The Kill Call Read online

  Cooper commented on the quality of the land, usually a good ice breaker with a farmer who looked as though he’d been around for a while and could take the credit for it. Across the yard, he could see an empty cow shed, and the padlocked door to what must have been the milking parlour.

  ‘Yes, it used to be all fields and cows round here,’ said Massey, then paused for a moment. ‘Now it’s just fields.’

  When Cooper explained that he wanted to see the route up to Birchlow that the old man had described, Massey wiped his hands on a rag and led him out of the yard. The farmhouse itself was a typical jumble of extensions and additions cluttering the outline of the original eighteenth-century building. A low profile against the Pennine winds, solid stone walls thick enough to keep out the cold.

  ‘My father would have been upset that I gave up the dairy herd,’ said the farmer as they passed through a gate and into the first field. ‘He bred some nice Friesian crosses. Wonderful milkers, they were. But not good enough. No cows would have been good enough.’

  ‘You inherited this farm from your father?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘Aye. And he took it over from his father. Lord, I was out in this yard helping with the morning milking by the time I was ten years old.’

  ‘You must have a lot of memories, then.’

  Massey’s eyes clouded for a moment. He was gazing at the hillside, rather than at the house and buildings. Perhaps he felt he’d grown up out there in the fields, rather than indoors.

  ‘You might say that. Yes, I’ve got a lot of my memories bound up in this land. Buried now, some of them.’

  They followed the line of the dry-stone wall as it snaked across the contours of the hillside, following the dips and hollows. At a couple of points it was intersected by similar walls running at right angles to it, dividing the fields into long, sloping strips of land. Ahead of him, Cooper could see miles and miles of wall, an endless limestone tracery overlaying the landscape.

  Massey stopped, removed his cap and scratched his head. His hair was wispy, and that distinctive sandy colour common among people whose distant ancestors had been Scandinavian settlers. Remarkable how that Viking blood had persisted through the generations.

  ‘I reckon you must be talking about the bridlepath over there,’ he said. ‘We call it Badger’s Way in these parts. It connects up with Black Harry Lane. You can get up to Black Harry Gate and way over to Longstone without going anywhere near a road, if you have a mind to.’

  ‘A bridlepath. So it can be used by horse riders, not just walkers?’

  ‘Aye. It would have been a packhorse road, I suppose, in the old days. It was made for horses. Trouble is, we tend to get motorbikes up here of a weekend. Those things muddy it up for everybody.’

  Cooper looked down into the bridlepath, which was sunk a few feet between two grass embankments topped by stone walls. In many places, you could pass unnoticed by anyone in the adjoining fields, even if you were on horseback.

  Up the hill, he could see the square Norman tower of the church at Birchlow. Along the edge of the moor, the land in front of him became even bumpier. One area seemed to be raised in a more regular shape, perhaps the site of an Iron Age hill fort or the capped shaft of an ancient lead mine. There were lots of those in the Peak District, archaeological sites that were the bane of farmers keen to plough up or improve their land, or to put up new buildings. This one seemed to share its location with a line of telephone poles, long since disused.

  ‘Do you allow the Eden Valley Hunt to use your land, Mr Massey?’ asked Cooper.

  Massey hesitated, a habit he’d probably developed in the face of repeated questions about fox hunting during the campaign for a ban. He would be weighing up the answer, deciding whether it was wise to come down on one side or the other, or stay on the fence.

  ‘They’ve got my permission,’ he said finally. ‘But they don’t hunt this way often. We don’t have the copses up here, see.’

  ‘And perhaps no problem with foxes?’

  The farmer straightened his cap. ‘Funny, but the one place I’ve seen foxes regularly is here, in Badger’s Way. They run up the lane at dusk sometimes. They’ve got it figured out, those buggers. They know they won’t be spotted.’

  ‘Yes, they’re clever enough.’

  Massey looked slyly at Cooper, perhaps remembering that he was a police officer.

  ‘Besides, the Eden Valley don’t hunt foxes any more, they just follow an artificial scent.’

  ‘Yes, I know that.’

  ‘So if I let the hunt come on to my land on that understanding, it’s not my responsibility if they decide to go off and chase foxes. The landowner can’t be prosecuted for it. That’s the law.’

  Cooper nodded. The hunt had made sure that farmers and landowners were reassured about their legal position after the hunting ban came in. Lots of them had been nervous that they would be targeted for prosecution if the hunt broke the law on their land by letting the pack kill a fox. It might be easier to prove whose land it had happened on, than who had been in charge of the hounds at the time.

  But Peter Massey was right. The Hunting Act said that he was safe from prosecution if he had only agreed to allow legal activities on his land by the hunt.

  As they walked back, Cooper asked Massey if he’d heard about the body found not a mile away from his farmhouse.

  ‘Aye, I heard. That’s not my land, though. It’s farmed by someone over Housley way. He gets some crops out of the lower acreage, I believe. That’s the only way to make money in farming these days.’

  ‘He has some sheep, too.’

  Massey sniffed. ‘Ah, well. They keep the grass down, I suppose.’

  ‘The dead man’s name was Patrick Rawson. Does it mean anything to you?’

  ‘Not a thing. He wasn’t from around here, though, was he?’

  ‘No.’

  Before he left, Cooper gazed around the yard of Rough Side Farm. Not much money had been spent on maintaining the buildings in recent years. That was a common enough story. Matt was the same at Bridge End – he’d rather spend money on a new tractor than replace a shed roof. He said that if farm buildings were built properly in the first place, they ought to last for ever. In practice, the problem was just passed on to the next generation as part of their inheritance.

  Cooper noticed a horseshoe nailed to the door of an old byre. But it was turned with the points up, to catch the luck, the way the old superstition said.

  ‘Do you ride yourself, Mr Massey?’ he asked.

  ‘Ride what? A horse, do you mean?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Massey shook his head. ‘Never. That’s for girls, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  The farmer politely walked Cooper to his car, as if escorting an important visitor. He even removed his cap and held it in both hands as he watched Cooper negotiate the large, muddy puddles in the farm entrance.

  ‘What about your family?’ asked Cooper. ‘Any sons ready to take over Rough Side Farm? Or daughters, perhaps?’

  Massey shook his head. ‘I’ve got two sons and a daughter, but they’re not interested in farming. They work in computers, and logistics, and human resources. I don’t think any of those things existed when I was at school. I have no idea what my children actually do all day. But I’m happy to live in ignorance.’

  Cooper took one last look at the old farmhouse, and the acres of windswept White Peak landscape that Massey had to himself.

  ‘What does ignorance of those things matter, when you’ve got the freedom of living out here?’

  13

  Back at the scene on Longstone Moor, Fry had found officers from the task force plodding wearily back to the rendezvous point in their boiler suits at the conclusion of their fingertip search. She gathered from their complaints about sore backs and wet knees that the search had produced precious little else.

  SOCOs were still working at the old huts and on Patrick Rawson’s Mitsubishi – she could see their va
n parked alongside the field barn, though the Mitsubishi itself was invisible from here. She ought to find a way over there to have a look at the car.

  Now that the weather had cleared and the sun was out, there were flies everywhere, hovering over the sheep droppings, gathering in small clouds over the puddles of water under the hawthorn trees. Fry heard a whine near her ear, and swatted at it with a hand. Earlier, she’d opened her mouth and felt something tickle the back of her throat. She was pretty sure she’d swallowed a mosquito. They’d been everywhere during the previous summer and autumn, and some had even survived the winter.

  Wayne Abbott was standing in front of her, a quizzical expression on his face.

  ‘Yes, Wayne?’

  ‘I wanted to update you.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry. What have you got?’

  ‘Well, first of all, there’s no sign of anything that could have been used as a murder weapon – no bloodstained stones, or anything of that kind. But we’ve been working on the blood splatter, specifically traces of blood in the soil where the hoof marks are. The indications are that some of the impressions were made before the blood traces. You can see that the pattern of spatter is intact in those areas.’

  As close as Fry peered at the ground beneath the evidence markers, she couldn’t make out the tiny flecks of blood against the soil.

  ‘I’ll take your word for it.’

  ‘Over here, however,’ said Abbott, ‘we can see that the hoof marks came after the injury. The pattern of spatter is completely broken up, some traces of blood have been pushed deep into the ground by the weight of the impressions.’

  Fry straightened. ‘So the horses were definitely here before and after the victim’s injury. That would suggest they were present during the fatal attack.’

  ‘It might be a reasonable conclusion,’ said Abbott. ‘Also …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Assuming for a moment that your killer or killers did arrive on horseback, we think we’ve managed to identify their approach route. They came across the neighbouring field over there, lower down the hill. The hoof marks are still distinct. There’s a crop of some kind planted in that field, so there’s bare soil, rather than this coarse grass.’

  ‘And what about the victim?’ asked Fry.

  ‘A little more difficult. But our best assessment is that he came direct from the location of his vehicle, which, as you know, was parked over by the old barn there. There’s a stile he could have come over. We’re examining that now, but it’s about fifty yards from the car. He might actually have come over the wall. In any case, he then went into the derelict hut.’

  ‘To try to get away from his assailants?’

  ‘I couldn’t say.’

  ‘And from there …?’

  ‘He came straight across this field. And he was running, which makes the shoe impressions smaller, but deeper. Because of the rain, not all the impressions are intact, but we’ve pieced together enough to be fairly confident.’

  Fry was starting to form a picture in her mind now. The scenario was coming to life, the details filling themselves in. She could imagine Patrick Rawson easing the Mitsubishi slowly up the track to the field barn that morning and parking his car out of sight. Why had he done that? Because he was involved in a secret assignation? Or to surprise someone who didn’t expect him to be there?

  Whatever the reason, something had gone wrong for Mr Rawson. She didn’t know yet how much time had passed between him arriving at the barn and the arrival of his killer or killers. Had there been an argument? Or had he been expecting someone quite different, and Rawson was the one who got a surprise? He must have been out of his car by that stage, or he would surely have got back in and driven away, if he felt under threat. She pictured him cut off from his vehicle, looking around for a means of escape.

  And at some point, Mr Rawson had started to run. A businessman in early middle age, wearing a waxed coat and brown brogues, he’d scrambled over a stile and begun to run across an empty field in North Derbyshire. He would have been dashing through driving rain, slipping in the wet grass, covering his shoes in mud. Where had he been running to?

  Fry turned and looked in the opposite direction, trying to imagine what Patrick Rawson would have been seeing as he ran. He had looked a reasonably fit man for his age, but he hadn’t been dressed for sprinting. Could he have been hoping to make it to the stone mill, which was visible in the distance to the east?

  ‘Anything else, Wayne?’

  ‘Yes, there is. The office sent through a bit of digital video footage for you. Thought you might want to watch it in the van, rather than wait until you get back to West Street.’

  Fry almost liked Abbott in that moment.

  ‘Brilliant.’

  ‘Apparently, this is from one of the protestors who were here yesterday,’ said Abbott as he set up the screen.

  ‘The hunt saboteurs.’

  ‘Right. The quality is crap, of course. The Photographic Unit might be able to enhance it a bit, but the camera work is decidedly shaky, I’m afraid.’

  An image came on the screen of a blurred road, then a section of dry-stone wall going past as the camera swung round rapidly. Splashes of rain hit the lens and ran sideways. Fry had almost forgotten about the rain. But anything filmed at the time Patrick Rawson met his death would have been shot pretty much underwater.

  ‘This kid obviously spotted something, or one of his mates did,’ said Abbott. ‘It steadies down in a minute.’

  The cameraman seemed to be running now, and the picture bounced up and down. Heavy breathing could be heard via the onboard microphone of his video camera, and somebody calling ‘Over there!’

  Then, for a few seconds, there was absolute gold. Over the top of the wall, two horses could be seen being ridden across a field, kicking up a spray of water and dirt. There was almost no detail to the image, and before Fry could blink the horses had gone again, hidden by the slope of the land and an intrusive tree. Distant shouts could be made out, much too far away to be deciphered. But, listening as hard as she could, Fry thought she made out a name, shouted twice. Rosie?

  The camera swung back again, wobbled, and focused on a group of young people standing in the road, their faces bright with excitement. Fry thought one of them could have been the girl she’d seen later with blood running down her face.

  ‘Run it back to the horses,’ she said.

  Abbott replayed it and froze the image at the point where the two riders could be seen most clearly. Fry gazed at the picture for a long time. In truth, it told her very little. She could see the general colour of the horses. She could tell that the riders weren’t wearing red coats, but tweed jackets and black helmets. But at least that was something.

  At the bottom of the screen, the date stamp said it was zero-eight thirty-six, an hour before the first of the mounted hunt were supposed to have arrived for the meet. If she could discover where the cameraman was standing, she could work out whether the riders were going towards the location where Patrick Rawson had died, or coming away from it.

  ‘So much for our Mrs Forbes and Mr Widdowson,’ she said.

  Cooper got a call from Fry as he left Birchlow, and decided to take the route across Longstone Edge itself. All along the edge were lay-bys, retired couples sitting in their little Smart cars to eat sandwiches and drink tea, enjoying the tranquillity of the Peak District before the Easter rush of tourists.

  Driving along the edge was the closest thing to flying Cooper could think of, without having to queue at security and cram yourself into an economy-class cabin. Looking out of the passenger window of the car, he couldn’t see any sign of the ground, just an open expanse way out into space, and a glimpse of the valley down below. Coasting down the Longstone Edge road was just like being in an aircraft coming in to land, watching the earth growing gradually closer.

  It wasn’t a good idea to take your eyes off the road and admire the scenery for too long, though. A while ago, a woman had driven her car
off the edge somewhere about here, ending up lodged in the trees below the road. She’d stayed there for twenty-four hours, too, trapped in her car as motorists passed on the road without seeing her.

  At the top, he heard the rumble of an engine, the whine of gears, the rattle of falling rock. Another quarry truck was labouring up the long track to the opencast workings. A scattering of sheep ambled along the roadside, where the dry-stone walls had fallen or vanished altogether. Their fleeces were thick and heavy after the winter, making their movements ungainly, like a bunch of walking armchairs. They didn’t seem a bit concerned to be sharing their stretch of road with those massive haulage lorries.

  When Cooper appeared at the scene to get the latest update, Fry described the video footage received from the hunt saboteur.

  ‘A shout?’ he said.

  ‘Probably someone calling the dogs back. The hounds, I mean.’

  He noted that she’d corrected herself on the use of ‘hound’. Could it be that Fry was finally learning to fit in? She’d been in Derbyshire for a few years now, the big-city girl out of her depth in the country. For the whole of that time, she’d made it plain that she resented officers like Cooper for knowing better than she did. And Cooper felt that he’d made himself the prime target of her resentment, somehow. It was almost as if he’d done something much more personal that had caused permanent, unforgivable offence. It was a pity – he felt sure they would work better together if he could only get over this barrier.

  ‘What did they shout?’ he asked her. ‘Could you tell?’

  ‘The quality of the sound is terrible,’ said Fry. ‘But the name sounds like Rosie.’

  ‘Rosie?’

  That didn’t sound right to Cooper. In his experience, hounds tended to be given names like Soldier, or Statesman, or Pirate. Rosie was far too twee for a foxhound. Fry wouldn’t realize that, of course.

  ‘It might tie in with what some of the hunt saboteurs told Inspector Redfearn about hearing the kill call,’ said Fry. ‘You know what that means?’