Dying to Sin

They moved on through the museum. Cooper glanced out of the window, and saw that it was still raining. He didn’t mind Edendale in the rain, but Amy objected to getting wet. And since it was the start of her Christmas holidays, and only his rest day, she got to say what they did and where they went. And that didn’t involve going out in the rain, thanks.

In the centre of town, Victoria Park had been taken over for a Victorian Christmas Market. These things seemed to be very popular, judging by the crowds coming into town. There was a smell of roasting chestnuts in the air, and the sound of a fairground organ. And there was an innovation for Edendale this year – a Continental market, where stalls sold French bread and German sausages. Some of the stallholders spoke with foreign accents and might even be French or German. You never knew these days.

In the evenings, mime artists, stilt walkers and clowns would mingle with the crowds, and Santa would turn up on his sleigh at exactly the same time every night. A couple of weeks earlier, a local TV presenter had been brought in to switch on the lights, but the headline act on the main stage tomorrow would be an Abba tribute band.

They stopped by a costume display. The rough trousers and leather knee-pads of a lead miner, the gowns and bonnets of an elegant lady.

‘So how are you liking school, Amy?’ he said, aware of an unfamiliar silence developing.

‘It’s so cliquey. They’re all goths or emos. Or chavs.’

‘Chavs, eh?’

‘They’re so stupid. There aren’t any real people, Uncle Ben.’

‘Would you rather be at home, or at school?’

‘Well, home is all right. I like being around the farm and the animals. But Mum and Dad are so immature sometimes.’

‘Oh, are they?’

‘They only think about money and possessions – they’re very materialistic. I can’t believe they never stop and think about serious subjects now and then.’

Cooper found himself trailing after his niece, as if he was the child demanding attention. It was supposed to be the other way round, but it never seemed to work like that in reality.

‘Well, they’re very busy looking after you and Josie,’ he said. ‘And they have to try to make sure the farm makes enough money to support the whole family. It’s very hard work, you know.’

Amy didn’t seem to hear. He could see that she was thinking about something again. It was very unnerving the way she did that, switched to auto pilot while her brain concentrated on some totally different subject. Perhaps she was already learning to multi-task, practising that skill all women claimed to have.

‘It’s just like Draco Malfoy, in that shop in Knockturn Alley,’ she said.

Cooper frowned, stumped again by the turn of the conversation. ‘Is it?’

His brain turned over, trying to pin down the reference. It was humiliating to find that his brain worked so much more slowly than Amy’s but he was finding it more and more difficult to keep up with his nieces’ interests these days. Their lives seemed to change so quickly, the pop stars they liked being different from one week to the next. Even the language they used evolved so rapidly that it left him behind.

‘Wait a minute – Draco Malfoy, did you say? That’s Harry Potter.’

‘Of course it’s Harry Potter.’ Amy could barely conceal the contempt in her voice. ‘It’s in The Chamber of Secrets. Draco Malfoy finds a hand of glory when he’s in the shop with his father. “Best friend of thieves and plunderers,” that’s what the shopkeeper says.’

‘“Best friend of thieves and plunderers.” OK, that would make sense.’

‘So it’s magic,’ said Amy.

‘Yes, of course. What did you think it was?’

‘I thought it was for real. Well, it’s in the museum, isn’t it? All this other stuff is for real – the costumes and the tools, and the old furniture.’

‘Yes.’

‘But the hand of glory isn’t real – it’s magic.’

‘It’s a genuine hand,’ said Cooper defensively. ‘A hand that belonged to a real person once.’

‘But it’s still magic. Magic is make-believe. Harry Potter is made up. It’s fiction, Uncle Ben.’

‘The fact is,’ said Cooper, treading cautiously, ‘people in the past believed those things were for real. They didn’t know that magic was just something out of stories like Harry Potter. They actually thought it worked, in real life. The hand of glory, all kinds of stuff.’

They got to the door of the museum and looked out on to the street. There were fewer umbrellas being carried by the pedestrians now, so the rain must be easing.

‘People can be really weird, can’t they?’ said Amy. ‘They believe in such stupid things.’

The old man’s dreams were worse during the day. He drifted in and out of consciousness, hardly aware of his surroundings, pressed down into the darkness of sleep by a great weight. At times, he wasn’t even sure he was still alive, it felt so impossible to wake up. It was so difficult, so far beyond his strength.

Our dawns and dusks are numbered. They’ll steal our land next, and our hills. I always thought the place would last for ever, but now I don’t care. I wouldn’t pass on the curse. It’ll die with me, and none too soon. It will an’ all.

Dark filth, cruel brutes. Coming to my home for their evil purposes, stealing away my life. Our life. They turned up in their white vans, and they went away again. Dark, some of them. Speaking in tongues. They might as well have had the number stamped on their foreheads. Them and their minions, traipsing all over the shop. A load of rammel in the sheds, I don’t know what …

Words and phrases repeated in his head, meaningless yet desperately important, the only thing that mattered.

For he that is dead. For he that is dead.

Aye, it were silin’ down again. That morning, he was fast on, so I didn’t waken him. He’d only be lorping around the house, the old dosser. Yammering about his mad ideas. Sacrilege and superstition, damnation and desecration.

The night before, they’d all been popped-up again. I thought I’d go scranny if they didn’t stop. Look, he’s a wick ’un, I said. I told you he was a wick ’un.

The old man opened his eyes for a moment, aware of movement and light, but sank back into sleep before his brain could focus.

But he was sickly, and always was. Weak in the head, and sick in the body. Sound, me. I’m sound, I always said. But him, he was badly. I never cottoned on how badly. But it makes no odds now, does it? It’s all for the best, in the end.

For he that is dead.

For he that is dead.

For he that is dead is freed from sin.

2

A single hair follicle was enough to make a DNA match. Polymerase chain reaction and short tandem repeats could get a result from one head hair, or even an eyelash. Invisible stains would work, too. Stains of saliva. Tears and blood.

Watching the activity at Pity Wood Farm, Diane Fry despaired of being able to rely on modern scientific techniques. Even the fingerprints Jamie Ward had left on his spade a few hours ago would have bloomed in the damp atmosphere and become useless.

Yet more vehicles had arrived at the scene, jockeying for parking places on the drier patches of ground. They were wasting their time, because there wouldn’t be a dry inch left by the end of the day. Even now, the sound of spinning wheels whined in the air as a driver churned another rut into the mud.

‘Well, I see the builders have trampled all over the job long before we got here.’

Fry turned to see Detective Inspector Paul Hitchens approaching the inner cordon, casually clad in jeans and green wellington boots, as if he’d only popped out to walk the dog on a Sunday afternoon.

‘Morning, sir.’

‘Morning, Diane.’ He looked down at the sea of mud. ‘That’s just great. What a start. But I suppose it makes a change from our own plods doing the trampling.’

‘Does it? I can’t see any difference from where I’m standing. All size-twelve boots look the same to me. I’m not bothered what type of helmets they were wearing when they were doing the trampling. It’s not as if they were bouncing around on their heads, is it?’

‘True.’

‘If we found an imprint of a Derbyshire Constabulary cap badge in the mud, that would be a different matter,’ said Fry. ‘Then we’d be looking for some uniformed idiot who’d tripped over his own feet. And we’d have a list of potential suspects right under our noses.’

Hitchens laughed. ‘Shall we have a look at the centre of all this attention?’

With DC Murfin trailing reluctantly behind, they followed a line of wooden planks borrowed from the builders to create a temporary bridge. Their feet thumped on the planks as if they were walking out on to a pier at the seaside. Blackpool, with mud.

And here was the end-of-the-pier show – a sort of gipsy fortune teller lurking in her shadowy tent, consulting the bones.

The Home Office pathologist, Mrs van Doon, straightened up as they approached. She brushed a stray lock of hair from her forehead, leaving a smear of dirt from her glove across her temple.

‘I shouldn’t worry too much about contamination of your crime scene,’ she said. ‘This body has been here long enough for half the population of Derbyshire to have passed through the area on their way to the pub and back again.’

Murfin looked suddenly interested. ‘There’s a pub?’

‘In the village,’ said the pathologist, gesturing with a trowel. ‘About a mile in that direction.’

Hitchens grunted impatiently. ‘How long has it been here exactly?’

‘Exactly? Is that a joke, Inspector?’

‘Make an estimate, then. We won’t hold you to it.’

‘On that understanding …’ Mrs van Doon gave an apologetic shrug. ‘A year or so? I assume you’ll be getting the forensic anthropologist in to examine the remains. Dr Jamieson might be able to give you a better estimate.’

‘At first glance, the body looks pretty well preserved to me,’ said Hitchens.

‘Oh, you’re looking at the hand. Well, the hand isn’t too badly decomposed, that’s true. But it had been well covered up and protected from the air – at least, before some individual stuck the edge of a spade through the plastic sheeting. There are some old rips in the covering at the head end, though. So the condition of that area of the body is a bit different.’

‘At the head end? That sounds like bad news. What are our chances of an ID going to be?’

Mrs van Doon shrugged in her scene suit, rustling faintly. ‘It’s too early to say. But I can tell you the victim has lost quite a bit of flesh on the left side. Down to the bone in places. I’ll know more when I can get her back to the mortuary. That might take a bit of time, though.’

‘Why?’

‘We need to be careful digging her out. Some of the skin is sloughing off, and the less of her we lose at this stage, the better. Wouldn’t you agree?’

‘It is a “her”, though,’ said Fry. ‘You did say “her”.’

‘Yes, I’m pretty sure of that, Sergeant,’ said the pathologist, her boots squelching as she squatted to peer into the hole. ‘Unless you’ve got a cross-dresser with a penchant for tights and blue skirts on your missing persons list.’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘I’ll pass the remains into Dr Jamieson’s care when he arrives. We can consult later, when she’s safely in the lab.’

‘Thank you, Doctor.’

As they re-crossed the plank bridge, Hitchens cast an eye over the farm buildings.

‘What do we know about the occupants?’

‘Apparently, the farm was owned by two elderly brothers,’ said Murfin, producing a notebook and demonstrating that he’d actually been doing some work while everyone else was standing around gassing. ‘One of them died quite recently, and the other is in a care home in Edendale.’

‘Was owned?’

‘Well, the place has been bought for development – hence the presence of all these builders in their hard hats. Development, or conversion. I’m not quite clear what they’re telling me.’

‘So who’s the present owner?’

‘A Mr Goodwin. He’s a lawyer, lives in Manchester. Mr Goodwin is the man employing the builders. I’ve got his contact details from the site foreman. But that seems to be all the bloke knows.’

‘Get on the phone, Gavin, and find out everything you can about the previous owners,’ said Fry. ‘We need names, dates, relationships. We need to know who else was in the household. Dig out anything that’s on record about them. Get some help, if you need it.’

‘If?’ said Murfin. ‘If?’

‘The body has been here for a year at least, according to the pathologist.’

‘That puts the victim in situ before Mr Goodwin took ownership, then. The sale went through only three months ago, I gather. The farm has been empty for about nine months, after the surviving owner went into care.’

Fry looked at their surroundings in more detail, the farm buildings beyond the stretch of mud and the track and the parked vehicles.

‘Does that explain the state of the place? How could it get like this in nine months?’

Ben Cooper would probably tell her that all this was evidence of the evolution of the farm over the centuries, as its owners adapted to new ways of working, changed the use of their buildings from cattle to sheep, from hay storage to machinery shed. Or whatever. To Fry, it looked like dereliction and chaos, pure and simple. Not an ounce of design or planning had gone into the farm, not even in the newer buildings.

Of course, farmers were a law unto themselves in so many ways. They were even allowed to create these shanty towns, reminiscent of the slums of some Third World country where there was no running water or drainage, and rubbish was dumped in the streets. In Rio de Janeiro, you might expect it. But not in Middle England.

‘What a place,’ she said, unable to avoid voicing her feelings for once.

‘The builders have hardly started on the house or outbuildings yet,’ said Murfin. ‘The foreman tells me they’ve been doing some work on the foundations and building an approach road. Then they have to tackle some of the exterior walls where they’re unsound. And of course there’s the roof. Not much point in trying to do any work on the interior until you’ve sorted out the roof, is there?’

‘What is it going to be when they’ve finished?’ asked Fry.

‘The foreman says a gentleman’s residence. Office suite, swimming pool, guest annexe.’

‘They’ve got a hell of a job on.’

Unrepaired splits in the iron guttering had allowed rainwater to run down the walls, dragging long grey stains across the stone. Wires sagged from the telegraph pole. Two black crows swayed on the wire in the wind, flicking their wings to keep their balance.

Fry noticed a large shed behind the house. A very large shed indeed, with a convex roof. Wheel tracks led from one end of the shed towards the stretch of ground where the body had been found. Old tracks that had been made when the ground was soft, but whose ruts had hardened and survived until the recent rain. That was the sort of building where anything could go on, out of sight of the public. Out of earshot, out of mind.

The rain was getting heavier. That could be a problem.

But then Fry corrected herself. There were never any problems, only challenges. No obstacles that couldn’t be overcome.

At least the FOAs had been right on the ball, getting that body tent over the makeshift grave as soon as they saw the conditions. By now, this rain could have washed away the evidence if they hadn’t acted quickly. Lucky they’d had one in the boot of their car. In these circumstances, there was an evens chance that they would have had to sit and wait for one to arrive.

According to their advertising, these tents were supposed to go up in ten seconds, but she bet it had taken a good bit longer than that. The peg-down eyelets looked none too secure in the soft ground, and the guy ropes were slippery with mud.

‘Duckboards,’ someone was saying into a radio. ‘We need duckboards here. Lots of duckboards.’

Fry turned back to Murfin again. ‘So where’s this builder who found the body?’

‘Waiting in the van over there. Ward is his name – Jamie Ward, aged twenty. I’d hardly call him your typical builder, actually.’

Fry looked at him. ‘So what would you call him, Gavin?’

Murfin closed his notebook. ‘Terrified,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’d call him – a terrified kid.’

Matt Cooper had loaded some sheep into a trailer and was doing the paperwork in the Land Rover when his brother arrived. Ben could see a sheaf of forms resting on a clipboard. Pink copy for the destination, blue for the haulier, yellow for the holding of departure.

Matt opened the door, the usual frown caused by paperwork clearing from his face.

‘Hello, little brother. How was Amy? Did she have a good time?’

‘Oh, yes. She was fascinated by the recipe for preserving a severed hand.’

‘That sounds about right. She’s been in a funny mood recently.’

Matt was still putting on weight. That was a new set of overalls he was wearing, and they were a size larger than the last ones. He was only in his mid-thirties, so he still had middle-aged spread to look forward to.

‘Amy talks in quite a grown-up way sometimes, doesn’t she?’ said Ben.

‘Oh, you noticed that. Yes, it’s a bit of a new thing. I think it’s some influence at school – she must have some new friends, or something.’

‘Or a new teacher she’s got a crush on?’

‘Do girls have crushes on teachers?’

‘Yes, I believe so, Matt.’

‘I mean … well, I think they’re mostly female teachers that she has at that school.’

‘Even so.’

Matt was silent for a moment. ‘I’ll ask Kate to have a quiet word,’ he said.

Ben turned to look at the farmhouse, conscious of its presence behind him, the old family home. Now that he no longer lived here, he noticed that Bridge End Farm was starting to look middle-aged, too. The house hadn’t been painted for a while, and he could see that some work needed doing on the roof of the barn. He supposed there wasn’t much money in the bank to spare for repairs these days.

‘It’ll just be a phase Amy is going through, won’t it?’ he said.

‘Are you sure?’

‘It could be a lot worse, Matt. She’s a sensible girl.’

Matt put his paperwork aside. ‘Ben, how come you know so much more about pubescent girls than I do? I’m the dad around here.’

‘You see all sorts of things in the job.’

‘I suppose you do. And of course, you don’t always talk about it, do you, Ben? Especially these days. Whenever you come to the farm now, you seem to have changed a little bit more.’

Ben watched Amy coming across the field, walking with exaggerated care, instead of running in an uninhibited way, as she once would have done.

‘Perhaps some of us are maturing faster than others,’ he said.

Ben couldn’t deny that he was losing his sense of connection to Bridge End Farm. The ties were no longer quite so binding since he’d moved out and rented his own flat in Edendale. Memories of his childhood at the farm were objects in the far distance, unless he stopped to think about them. And then the details could spring at him with unexpected ferocity, like wild animals that hated to be stared at.

‘Nothing much happening, then?’ asked Matt. ‘No urgent crime on the streets of Edendale to take you away from us? If you’re at a loose end, you could help me batten down for the weather. It’s not looking too good.’

Ben turned and looked at the hills in the east, where the bad weather came from. A bank of cloud was building up, dark and ominous. Those easterly winds had been a feature of his early years. At Bridge End, when the wind blew from the east it made all the shutters bang and the doors of the loose boxes rattle against their latches. The trees on the eastern ridge would be bent over at unnatural angles, their bare branches flailing helplessly against the power of the gale. At night, animals would stir uneasily in the barns as the young Ben lay listening to the banging and the moaning of the wind, jumping at the crash of a bucket hurled across the yard or a tile dislodged from the roof.

Just when Cooper was thinking that nothing would ever make him jump with alarm like that any more, the phone in his pocket began to ring.

Jamie Ward was shivering miserably in the front seat of the crew bus that had brought the builders to Pity Wood Farm. It was a converted Transit, smelling powerfully of cigarettes and muddy clothes. The seats were worn thin, the floor scuffed by dozens of work boots. Fry moved a hard hat aside, slid in next to him, and wound the window down to prevent the interior steaming up. Rain covered the windscreen, blocking out the view of the farm.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

‘I’ll be OK.’

He didn’t sound very sure, but Fry let it pass. The sooner she finished with him, the better it would be. If he went into shock, he’d be useless.

Murfin had been right about Jamie Ward. He was younger than any of the other men she’d seen standing around the site, and he had an entirely different look about him. His hair was streaked blond, and was gelled up at the front – hardly the typical builder’s style. But he was a well-built lad, six feet tall at least, a good build for a rugby player. His hands were powerful and broad, just as suitable for hard physical work as for playing rugby.

‘I’m studying Microbiology at Sheffield University,’ said Jamie when she asked him. ‘But I need to find work whenever I can, you know – to get some dosh.’

‘You work as a builder’s labourer? That’s a bit of an unusual vacation job for a student,’ suggested Fry.

Jamie shrugged. ‘It suits me. It beats working in McDonald’s, anyway. I like to be outside in the open air, doing a bit of physical work. I’d go mad otherwise. I don’t have any skills or training, but I can use a spade and push a wheelbarrow about.’

‘And carry a hod full of bricks?’

‘We’re not allowed to use hods any more,’ said Jamie. ‘Health and Safety – you could do your back in, or drop bricks on someone’s head.’

‘Really?’

He nodded. ‘Besides, we’re not using bricks on this site. It’s going to be entirely stone on the outside, to match the original walls. Breeze block on the inside, of course.’ Jamie wiped off a few inches of condensation and looked at the figures moving about in the rain. ‘Funny, really, when there’s all this clay lying about. But stone is much more fashionable. That’s what the owner wants.’

Fry saw him relaxing a little, now that he had managed to get off the painful subject of the body he’d found.

‘So you like to be outside in the open air?’ she asked, thinking that Jamie Ward reminded her a little of Ben Cooper. ‘Are you from a farming family, by any chance?’

‘Well, I used to help my grandfather around his place when I was a teenager. Just at weekends and during the school holidays. He doesn’t have the farm any more, though – Granddad sold up when it stopped making money.’

‘Sensible man.’

‘Right. Well, I wouldn’t have wanted to spend my life doing the job that Granddad did. He was at it twenty-four seven. There was no let-up from looking after the animals. Livestock farming is for losers, don’t you think? Anyone with any sense is getting out as fast as they can.’

They both sat for a moment peering through the patch of cleared glass at the buildings of Pity Wood Farm, like divers examining a deep sea wreck.

‘I mean,’ said Jamie, ‘look at this place, for example.’

‘You’re right there.’

Ward glanced sideways at her. ‘But you want me to tell you what happened, don’t you? How I came to find the … well …’