Kill Call (4 page)

There was a moment when he had been sitting in his brother Matt’s new Nissan 4x4 on the way back from Staffordshire. He recalled the sound of Phil Collins suddenly filling the car. ‘Another Day in Paradise’. The music had broken a painful silence that had lasted since he and Matt, and their sister Claire, had left the National Memorial Arboretum, near Lichfield.

As always, Matt had been gripping the steering wheel as if he was at the controls of a tractor, pushing the John Deere 6030 across a ploughed slope on a Derbyshire hillside, muscles tensed in his forearms as though power-assisted steering had never been invented. He was getting so big now that he could probably pull the plough himself, like a shire horse.

‘We’re not late,’ said Ben. ‘We don’t have an appointment to meet. Personally, I’d rather get home alive.’

‘Oh, am I driving too fast?’

‘Just a bit.’

‘Sorry. I forgot the KGB were in the car.’

Matt had insisted on driving them down from Edendale that morning, because he desperately wanted to show off the new 4x4. In the visitor centre at the arboretum, the first thing Ben had noticed was a huge, carved police officer standing just inside the entrance. It must have been about twelve feet high, like a giant totem pole. A bobby complete with tunic and helmet, but made out of some sort of copper-coloured wood.

After picking up a guide book, they had taken advantage of a break in the rain to cross Millennium Avenue to the plinth marking the start of The Beat, a long avenue of chestnuts. At the top of it was their destination, the Police Memorial Garden.

As they walked down The Beat, it had seemed to Ben that the entire history of Britain’s armed forces must be recorded here, in one way or another. There was a memorial to the Rats of Tobruk, the Iraq and Afghanistan willows, and trees planted for the First Army Veterans. Everyone from the Kenya Police to the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force was remembered.

The guide book said that chestnuts had been chosen for The Beat because the first police truncheons were made from their wood, chestnut being particularly durable – not to say hard, if you were cracked across the skull with it. Several of the trees had been grown from conkers taken from Drayton Manor, the home of Sir Robert Peel himself. Who knew that the founder of the police service had grown his own chestnut trees?

Ben saw that Matt and Claire had reached the Memorial Garden before him. He supposed he must have been dawdling, subconsciously delaying the moment. Yet he’d promised himself he’d face up to everything he had to deal with from now on. Nothing was to be gained from shutting his memories away and slamming the lid down tight.

Startled by a sound behind him in the office, Cooper looked around guiltily, remembering where he was. For the first time, he became aware of the atmosphere in the office, a little bit more relaxed than usual.

‘So where’s DS Fry?’ he asked Irvine.

‘Call-out to a body.’

‘Suspicious?’

‘Sounds like it.’

‘Have we got some details?’

‘Here somewhere,’ said Irvine.

Cooper read quickly through a copy of the incident log. The Eden Valley Hunt? What were they doing with the hunt? Saboteurs? That could be tricky. Fry would be totally out of her depth.

Without even bothering to sit down at his desk, he made a call to a familiar mobile number, but only got the recorded voicemail message. Irvine and Hurst watched him in amazement as he headed back out of the office.

‘Diane? I think you’ll need me. I’m on my way.’

‘Don’t forget,’ said the uniformed inspector, surveying the small group of officers he’d been allocated that morning, ‘it’s perfectly OK for them to be killed – as long as they’re shot.’

Standing on a roadside near Birchlow, Diane Fry watched the inspector at work. Like a practised mind reader, she could tell what he was thinking. With luck, they wouldn’t be called on to do very much today, except watch.

Officers nodded and shuffled their feet. They adjusted their high-vis jackets and tucked in the scarves they hoped would stop the rain from trickling down their necks. Fry thought some of them looked bored already. With luck, they’d be even more fed up before the morning was over. Their presence was supposed to be a deterrent, rather than anything else. It was policing as a spectator sport.

The inspector’s name was Redfearn, a grey-haired veteran approaching his thirty years’ service, twelve of which had been spent in the Met before he returned to Derbyshire. Fry always wondered how he’d managed to maintain an unruffled, pragmatic manner all that time. It was great for dealing with young bobbies, but there had been times when she’d wanted to prod him into some kind of response. Being in CID, she didn’t have too much contact with him, but today was going to be different.

‘They can even use dogs, provided it’s no more than two,’ said Redfearn. ‘But the actual killing has to be done by shooting. Or by a bird of prey, if there happens to be one present. That’s legal.’

The inspector paused, glancing at the vehicles already gathered in a field and along the grass verges as far as the eye could see. No doubt he was thinking that the rain might keep the numbers down. But it was late in the season, and intelligence had suggested a confrontation could be expected.

‘From past experience, it’s probably the sabs you’ll have to watch out for,’ he said. ‘But we don’t take sides, all right? We’re here to uphold the law, but mostly to prevent public order offences and ensure all parties can go about their lawful activities. So keep your eyes open, and your wits about you. Oh, and try to keep your feet dry.’

As the officers dispersed, Fry introduced herself to the inspector. She didn’t envy him his job. Keeping public order was often a thankless task, especially when you found yourself thrust between two groups who each had the right to go about their peaceful activities. Hunt duty wasn’t an assignment that many would want.

The Eden Valley Hunt met twice a week, and Fry felt it was surely no coincidence that today’s meet was so close to her potential murder scene. In fact, she realized now that the air support unit’s surveillance task was connected with the hunt. The helicopter was visible hovering over a copse a couple of fields away.

‘You think one of the hunt supporters might know something about your body?’ said Redfearn when she explained.

‘Someone left hoofprints all over my crime scene, Inspector. In fact, it looks like more than one horse to me. Your operation here is less than half a mile away – I could see you from the scene down there. It seems to me you might have some potential witnesses for me.’

‘There are quite a lot of them, you know. There are horse boxes and trailers parked all the way back from here to Birchlow.’

‘We’re going to have to talk to them, and find out who was here first this morning.’

‘What time?’

‘Around eight thirty a. m., the ME says.’

‘You want the huntsman, or one of the whippers-in, then. They’d be here with the hound van, early doors. Oh, and a couple of hunt followers would have been out laying the artificial scent.’

‘Where are they now?’

Redfearn looked around. ‘God knows, Sergeant. In one of these fields somewhere. They’ll turn up later on.’

‘I need to grab them as soon as poss.’

‘Understood.’

The inspector used his radio, asking for someone whose name she couldn’t catch to come to the control point and speak to Inspector Redfearn. Well, they would do for a start. Impatient though she was to get on with the job, Fry was well aware that she didn’t yet have the manpower to start interviewing dozens of hunt supporters. She glanced at the lines of horse boxes. Was it dozens, or scores? Or even hundreds?

‘And what about your saboteurs, Inspector?’ she said, when he’d finished with his radio.

‘What about them?’

‘I’m wondering if one of them might be missing. It would be useful to talk to them.’

He shook his head. ‘Well, the sabs aren’t very forthcoming, you know. It’s difficult enough getting their own names and addresses out of them. Understandably, because if their identities get known, they can be subject to repercussions. But we’ll try to rope in a couple for you, if you like.’

‘I’d appreciate it.’

Fry turned at a clatter of hooves and saw a bunch of riders rounding the corner. Red coats, black coats, mud-spattered boots, gleaming horses. They trotted towards her as if they’d just fallen out of a time warp. Because surely those scarlet coats charging across the landscape were a throwback to a world of pub prints and Victorian Christmas cards. Hard to believe that it still went on, so far into the twenty-first century, and after all that fuss about the legislation to ban it.

‘Are you expecting much trouble?’ she asked the inspector as the riders passed.

‘Hard to tell. There’s a cyclical pattern to these things, though. Tension builds up over the hunting season between September and March. Niggling resentments from the start of the season can lead up to minor assaults and scuffles around Christmas, then more serious incidents tend to happen at the end of the season. Both sides get a cooling-off period during the summer, you see.’

Seasons and cooling-off periods; it all sounded like one big game to Fry. She wondered what constituted a goal for either side. A fox killed, or a fox saved. A black eye or a successful prosecution. Then they all went home with their stories to tell, and met up again next September. Amazing.

They stepped to one side of the road to allow another a horse box to pass. A late-comer, since the rest of the hunt had already assembled and scattered across the fields.

‘Before the Hunting Act, we did have a lot of violent confrontations between sabs and hunt supporters,’ said Inspector Redfearn. ‘More than we do now. The Eden Valley Hunt was unpopular, and it attracted a lot of protests. Sabs travelled hundreds of miles to be here.’

‘Have you always been on hunt duty?’

‘No, but it comes round regularly. Ironically, the turn-out for the hunt has increased since the ban. Their support is booming. On the other hand, the anti-hunt groups lost a lot of members, people who thought the battle was over when the act came in. Now there’s just the hardcore left, and they have to try that much harder to make their presence felt.’

‘And are the saboteurs local?’ asked Fry.

‘We think we’ve got three different groups today. Our own local group we see quite regularly, and they’re generally peaceful. The trouble makers seem to come from other parts of the country, and they’re of a rather more aggressive nature. It generally starts with the foot followers being given grief, then someone gets spat at, a girl’s pony gets sprayed with an unidentified substance. It can take less aggro than that for incidents to kick off big time.’

‘The Eden Valley don’t hunt foxes now, though,’ said Fry.

‘Their official policy is to observe the law. But you know there are exemptions under the Act.’

‘Of course. I heard your briefing.’

‘Well, even if they don’t catch foxes any more, their opposition still turn out. Only now some of them call themselves “hunt monitors” and they’re armed with video cameras, aiming to catch infringements of the law. We never condone vigilante groups, no matter what their cause, so we watch the sabs carefully.’

Fry nodded. She didn’t know who her victim was, yet she already seemed to have an array of potential witnesses, suspects and associates, all milling around the landscape having what passed for fun in these parts. Well, as much fun as you could have in the rain.

A lone rider cantered down the road, a woman in a red coat who dug her knees into her horse’s flanks to turn it as she approached them. The mare trotted over the last few yards of wet grass, hooves thumping on the soft ground, steam spurting from its nostrils.

The rider’s boots and jodhpurs were splattered with mud and her face was red from exertion and the cold air.

‘What’s the problem, Inspector?’

‘This is Detective Sergeant Fry,’ said Redfearn. ‘She’s investigating a suspicious death in this area.’

‘I saw the activity across the way. Thought your people had just got lost.’

‘This is Mrs Forbes,’ Redfearn told Fry. ‘Joint master of the Eden Valley Hunt.’

Fry didn’t think she’d ever been quite so near to a horse before. She knew absolutely nothing about them, except that they bit at one end and kicked at the other.

She explained to Mrs Forbes what she wanted. As she spoke, the rider looked down at her with an expression she’d seen on the faces of the hunt supporters when the saboteurs got too close. An unmistakable hint of contempt, probably just the instinct of the mounted person looking down from a great height on the lowly pedestrian.

‘You think any of our members might know something about this?’ said Mrs Forbes. ‘What nonsense.’

‘If we could just speak to the people –’

‘I can’t allow you to speak to anyone. It’s just some mad story made up by those antis.’

Fry could feel the horse’s breath blowing from its nostrils in warm jets. She suspected that the animal regarded him with much more benevolence than its owner did.

‘One way or another, I’ll speak to your huntsman, and anyone else who was in this area at around eight thirty this morning,’ said Fry. ‘If you prefer, we can stop the hunt altogether while we do that.’

Beside her, Redfearn cleared his throat nervously, but said nothing. Mrs Forbes stared from one to the other, her hands gripping the reins tightly, as if it was her horse that was on the verge of getting out of control, rather than her own reactions.

‘Do what you like,’ she said finally. ‘Who is this person who got himself killed?’

‘We don’t know yet.’

Mrs Forbes snorted, and pulled at her reins. ‘I’ll give Widdowson instructions.’

Fry watched her go, the mare’s tail flicking from side to side as if bothered by invisible flies.

‘Widdowson?’ she said.

‘The huntsman,’ said Redfearn.

The inspector’s radio crackled, and he listened for a moment.

‘This body of yours, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Did I understand that he died some time this morning?’

‘About eight thirty. Why?’

‘Funny thing, that’s all. One of my officers is reporting that some of the sabs got a bit over-excited. They said they heard three long, wavering notes on a hunting horn. It sounded to them like the signal that calls in the hounds to kill the fox, or the terrier men to dig him out. That got them all worked up. But it was too early, the hunt hadn’t even moved off. So I think they must have been mistaken.’