have been doing something else entirely.
14
By the middle of the afternoon, the low sun was painting more colour into the landscape. As Cooper left West Street and drove down the hill into the centre of Edendale, the clouds over the eastern hills were developing yellow and pink tinges, and the moors were no longer such a dingy brown.
Friday was market day in Edendale. There were crowds doing their pre-Christmas shopping among the market stalls. Stout men with ruddy faces and waistcoats, tall men with long white sideburns, women in tweed skirts and headscarves — the sort of people you never saw at any other time, even in Edendale. It was almost as if they were employed by the council to give an authentic Dickensian flavour to the town for the festive season. Or perhaps they were members of some esoteric club, the Pickwick Papers Re-enactment Society.
But Cooper knew that was his new, town-dwelling self speaking. He knew who they were — these were the small hill farmers, the inhabitants of the more isolated homesteads, who travelled into town for market day.
By the time he reached the market square, it was already nearly four o’clock, and the market was being packed up for the end of the day. A procession of Ford Transits and Renault Trafics squeezed through the side streets, blocking every access while they loaded. Some of the stalls were clearing rapidly, their owners anxious to get home to their fires. Others took longer, stallholders staggering backwards and forwards in green and red Santa hats, shouting banter to each other. ‘I can manage on my own, don’t worry about me, I’ll be all right. You’re too old to be carrying these heavy boxes.’
Cooper found an empty slot to park the Toyota, thinking smugly that it wouldn’t have been quite so easy if he’d arrived in town an hour earlier. From here, he could easily walk the half mile to The Oaks.
He passed the town hall, its facade boasting four decorative pillars. The building had been edged with stones carved in a wavy pattern, and there were so many of them that local people had nicknamed their town hall ‘The Wavy House’.
His feet tangled for a second in the tattered remains of some party poppers discarded on the pavement. Office parties would be going everywhere tonight, as they had been last night — and would be tomorrow night too, of course. By the morning, council workers could expect to have far more than a few party poppers to clear up.
Within minutes of him arriving, the streetlights were coming on, and it was dark in the corners of the market square. Workers were stripping the awnings and dismantling the tubular steel stalls, clanging and chattering, wheeling racks of clothes over the cobbles. The dipped headlights of cars swept by from the roundabout. A tractor came towards him with a yellow warning light flashing, towing a trailer to collect the dismantled stalls.
When he entered the lounge at The Oaks to see Raymond Sutton, the other residents fell silent, watching him. He supposed they thought he was just a visitor. Perhaps they took him for Raymond’s grandson or something. They’d be asking Raymond questions about him as soon as he left. With a sinking certainty, Cooper thought it was probable that some of these old dears never got a visitor of their own from one year to the next.
The Oaks reminded him of the Old Vicarage, the nursing home his own mother had been in towards the end. On the surface, there weren’t all that many similarities. Residents of The Oaks were just old and needed some help with their day-today living. They were the frail and forgetful, the tired and confused, the ones who just couldn’t cope and had no one to look after them. They probably went on outings and had bingo evenings and sing-songs. Isabel Cooper had never had any need for those things.
‘We’ve had a bit of an issue with Raymond this afternoon,’ said the care assistant, Elaine, when she let him in. ‘He got a bit upset.’
‘What was wrong?’
‘It’s difficult to say. We have a couple of care workers here who are from Lithuania. They’re nice girls, but Raymond doesn’t like it when they speak to him. I think it’s because he doesn’t understand them properly. It must be awful not to understand what’s going on.’
‘I feel like that myself sometimes.’
‘He’s all right now, anyway. He soon calms down.’
‘Does Mr Sutton have any old photo albums, do you know?’ asked Cooper. ‘Photos from his time at the farm?’
‘Not that I know of. Only women keep photo albums, don’t they? I can’t see Raymond sitting around in the evening sticking pictures of family weddings and christenings into an album.’
Now that he looked at Raymond Sutton more closely in the light, Cooper could see that the old man’s skin was dry, and faintly yellow. He was reminded of the kitchen at Pity Wood Farm, the tint of the walls and the smoky stains on the ceiling. Mr Sutton would have fitted into the Yellow Room naturally, almost as if he’d decorated it in his own image.
Perhaps some kind of liver problem had caused this unhealthy colour. He made a note to ask one of the staff about Mr Sutton’s physical health. Heartless as it might seem, no investigation team wanted their chief witness dying before he could provide a full statement.
Chief witness? Raymond Sutton might yet turn out to be the principal suspect. All the more reason to be concerned about his health.
‘Do you remember me, sir? I’m Detective Constable Cooper, from Edendale Police. I came to see you the other day, with my inspector.’
‘I don’t get many visitors, lad,’ said Sutton. ‘How would I forget?’
Cooper mentally crossed his fingers that Mr Sutton was having a good spell. If he believed he couldn’t forget, that was a positive sign, wasn’t it?
‘Don’t you have any family left, Mr Sutton?’
‘Some cousins in Stoke. They might get my money when I go, but they won’t get the farm, will they?’
‘No, you’ve already sold the farm.’
Cooper sat alongside him.
‘Your brother died, didn’t he? Derek?’
‘Aye. He’s gone over, has Derek.’
‘That was before you sold the farm, Mr Sutton.’
The old man nodded slowly. ‘We could see he was tappy already by then.’
‘Tappy?’ repeated Cooper.
‘Approaching his end.’
Cooper searched his memory for the word, and came up with an image of a wounded animal going to ground in the woods to die.
‘Sir, did anyone else die at the farm? Women?’
‘Women?’
‘Did some women die?’
Sutton looked at him closely. ‘Are you a Christian?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘A proper Christian?’
‘Yes, sir.’
He genuinely felt it was true. But Cooper hoped he wouldn’t be asked when he last went to church on a Sunday. Like many people he knew, he’d got out of the habit. Weddings, funerals and christenings — that was about it these days. His mother had been the one keen on church attendance, so he and Matt and Claire had always gone to St Aidan’s regularly as children. Sunday school, too. Bible stories and choir practice, Whit walks and visits by the Church Army with their free badges. But he suspected that had been as much because it was the respectable thing to do, rather than on account of any particular devoutness on his mother’s part.
It was probably that factor that led him to be a bit facetious sometimes when other people’s beliefs seemed to be just
‘So you know that Hell burns,’ said Sutton. ‘Hell burns with an agony like no other.’
‘Yes, sir. And there’s no butter in Hell.’
Sutton stared at him, failing to smile at the joke, failing even to get the allusion. Cooper immediately wished
