Dying to Sin

36

There was a long moment, frozen in time, while the fog drifted in through the car window. David Palfreyman stood quite still, his finger tensed on the trigger. Behind him, he could hear the sound of another car approaching.

Suddenly, it had become a different situation. Maybe he’d miscalculated, and made his move at the wrong time. But it wasn’t beyond his abilities to sort out. None of these people were clever enough to get away from him.

‘You two stay there,’ he grunted. ‘And don’t bloody move.’

Cooper raised his head. For a second, he glimpsed Palfreyman at the shattered window, bending down to peer into the car. His shotgun was resting on the glass, both barrels pointing into the passenger seat. If it was fired at that range, in an enclosed space, he and Fry were both dead meat.

But then Palfreyman was gone, stepping away from the car and vanishing instantly into the fog.

Fry had her eyes closed, until Cooper touched her arm.

‘Am I still alive?’ she said.

‘Yes, somehow.’

‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know. Something spooked him.’

Fry looked at him in concern, and Cooper realized that he was shaking as much as she was.

‘What the hell are you waiting for, then?’ she said.

Cooper started the ignition and accelerated across the mud, not bothering with the lights. Because of that, the driver of the car coming towards him didn’t see the Toyota at all, and they smashed head on into each other before Cooper could even get as far as the first gate.

‘Is that our back-up?’ asked Fry, shielding her eyes against the glare of the other car’s headlights.

Then the doors of the Toyota were jerked open, and they both found themselves looking into the wrong end of a nine-millimetre pistol. It definitely wasn’t their back-up.

A few minutes later, Fry and Cooper had been dragged out of their car and pushed into the agent’s house after one of the two men in black balaclavas had shot the padlock off the door. The door was slammed, and they stood behind it, trying to hear what was going on outside.

‘Friends of Palfreyman’s,’ said Cooper. ‘Trying to decide which of them gets the privilege of shooting us.’

‘I hope it takes a long time for them to make their minds up.’

‘Let’s face it, we were outnumbered and outgunned, even when it was just Palfreyman on his own.’

‘That maniac. PC Bloody — ’

‘Hold on, Diane.’

Cooper was peering through the window, watching the two men moving around outside. They seemed to be trying to separate the bonnet of their car from his, and they were having trouble with the bumper. One of the men was tall and dressed in a black coat and jeans. The other was smaller and thicker set, but they both wore balaclavas that hid their faces, so even without the fog, identification would be impossible.

Or would it?

Cooper watched the taller figure. His dark outline looked vaguely familiar, but the associations being set off in Cooper’s mind were all wrong. Ridiculous, in these circumstances. He was actually thinking of the vicar at All Saints, Here we are … Dying to sin … And he was thinking of himself, laughing at a private joke and being glared at by Liz for sniggering in church. And if they don’t like your face, they’ll cut off your hand.

‘Oh, shit,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Diane,’ he whispered. ‘Cast your mind back. Did you say Joanne Brindley was in a pantomime?’

‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘Think. Was it the one at the Royal Theatre? Aladdin?’

‘Well, she was in something. I interviewed her while she was dressed in a police tunic and tights. But what has that got to do with anything?’

‘And a sort of Fu Manchu moustache?’

‘That’s right. She said she was only in the chorus to make up the numbers, but there are some really good actors in the cast.’

‘One very good actor, at least,’ said Cooper. ‘He plays Abanazar, a difficult role to get right. He’s Mrs Brindley’s husband, Alex.’

‘Mr Brindley is an actor?’

‘Yes. And you said yourself a good actor would be the only person who could lie without giving himself away.’

Fry joined him at the window. ‘Is that him? Brindley? I don’t believe it.’

‘He’s in character,’ said Cooper.

‘Alex Brindley was the only person in Rakedale I thought wasn’t lying to me.’

‘He played a good part, then. Keeping his grasp on the magic lamp.’

The two men had moved back towards the door of the house, and they were pulling their nine millimetres out of their pockets again. This was probably it, their last moments. Cooper wondered whether he should pray. He felt ridiculously glad that he’d been to church on Sunday.

Then one of the men dropped his torch in the mud, and both of them stopped, just outside the door. For a second, before it died completely, the light of the torch caught the paleness of a face, gleaming with water. And a voice came out of the darkness.

‘You should never have come on to my patch.’

Cooper was deafened by the boom of a shotgun fired at close range. The blast stunned his ears, and the flash made him screw his eyes tight shut, anticipating a spray of pellets entering his flesh, ripping open his face.

But the pain didn’t come — only another boom as the second barrel was discharged. And then a high-pitched scream that split the air, amplified by the fog into an awful ear-bursting noise.

The smell of burnt gunpowder filled Cooper’s nostrils, hot and acrid. This wasn’t potassium nitrate cooking in the kitchen at Pity Wood Farm. This was the real thing, and far more deadly.

Cooper found himself spread flat on the ground, his face pressed to the concrete, trying desperately to dig himself into the floor, the taste of stone in his mouth. He became aware that Fry was close beside him, her body pushed up against his, seeking any inch of safety.

They waited, afraid to move or breathe, until they heard footsteps heading away over the spoil heap, back towards the cars. Cooper felt Fry begin to tense, as if she was going to stand up. He grabbed her arm and pulled her back down.

‘Wait!’

Her face was close to his now, and he could see her eyes glinting with fear and excitement.

‘Someone is being killed,’ she said. ‘We should do something to stop it.’

‘Like what? We’re not armed. Remember the first rule is to protect your own life, otherwise you’re no use for protecting members of the public.’

‘I’m the senior officer here, Ben.’

‘So? Are you going to get us both killed to prove something? That won’t impress Superintendent Branagh, you know.’

‘Bastard,’ she hissed. But she stayed down, waiting until they finally heard a car engine start up. A vehicle passed slowly along the roadway towards the agent’s house.

‘OK?’ she said.

‘OK. But take it slow and quiet.’

When they emerged from the door, nothing was moving outside. Two bodies lay in the mud, still wearing their balaclavas. A double-barrelled shotgun had been broken open and left on the roof of Cooper’s Toyota. There was no sign of David Palfreyman.

Fry and Cooper stood looking at the bodies, knowing that they shouldn’t touch anything, wondering how they’d managed to survive. They looked up when more headlights swung across the mine buildings and lit up the engine house. They were ready to run again. But they saw the blue flash, and they knew it was finally their back-up.

After that, they were surrounded by a familiar chaos. More and more vehicles arrived with their lights flashing — paramedics, armed response, the duty inspector, the whole circus.

To Fry and Cooper, trying to recover from the adrenalin still surging through their bodies, it all seemed to be going on around them in a dream. DI Hitchens appeared, and Cooper thought he saw Superintendent Branagh in the fog, but she didn’t speak to either of them.

From conversations he overheard, Cooper gathered that at least one of the nine-millimetre pistols had been fired. He didn’t recall hearing the shot, but maybe it had been drowned out by the simultaneous discharge of Palfreyman’s shotgun. Cooper knew that someone was bound to ask him later which had come first. He was going to make a bad witness.

Within an hour or so, news came in that David Palfreyman had been picked up, and he was claiming self-defence. He wouldn’t say where he’d obtained the shotgun — but then, he didn’t know that Fry and Cooper had been following Jack Elder.

‘They’ve got Elder in custody, too,’ said Fry. ‘I said he should never have been released in the first place.’

‘He wouldn’t have led us here then, would he?’ said Cooper.

‘Is that a bad thing?’

The second gunman with Alex Brindley was unfamiliar to Cooper. But he felt sure that he’d turn out to be on record, a bit of hired muscle available for the dirty work. There was plenty to be had, if you knew where to ask and you’d got the money. And Alex Brindley had the money, all right. It just didn’t come from the kind of source you might have expected from his nice house and nice family. Dealing in Class A drugs was a lucrative business.

‘No doubt they’ll match the nine millimetres with the Farnham shooting,’ said Cooper.

‘I’d give odds on it. Brindley took Tom Farnham out before he gave away too much information, and he came here to meet Palfreyman, intending to do the same with him.’

Cooper nodded. But David Palfreyman had called in his favours and dealt out his own form of justice for the last time. The manufacture of Class A drugs on his patch had been an insult. The fact that he hadn’t known about it, unforgivable.

They’d been told to sit in a car and wait until they were interviewed. But Cooper got bored and slipped out to watch the activity around Magpie Mine. The floodlights that were going up had turned the scene into a strange underwater world, figures moving around in a yellow murk as if they were swimming. Voices boomed and echoed between the stone walls.

As he stood in the fog, Cooper heard another sound drifting on the night air. It came from way over in the direction of Monyash, or one of the villages to the north. The air was so still that the sound might have been travelling for miles before it reached him. It could have been a message crossing the light years from another planet, for all the sense he made of it.

Then some combination of notes, or a recognizable snatch of syllables, struck a chord in his memory. Carol singers. That’s what he could hear — carol singers. If he wasn’t mistaken, they were performing ‘Once in Royal David’s City’. He pictured a group of singers from a local church, probably performing outside a pub. ‘Stood a lowly cattle shed’ came clear through the fog. It reminded him of Pity Wood Farm, in a strange kind of way. Lowly, all right.

Somebody had once told him that Christmas had been stolen from the pagans. The twenty-fifth of December was supposed to be the birthday of Mithras, the god of blood, worshipped by Romans. Mithraic ceremonies had been held in caves, with the smell of smoke, a long knife plunged into the throat of a sacrificial bullock, and blood that fell hissing on an altar stone. Fire and blood, and the entrails of beasts. It must have been tradition.

Cooper found it unsettling to think about such things out here in the darkness, on a cold night in December, with two bodies lying almost at his feet and pools of fresh blood forming on the ground in the lingering scent of gunpowder. It was as if the singing he heard in the distance might not be carol singers at all, but the chanting of the worshippers of Mithras, deep in their caves.

Well, things went back a tidy way in these parts. Two thousand years? That was just middlin’ old.

Fry had followed him from the car. Cooper looked at her, huddling in her coat against the cold, but still shivering as though she would never stop.

‘Diane,’ he said. ‘Is it too early to wish you happy birthday?’