The Kill Call

42

Tuesday

Juliana van Doon hovered over the body of Michael Clay, laid out on the mortuary table in Edendale. The body exuded an almost palpable aura of cold, the blue tinge to his skin strange and alien in the mortuary lights.

‘No, he didn’t drown,’ she said. ‘There was no water in his lungs. But he suffocated all the same.’

Fry shivered involuntarily. A visit to the mortuary wasn’t her idea of the best way to start the day. But today it seemed somehow appropriate.

‘Suffocated?’ she said. ‘How can that be?’

‘Oxygen deprivation.’

Tensing, Fry waited for the patronizing remark, but it didn’t come. Instead, the pathologist looked down at the body, and wouldn’t even meet her eye. Mrs van Doon seemed awkward with her this morning, almost as if she’d heard something that had changed her attitude. Fry told herself she must be imagining things. Yet still the pathologist looked away as she continued to explain.

‘He has cyanosis, look – the bluish discolouration of the fingers, toes and ears, and around the mouth. That’s caused by a dramatic drop in the oxygen content of the blood circulating through the body. Blood poor in oxygen is purple, rather than red.’

‘But he was found in a flooded bunker,’ said Fry. ‘I assumed…’

Mrs van Doon shook her head. ‘If this bunker of yours regularly gets wet and dries out again, I imagine there was a certain amount of rusted metal around.’

‘Yes, there was.’

The pathologist hadn’t even picked up on her slip, her use of the word ‘assumed’. Never assume, it makes an ass…

‘Oxidized metal produces carbon dioxide, and that’s lethal in a confined space,’ said Mrs van Doon. ‘Even without the hatch being closed, the victim was at serious risk. He could have passed out fairly quickly, especially if he was panicking, and exerting himself physically.’

Fry looked at Michael Clay’s blue-tinged fingers. ‘He would have been running up the ladder, trying to force the hatch open. Shouting for help.’

‘Of course. No ventilation either, I suppose?’

‘A couple of sliding vents, but they were rusted shut.’

‘It wouldn’t have made any difference if they’d been open,’ said the pathologist. ‘Carbon dioxide is heavier than air. Without a pump to replenish the atmosphere, he wouldn’t have survived very long. As things went downhill, he would have become confused and disoriented, losing co-ordination. His breathing would have progressively weakened, like a fish out of water, and then he would have lost consciousness. Sometimes, people die from cardiac arrhythmia before the asphyxia.’

‘So he was already dead when the bunker started to flood?’ asked Fry.

‘Mmm.’ Mrs van Doon tapped a scalpel thoughtfully against a stainless-steel dish, a habit that Fry normally found irritating. Today, it didn’t seem to matter. ‘Perhaps not when it started to flood. It would have taken time.’

‘So he would have lived long enough to see the water coming in?’

‘I think so. It’s all a bit academic, perhaps.’

‘I bet it didn’t feel academic to Mr Clay,’ said Fry, trying half-heartedly to get a reaction.

‘Perhaps not.’

‘More like something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story.’

‘Poe?’

‘He was the writer obsessed with premature burial.’

‘I don’t remember that particular story,’ said the pathologist mildly. ‘I was always scared by the one that had the walls gradually closing in. That used to give me serious nightmares.’

Fry shook her head. ‘For me, it’s drowning slowly, as the water gets higher and higher. Trying to get one more gasp of air, but feeling the water reach your mouth. As far as I’m concerned, it would be a blessing to pass out from lack of oxygen first.’

Then the other woman met her eye properly for the first time. Fry felt a physical shock from the contact. Was there sympathy in her expression? Surely not pity? God, please don’t let the pathologist be feeling pity for her.

‘We all have to be thankful for our blessings,’ said Mrs van Doon. ‘However small they may be.’

Cooper knew from personal experience that Fry’s smile was worse than any verbal threat she might have made. It sometimes reminded him of a snake opening its mouth to reveal the poison on its fangs. Perhaps it was lucky that E Division hadn’t introduced video cameras into the interview rooms yet. Those whirring tapes caught the words being spoken, but not the gestures or the facial expressions.

‘So, Mr Massey,’ she said. ‘Do you still say you don’t know whether you meant to kill Mr Clay?’

Massey was very composed now. All that he had bottled up inside him had come out, and he was facing everything that happened to him now with a quiet resignation.

‘I thought about it a time or two over the next few days,’ he said calmly. ‘I wondered whether to go and let him out. I even walked towards the post a couple of times. But it was so quiet, I just turned round and walked away again. I might have let him out, but I didn’t know what to say to him, how to explain it. And as time passed, it became more difficult to explain. After a while, I knew I would never be able to explain it to anyone. I don’t suppose you understand what I’m saying, even now?’

‘It’s hard for us to put ourselves in your position, Mr Massey.’

‘Yes, I see that. It’s hard for me too.’ He looked from Fry to Cooper. ‘I’m not a killer, you know. Not really. It was, well… sort of circumstances that just came together. The kind of thing I never thought would happen. You just react without thinking when it does happen. It was almost as if I’d been trained for it, had it drilled into me what to do in that situation. I really didn’t think about it. I never thought, “I’m going to kill him.” So I don’t think you can say that I had the intention. Can you?’

‘That will be for a court to decide, Mr Massey.’

‘I suppose so. What happens now?’

‘We’re going to have to charge you.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘Why did you hate him so much?’ asked Cooper. ‘Was it to do with the death of Jimmy Hind?’

‘Of course,’ said Massey. ‘Les had brought his son to the post that night. He was a new observer, learning the ropes. Strictly speaking, there was only supposed to be a crew of three on duty. Les told me not to mention it. But then, a few days later, I saw Shirley. And I saw who she was with. It was Stuart.’

They both stared at him for a moment, thinking they’d misheard.

‘Stuart?’ said Fry.

Massey nodded. ‘Like I said, Stuart wasn’t supposed to be there. But it was him I saw with Shirley a few days later. And I realized he’d been after her all that time. He was Jimmy’s rival. It was him that left the loose knot on the siren, I’m sure of it.’

‘Stuart? Did you say Stuart?’

‘Yes, Stuart Clay, Les’s son.’

Fry stared at him. ‘Mr Massey, Stuart Clay died last year. He had pancreatic cancer.’

Massey looked completely uncomprehending. ‘That’s not possible. He was there on Wednesday.’

‘No.’

‘It was Stuart Clay, Les Clay’s son. I knew him – he was with us at the post that night. He killed Jimmy.’

Cooper shook his head. ‘DS Fry is right, Mr Massey. Stuart Clay died nearly a year ago. The man who visited you was his younger brother, Michael. Here’s a photo of him -’

‘That’s him: Stuart.’

‘No, it’s Michael. He was eight years younger than Stuart. Stuart would have been your age now.’

‘No.’

‘Michael had to deal with his brother’s affairs when he died,’ said Cooper. ‘We think that it was when he cleared out Stuart’s papers that he first came across references to the ROC and the post at Birchlow. Then he found other things – there was a cap badge, a photograph of the crew. And, above all, there were a lot of newspaper cuttings relating to the death of Jimmy Hind. That was why Michael came to have a look at the post while he was in Derbyshire. It was part of the process of putting his older brother’s memory to rest.’

But Massey still wasn’t convinced. It was obvious from the stubborn expression on his face, the distant, unconnected look in his pale, blue eyes.

For one last time, Cooper produced the photograph of the crew of the Birchlow observer post, Post 4 Romeo. He was confident that he was finally showing it to the right person.

‘Mr Massey, do you remember this photo?’

Massey screwed up his eyes, and held the photograph to the light.

‘That’s us, in the 1960s sometime. There’s me and Jimmy. The big bloke is Les Clay. And there’s Stuart Clay, Shirley Outram. I know all of them. They’re just as I remember them.’

In the photo, Jimmy Hind was wearing round, wire-rimmed glasses, like John Lennon’s. He was the only one in glasses, though Peter Massey had also been squinting a little as he looked at the camera.

‘Do you normally wear glasses, Mr Massey?’

‘Only when I need them.’

‘Are you short sighted, or long sighted?’

‘Short sighted, I suppose.’

‘If I left the room now, would you be able to describe my face to someone? Would you know me again if you saw me in forty years’ time?’

‘Why would I need to?’

Cooper lowered his head, no longer able to look Massey in the eye. He was thinking of the man who’d died in the underground bunker, starved of oxygen as the flood water crept higher around him.

‘Why?’ he said. ‘So that you don’t make a mistake about someone’s identity again.’

‘He’s hopeless without his glasses,’ said Cooper later, when he and Fry had concluded the interview. ‘He says he doesn’t need to wear them around the farm. He doesn’t miss anything that he wants to see. But there are some things he doesn’t want to see too clearly, anyway.’

‘Like people?’ suggested Fry.

‘Yes, people. He knew me, but he wouldn’t be able to describe my face. When he saw Michael Clay, his memories were of a voice, an outline, a way of walking, a series of gestures or mannerisms. The sort of thing that brothers have in common, or fathers and sons. People say that Matt and I have a lot of similar mannerisms, though we don’t really look alike.’

Fry seemed distant and detached this morning, as if a great weight was on her mind that prevented her from focusing properly.

‘I don’t understand why Peter Massey did it,’ she said.

‘I don’t think he understands either,’ said Cooper.

‘Well, that’s not good enough.’

Her tone was suddenly sharp, almost vicious. But Cooper could understand her annoyance. He just didn’t know quite how much of it was directed at himself.

Cooper had wanted to see Fry bring her case to a successful conclusion. But somehow he’d managed to take the credit for himself, without intending to. This morning, a congratulatory memo had been emailed to everyone in CID from Superintendent Branagh, singling out the actions of DC Cooper for particular praise. That would do his hopes for promotion no harm at all. The trouble was, he didn’t know whether Fry had read the memo yet, since she’d come straight from the mortuary to the interview with Massey. Certainly, no one had dared to mention it in front of her so far.

‘I suppose it’s in the nature of the job that we always want motives,’ he said. ‘But people often do things they can’t explain the reasons for, even to themselves. We’re wasting our time trying to make them give a reason for it, something neat and logical that we can write down and present to a judge and jury.’

‘I don’t agree,’ said Fry. ‘Being obliged to explain to another person why you did something can clarify the reasons in your own mind. It’s the same principle that lies behind a lot of psychotherapy. If you’re never forced to explain yourself, you can just carry on wallowing in denial.’

Cooper thought of some of the real killers he’d seen – the social predators, people with the glint of cruelty in their eyes. But Peter Massey wasn’t one of those. In his own way, he probably thought of himself as being just as noble as William Mompesson, sacrificing his own future to rid the world of a pestilence. A large number of murderers were convinced they were doing the right thing at the time. It often came as a surprise that society didn’t agree with them.

Whose motto had been ‘ Hate and wait ’? Was it one of the de Medicis? Well, Peter Massey had certainly done that. He’d waited more than forty years, nursing his hatred. You’d think that emotions might fade over four decades, but sometimes they just grew stronger.

Cooper realized that Michael Clay’s death had taken a hold on his mind. How could it not, when he’d been there himself, in the darkness of the flooded ROC bunker, feeling the debris of the past floating up around him, sensing the presence of death in the water.

This was the sort of thing he would think about at night when he went to bed. His memories would resurface from the mud of his subconscious. The invisible creatures that had swum about his feet; the rough, fibrous thing that had flapped towards the floor. And, most of all, the white face that had turned slowly towards him. A floating, blank-eyed face, staring and staring…

Yes, those images he’d created for himself would swirl through his brain, moving in endless spirals until he drifted to sleep. He prayed they wouldn’t stay there for ever, haunting his dreams, too.

That morning, Environmental Health officers had visited Le Chien Noir in Edendale. They called Fry to tell her that they had obtained an ELISA kit for detecting animal species content in cooked meat. ELISA wasn’t in the police handbook of acronyms, so Fry had to ask for an explanation. Enzyme-Linked Immuno Sorbent Assay. She was none the wiser.

‘The testing method is based on antibodies raised to heat-resistant species-specific, muscle-related glycol-proteins. On your information, we used the cooked-horse species kit. They’re made in the USA, and we don’t use very many that are species specific.’

‘And the result?’ asked Fry.

‘No horse.’

‘No horse?’

‘Not at Le Chien Noir.’

When Fry put the phone down, she reflected that the people who hadn’t put a foot wrong all week were those she’d had the strongest personal reaction against. The Eden Valley Hunt had been above suspicion, apart from one rogue steward. C.J. Hawleys abattoir in Yorkshire was also operating according to all the regulations, so far as she could tell. And R amp; G Enterprises were a very respectable, forward-looking company, whatever you might think of the purple slabs of meat coming off their packing line.

No, the trouble had been caused by all those individuals with their personal needs and desires, their troubled emotions and hunger for revenge. Peter Massey just happened to have waited a lot longer for his vengeance, for the day when he could finally achieve a form of justice.

As her phone rang again, some instinct made Fry glance up at the other members of the CID team. At least two people looked hastily away. What were they waiting for? What had they been expecting her to do? She was only answering the phone.

‘Hello, DS Fry.’

‘Diane.’

She recognized the smooth tones immediately, of course. The caller was Gareth Blake. Just the sound of her name from his lips brought back all the feelings she’d been trying to suppress since yesterday. All the activity, the need to respond to Cooper’s call from Birchlow, the visit to the mortuary, the interview with Massey… it had all served the same purpose: to avoid the moment that she knew was coming. And to suppress the memories that would now forever bubble up in her mind.

‘Obviously, I don’t want to put any pressure on you, Diane,’ said Blake.

‘No. I -’

‘But it would be good to talk to you again fairly soon. You know there’s a decision to be made.’

To distract herself, Fry stared at her computer screen, saw that she had some emails, and automatically clicked on them to see what they were. It was an instinctive action, with no real thought of finding anything of interest. But she noticed a message from Superintendent Branagh, and opened it.

Blake was continuing to talk, pouring a meaningless noise in her ear, as Fry read the memo from Branagh for the first time.

Cooper had been asked to check through a copy of a statement that Peter Massey had made before his interview. It was a curious document, reading like an extract from the journal that they’d found at Rough Side Farm after his arrest. An odd glimpse into the world of 1968 and the memories that Massey had lived with for the past forty years.

Cooper thought the words were sad and thoughtful, with no apparent attempt at self-justification. It must have been a relief for him to get it all down on paper. There was even a sense of fatalism about Massey’s conclusion:

‘ I thought that what they said must be wrong. At the start, Jimmy and Les and Shirley were all dead. Three of them, just the way it was bound to be. When they told me Stuart was dead, and his brother too, that was all wrong.

‘ But it seems there’s a third, after all. A man I never knew, or even heard of until he was dead. But I suppose he had to die. It’s fate, and you can’t escape that. Everything happens in threes.’

Cooper wasn’t so sure about fate himself. He’d never felt that sense of an inescapable destiny waiting for him, making everything he did completely futile. Perhaps he was too young yet. It was possible that you had to reach Mr Massey’s age, before you were able to stop and look back on your life, and get that sudden terrifying perspective that convinced you it had all been in vain.

He smiled wryly to himself. Something to look forward to, then. He supposed it was better to enjoy life while he could. Best to appreciate what he had – friends, family, his relationship with Liz, the renewed prospect of promotion.

He felt conscious of Diane Fry’s presence on the other side of the room. Without looking, Cooper knew that she’d read the memo from Branagh now. The tension was obvious in the set of her shoulders, the jerkiness of her movements. He wondered what she would say, or whether she would say nothing at all. Perhaps she would store it up and hold it against him for ever more.

One thing Cooper knew. Despite his best efforts, he was no nearer to understanding Diane Fry than he’d ever been.

For some reason, Fry had found herself thinking about rats. In particular, the black, flea-ridden rodents that had brought the Black Death to Eyam. The image of those rats seemed to sum up the past week for her. They were a symbol of disease and death, and the dark, rustling memories that lurked in the disused corners of people’s heads. That lurked inside her own, for certain.

Now, a dirty sediment was being stirred up in her life, a spreading black contagion that all the rain of the last few days would never be able to wash away.

Not for the first time, Fry wondered what Ben Cooper knew that he wasn’t supposed to. There was no way he could be aware of the reason for DI Blake’s visit from the West Midlands yesterday. He couldn’t possibly understand what was going on in her mind, the continuous weighing up of pros and cons, the constant running through her head of possible scenarios. He had no idea about the struggle she would face, coping with the pressures she would come under, until she bit the bullet and made a decision.

And, above all, someone like Cooper could never comprehend the painful attempt to balance two powerful urges. The need to keep her most terrible memories safely buried now had to be set against this urge she’d suddenly discovered growing inside – the burning desire for vengeance and justice.

Without being aware of any conscious intention, Fry got to her feet and moved across to Cooper’s desk. What she wanted to ask him, she wasn’t at all sure. She was just aware of a need to speak to him, to make some form of contact. But the tense atmosphere in the room made her pause, and she forgot whatever it was that she might have intended to say.

On his desk, Cooper had spread some of the items found during the search of Adrian Tarrant’s house. She watched him pick up the hunting horn in its plastic evidence bag and turn it over to read the label, its brass and copper length glinting in the light. The sight of it made Fry blurt out the first thing that came into her head.

‘You know, Ben,’ she said, ‘I never did hear the kill call.’

Cooper looked up at her, his eyes intense, his face faintly flushed.

‘I was just thinking – we’re not even certain that the horn works,’ he said.

‘We could try it,’ suggested Fry, trying to sound more casual than she felt. ‘Do you know how to use one?’

Cooper raised an eyebrow. ‘Maybe. But trying the kill call? We might contaminate the evidence. It’s a big decision to make.’

‘I suppose you’ve given it some thought, though. You’re the sort of man who would.’

‘Yes, I have.’

‘And what’s your conclusion, Ben?’

‘Well…’

Fry waited anxiously on his words, conscious of an overwhelming need for someone to make a decision. One way or another, the decision that she had to take in the next few weeks would change her life, and she needed some guidance. Any kind of direction would be welcome right now. A sign, a portent, a few words of advice.

‘Actually, Peter Massey had a thought about decisions,’ said Cooper.

‘Oh?’

‘Do you want to hear it, Diane?’

‘Go ahead. Tell me.’

Cooper glanced at her curiously, before turning over a page of Massey’s statement and read from the last paragraph:

A finger on the button, or a bundle of cloth on the doorstep. An outbreak of the plague, or the radioactive cloud of a nuclear holocaust. It only needs a second. It only takes one person’s decision. And who knows what pestilence might be released into the world?