The Kill Call

33

Most suspects who ended up in an interview room weren’t bright enough to maintain a consistent lie. Their stories were easily undermined by the use of logic, their memories too short to survive a few hours’ wait in the cells between interviews. And a change of interviewers usually seemed to unsettle them.

It was always a source of amazement to Fry that anyone thought they could get away with telling a different story to a different interviewer. Did they think that no one compared notes? Did they not notice the tapes running? Yet it was true what they taught you about interviewing techniques: Suspects seemed to feel they had to try harder to impress one or the other.

In Interview Room One, Naomi Widdowson had been waiting for a while. She was pacing restlessly, muttering to herself, fidgeting like a junkie suffering from withdrawal symptoms.

‘Get close enough to smell her breath, to see if she’s been drinking,’ suggested Hitchens, before Fry went in.

‘You think she might be drunk?’

‘That, or mad. But when they’re mad, you can usually tell it from their eyes.’

Fry entered the interview room and persuaded Naomi to sit down. The woman kept flicking her fingers, and shuddering as if she was cold.

‘Yes, Rosie was my horse,’ she said. ‘I never denied that.’

‘When I asked you, you said the name meant nothing to you,’ said Fry.

Naomi looked at Fry as if she couldn’t really see her, the way someone might look at a ghost, not quite able to focus properly on the figure in front of them.

‘She was stolen and went for meat, I’m sure of it. Rosie died the same way as all those other horses. It was horrible to think about – I’ve never been able to get it out of my mind since. Patrick Rawson did that to me. He did the same to so many people. He deserved to be punished.’

‘He didn’t deserve to be murdered.’

‘You know what? A lot of people would consider Patrick Rawson to be guilty of murder. But we never meant to kill him.’

‘Who made the arrangement to meet on Longstone Moor?’ asked Fry.

‘I did. I phoned him and set up the appointment. Told him we had a lot of horses for sale. Thoroughbreds, for meat. He fell for it completely. Greedy people always do.’

‘You deliberately used an unregistered pay-as-you-go mobile to make this call to Mr Rawson, didn’t you?’

Naomi frowned. ‘A what? Yes, my phone is pay-as-you-go. What does that have to do with it?’

Fry looked at her, registering her puzzlement. So Naomi Widdowson hadn’t planned that, didn’t know that a call from an unregistered phone would be almost impossible to trace. Her phone just happened to be pay-as-you-go. This wasn’t turning out to be a clever criminal mind at work, was it?

‘Is this your mobile number?’ asked Fry, showing her a copy of the phone record.

‘Yes.’

‘You went to the meeting on horseback, Miss Widdowson. Why did you do that?’

‘It was the easiest way to get there, and get away again quickly. We pulled scarves over our faces, so he couldn’t identify us. He might have remembered a car. Besides…’

‘Yes?’

‘It just seemed, well… right. In the circumstances.’

Fry nodded. It was just what Dermot Walsh had said: poetic justice. But there hadn’t really been anything poetic in the crushed skull, in the fatally injured man trying desperately to run from his attackers, even as his blood drained away into the ground and his brain swelled against the shattered bone.

‘And your brother went with you on this meeting, didn’t he?’

Naomi pushed herself up on to her feet, her fingers tense and trembling on the edge of the table.

‘No. You can’t fix any of this on Rick.’

‘Please sit down, Miss Widdowson.’

‘I need to make you understand that it had nothing to do with Rick.’

‘He does have a record. Several previous offences of violence.’

Naomi slowly sank into the chair again, as if deflated. ‘What does that have to do with it? You’re all the same, once a person gets into trouble. Isn’t it supposed to be innocent until proved guilty?’

‘And you still say you didn’t intend to kill Patrick Rawson?’ asked Fry.

‘No. It was an accident.’

Her tone carried a hint of regret. And it was probably that which finally convinced Fry she was telling the truth.

Rick Widdowson had recovered from the humiliation of his arrest very quickly. He walked into Interview Room Two with a strut, swinging his shoulders, his head tilted to spread a smirk around the room.

‘Have you been informed of your rights?’ asked Fry. ‘Offered facilities and refreshments while you’ve been waiting?’

‘Good cop, bad cop – never goes out of fashion, does it?’ he said.

‘This is good cop, good cop. You haven’t even seen the bad one yet.’

‘You don’t have anything on me,’ said Widdowson, sitting confidently at the table opposite Fry. ‘If you did, there’d be a solicitor here, and the tape recorders running.’

That was the trouble with regular customers – they knew too much. Rick was right, of course. She had no evidence to implicate him in the death of Patrick Rawson. Not yet.

‘So why did you try to escape when we visited your home?’ said Fry.

He smiled. ‘I was going for help. I thought we had burglars.’

Fry sighed. ‘You know your sister is in trouble. Wouldn’t you like to help her?’

‘’Course I would. Only too keen to help.’

If that was so, his loyalty might only be one way, thought Fry.

‘You can start by telling me where you were on Tuesday morning.’

‘I don’t have anything to say.’

‘You might as well go, then.’

Widdowson made a move to get up, then froze. Fry could see the calculation going through his mind, and she guessed what he was thinking.

‘Yes, you’re free to leave at any time, Mr Widdowson. You can get up and walk out. But that would be a strange thing to do if, as you claim, you want to help your sister. “Only too keen to help” – wasn’t that your phrase? And I believe you, of course.’

Widdowson continued to hesitate, glancing at the door instead of at Fry.

‘But if you walk out now, sir, I’d probably have to stop believing you.’

With a deep sigh, Widdowson sat back down and stared at his hands.

‘I do want to help her.’ He paused, seeming to realize that what he’d said didn’t sound enough. ‘I’m her brother, after all.’

‘That’s good. I was starting to get the opposite impression.’

‘It’s just… Well, I know what you lot are like. If you haven’t got anyone else in your sights, you’ll fix it on the nearest person you can find.’

Fry raised an eyebrow. A little too dramatically, perhaps. But an interview room was a stage of a kind. You had to make your gestures understood by the dimmest suspect sitting at the back of the intellectual stalls.

‘You’re suggesting that we were going to accuse you of being involved in Patrick Rawson’s death? Where did you get that idea from, Mr Widdowson? I’m sure I didn’t say anything to give you that impression, did I?’

‘Well, not exactly.’

‘Was it something one of my colleagues said? Did they give you that impression?’

Widdowson frowned. ‘I don’t know what made me think that,’ he said. ‘It was nothing.’

‘Oh, well.’ Fry gave a hint of a shrug, and smiled. ‘Perhaps it was just something in your own mind, sir? It happens sometimes, doesn’t it? We hear what we’re expecting to hear, rather than what someone actually says.’

With an effort, Widdowson squared his shoulders and met Fry’s stare. ‘I’m here to help. Like I said. If you tell me what you want from me, I’ll do my best. Otherwise, we’re all wasting our time, aren’t we?’

Fry looked down at her notes. Her scrawl was illegible, even to her. To Widdowson, it must have looked like an indecipherable code.

‘It would be helpful, sir, if you could just go over the events of Tuesday morning. Who knows what it might produce?’

‘Like what?’

‘It could be something really useful,’ said Fry. ‘Something that might help us -’

‘Yes, I know: Help you to catch the killer.’

‘Right. I’m glad we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet at last, Mr Widdowson.’

He looked at her with a puzzled frown. ‘Tuesday morning, I was at home doing a bit of rip and burn on some CDs I’d borrowed.’

‘Any witnesses who can confirm that?’

‘Not unless Bill Gates has managed to sneak some spyware into Windows Media Player.’

‘You didn’t make or receive any phone calls?’

‘No. Besides, how would that tell you where I was? I use my mobile all the time. I don’t even have a land-line at home.’

Fry shrugged. She wasn’t going to get drawn into a discussion on that one. The less that certain members of the public knew about what was possible and not possible, the better. The cleverer ones already knew too much about fingerprints and DNA from watching re-runs of CSI .

‘You didn’t watch any daytime TV?’

‘Nah. I don’t watch much these days, except the football. There’s too much else to do.’

‘So no one else was at home with you?’ said Fry.

Widdowson hesitated, suspecting that he might have detected a trap. ‘Mum, of course. She’s practically housebound.’

‘Your sister was out, then.’

‘I suppose she must have been.’

‘You help her with the horses, don’t you?’

He didn’t like the change of subject. But that was fine.

‘Yes, sometimes.’

‘So you must ride, too. Which horse is yours? Bonny or Baby?’

He laughed scornfully. ‘No way. You wouldn’t get me on one of those things. I do a bit of work to help out, that’s all.’

‘So your sister must have been out riding on her own that morning.’

Widdowson stared at her.

‘I don’t have anything else to say.’

‘Thank you,’ said Fry. ‘That’s all I wanted to know.’

DI Hitchens listened to Fry’s theory carefully. She could tell that he wanted to believe her, and didn’t want to see some huge hole in her case.

‘So Patrick Rawson and Michael Clay were drawn to Derbyshire deliberately, for the purpose of revenge,’ he said, knitting his fingers together, which in him was a gesture of satisfaction.

‘Patrick Rawson, certainly,’ said Fry.

Hitchens looked at her, surprised. ‘These Widdowson people carried out their own sting operation. Having got Mr Rawson into the area, they then intended to kill him. Isn’t that what you mean?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘You think Naomi Widdowson is telling the truth? It was an accident?’

‘I don’t think Miss Widdowson intended to kill Patrick Rawson,’ said Fry carefully.

Hitchens unlocked his fingers. ‘Let me get this straight. She admits that she made a phone call to Mr Rawson, arranging to meet him at the field barn on Longstone Moor that morning at eight thirty.’

‘Yes.’

‘She gave a false name, and claimed to have a number of horses for sale. Unfit horses, unsuitable for riding. But Thoroughbreds, to tempt him.’

‘Thoroughbreds that had clean passports. No Section Nine declaration.’

‘So they could go for human consumption.’

‘Yes.’

Hitchens looked at her interview notes, as if he thought he might be missing something. ‘And her story is that she went to the meeting alone, on horseback.’

‘Because it was more anonymous, and easier to make a getaway.’

‘Right. And all she intended was to give Mr Rawson a scare. In her own words, “to teach him a lesson”. But when she galloped her horse at him, Mr Rawson tripped and fell. The horse spooked and reared, and he got kicked in the head. That’s it?’

‘Pretty much,’ agreed Fry.

‘In her account, there were no witnesses.’

‘No.’

‘And without a witness, it would be difficult to prove that it happened any differently. It could have been an accident.’

Fry nodded. ‘It’s funny,’ she said. ‘We started off with the assumption that Patrick Rawson’s killing was the result of some human relationship that had gone wrong.’

‘Well, that’s usually the case, Diane.’

‘Yes. But, in the end, it turns out that Rawson died because of the nature of someone’s relationship with an animal. That’s a new one on me.’

‘And me.’

‘The trouble is,’ said Fry, ‘Naomi Widdowson obviously knows nothing at all about what happened to Michael Clay.’

‘So are we accepting Miss Widdowson’s account?’ asked Hitchens.

‘No, we’re not,’ said Fry. ‘Because we know that she wasn’t on her own.’

‘She’s shielding someone, then. Her brother?’

‘I don’t think so.’

Fry took the postmortem photos of Patrick Rawson’s head injury from her case file and lay them on Hitchens’ desk.

‘Mrs van Doon has completed her analysis of the injury pattern,’ she said. ‘As we can see, the depression in the skull is basically the shape of a horseshoe, which would substantiate Naomi Widdowson’s story. But this area here, where the pattern has been obliterated – that was caused by a later injury. Mrs van Doon thinks a blunt-ended weapon.’

Hitchens examined the photos closely. ‘Interesting. So someone finished Patrick Rawson off.’

‘That’s our murderer,’ said Fry. ‘It’s whoever the second person was who went to that meeting with Naomi Widdowson. It’s the person she’s shielding. And it’s someone who had a reason for making sure that Patrick Rawson was dead.’

Cooper knew only too well how an overnight resolve could dissipate completely by morning. You went to bed with your mind full of determination, and by the time you got up your willpower was as mushy as the muesli in your breakfast bowl. Things seemed so much less important in the cold light of day. Easier, surely, to let it all go by and get on with life.

But that morning, a couple of hours before dawn, he had already been wide awake and planning how he would carry out his intention.

‘You’re getting really good at these interviews,’ said Cooper in the CID room.

‘I always was good,’ said Fry.

‘No, I mean – you really knew how to handle the Widdowsons. They’re going to give more away about what happened at any moment.’

‘If they have anything more to give away.’

Cooper turned. ‘What? Do you think they might be genuine?’

‘I’ve no idea, Ben.’

‘Oh.’

Cooper wasn’t quite sure how Fry had managed to make him feel in the wrong when all he had tried to do was pay her a professional compliment.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘if something’s bothering you, you should talk about it.’

Fry looked at him, a cool expression on her face that he couldn’t read. Sometimes, it seemed to be an expression that she put on entirely for his benefit, a mask that he wasn’t supposed to penetrate.

‘Ben,’ she said, ‘if I was going to talk to someone about what’s bothering me – it certainly wouldn’t be you.’

Cooper sat back, feeling the physical force of her rebuff.

‘OK. It’s up to you.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘I’m being serious, Diane.’

‘No, you’re being ludicrous. There’s a difference.’

‘I’m sorry you feel like that,’ said Cooper. ‘Because I wanted to ask you something.’

Just then, Gavin Murfin came into the office with a report in his hand.

‘Fingerprint section have got their, er… fingers out at last,’ he said, with a grin. ‘They’ve got us a result on the prints lifted from the gate in that field where Patrick Rawson died.’

‘And…?’ said Fry, completely forgetting Cooper.

Murfin scanned the report. ‘Adrian Tarrant, aged thirty- two. HGV driver, with an address in Eyam.’

‘He has a record? If his prints were on file, they should have made the match long before now. Days ago.’

Murfin shook his head. ‘They weren’t on file until today,’ he said. ‘He was arrested this morning, during a meeting of the Eden Valley Hunt.’

‘What?’ said Cooper. ‘We were there.’

‘Well, you must have missed it. It seems Mr Tarrant was identified by a female hunt saboteur as the person who assaulted her during an incident on Tuesday. He was arrested and brought here for processing. DNA sample and fingerprints taken, as per routine.’

‘And when they put his prints into the system, they got a match.’

‘Bingo,’ smiled Murfin.

‘Adrian Tarrant,’ said Fry. ‘I knew it was him.’

Adrian Tarrant had been employed by one of the haulage companies whose lorries rumbled constantly backwards and forwards to the opencast quarries on Longstone Edge. Fry reflected that he might well have seen her as he passed along the haulage road in a cloud of dust. But she wondered whether his job might not give an alibi for eight thirty on Tuesday morning, when Patrick Rawson was killed.

That was, until she discovered Tarrant had been sacked by his employers the previous week, for turning up over the alcohol limit once too often.

The house in Eyam was already guarded by uniformed officers standing at the gate. It was a small, stone-faced council house, not much more than a two-up, two-down, with a tiny kitchen and bathroom. According to the neighbours, Adrian Tarrant shared the house with another man, possibly a cousin, who worked as a long-distance lorry driver and was currently away on a job.

Fry could see from the state of the house that this was likely to be true. A couple of days’ washing-up stood on the kitchen drainer, newspapers and empty beer cans decorated the carpet in the sitting room. The TV remote looked much better used than the vacuum cleaner.

The team moved through the house systematically, not entirely sure what they were looking for, so looking that bit more carefully.

‘Apparently, it was Tarrant’s fellow hunt stewards who pointed the finger initially,’ said Cooper. ‘Then, when he was pulled in, the girl he injured made a positive identification. So it just shows -’

‘Not all hunting people are bad, I know,’ said Fry.

‘They can’t risk someone like him giving them a bad reputation. Not any more.’

In the sitting room, Fry began to open the drawers of a small dresser, her gloved fingers moving through the contents. Some CDs, spare batteries, a pair of gloves. Luke Irvine was examining a desktop PC on a table in the corner. Was Tarrant the type to send a lot of emails? She doubted it, but you had to check. Just as Cooper came into the room from the kitchen, she touched something solid in the drawer. Her fingers closed around an unusual shape.

‘That’s odd.’

Cooper came over to her. ‘What have you found, Diane?’

‘I’m not sure.’

Fry showed him the object she’d found in the drawer – a small, flared brass and copper tube, no more than nine inches long.

‘Those things aren’t easy to use,’ said Cooper. ‘It takes a lot of practice to get it right.’

‘What is it?’

‘A hunting horn, of course.’

Carefully, Fry bagged the horn for evidence.

‘Adrian Tarrant must have had it,’ she said. ‘So it looks as though the kill call was real, after all – and Tarrant was the one who blew it. For a while, I thought the sabs were making it up.’

‘Rather a theatrical gesture, wasn’t it?’ said Cooper.

‘Theatrical?’ Fry thought of all the gleaming horses and red coats, the panting hounds and glossy boots, all the centuries of ritual and tradition. ‘Well, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? A bit of theatre.’

‘The kill call?’ said Irvine, straightening up from the PC when he overheard their conversation.

‘It’s a hunting term,’ explained Cooper. ‘Three long notes, calling the hounds in to kill the fox.’

‘Oh, I see. It has another meaning, too.’

‘Of course. Something to do with computer programming, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, it’s used in multi-tasking. The kill call lets one process terminate another.’

Fry looked around Adrian Tarrant’s home, sniffing at the beer cans and unwashed plates. ‘Well, let’s see if we’ve found enough to terminate Mr Tarrant’s activities.’

That afternoon, Fry spent a long time sitting across the table from Adrian Tarrant in an interview room, watching him as if he was an animal at the zoo. She wasn’t sure what sort of animal he would be. He might as well have been a hibernating bear, for all the communication that was going on between them.

Tarrant was silent, stubbornly so. He didn’t even need the presence of the duty solicitor to encourage him to go ‘no comment’. But now and then he raised his head and stared back at her. Fry remembered his eyes – those eyes that had stared at her as he ran past her near Birchlow on Tuesday, and again in the woods on Saturday.

‘Why did you kill Patrick Rawson?’ she asked. ‘Was it for money? We know you lost your job. Or perhaps you’ve got yourself into some kind of trouble? Do you owe a lot of cash? Is it for drugs?’

He remained silent, denying the tapes any response. These were facts that might come out some other way, and other members of the team were already at work in the CID room, phoning his ex-employers, former colleagues, members of his family. SOCOs and a search team were about to pull apart his house. But Tarrant wasn’t going to help. Why should he save the police time?

‘What did you use to finish Patrick Rawson off when the horse didn’t kill him?’

Fry really wanted to know the answer to that one. Her money was on the pickaxe handle that he’d been carrying when she saw him in the woods. She hoped the search would turn it up. Bloodstains were preserved well on a wooden handle. Patrick Rawson’s DNA would clinch it, even if Adrian Tarrant stayed permanently dumb.

‘How well do you ride a horse? Not well, I bet. You’re not the type.’

He didn’t rise to it. She hadn’t expected him to. In a way, he had only been doing what everyone else did, making a living by exploiting his natural talents. In Tarrant’s case, his talent was a capacity for violence.

After interviewing the other hunt stewards, Fry had two witnesses to the fact that Tarrant had been absent from steward duty until later, around the time that she’d seen him on the road. She thought of the protestor who had been injured during the hunt and had identified Adrian Tarrant as her assailant. Tarrant had come fresh from killing Patrick Rawson, and the assault had probably come all too easily to him.

Now Fry knew what sort of animal Adrian Tarrant was. The sort whose instinct was to kill. Once the scent of blood was in their nostrils, they were likely to attack anything that crossed their path.

‘He’s saying nothing,’ said Hitchens, when she took a break. ‘And I’d anticipate that he doesn’t intend to.’

‘I agree,’ said Fry.

‘No explanation for how his prints came to be on the gate?’

‘None offered.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

Fry did at least have a clearer picture now of what had happened to Patrick Rawson. Earlier, she’d imagined him running across the field in his waxed coat and brown brogues, and had wondered where he’d been running to. But it had been more a question of what he was running away from. Sean Crabbe had just been the final element in deciding Mr Rawson’s fate.

And that reminded her it was Sean’s turn to face his fate now. The CPS would be making a decision early next week on what charges to bring against him. Fry found herself hoping that he’d avoid a custodial sentence. Of all the people prison would do no good for, Sean Crabbe had to be top of the list.

‘So what are we going to do now, sir?’ asked Fry. ‘We don’t have any other evidence against Adrian Tarrant.’

‘I suggest you have another go at Naomi Widdowson,’ said Hitchens.

‘Why?’

Hitchens smiled. ‘Because, according to Tarrant’s colleagues at the haulage company, Naomi is his girlfriend.’