Dying to Sin bcadf-8 Page 15

  Friday was market day in Edendale. There were crowds doing their pre-Christmas shopping among the market stalls. Stout men with ruddy faces and waistcoats, tall men with long white sideburns, women in tweed skirts and headscarves — the sort of people you never saw at any other time, even in Edendale. It was almost as if they were employed by the council to give an authentic Dickensian flavour to the town for the festive season. Or perhaps they were members of some esoteric club, the Pickwick Papers Re-enactment Society.

  But Cooper knew that was his new, town-dwelling self speaking. He knew who they were — these were the small hill farmers, the inhabitants of the more isolated homesteads, who travelled into town for market day.

  By the time he reached the market square, it was already nearly four o’clock, and the market was being packed up for the end of the day. A procession of Ford Transits and Renault Trafics squeezed through the side streets, blocking every access while they loaded. Some of the stalls were clearing rapidly, their owners anxious to get home to their fires. Others took longer, stallholders staggering backwards and forwards in green and red Santa hats, shouting banter to each other. ‘I can manage on my own, don’t worry about me, I’ll be all right. You’re too old to be carrying these heavy boxes.’

  Cooper found an empty slot to park the Toyota, thinking smugly that it wouldn’t have been quite so easy if he’d arrived in town an hour earlier. From here, he could easily walk the half mile to The Oaks.

  He passed the town hall, its facade boasting four decorative pillars. The building had been edged with stones carved in a wavy pattern, and there were so many of them that local people had nicknamed their town hall ‘The Wavy House’.

  His feet tangled for a second in the tattered remains of some party poppers discarded on the pavement. Office parties would be going everywhere tonight, as they had been last night — and would be tomorrow night too, of course. By the morning, council workers could expect to have far more than a few party poppers to clear up.

  Within minutes of him arriving, the streetlights were coming on, and it was dark in the corners of the market square. Workers were stripping the awnings and dismantling the tubular steel stalls, clanging and chattering, wheeling racks of clothes over the cobbles. The dipped headlights of cars swept by from the roundabout. A tractor came towards him with a yellow warning light flashing, towing a trailer to collect the dismantled stalls.

  When he entered the lounge at The Oaks to see Raymond Sutton, the other residents fell silent, watching him. He supposed they thought he was just a visitor. Perhaps they took him for Raymond’s grandson or something. They’d be asking Raymond questions about him as soon as he left. With a sinking certainty, Cooper thought it was probable that some of these old dears never got a visitor of their own from one year to the next.

  The Oaks reminded him of the Old Vicarage, the nursing home his own mother had been in towards the end. On the surface, there weren’t all that many similarities. Residents of The Oaks were just old and needed some help with their day-today living. They were the frail and forgetful, the tired and confused, the ones who just couldn’t cope and had no one to look after them. They probably went on outings and had bingo evenings and sing-songs. Isabel Cooper had never had any need for those things.

  ‘We’ve had a bit of an issue with Raymond this afternoon,’ said the care assistant, Elaine, when she let him in. ‘He got a bit upset.’

  ‘What was wrong?’

  ‘It’s difficult to say. We have a couple of care workers here who are from Lithuania. They’re nice girls, but Raymond doesn’t like it when they speak to him. I think it’s because he doesn’t understand them properly. It must be awful not to understand what’s going on.’

  ‘I feel like that myself sometimes.’

  ‘He’s all right now, anyway. He soon calms down.’

  ‘Does Mr Sutton have any old photo albums, do you know?’ asked Cooper. ‘Photos from his time at the farm?’

  ‘Not that I know of. Only women keep photo albums, don’t they? I can’t see Raymond sitting around in the evening sticking pictures of family weddings and christenings into an album.’

  Now that he looked at Raymond Sutton more closely in the light, Cooper could see that the old man’s skin was dry, and faintly yellow. He was reminded of the kitchen at Pity Wood Farm, the tint of the walls and the smoky stains on the ceiling. Mr Sutton would have fitted into the Yellow Room naturally, almost as if he’d decorated it in his own image.

  Perhaps some kind of liver problem had caused this unhealthy colour. He made a note to ask one of the staff about Mr Sutton’s physical health. Heartless as it might seem, no investigation team wanted their chief witness dying before he could provide a full statement.

  Chief witness? Raymond Sutton might yet turn out to be the principal suspect. All the more reason to be concerned about his health.

  ‘Do you remember me, sir? I’m Detective Constable Cooper, from Edendale Police. I came to see you the other day, with my inspector.’

  ‘I don’t get many visitors, lad,’ said Sutton. ‘How would I forget?’

  Cooper mentally crossed his fingers that Mr Sutton was having a good spell. If he believed he couldn’t forget, that was a positive sign, wasn’t it?

  ‘Don’t you have any family left, Mr Sutton?’

  ‘Some cousins in Stoke. They might get my money when I go, but they won’t get the farm, will they?’

  ‘No, you’ve already sold the farm.’

  Cooper sat alongside him.

  ‘Your brother died, didn’t he? Derek?’

  ‘Aye. He’s gone over, has Derek.’

  ‘That was before you sold the farm, Mr Sutton.’

  The old man nodded slowly. ‘We could see he was tappy already by then.’

  ‘Tappy?’ repeated Cooper.

  ‘Approaching his end.’

  Cooper searched his memory for the word, and came up with an image of a wounded animal going to ground in the woods to die.

  ‘Sir, did anyone else die at the farm? Women?’

  ‘Women?’

  ‘Did some women die?’

  Sutton looked at him closely. ‘Are you a Christian?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘A proper Christian?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He genuinely felt it was true. But Cooper hoped he wouldn’t be asked when he last went to church on a Sunday. Like many people he knew, he’d got out of the habit. Weddings, funerals and christenings — that was about it these days. His mother had been the one keen on church attendance, so he and Matt and Claire had always gone to St Aidan’s regularly as children. Sunday school, too. Bible stories and choir practice, Whit walks and visits by the Church Army with their free badges. But he suspected that had been as much because it was the respectable thing to do, rather than on account of any particular devoutness on his mother’s part.

  It was probably that factor that led him to be a bit facetious sometimes when other people’s beliefs seemed to be just too extreme.

  ‘So you know that Hell burns,’ said Sutton. ‘Hell burns with an agony like no other.’

  ‘Yes, sir. And there’s no butter in Hell.’

  Sutton stared at him, failing to smile at the joke, failing even to get the allusion. Cooper immediately wished he could take the words back. He felt embarrassed, realizing that Raymond Sutton might never have been the type for reading books, except one. Certainly not shamefully disrespectful parodies like Cold Comfort Farm.

  Still, his brain kept throwing up images from the Gibbons book. The preacher, Amos Starkadder, hectoring the Church of the Quivering Brethren — ‘Ye’re all damned!’ And Brother Ambleforth, whose job was to lead the quivering, conducting the congregation with a poker to put them all in mind of hellfire.

  Cooper wondered irreverently whether Raymond Sutton might get into the role on Christmas Day, if asked to pull a cracker by one of the female residents. ‘Hush, woman … Tempt me not wi’ motters and paper caps. Hell is paved w
i’ such.’

  ‘So you’re like me, and you don’t believe in evil spirits?’ asked Sutton suddenly.

  ‘What? Ghosts, you mean?’

  ‘Not ghosts so much. More of … well, perhaps a presence in the atmosphere of the house.’

  ‘I’m not sure. Perhaps, in certain circumstances.’

  ‘When something dreadful has happened.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you been to the old house?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Sutton.’

  ‘I always swore I wouldn’t take anything away from the place. I wanted it all burned, destroyed. I wanted someone to come in with a bulldozer and a big bloody skip, and cart it all off. It was cursed.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Sutton looked at him, working his mouth nervously. ‘There was one thing, though. There was the good book. Our family Bible.’

  ‘I saw it,’ said Cooper.

  The old man gripped his arm. ‘Is it still there?’

  ‘Do you want me to see if I can get it for you?’

  ‘Yes.’ His grip relaxed, to Cooper’s relief. ‘Can you do that?’

  ‘I’ll have to ask my supervisor. But I’m sure it’s still safe.’

  ‘Thank you. You’re a good lad, coming to see me.’

  ‘Mr Sutton, I need to ask you about any employees you had on the farm in the last four years.’

  ‘Employees?’

  ‘You had a poultry production business. Do you remember the birds?’

  Cooper noticed his voice rising, the way people’s voices did when they were talking to someone who was deaf or stupid, or foreign. Was Raymond Sutton deaf? There was no sign of a hearing aid, but that proved nothing. Small items like hearing aids and spectacles went missing very easily in residential care homes. False teeth too, sometimes.

  ‘We raised poultry, yes. We had thousands in the big sheds,’ said Sutton. ‘Did you want to buy some birds? You’re too late. We got rid of them. All the lot.’

  ‘No, I want to ask you about your employees. Can you remember the names of anyone who worked for you at the farm during that time? During the last four years?’

  Sutton hummed quietly. It occurred to Cooper that he might not actually know what year it was now, so the question might be meaningless.

  ‘I brought the farm records book,’ he said. ‘It might bring back memories. See if you can think of a few names to go with these initials, look.’

  Sutton glanced at the book for a moment, and sighed. ‘The service round here is terrible. I’d kill for a cup of tea.’

  As he signed himself out at the door a few minutes later, Elaine smiled at him.

  ‘Was Raymond a bit better?’

  ‘Yes, a bit. I was trying to jog his memory.’

  ‘It works sometimes. He’s a bit unpredictable. It depends how tired he is.’

  Cooper looked at the collection of old ladies on their chairs in front of the TV set.

  ‘Some of the residents will be going home to their families for Christmas, I suppose?’ he asked her.

  ‘Yes, some. But not all.’

  ‘Are a few of them too ill to leave?’

  ‘Yes, and then there are those who don’t have families. Well, not families who want to see them at Christmas, anyway.’

  ‘I see.’

  Cooper stood outside for a few minutes, looking at the windows of The Oaks. He had no idea when family and community had started to fall apart, but he had a feeling his grandparents wouldn’t have recognized society the way it was now. In their time, old folk had been looked after, instead of being allowed to spend their final years abandoned and alone. He had known, deep down, that the disintegration of family life was happening everywhere — not just in the big cities, but right here in the villages that had always relied so much on a sense of community.

  Of course, he saw the results every day among the people he had to deal with in his job. Children running out of control on the streets, young people walking away from home to lives full of drugs and destitution. Single mothers everywhere, trying to raise families on their own. Mentally disturbed individuals who either lived outside society, or ended up in prison. Old people dying, neglected, their deaths unnoticed for months by their family or neighbours, or even by the postman. It would never have happened at one time, he was sure.

  Of course, people had died for quite different reasons back then.

  Back in the town centre, the streets were full of light — the white bulbs of the Christmas trees attached to the buildings, the occasional orange streetlamp, the light from shop windows falling on the pavements. Beneath the lights, the last stragglers were on their way to the car parks, some of them setting off across the county after a day at the cattle market. School children were hanging around outside the chip shops with their friends, celebrating the last day of term.

  The hotel on the square had a stream of smoke drifting from one of its chimneys, and a flashing tree in an upper window. It was a better display than the official tree in the park across the way. A yellow Sixes bus went by, the slogan ‘Be a dirty stop-out’ on the back.

  It was really going cold now, and Cooper thought he felt the first touch of rain.

  That night, Matt took his brother to their local pub, the Queen Anne. It was one of the oldest pubs in the Peak District, dating back to the early seventeenth century, it was said, and reputedly haunted by the friendly ghost of a landlord who died in the cellar tending his ales. But all the best pubs had at least one ghost, didn’t they?

  The wooden bar was stained black, and a line of stools stood in front of it. The food at the Queen Anne was traditional enough to satisfy even Matt — home-made steak-and-ale pie, haddock and chips, chicken and chips, T-bone steak. There was practically dancing in the streets when T-bone steak came back on the menu after the BSE scare. The doom mongers had predicted it was gone for ever — eating meat off the bone being considered far too risky for men who spent their days operating high-powered machinery with sharp blades and handling bad-tempered animals that could kill with a single kick.

  Ales were served on a rotation basis, and tonight the bar boasted Barnsley Bitter, Ale Force from the Storm Brewery at Macclesfield, and Towns of Chesterfield. Even a cask-strength whisky. Enough to drown your sorrows, whatever they might be. But a pint of Towns would suit, for now. It was good to get out of the rain.

  ‘I’ll get the first round in,’ Matt said.

  ‘I won’t argue.’

  Cooper noticed they’d introduced lamb madras to the menu at the Queen Anne. There were two bars, one that had been a smoking area until the ban came in. Like himself, Matt had never smoked, but would probably have liked to see the smoking bar retained. Tradition again? Or a stubborn fondness for dangerous activities?

  Ben remembered their great-uncle, who had farmed all his life, explaining that a farmer’s life and the lives of his animals followed an annual cycle that moved with the seasons and was influenced by natural elements, such as the weather.

  ‘Not these days,’ said Matt sourly, when he was reminded of it. ‘More like influenced by the price of milk and the latest EU regulations.’

  An old milk churn stood near the doorway under an ancient stone lintel, and log fires burned in both bars. In the summer they often preferred to sit outside at one of the picnic tables in the garden, admiring the hills or watching the gliders pass overhead. But Matt wasn’t in a mood to notice the scenery, even if it had been daylight.

  ‘Some of the people who live in these villages now are on a different planet from what we are. If you meet people down at the postbox or in the pub, they don’t relate to what you’re doing at all. Their work and life experiences are so different from ours. They think we’re either mad or quaint.’

  That night, the pub was filled with people in various stages of saturation and evaporation. It was like a Turkish bath where everyone had forgotten to take their clothes off. You couldn’t get near the fire for piles of drenched cagoules and plastic over-trousers.

&nbs
p; ‘It’s sheer ignorance. They think we’re all either grain barons or peasants.’

  The smell of cooked food mingled with the steam from drying clothes, like the aroma from the kitchens of some exotic restaurant. If he closed his eyes, Cooper could imagine a genuine curry being prepared in the background, hot with cayenne and spiced with interesting herbs.

  ‘You know Geoff Weeks at One Ash? He has Right to Roam over part of his farm. Some ramblers complained about finding a dead sheep on his land the other day. They rang the police, even — can you believe it?’

  Ben wanted to say that, yes, he could believe it. You only had to spend half an hour in the Call Reception Centre to get an idea of the complaints from the public that call handlers had to deal with. Three thousand of them a day. Litter on the pavement, birds stuck up trees. A dead sheep was nothing. Sometimes the actual nature of the incident wasn’t clear until response officers arrived at the scene.

  But he said nothing, preferring not to interrupt Matt when he was getting things off his chest.

  ‘If you’ve got five hundred ewes,’ said Matt, ‘and you run them until they’re seven or eight crop, the way Geoff does, then a certain percentage of them are going to die. It’s a fact of life, isn’t it?’

  Ben nodded. Yes, death was certainly a fact of life in the countryside. It was one of the things that urban dwellers didn’t appreciate. These days, they ran special coach trips from the cities to give townies a chance to smell the difference between a cow and sheep. But you didn’t know about the omnipresence of death until you lived here.

  Usually, a mention of the word ‘diversification’ was enough to spark a rant on its own. Tonight, Matt was abnormally subdued.

  ‘I don’t know if you remember Jack Firth, over near Chapel. It turns out he’d been running a nice little sideline, killing and burying unwanted greyhounds on his land. The rules say unwanted dogs should be euthanized by a vet, but breeders and trainers find that too expensive. It was much cheaper to use Jack’s services.’