Dying to Sin

21

That night, Cooper drove out of Edendale until he’d left the streetlamps behind and there was only the reflection of the Toyota’s headlights from the cat’s eyes in the road and from the rain that drifted across the bonnet. He saw few cars on the road and passed even fewer houses — just the occasional farm wrapped in its own little bowl of light.

According to the weather forecast on the BBC, there was no chance of snow this year. It would be a traditional grey Christmas. Fog was the best that Edendale could hope for in the way of seasonal weather. There’d be a blanket of it filling the valley, smothering the sound of Christmas Day traffic, hiding the flickering lights of the council decorations. And killing a few more visitors on the roads, no doubt.

The old people sometimes described the Peak District climate as ‘six months of bad weather, followed by six months of winter’. But those times were past, the years when snow drifts had made the roads impassable and villages were cut off for weeks. Cooper felt a curious sense of loss.

Fry had taken on the task of interviewing Jack Elder herself, allowing Cooper to keep his date. He had no idea what had made her do that, because he didn’t normally expect favours from her. Still, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, as his mother would have said.

Liz Petty lived in Bakewell, the touristy heart of the Peak District. Tonight, she felt like a change, so they opted to eat at the Australian Bar, close to the Bakewell section police station. Here, the Aussie theme had gone beyond the name and the boomerangs in the window, and had spread right through the menu.

While they shared some skinny dips, Liz got a few grumbles off her chest. Cooper had heard most of them before, around the station. Like the other SOCOs, she often complained how frustrating it was to hear police officers say there were ‘no forensics’.

‘Some of them still don’t know what the word means,’ she said.

The division had finally got one of the two long-wheelbase four-by-fours that Scenes of Crime had been saying they needed for years, but not the second. And the policy of automatic attendance at burglary scenes had led to some crazy situations, such as SOCOs dusting for fingerprints when the aluminium powder from their last visit to a victim’s home was still visible on the window frame. There was a story doing the rounds about another burglary, where the officer dealing with the incident had entered in the command and control log: There are no forensic possibilities for SOCO, but I have to ask them to attend.

Dipping a deep-fried potato wedge into mayo and garlic, Cooper exercised his listening skills. It wasn’t difficult in Liz’s presence. She never bored him, because she never took herself too seriously. At the end of her whinge, she would gaze at him and burst out laughing. He treasured those moments, when they seemed to be connecting at some level that was beyond any words.

‘We’re still the forgotten department,’ she said. ‘The Cinderellas of the division.’

‘There was only one Cinderella,’ said Cooper. ‘The others were Ugly Sisters.’

And Liz laughed. ‘That describes my colleagues perfectly.’

Liz chose Swagman’s Tucker, while Cooper passed over the Bruce Burgers and hesitated between Bondi Chicken or Dingo Dog. Waiting for him to decide, Liz took a drink of wine and gazed out of the window at Granby Road. She lived just off Fly Hill, only a few minutes’ walk away, in a three-storey terraced cottage she rented from her uncle.

Cooper found himself distracted from the menu by her profile against the lights from the street outside. He would be happy just to sit and look at her for a while, listening to her talk, and forget about the Dingo Dog.

But then he realized how hungry he was, and ordered the Outback Bruce Burger after all.

‘I hear you’re getting a new superintendent,’ said Liz.

‘Yes. She arrives on Tuesday, but she’s already making her presence felt.’

‘Are there going to be changes?’

‘You bet.’

‘One of the guys said he thought Diane Fry might be leaving.’

‘Did he?’

Cooper was completely taken aback. There had been several occasions when he’d thought Fry might head off into the blue. Fry had even hinted at it herself, hankering after a job in Europol, or anywhere more exciting than Edendale. But it was so odd to hear it from someone else. It made the idea sound as though it might be true.

‘Well, she’s ambitious,’ said Liz.

‘She certainly is.’

‘To be honest, I think it would be a good thing if she went, Ben.’

Cooper was silent for a moment, thinking about his Bruce Burger. He’d promised himself not to dwell on work tonight. Not the current enquiry, anyway. You had to escape from those things for a while.

‘There are always changes,’ he said. ‘Life never stays the same. See how different it is since you came to E Division.’

He meant changes in her department. Before Liz’s time, there had been a period when there were only two SOCOs in the division for eighteen months. But their performance was measured on volume crime, and no account was taken of serious crime and road traffic collision work. If Liz had grumbles, she ought to have heard the level of whining in Scenes of Crime for those few months.

But Liz took his comment quite differently, and went slightly pink. She changed the subject as their food arrived.

‘Speaking of Cinderella, wasn’t the pantomime great the other night?’

‘Great.’

‘I know it’s all a bit naff, Ben. But if you take it in the right spirit, it’s good fun.’

‘Of course. It was great. I enjoyed it. Really.’

Liz laughed again, because she knew he was lying.

‘And you’re still coming with me to the baptism service tomorrow, aren’t you?’

‘Of course. I’ll be there, with my suit on and everything.’

And, although he’d promised himself he wouldn’t, Cooper found himself thinking about work. He was mentally trying to fit the residents of Rakedale into a pantomime cast. Some of them were chasing the magic genie of the lamp, while others stood around in the street cracking bad jokes, and the Emperor Ping Pong refused to let his daughter marry a poor washerwoman’s son.

Cooper had a feeling he’d met Wishy Washy and Widow Twankey. Maybe even Inspector Chu. But where was the evil Abanazar?

Jack Elder dragged his fingers through his beard, staring in disbelief at the walls of the interview room and at the triple-deck tape recorder as the tapes started to turn, waiting for his answers to Fry’s questions. He’d been waiting an hour already, while checks were made on him. It wasn’t long, but it was enough for anyone to get nervous about what was going to happen next.

‘Mr Elder, we have information that you’ve been offering supplies of cheap diesel. Would you like to tell us where you’ve obtained that diesel from?’

‘Oh, that? Well, that’s just a bit of business, you know. I work for this little haulage company as a driver. I’m a farmworker really, but you make a living any way you can round here these days, and haulage is a good business to be in, if you get your HGV licence. And I’ve got this mate, you see — ’

‘Name?’

‘You what?’

‘The name of your friend?’

‘Now, I can’t do that. You don’t shop a mate, do you?’

‘Well, I can understand that. But it would only be a problem if you were doing something illegal together, Mr Elder. Is that the case?’

‘Well, I …’ He stumbled, unsure now of what the right answer was.

‘Where did this cheap diesel come from, sir?’

‘My mate, see, he works for the same haulage company, at the depot. The company has its own diesel tanks, to keep the wagons fuelled up.’

‘So this is diesel you and your friend steal from your employer?’

‘No, well … I don’t ask him how he gets hold of it, I just assume it’s legitimate, you know. Surplus to requirements, or something.’

‘Oh, come on.’

‘I help him to sell it, that’s all,’ said Elder earnestly. ‘He gives me a cut on sales. A bit of commission, if you like. Just to supplement my wages.’

Fry felt unreasonably disappointed that Elder was only admitting to the diesel being stolen.

‘You see, the thing is, Mr Elder, we checked your record on the Police National Computer, and we discovered that you have a conviction for the use of illegal fuel.’

‘Ah, well.’

‘And that wasn’t stolen fuel, but laundered red diesel.’

‘That was just a one-off, you know. I thought I’d get away with it, just using it once, but the Excise turned up in the wrong place and they caught me out. I held my hand up for it and got a fine.’

‘It’s quite a common offence in these parts, it seems,’ said Fry.

‘I wouldn’t know about that.’

‘Red diesel is sold to farmers and people like them for use in off-road vehicles. Tractors and so on. As a farmworker by trade, I expect you know lots of farmers.’

‘Yes, I do. But — ’

‘Tell me, Mr Elder, isn’t it the truth that the diesel you’re helping your friend to sell isn’t from the haulage firm at all, but red diesel that is being laundered somewhere for sale to motorists?’

‘I can’t answer that.’

‘There’s a huge mark-up, I believe. Plenty of commission on sales, if there’s a sizeable operation going on somewhere. We need you to tell us where that laundering operation is, Mr Elder.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Have you ever been to Pity Wood Farm, sir?’

‘Oh — Pity Wood?’

‘Pity Wood Farm. It was the home of the Sutton family until recently. I’m sure you know it. Have you ever been there?’

‘No, I haven’t,’ said Elder, dropping his gaze to the table and fiddling with his beard.

‘Are you quite sure?’

‘Sure.’

‘Only, we do have a witness who says he’s seen you going in and out of the farm in your lorry many times.’

‘Well, he’s lying,’ said Elder. ‘Whoever he is, he’s lying. I know the Suttons, of course I do. But I only ever met them in the pub. I was never at that farm.’

‘You know your answer is being recorded, Mr Elder?’

‘Yes. Well, I mean … I think I should have a solicitor.’

‘You’ll get one,’ said Fry. ‘But it might take some time. It’s nearly Christmas, you know.’

An officer knocked on the door. Fry paused the interview and went out. He passed her a message.

‘Oh, interesting.’

She went back in, and found Elder watching her hopefully in a vain expectation that she might be coming back to tell him it was all a big mistake and he could leave.

‘On quite another matter, Mr Elder,’ she said, ‘do you know a place called Godfrey’s Rough?’

Elder looked confused by the change in the direction of questioning.

‘Where?’

‘Godfrey’s Rough picnic site. I believe it’s a well-known dogging area.’

‘Sorry?’ Elder cocked his head as if he had misheard and thought his ear might have suddenly become blocked. ‘Did you say “dogging”? Are you talking about people walking their dogs? But they do that everywhere.’

‘Walking their dogs? Hardly.’

Elder looked even more puzzled.

‘It’s one of those modern expressions, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Something to do with the internet? Or mountain bikes. Or those skateboarding things. They have their own languages, the young people. I can’t understand a word they’re saying sometimes.’

‘The fact is, Mr Elder, couples park up in some of these out-of-the-way places at night for the purpose of having sex in their cars.’

‘Oh, is that all?’ said Elder.

‘Not quite. Sometimes there are people there who watch them doing it.’

‘Those are peeping toms,’ said Elder. ‘Voyeurs, you might call them. Well, that’s not new. We’ve always had them. We had sex in my day, too, you know — just not so much of it, and more discreet. In those days, peeping toms had a hard job of it, so to speak.’

Elder smiled. Fry felt that familiar frustration of trying to get through to people who seemed to talk a different language from her own. Most of all, she hated those secret little smiles and nods of understanding that sometimes passed between Ben Cooper and people like this Elder. It was as if the fact they were born within a few miles of each other gave them some hidden means of communication that no one else could ever learn. She was glad she’d let Cooper go.

‘You don’t understand, Mr Elder,’ she said. ‘This is watching by arrangement. It’s part of the thrill, apparently.’

Elder’s eyes popped. ‘They want folk watching them while they’re doing it?’ He considered the prospect, didn’t find it appealing, and shook his head. ‘No, I can’t see it. I’d call it perverted. But I suppose things are different now. Is that really what they get up to at night?’

‘And not just at night either. Lunchtimes, even. During their breaks from work. Sometimes it’s at a date and time fixed up in advance. Sometimes they just go along to a well-known dogging spot like Godfrey’s Rough and see what turns up. The people who do the watching are the ones called doggers.’

Elder was quiet, trying to imagine the scene in the woods.

‘I suppose this is shocking you, Mr Elder?’

‘It’s a new idea, that’s all. And it’s a bit too late for me to learn, maybe?’

‘I think not, sir.’

‘Happen they’re not doing any harm, anyway,’ said Elder. ‘Have you thought of that?’

‘The point is,’ said Fry, ‘things can sometimes go wrong. Doggers have been known to fall out with each other. People try to join in when they’re not wanted … Well, you can imagine. It’s fraught with dangers.’

Elder nodded slowly. ‘That’s bound to happen,’ he said. ‘Folks are always the same. But these’ll be city folks, no doubt. Students and such.’

‘Some of the keenest doggers,’ said Fry, ‘are lorry drivers.’

‘Eh?’

‘Lorry drivers. Truckers. They have favourite places where they like to park up for the night. I suppose they get bored just watching the telly in the back of the cab and eating microwaved chips. So they get together sometimes, have a few cans of beer, and go dogging. A bunch of big, hairy truckers can be a bit intimidating, and not quite what people are expecting. Things can get out of hand.’

‘Those will be long-distance drivers,’ said Elder. ‘Blokes doing a haul up to Scotland or somewhere. They’re miles away from home, you see. They have to stop where they can. Most of them are from the Continent these days — Germans and French and Italians. I saw one the other day from a place called Azerbaijan. I don’t even know where that is. I couldn’t find it on the map. A damn great Mercedes he was driving, too. Just think of it. Miles away from home. Miles and miles and miles.’

‘Not all of them are from the Continent, Mr Elder,’ said Fry. ‘Some of them aren’t far away from home at all.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘See this make and registration?’ said Fry, showing the note. ‘This DAF was recorded by one of our patrols as being parked at Godfrey’s Rough. It’s a local registration, Mr Elder. This lorry doesn’t belong to any Frenchman or Azerbaijani. It belongs to you.’

Fry paused the interview tapes again. Jack Elder was developing the classic breathless, bewildered look of the guilty person suddenly finding himself smothered under the weight of evidence that he’d either overlooked or had never imagined could exist.

‘We’ll take a break, shall we, Mr Elder? You can settle into your cell while we wait for the duty solicitor to arrive. It will probably be tomorrow when we can talk again. I hope you didn’t have plans for Christmas.’

Tom Farnham was only thirty-eight years old. He jogged a couple of miles through the woods whenever he had time, and he visited the gym about once a month. He was as fit as he wanted to be, for his age. Though he was struggling financially right now, he had lots of plans for future enterprises, when the time was right. Tom Farnham liked money.

When Farnham went out to his workshop that night, the wind had risen. He could hear a continuous rustling in the woods, as if the trees were whispering to each other, whispering secrets that ought to be kept quiet. It was still raining, and the trees were sodden. In these woods, the sound of dripping water could be mistaken for footsteps after a while.

As usual, he’d left the door of the garage open to disperse the petrol fumes. The lawnmower was pretty much finished, and he just wanted to see how the newly sprayed paint was drying. Those detectives had interrupted him, and he wasn’t sure whether he’d made as good a job of it as he’d have liked.

In a way, it was a relief to have rid of that skull from his property. He’d never liked the thing, and anything that couldn’t make him money was a waste of space, in the end. All the stuff about it bringing luck and protecting you was nonsense, of course. Ridiculous superstition that only the likes of Derek Sutton believed in.

While he was bending over the lawnmower, Farnham sensed that the quality of the light had changed, and realized that his security light had come on outside. That wasn’t unusual. Wild animals strayed out of the woods sometimes and got into his garden. Foxes, badgers, even a small deer occasionally. It was surprising what lurked in Pity Wood.

It was only when he heard the crash of his garage door thrown back and the thump of boots on concrete that Farnham began to rise. He had barely straightened up when the first of the dark figures burst into the light, meeting the turn of his shoulder with the impact of a baseball bat.

Fry was a good driver, trained in the West Midlands force driving school to handle pursuit cars. But she spent most of the drive home distracted from the road. She was trying to avoid Christmas songs on the radio, flicking from station to station until she found something unseasonal. She ended up listening to ‘Crosstown Traffic’ from Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland — the only rock song she could think of that featured a kazoo. Nothing Christmassy about that.

For the past few hours, Fry had been trying to keep the conversation with DI Hitchens out of her mind. But that was only possible during the day, when she was working. The Pity Wood Farm enquiry provided enough to occupy her mind and take her full concentration. It wasn’t the case when she left the station in West Street and headed out towards her flat in Grosvenor Avenue. The concentration started to slip, despite her best efforts.

Fry knew that she ought to have gone south, to London. They always needed officers in the Met, and it would have suited her much better in a big city where nobody cared who you were or what you did with your life. By now, she would have been well established, fast-tracking to promotion, instead of dickering about in this rural force.

Turning her Peugeot into Castleton Road, Fry stopped at the little corner shop run by an Asian family. The young couple had always been pleasant to her, even when she hadn’t been in a mood to reciprocate. A friendly greeting could be welcome at times.

She wasn’t really hungry, but she bought enough supplies to keep body and soul together for another twenty-four hours. Cheese and toast would satisfy her. Anything else would sit uncomfortably on that tight, anxious knot in her stomach. She passed over the cakes and chocolate displays, and instead picked up a yogurt. And not just any yogurt, but an organic bio-live luscious low-fat fruit yogurt, raspberry and cranberry flavour. She felt strangely virtuous.

Groups of young men and women tottered or staggered around the pubs on the corner of Grosvenor Avenue, some of them with tinsel in their hair or reindeer antlers on their heads. It was Saturday night, of course. She’d forgotten that. At weekends, some of her fellow flat-dwellers lived dangerous and unpredictable private lives. Not her concern when she was off duty, though.

‘Just stay out of my way, or I’ll run you over,’ she muttered at a drunk who stumbled off the kerb into the path of her car. What difference would another dead body make?

But a fresh body was a different matter from aged remains. Pity Wood Farm was a classic historical case. Fry knew that most of the evidence in any historical investigation was found in the form of layers. It didn’t matter whether you were researching your family history, or hunting for a serial killer. There would be layers on top of each other — different levels of meaning and significance. Over the years, meanings distorted and accumulated irrelevant associations. An enquiry had to dig down to the lowest level to find the one that was most accurate, the most free of irrelevant material. A good bit of digging, that was what she needed. But psychological digging, not the knee-deep-in-mud type.

She was aware that the lorry driver, Jack Elder, might turn out to be a complete red herring. But it was comforting to have someone in custody. Anyone. At least there would be charges at some point.

But somewhere, waiting to be dug up, were the identities of the two victims at Pity Wood Farm. They couldn’t remain Victim A and Victim B, a couple of reference numbers in the anthropologist’s report, and a Forensic Science Service casework enquiries code. They had been human beings once, and they were owed a proper identity.

The body that Jamie Ward discovered had made the message clear. Fry wouldn’t forget that grey hand, bent in a pathetic summons, coaxing her towards the grave, and ensuring that she could never turn her back on it.

Of course, once an ID was established, that was really only the beginning. These young women had families — partners, parents, perhaps even children — who were wondering where they’d gone, and waiting to hear from them.

There was an astonishing statistic that Fry had once been given. Something like ninety-eight per cent of couples who lost a son or daughter through murder would separate within a couple of years of the crime. It was because the loss of a child was an experience that destroyed your life, and put such a strain on a relationship that the damage might never be repaired.

Ninety-eight per cent. That was a really bad statistic. When a victim had been a teenager or young woman when she went missing, the parents would no longer be together, almost certainly. She would be looking for people whose lives had already been wrecked. She’d be turning up on their doorstep to tell them a body had been discovered, and she thought it was probably their daughter. Could they come along and confirm that? Oh, and Merry Christmas, by the way.

Fry finally pulled up at number twelve and walked up to her flat on the first floor. Angie was out, of course, but her clothes were still here. Outside, the noise of drunken revellers would go on for hours yet, and the rain wouldn’t stop them. It had been dark since before she called at the museum to see the hand of glory. But that was the nature of late December.

Rain and dark nights. Ideal for festive jollity.

Farnham’s clothes were soaking wet now, and his shoes slithered in the mud as he dodged from tree to tree, stumbling over roots. His breath was ragged against the sound of rain and the whip of branches hitting his face. The noise of his breathing went ahead of him through the woods. But it was the sound of a man whose life was already over.

For a second, he stopped and leaned against the trunk of an oak tree. He shook his head, spraying rain, sweat and mud from his face. His jacket was streaked with dirt, and fragments of vegetation clung to his jeans where he had charged through the undergrowth. Ahead of him were more trees, and the bank of a fast-running stream, brown water surging noisily in the night.

His wheezing concealed any noises from behind him, except for one soft footstep. There was a moment of silence. Birds rustled their damp wings in the branches, and a small shower of water fell on his face. As his breath blew out painfully into the air, he knew it might be his last.

‘You don’t want to do this,’ he called. ‘Stop it, now.’

He heard his own voice shaking with fear, and became angry at the humiliation he was being forced to suffer.

‘You’re making a mistake. You know that? A big mistake.’

A bullet whistled over his head and shredded a branch before burying itself in the trunk of a tree. It was no more than a bit of foreplay, though. Farnham heard the cocking of a hammer.

He began to run again, dodging left and right, slithering in the mud between the trees. He was almost back at his house, desperately trying to reach a phone, when the second bullet entered the back of his thigh, just above the knee. It snapped a tendon, punched a hole out of the femur and pierced the full thickness of his thigh muscle. The bullet emerged from a rip in his jeans and buried itself in the earth as he fell forward on to his face.

Farnham tried to get up again, but found his right leg refused to support his weight. He was crying as he flopped helplessly on the ground, terrified of the footsteps moving slowly towards him — a deliberate, skating tread which barely disturbed the wet leaves. He heard a rustling, and then a voice, quiet and low.

‘We all make mistakes,’ it said.

And Farnham never even noticed the third bullet.

When they’d finished what they came to do, the two men dragged Tom Farnham’s body back into the workshop and closed the door. Then they vanished as quickly as they’d come, slipping away into the darkness among the trees.

They left nothing behind them that moved. Nothing, except a thin, red ribbon of blood, meandering slowly across the concrete floor.