing, even for a non-tourist village like Rakedale. Closed at lunchtimes during the week, of course — and not too sure whether it really wanted to be open at other times, either. Catering for the public was all a bit too much trouble, even for the front door, which scraped reluctantly against the raised edge of a flagstone when Cooper tried to push it open.

Strands of tinsel glittered over his head as he passed through the door into the bar, expecting one of those silences that descended whenever a stranger walked into the saloon in a Western film. In here, Fry would have been pretty much a woman with two heads. He bet everyone had stared at her, but no one would have been willing to catch her eye. There were some situations where her approach didn’t necessarily work.

The men in the bar were quiet as Cooper walked in. He greeted the sheepdog, which was the only one to acknowledge him, and went to the bar. At least there was a nice open fire, which was useful while he observed the customary wait. At his feet was a brick step up to the bar, and a bowl of water for customers’ dogs.

Cooper always looked at the beer pumps in a pub — they could tell you so much about the customers. Real ale or keg, lager or Guinness? Here, they had Black Sheep, Ruddles, and Baboushka spiced ale from one of the Derbyshire breweries, Thornbridge. There was also M amp; B Mild, a drink that was definitely out of fashion in the trendy bars back in town.

‘Cooper, did you say?’ asked Ned Dain.

‘Yes, DC Cooper, from Edendale.’

‘And you work with that woman sergeant that came in the other day?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was your dad a bobby?’

‘Yes, he was.’

‘OK, I get it now.’

Dain laughed as he moved along the bar to serve a customer. It was a slightly disturbing laugh that he had, a sound like the deep, wet gurgle from one of his own beer pumps.

‘Oh, and tell that sergeant from me there’s no Billy,’ called Dain. In the corner, a man with a beard laughed.

‘Billy?’ said Cooper.

‘Just our joke. There never was any such person as Billy Sutton.’

Puzzled, Cooper opened his mouth to put another question, but the landlord interrupted him.

‘You ought to talk to the old lady,’ said Dain. ‘My mother. She’ll remember the stuff you want to ask about.’

‘How do you know what I want to ask about?’ said Cooper.

‘Talk to the old lady,’ repeated Dain. ‘You’ll find her through there. And shut the door behind you.’

The old lady seemed to have her own sitting room off the kitchen, where she could supervise what was going on through the open door without taking her eyes off the TV for too long. Cooper entered her lair respectfully, conscious that he was being studied critically. The first impression he made might be crucial, the one factor that could make Mrs Dain decide whether to open up to him or keep her mouth firmly shut, the way so many people in Rakedale were doing.

When he introduced himself and told her what he had come to talk to her about, he could see her bending her head forward to listen closely to his words. He suspected she was not just hearing what he said, but listening to his accent, judging whether he was local, assessing from his manner whether he was worth talking to.

To his surprise, she lit a cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke. So the door to the bar was kept closed for Health and Safety reasons. No one would realize that there was a free passage of air into the kitchen.

‘Who else have you spoken to?’ she said eagerly, when Cooper told her the purpose of his visit.

‘Oh, Mr Palfreyman. Mr Farnham.’

‘Tom Farnham? Did you ask him about his wife?’

‘He’s a widower, isn’t he?’

‘Yes, but you know what they say — a widower by choice.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Well, it’s only gossip, I suppose. It’s just what people were saying at the time.’

‘Are you suggesting that Mr Farnham killed his wife?’

‘Not me. It’s what I heard, that’s all.’

‘He was never charged with anything. The inquest verdict was accidental death.’

‘Well, they never found any evidence. It doesn’t mean he didn’t kill her, does it? The perfect murder is the one they can’t prove you committed.’

‘It’s a point of view,’ said Cooper.

Privately, he wanted to agree with Mrs Dain. There were plenty of cases where the police believed they knew the perpetrators of crimes, but were never able to prove their guilt in court. It was a mistake to believe that their aim was to achieve justice. Most effort was concentrated on putting together a strong enough case for a prosecution. Without sufficient evidence, and without a rigid adherence to procedures in gathering and presenting it, the concept of justice became academic. It was an interpretation of the criminal justice system that wasn’t normally shared with members of the public.

‘I know how easily these rumours get around,’ said Cooper. ‘But it’s unwise to repeat them, Mrs Dain.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t repeat it to anybody else,’ said the old lady hastily. ‘But I thought it would be all right in your case. I mean — you know what it’s like, don’t you?’

When the kitchen door opened again, Cooper caught the sound and smell of sizzling onion rings. He was starting to feel hungry. Cutlery rattled and a girl emerged from the kitchen and went into the bar with two plates of food. Proper countryside portions, too — the plates were laden. Cooper inhaled as the onion rings passed by.

‘It would be about five years ago. Your husband was the licensee then.’

‘His name was over the door. But I ran the pub.’

Cooper smiled. ‘Yes, that’s what I heard.’

‘You heard right.’

‘At that time, there were some itinerant workers employed at Pity Wood Farm.’

‘Pity Wood? The Suttons?’

‘Yes.’

‘It was a shame about those boys. I knew them when they were young men. They were a few years older than me, of course, but as a girl I took quite an interest in them. I always thought Derek was rather dashing. He was the one I fancied, anyway.’

She looked at Cooper with a hint of a twinkle, and he knew she’d been won over.

‘And Raymond?’ he asked.

‘Raymond wasn’t too bad, but he was a bit dour — especially later on, when he got all Bible and black suit.’

‘You mean when he took to religion?’

‘Aye. That was a bit of a shock. He thought we all ought to be as miserable as he was, told us we were going to Hell for enjoying ourselves. We never saw him in the pub after that, of course. Derek had to come in on his own. Sometimes he had a mite too much to drink. I couldn’t blame him, if all he had to go home to was that brother of his. But I bet there were a few rows at home over his drinking.’

Cooper thought of his early image of Raymond and Derek Sutton sitting in their armchairs in silence. He had barely known their names then, but they’d been clear in his mind already.

‘I’m not so sure about that.’

‘And then, of course …’ Mrs Dain began to struggle out of her chair, and Cooper leaned forward to offer a hand to help her up. ‘There are some photographs here somewhere. I keep them in the drawer.’

‘Photographs of the Suttons?’

Mrs Dain pulled out a set of photographic envelopes and began to sort through them very slowly, pausing occasionally, as if for private recollection.

‘Have you found anything?’ said Cooper.

The old lady looked offended to be hurried, or perhaps Cooper had said something wrong. Whatever the reason, she changed her mind.

‘No. Now that I recall, I gave some photos to the new heritage centre for their exhibition.’

‘That’s a shame.’

‘I’m sure there was a photograph of the brothers. Decent lads. I was never quite sure about their mother, though. I always had a suspicion she was of the Old Religion.’

For a moment, the faint murmur of conversation from the bar and the clatter of cutlery from the kitchen were the only sounds. In the little sitting room, there was silence. Cooper sat quite still, holding himself in, hoping the old lady would explain. From the way she said ‘Old Religion’, he could tell the words had capital letters. But if he was too impatient again, or said the wrong thing, he knew he would never find out what she meant. She would become one of Fry’s ‘Three Monkeys’ in an instant.

So he waited. But instead of explaining, Mrs Dain slid the photographs back in the drawer with an air of finality, and picked up her cigarette from the ashtray. She put it to her lips, sucked, blew, coughed, and had to sit down suddenly.

‘The Old Religion,’ said Cooper. ‘What do you mean by that?’

But it was no good. The moment had drifted by.

‘It’s all in the past,’ said Mrs Dain. ‘Beatrice Sutton is long dead. Things like that don’t exist any more, so there’s no point in talking about it.’

‘I’d be interested to hear — ’

‘There’s no point,’ said the old lady firmly, ‘in talking about it.’

Cooper raised the palms of his hands in a placatory gesture. He didn’t want to antagonize her, not when he’d been doing so well. Mrs Dain had accepted him into her world, and he’d made good progress with her. She would tell him the rest of it when she was ready.

Fry took delivery of a small envelope that had been left for her at the front desk in West Street. It was a grubby white envelope, with her name scrawled on it in felt-tipped pen and her rank spelled wrongly.

She pulled on a pair of gloves before she opened it. You couldn’t be too careful. She was pretty sure it wasn’t a letter bomb, but there were plenty of people who might think of sending her other unpleasant items by way of greeting.

But inside the envelope she found only one thing — a small, cheap crucifix with part of the base chipped away.

Fry let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.

‘Thank you, Nikolai,’ she said.

Cooper took the opportunity to take a toilet break, and discovered that the toilets at the Dog Inn were reached through a series of winding stone passages that seemed to lead almost into the next village.

When he returned to the bar, it was as if Ned Dain had been given some kind of signal by his mother, or maybe it was just the fact that she’d agreed to speak with Cooper for so long that had given the official seal of approval. Whatever the reason, Dain sidled up to him before he left the pub and whispered in a conspiratorial manner.

‘I thought you ought to know, there was a foreigner in here last night, asking questions.’

Cooper stopped. ‘Oh? What sort of questions?’

‘He wanted to know what all the police activity was. What was going on up at that old farm? He wasn’t very subtle about it. His English wasn’t too good, but we could see what he was after. Nosing about, wanting the gossip.’

‘Could you get an idea of his nationality?’

Dain shook his head and flapped the moisture out of a bar cloth. ‘Not really. He looked like you or me. Not totally dark or anything, I mean. Not that kind of foreigner. He sounded like some of those blokes that have been doing the building work at Pity Wood.’

‘East European?’

‘Probably. I couldn’t be sure. A few of those builders came in here on Thursday, chattering away to each other. He sounded like them.’

‘Can you describe him? Age? Height? How was he dressed?’

‘Hold on, that’s too many questions all at once. I suppose he’d be about twenty-five or twenty-six, not above average height. Oh, and I do remember he was wearing a sort of black padded coat. You know, you see asylum seekers wearing them when they get pulled off the EuroStar.’

‘And you didn’t find anything else out about him?’ asked Cooper, sure that the landlord must have tried.

Dain wiped an imaginary spill off the bar counter with his cloth. ‘Close-mouthed, he was. I’d go so far as to say ignorant. I can’t do with folk like that, who come in here and don’t know how to make conversation. They take offence if you ask them an innocent question or two.’

‘Funny, that,’ said Cooper.