Dying to Sin

For a few minutes, Fry thought it was strange that no one seemed to be looking at her, as if they’d accepted her without curiosity. But then she realized that they were watching her, after all. They were making an elaborate pretence of not noticing her, but they were observing out of the corners of their eyes, letting their gaze sweep casually across her as if she wasn’t there, but registering more and more details about her each time they turned their heads. Bystanders were notoriously poor at remembering descriptions, but these people would be able to draw her accurately from memory, each and every one of them. They were all watching her.

As she waited, a desultory conversation started up about the weather. Wasn’t it wet and cold and windy, they said. Wetter and colder and windier than usual for this time of year. It would probably be even wetter and colder over Christmas, just their luck. Somebody must have stood on an ant.

Fry finally got some attention when a middle-aged man emerged from a door behind the bar. He was wearing an old cardigan and carrying a mug of tea with ‘Number One Dad’ printed on it. He introduced himself as Ned Dain, the licensee.

‘The Suttons?’ he said. ‘I remember the two old men. They’re not still at the farm, surely?’

‘No.’

‘I thought not. We haven’t seen them in here for ages. Died, did they?’

‘Only one of them did.’

‘Damn.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Well, I bet that would be really hard on the other brother,’ said Dain. ‘They were so close they were almost like twins. Spoke the same, had a similar manner. Yet someone told me once they didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of things. They kept it hidden well, if that was the case.’ He took a sip of tea. ‘There were a few years between them in age, I think.’

‘We’ve been told Derek was the youngest by four years.’

‘Is he the one that died?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Damn.’

The men in the bar had moved on to discussing the Middle East problem, and whether anyone had seen the darts on the telly last night.

‘Can you tell me anything else about them?’

‘They always kept themselves pretty much to themselves,’ said Dain. ‘But there’s usually somebody who knows something around here. What did you want to know?’

‘Was either of them married, for example?’

‘Hold on. Hey, Jack!’

The man with the long, grey beard looked up. ‘Aye?’

‘The Sutton brothers at Pity Wood — was one of them married?’

Jack glanced slyly at Fry before answering. ‘I don’t rightly recall. Might have been. It was a long time ago, if so.’

‘You’re right,’ said Dain. ‘I don’t recollect they were married. A set of old bachelors, I’d reckon. We mostly saw the brothers together, if we saw them at all. If there was ever a wife, she must have died, too, or walked out — who knows?’

‘Well, who does?’

Dain seemed not to be able to answer a direct question.

‘Derek,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘And then there was, let’s see … Billy? No, of course not. That’s me getting mixed up. I’m getting a terrible memory for names.’

‘Billy?’ The man called Jack coughed and laughed into his beard. ‘There was never any Billy. You’ve got that wrong, Ned.’

‘Raymond,’ said Fry.

‘Raymond. That’s right. Derek, Raymond …?’

‘Yes, Derek and Raymond. Those are their names.’

Dain gave her a quizzical look. ‘All right, if you say so. Well, Raymond, now — he played the organ at the chapel. You could ask the minister about him. He’s circuit, of course, based in Monyash. Or there’s Ellis Bland — he’s the caretaker.’

Jack spoke up again. ‘Ned, they had a funeral at the chapel, didn’t they? The Suttons.’

‘That would have been Derek, then,’ said Fry.

‘Aye, Derek. Funny bugger — superstitious as all get out. Magpies, black cats, I don’t know what. He thought everything he saw was going to bring bad luck.’

‘He’s dead now, so he must have been right,’ said Dain.

‘Well, we hope he was dead, since they buried him.’

Jack cackled and went back to his tobacco. Fry tried to regain the attention.

‘Apart from the Suttons themselves, were there any farmworkers that used to come in the pub?’ she asked.

‘No, but perhaps my Dad would remember them, if they came in here.’

‘Was your father the licensee before you?’

‘Not him,’ said Dain with a laugh. ‘Well, his name was over the door, but running a pub would be too much like hard work for that drunken old bastard. No, you’d have found him sitting on that side of the bar most nights. He knew everyone around here, though. If strangers came in, he’d be giving them the once-over as they walked to the bar, and he’d know everything about them by the time they left the pub again. You could do with blokes like my old dad on the police force, if you want information.’

‘I suppose he’s not still around,’ said Fry.

‘Well, not around here, thank God,’ said Dain. ‘We put him in a home when he got too bad. Cracked as a tin bucket he was, by the end. Too much drink wrecked his brain. But it was his liver that did for him in the end.’

‘Oh.’

‘Me, I won’t go that way. I’m as fit as a fiddle, and twice as tuneful.’

Dain rubbed a hand on the bar counter, as if finding a blemish on the polished wood.

‘Come to think of it,’ he said, ‘I think the police did use my dad as a source of information from time to time. The local bobby would come in here himself in those days, in uniform and all. And he’d expect free drinks. Those were different times, I suppose. He even brought his sergeant in sometimes.’

Picturing the scene, Fry suddenly had a bad feeling about the answer to her next question. ‘Can you remember the name of that sergeant?’

Dain shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think so. It’s too long ago.’

‘Shame.’

Dain ran a cloth across the bar counter. ‘Wait, though … it was a fairly common name. Oh, that’s annoying. It’s right on the tip of my tongue.’

Fry waited as patiently as she could while he fumbled through his memories, but nothing seemed to be emerging.

‘Cooper?’ she suggested. ‘Sergeant Joe Cooper, perhaps?’

‘Who?’ said Dain. ‘Nah, that’s not it. Cooper? Where did you get that from?’ Then his face broke into a broken-toothed smile. ‘Nothing like it. Williams, that was his name. Big Welsh bloke. We called him Taffy.’

‘And the local bobby himself?’

‘Oh, Dave Palfreyman? He’s still around, all right. You won’t be able to miss him.’

Outside the Dog Inn, Fry stood for a moment in the rain. Something about the conversation in the pub was worrying her. Not the barely concealed hostility, or Ned Dain’s infuriatingly poor memory — if that’s what it was. No, it was a faint ambiguity that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Not anything that had been said, but something that had been missing.

Fry stepped over a pothole in the car park that was slowly filling with water, and found herself thinking about the patch of disturbed ground that Jamie Ward had pointed out at Pity Wood Farm. It had been nagging at the back