camera, sometimes away. But always through that darkness. Why did no one ever put the lights on? he wondered. Did the people in these stories never suspect what might be waiting for them in those shadows, when they moved beyond the rectangles of light?
But that was the whole point, wasn’t it? It was all about the vicarious fear. The thrill was in anticipating the moment when a character stepped out of the safety zone. That was what riveted him to the screen, filled his mind and kept him from sleeping. It was watching a person walk into the dark.
When his phone rang, he thought at first it was part of the film. No one called him this late, unless it was bad news. When he answered, he wasn’t surprised to find it was DI Hitchens.
‘Sorry to bother you, Ben, but I thought you should know. Raymond Sutton has tried to hang himself in his room at The Oaks.’
33
Fry was already tired when she sat down at her desk next morning. She was supposed to produce a full report for the chiefs on her visit to the Garda Siochana, an analysis of the level of co-operation, and whether she’d made any useful contacts. Fry knew that any report to be read by senior management should use two positives to every negative, if it was going to give the right impression. Three was good, too. But never four — if you used four, it started to sound like sarcasm.
Well, on this occasion, a few bullet points would satisfy them. They wouldn’t want to know too much about Garda Lenaghan, would they? The identification of Orla Doyle should be enough to focus the interest.
Fry had now made two positive IDs on the bodies found at Pity Wood Farm, though not without a bit of good luck. She hoped her efforts would be properly appreciated. It wasn’t her fault that the skull didn’t belong to Orla Doyle. Everyone in the office this morning was talking about Victim C, which was the last thing she needed.
She found a copy of a file on her desk. There were photographs, so far out of proportion that they looked huge and disorientating. The Forensic Science Service laboratory had performed wonders getting fingerprints from Nadezda Halak’s hand, processing the sloughing skin sufficiently to provide a strong possibility of a match if her prints were on record. It couldn’t have been easy, teasing out an identifiable print from a fragment of rotting hand. The entire thumb was gone, and so were half of the index and middle fingers. The skin that remained had been decomposing and so fragile that it had to be soaked in alcohol to toughen it up and draw out the water.
But under twenty times magnification in the scanning electron microscope, traces of damage to the bones of the hand were just about visible, along with fractures at the surface where the cartilage had been attached to the central arch. Magnified a hundred times, the damage was unmistakable — linear fractures ending in a small region of crushed bone. There were no signs of healing, which indicated that the fracture had occurred perimortem — at, or just before, death.
Instead of finishing her report, Fry phoned the Forensic Science Service and asked to speak to one of the chemists who was dealing with evidence from the abandoned meth lab at Pity Wood.
‘Yes, methamphetamine production in a makeshift laboratory is a very dangerous activity, unless you have training as a chemist,’ she said.
‘I think we can take it that the people involved at Pity Wood didn’t have that training, Doctor.’
‘Well, if an operator without proper training allows the red phosphorus to overheat — due to lack of adequate ventilation, perhaps — then phosphine gas can be produced. If it’s produced in large enough quantities, the gas usually explodes. Technically, the conclusion would be auto-ignition from diphosphine formation, caused by the overheating of phosphorus.’
‘Thank you.’
Fry put the phone down. Training as a chemist? The idea was enough to make anyone laugh. Illegal workers like Nadezda Halak, paid a pittance and hardly daring to go out in daylight for fear of being seen? Their instructions would have been basic, their understanding of what they were involved in even less, perhaps.
In other circumstances, Fry would have said that it was a mistake to assume innocence, just because an individual was dead. It was possible to be guilty and a victim at the same time. But she could never believe it of Nadezda and her fellow workers at Pity Wood.
* * *
Cooper came in, accompanying DI Hitchens after a visit to Edendale District General Hospital, where Raymond Sutton was being treated.
‘Mr Sutton isn’t in good shape,’ said Cooper, chewing his lip nervously. ‘They’re very worried about him on the ward. He wasn’t strong to start with. If one of the care assistants hadn’t been passing his room, he would have been dead a few minutes later.’
‘Nobody’s blaming you, mate,’ said Murfin.
‘We gave him a bit of a hard time, put too much pressure on him. He’s an old man, after all.’
‘Gavin’s right, Ben,’ said Hitchens. ‘No one is blaming you.’
‘Are you sure, sir?’
‘Yes, absolutely.’
As the DI left, Fry put her phone down and caught up with the news.
‘Raymond Sutton? Poor bloke. I suppose this is your fault, Ben.’
Cooper slumped in his chair, crushed into silence.
‘Me, I blame the scapegoats,’ said Murfin. ‘They’re always responsible for anything that goes wrong, I find.’
‘Shut up, Gavin.’
‘Yes, boss.’
‘So who is this Victim C that everyone’s talking about?’ asked Fry. ‘Any theories?’
‘There were undoubtedly male workers at the farm,’ said Cooper.
‘Another migrant who met a sticky end?’
‘Well, who else?’
‘The mysterious Alan,’ said Fry. ‘Haven’t we been told that he disappeared seven or eight years ago? I know everyone tries to claim that he left home because he didn’t get on with his brothers, but we have no proof of that.’
‘You’re right,’ said Cooper.
‘You know I’m right, Ben. You’ve known from the moment that Alan was first mentioned that he didn’t just leave home. You understand these people better than me. But I remember you saying that they could be protecting someone.’
‘Yes, I did say that.’
‘Well, I’ll ask you again: protecting who?’
Cooper hung his head. ‘I don’t know, Diane. Perhaps the whole family. Perhaps the village. I really don’t know.’
‘We ought to have been making some effort to trace Alan Sutton, don’t you think?’
‘It didn’t seem a priority before.’
‘But things change, Ben,’ said Fry. ‘Around here, things change all the time.’
Cooper saw Murfin wink at him as he got up to attend his personal interview with the new superintendent. He was first man over the top, and he looked like a condemned criminal on his way to the scaffold, trying to stay cheerful but knowing he was doomed.
It was a bit like the family at Pity Wood Farm. Yes, Cooper felt sure the Suttons must have thought they were doomed. Cursed, anyway. Aside from the personal problems between the brothers, plague and pestilence had followed the changes in farming over the last couple of decades. BSE, foot and mouth, and now bird flu — each one like a dark cloud on the horizon that could break into a storm at any moment and wipe an entire industry away.
Already, the threat had come very close. The foot-and-mouth outbreak of 2001 hadn’t quite reached the Peak District. But there were farms a few miles south, on the border near Sudbury, where cattle and sheep had been
