Dying to Sin

‘All your failed enterprises,’ said Cooper. ‘None of them lasted more than a year or two.’

‘Yes. Well, like I said, it wasn’t my fault they failed. Times were difficult. We had a lot of bad luck.’

‘We’ll need to know who sub-contracted your labour. Who was the gang master?’

‘Look, do I have to?’ said Farnham. ‘I want to help, really I do. But dumping on someone else is not good.’

‘Well, we could arrest you, Mr Farnham, and take you into custody in Edendale. And then we could search your house, as well as taking your fingerprints and your DNA. And we’ll see what that ties you to.’

Farnham groaned. ‘His name was Rourke.’

‘Rourke?’

‘Martin Rourke, yes. He was the man, you know — the fixer.’

‘Is he local?’

‘No, not him. I think he lived in Chesterfield at that time, but he was Irish. I haven’t seen him around for a year or so. I can give you the phone number we used for him, if it’s any help.’

‘Yes, please. And what about the women, sir?’

‘Women?’ said Farnham. ‘Which women do you mean?’

‘Which women? Were there a lot of them?’

Farnham began to look shifty again. For a few minutes, he’d been telling the truth, but now his eyes were roving around the workshop, his hand went to cover his mouth, as if to keep the words from escaping.

‘Well, there isn’t much entertainment out here, you know. Just the pub in Rakedale, which doesn’t satisfy all of a man’s needs, if you know what I mean. And a lot of the blokes didn’t want to go to the pub anyway. If they were dossing on the farm for a week or two, they needed something to keep them happy.’

‘So women came to the farm?’

‘Now and then.’

‘Now and then? What does that mean? Once a week, once a month? A special treat on someone’s birthday? What?’

‘Most weekends, I suppose. But only in those seasons, you know — when there were gangs on the farm to get the harvest in, or to get an order out. You want to talk to Rourke — he was the one who organized it all. He always seemed to have the right sort of contacts.’

‘Are you sure you don’t know where Mr Rourke is now?’

‘Nah. He could be anywhere. He might be working in agriculture, or the building trade. Rourke was the sort who could turn his hand to anything, I reckon. Always good at talking himself up, you know? He might have gone back to Ireland, of course. They say there’s a lot of jobs over there now. No need for the paddies to come to England for work any more.’

‘The Celtic Tiger.’

Farnham rallied enough to make a joke. ‘Yes, I suppose you might call him that.’

Fry never responded to interviewees who tried to be funny or make light of the subject. She regarded Farnham sourly until he stopped smiling.

‘We suspect that Pity Wood Farm was being used for some kind of illegal activity, Mr Farnham,’ she said. ‘We think this was happening during your period there as a partner or farm manager, whatever you want to call yourself.’

‘If anything was happening, you can’t prove I was involved.’

‘The circumstances look very suspicious.’

‘Well, I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you to your speculation. I congratulate you on your imagination, Sergeant. But I don’t have much time for flights of fancy myself.’

‘The evidence is there at Pity Wood, Mr Farnham. Once we have a tight enough case against you, we’ll be back.’

‘Look, I’m not so stupid that I’d leave evidence lying around, if I’d committed a crime, now, am I? So if there was evidence left lying around, that proves that I didn’t do it, right? That is clearly the action of somebody with much less ability for planning ahead and foreseeing all eventualities than I am. So it’s psychologically wrong, don’t you see?’

‘Mr Farnham, we only deal with the facts, not with psychological theories.’

‘OK, you do that. You won’t find any evidence that connects to me. It just isn’t possible.’

Fry was frowning as they left Farnham’s house. Within a mile or two, her frown had turned to an expression of outrage, and she turned on Cooper.

‘Imagination?’ she said. ‘Imagination? Moi?’

‘So how do we go about finding Martin Rourke?’ asked Cooper.

‘Check the PNC and pray for an accurate address?’

Cooper ran the check when they got back to the office. The PNC could give him convictions, distinguishing marks, place of birth. But that wasn’t enough. He logged into the criminal intelligence system and looked for aliases, changes of address or known associates. No sign of Martin Rourke.

That left only one option. He put a call in to liaison and got a contact for the Garda Siochana in Dublin. Oh, yes, said the officer. They’d do everything in their power to help their colleagues in Derbyshire locate Mr Martin Rourke.

Cooper thanked him, and rang off. Oh, yes? Well, it would take the luck of the Irish.

20

That afternoon, the yellow skull recovered from Tom Farnham’s garage was packed up and sent off to Sheffield University for the anthropology team to examine. Dr Jamieson would report on its provenance, in due course. But this was Saturday, so Fry knew she couldn’t expect any results for a few days.

She looked across the CID room, where Cooper was at his desk.

‘You know, this is a case that has to be all about the victims,’ she said.

‘Isn’t every case about the victims, Diane?’

‘Of course,’ said Fry, waving a hand impatiently. ‘But, in this instance, the identity of the victims is crucial. We not only have to find out who they were, but how they were connected to each other — and we need to do both of those things before we can even begin to focus on any suspects. How did these women come to be at Pity Wood Farm? If we can start to build up a picture of them, Ben, we’re halfway there. Damn it, if we can do that, we’re almost all the way there.’

Cooper looked thoughtful. It was the one thing Fry could say about him — he always listened and considered what she said, even if he then went off and did something entirely different.

‘In a way, it feels as though there ought to be a third victim,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘A third victim. One who came in between these two, perhaps. I don’t know. But a victim that would fill in the gaps and make the connection. The ones we’ve found might not be Victims A and B at all, but A and C. It could be the absence of the real Victim B that’s making them look as though they’re not part of a sequence.’

‘Explain yourself, Ben.’

Cooper got up and began to pace in frustration, as if he was struggling to articulate in plain words some nagging but elusive idea that had been slithering at the back of his mind.

‘What I mean is, there might have been a third person who had connections to these other two. If there was a middle victim, the pieces could fall together. At the moment, it’s like there’s a black hole, a missing section where all the links have been broken.’

‘But there isn’t a third victim.’

‘Not that we’ve found, Diane.’

Fry thought of the excavated farmyard. ‘Well, not at Pity Wood. There isn’t a third victim there. We’d have found her by now, Ben.’

‘Has anyone checked that old caravan?’

‘The search team gave it an initial sweep. The SOCOs haven’t got round to it yet, but there’s certainly no