Kill Call (39 page)

Cooper dropped David Headon and Keith Falconer back at the pub and bought them a drink for their time. He knew they’d enjoyed themselves, because it had been impossible to stop them talking all the way back to Edendale.

When he left them, Cooper drove home in the dark, remembering that there would be no Randy to welcome him, and never would be again. Was that why he had subconsciously been seeking something to distract himself, an excuse to avoid going home? It was the sort of thing that he suspected of Diane Fry. But it was definitely disheartening to think that the flat would be so dark and silent, with Randy lying in his grave.

He’d heard nothing from Fry since he left West Street, but he hoped for her sake that her interviews had led to a successful conclusion. His own interest in the Rawson enquiry had waned, and he wasn’t sure why. It was something to do with the ROC badge he’d found at Eden View, and with Michael Clay’s local connection. If Clay hadn’t been a member of the Edendale ROC post’s crew, why did he have the badge?

As he crossed the lights and turned into Welbeck Street, Cooper thought about the stories Headon and Falconer had been telling him about the 1960s and the start of the Cold War. It was hard for him to imagine what people had gone through in those strange times. The 1960s weren’t so far in the past, yet they might as well be a chapter in a history book, for all he could understand of the world those young ROC observers had lived in.

Come to think of it, he didn’t think it had even been covered in his Modern History lessons at school. The Cold War did get a mention, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War. But the preparations in Britain for life after a nuclear apocalypse? That had gone unremarked.

Yet for many thousands of ordinary people it had been something right at the forefront of their lives. Any day, any night, they could have heard that rising and falling wail of the siren, following an Attack Warning Red, and know that they had only four minutes. Four minutes – to do what? To find some way to live, and to decide the way they wanted to die.

When he thought about the present enquiry, Cooper felt as though they’d all been drawn off on a false trail, misled by a powerfully laid artificial scent. It seemed as though he and Fry had almost physically been following a trail of meat across the country, their noses close to the ground, sniffing the scent like a pack of hounds. But, like all hounds, they were easily mis-directed by a clever and experienced saboteur.

For a moment, Cooper wondered what those big, purple steaks of horse meat that Fry had described actually smelled like.

But he knew, of course. Like all meat, they would smell of blood.

In their underground bunkers, the ROC observers would have been able to lock down the hatch and protect themselves against nuclear blasts and radioactive fallout. But there were some things you couldn’t close your door against. Time, death, the plague.

The people of Eyam had done much the same thing when the Black Death hit their village, hadn’t they? Battened down the hatches, stayed indoors waiting out the storm, until the fallout cleared, emerging only to bury their dead. He imagined Mompesson’s parishioners peering out of their cottage windows, praying that it was safe, that the holocaust was finally over. But wondering, all the same, whose turn it was to die today.

36

Journal of 1968

Well, then came the time for Les to die. He might have been number one, but he had to take his turn. Nature stepped in, struck him down with a heart attack. And I couldn’t say I was sorry.

Since then, there have been some days when I would just go down there and think. For a while, we still had the folding chairs, the wooden cupboard, a set of drawers that came out of Les’s kitchen. Now and then, I would light one of the tommy cookers at the bottom of the shaft, though it would take twenty minutes to boil a kettle, the way it always did.

For a few minutes, I’d sit and remember the foul air, the cold of the concrete that crept into flesh and bone. We wore two of everything back then, because once the cold got into your bones, you would never get warm again. There was always an icy draught across your feet as you sat there waiting for the messages, filling in the log, baling out the sump. The only thing you could do was go for a walk or run round upstairs. We were pretty numb by the end of the night.

Of course, the pit was long since derelict and overgrown. When we were active, we were given an allowance to keep it tidy. Twenty-five pounds a year, I think it was. The grass wasn’t allowed to grow then, not a single weed or thistle was allowed.

In the real old days, we spent our time watching the sky for rats. But it was all different when the 1960s came round. Instead of the sky, we had a concrete ceiling and a pair of metal-framed bunk beds. Some blokes sneaked in a comfy chair or two, curtains, or an office desk. Once we took down some carpet pieces. Years afterwards, they still lay there, half-rotted.

I don’t know what would have happened if it had really all kicked off one time. I reckon it would have been a bit like musical chairs, a matter of luck who found themselves down below. We talked a lot about what would happen to our families. You wanted to be sure they were looked after, if you were one of the crew underground.

But some of us never knew, were never entirely sure, whether we’d leave our wives and children when it came to it. Once you were down there, you might have to stay for a fortnight. Imagine waiting for the message to come – those three fatal words: Attack Warning Red. Then measuring the fireball over your own county, taking the elevation and bearing, waiting for the radioactive dust cloud to arrive. Attack Warning Black.

And that meant the maroons. Three of them, of course. According to regulations, we were supposed to fire them, one after the other, to warn against nuclear fallout. Two bangs meant nothing; it was the third one that counted.

So what about Jimmy and Les? Did they mean nothing? Was Shirley’s death the one that really mattered, the final thump and scream that changed the whole world? There are some situations where we have no regulations to follow, some questions that can only be answered from the heart.

And here we are, forty years later … Did there have to be so many deaths to restore the balance? I thought there was just one, but I was wrong. There had to be another, and another.

It’s funny, really funny, how everything happens in threes.

37

Sunday

It had rained heavily again during the night. Below ground, the limestone caves of the White Peak would be flooding dangerously, water roaring through fissures and cracks like thunder, scouring another half a centimetre from the rock.

Yet when the sun came out after heavy rain, the amount of colour in the landscape was stunning. On the main street of Eyam that Sunday morning, Cooper could detect a real feeling of spring in the air. He could smell it, and taste it, and even sense its warmth on his skin.

Each year, it was becoming more difficult to judge when to expect this feeling. It seemed to come anywhere between the middle of January and April. That was climate change, he supposed. Hawthorns were in blossom in February instead of May, blackthorns had been flowering since the end of January. Once again, there had been no real winter.

Cooper had passed an ancient lock-up garage with a collapsing roof. And here on the village green were the stocks, still intact – a reminder of the days when justice was not only harsh, but had to be publicly seen to be done.

In this part of Eyam, there were no pavements or footpaths, doors opened directly on to the road. He could never resist peeking into the front windows that were so temptingly available to the passers-by. Didn’t other people do that?

He looked up at the sound of a car, but it passed him by, and he walked back down the road. He found himself standing in front of Plague Cottage again, where the Black Death had first arrived in Eyam. A massive stone lintel sat over the door of the cottage, pressing down on the frame, as if representing the great weight of history.

‘So this is Eyam. Sorry – Eem.’

Fry was standing on the pavement a few feet away, not looking at him but at the houses. She was regarding them as if they were exhibits in a museum – which, in a way, they were.

‘I didn’t think you would come,’ he said.

‘It was touch and go. The washing and ironing nearly won.’

Cooper smiled. He had been amazed when Fry agreed to come. He’d been expecting the usual rejection, the sharp response of someone who had far better things to do with her time than socialize with her colleagues, thank you very much. He didn’t know what had changed in her, to make her accept. But now she was here, he realized he had no proper plan. He’d only suggested Eyam because it seemed to have some relevance, a link to the one aspect of life they had in common.

‘And this is the Plague Cottage.’

Fry looked at the green plaque with its gold lettering.

Edward Cooper, aged four, died on the 22nd September 1665 Jonathan Cooper, aged twelve, died on the 2nd October 1665 Mary alone survived, but lost thirteen relatives.

‘Two brothers, who died within days of each other,’ said Fry.

‘They told us in school that the arrival of the Black Death was blamed on a miasma,’ said Cooper. ‘“Evil humours” drifting in the air. Women carried scented posies around to ward off the poisonous fumes, and men smoked pipes, hoping to protect themselves with tobacco smoke.’

He felt no need of maps or tourist guides to find his way around Eyam now. It had a familiar feel to it already. As they walked, they passed interesting little alleyways, passages into back yards and stone-flagged ginnels. At one point an enormous stone water trough stood by the side of the lane, a trickle of water still issuing from a pipe in the wall, as it must have done for centuries.

For a few minutes, they ploughed through the usual small talk. Cooper had wanted to prise Fry away from the office, disentangle her from any of her crime scenes, and get her on neutral ground where they could talk about something other than work. Eyam had been the best place he could think of, without sounding too unlikely.

But he was finding it hard going. Fry constantly steered the conversation back to a safe topic. Of course, the murder of Patrick Rawson had absorbed her attention for the past week. It had opened her eyes to subjects she hadn’t been aware of before, too. It was bound to be in her mind.

‘So what about the wife?’ said Cooper, finally giving in to the inevitable. ‘Deborah Rawson?’

‘She’ll be charged with conspiracy to murder. She didn’t kill her husband herself, but she arranged it, at least.’

‘And it was well planned, too.’

‘She’s a woman,’ said Fry. ‘She would have worked it all out in her mind, run through the scenario over and over, imagined what it would be like, and how she would feel afterwards. It wouldn’t have been some spontaneous impulse to violence, with no thought or emotion behind it. That’s a man’s type of crime.’

‘You think anyone is capable of murder, don’t you?’ said Cooper.

‘Yes.’

Cooper had parked the Toyota near St Lawrence’s Church, and they strolled through the churchyard as Fry told him the story. St Lawrence’s boasted a large sundial over the chancel door, and a small group of visitors stood in front of it, checking the time and trying to figure out the Roman numerals. At some time, a motto had been inscribed in Latin on the supporting stones. It was almost worn away, but Cooper could just make out in the right light: Ut umbra sic vita – ‘As the shadow passes, so does life’.

‘So Deborah Rawson contacted Naomi Widdowson and told her when her husband would be visiting Derbyshire?’ he said.

Fry nodded. ‘Yes. Naomi had been phoning Sutton Coldfield, trying to get hold of Patrick Rawson to give him a piece of her mind. Deborah got talking to her, and decided to use her. It’s all backed up by the phone records. She gave Miss Widdowson her husband’s mobile phone number, so she could arrange to meet him. It seems Naomi told him she had some horses for sale.’

‘Thoroughbreds, ideal for their meat?’

‘Exactly.’

Cooper looked at Fry’s face to read her expression. She sounded almost approving of the attention to detail that had gone into Deborah Rawson’s planning. But the satisfaction in her eyes might just have been her contentment at being able to discuss work, when she’d feared some kind of social occasion.

‘It all hangs together,’ said Fry. ‘Rawson had told Melvyn Senior that he’d have some horses that would need transporting later in the week, and he’d also phoned Hawley’s abattoir to book them in for slaughter. As far as Rawson was concerned, the deal was all set up.’

When the tourists had moved on, the only sound in the churchyard was the wind stirring the branches of the trees. Cooper still thought it was strange that the only plague victim buried here was the rector’s wife. The dead bodies were hardly likely to be infectious – they would already have been abandoned by plague-carrying fleas in favour of living hosts. The same sort of thing had gone on everywhere in the Middle Ages, though no amount of corpse-dumping would have saved a doomed town when the plague swept through Europe.

He realized that Fry was looking at him oddly, a faintly derisive smile suggesting that he was behaving in exactly the way she expected. Cooper wondered if this idea was going to work, or whether she would lose patience with him and walk away. The situation seemed so fragile.

‘I don’t understand why Rawson went back to horse dealing when he had his other enterprises,’ he said, desperate to regain her attention.

‘Well, he was getting himself into financial difficulties with the new ventures,’ said Fry. ‘He’d stretched himself too far, that was his problem. The house in Sutton Coldfield was fully mortgaged to raise capital for the meat-distribution business. But with the way the housing market has been, the property was worth less and less, and interest rates were going up. That outbreak of trichinosis would have ruined R & G Enterprises. Their hopes of public acceptance of horse meat would have been wiped out in a stroke.’

‘I can just imagine the headlines,’ said Cooper. ‘So Rawson was going back to his old living?’