Dying to Sin

already know from my husband. It was Alex who spoke to this man, not me.’

Over their heads, music began. Feet thumped on wooden boards. Fry had to raise her voice over the noise.

‘Mrs Brindley, I know you’ve been in Rakedale longer than your husband — you inherited the house from an aunt, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘So you must know more about the sort of beliefs and superstitions people in a place like Rakedale have. I’ve heard talk of something called the “Old Religion”.’

‘Oh, I remember the old people talking about things like that. I mean, the people who were already old when I was a child — my grandmothers, and their generation. But it doesn’t still go on now, does it? I’m sure it can’t do, Sergeant. Not in this age of TV and computers and mobile phones. I can’t credit that people still believe in those things.’

‘But there was an incident when you first moved to Rakedale, wasn’t there? A rather unpleasant incident, involving you personally.’

‘Oh. So someone has been talking, have they?’ Mrs Brindley gave a brittle laugh, causing the stage make-up on her face to crack and fall in a small shower on her costume. ‘I wonder who that could have been? As if I didn’t know.’

‘PC Palfreyman dealt with it at the time, in his own way. But you must have been disturbed by it.’

‘Yes, of course. To be honest, I’ve never forgotten it. It wasn’t the birds so much as the few minutes when I thought there was an intruder in my house. A real, human intruder.’

‘Well, there must have been a real intruder in the first place. Did Mr Palfreyman ever tell you who he suspected?’

‘No. And I agreed with him that it was best not to know. I would have found it difficult to behave normally with them, if I’d found out. And then it would have been me who was being odd and refusing to be friendly.’

Fry knew from PC Palfreyman’s story that Joanne Stubbs, as she then was, had already been considered odd in the extreme by the villagers of Rakedale. But there were subtle and peculiar dynamics in rural relationships that had to be respected. There was certainly some kind of unspoken code that she didn’t understand. Probably that was why she had never been accepted the way that Joanne Stubbs finally had. It was because she refused to acknowledge the code.

‘A bit of a Catch-22 situation, Mrs Brindley.’

Joanne tugged at her costume. It was only a short tunic, and she was wearing nothing but tights below it.

‘I got over it. There’s no need to drag it all up again now. It’s in the past, as far as I’m concerned.’

‘Do you think the person responsible might have been Jack Elder?’

She sighed. ‘Yes, it’s possible.’

‘Have you mentioned this to your husband?’

‘As I said, it’s in the past.’

In Fry’s experience, the people who said ‘It’s in the past’ most often were those who couldn’t wipe out the memory of a traumatic experience. Repeating the mantra seemed to give them some degree of reassurance, like licking an open wound. They used the words as a defence against recollection.

Yes, those bad memories could be a killer.

Cooper had left Liz waiting in the car for him while he talked to Raymond Sutton. She was very tolerant, but by the time he came out of The Oaks, she was starting to sulk a bit. Understandably. He was neglecting her badly.

Cooper apologized as best he could. ‘I came to the reception after the baptism,’ he said. ‘I ate some sandwiches and sausage rolls, because you said you had to stay for a while. Now this was something I had to do.’

‘All right. It’s the job. And did you speak to the old man?’

‘Briefly. They were having a Christmas party.’

‘I hope you stayed away from the mistletoe.’

‘I tried.’

‘So what’s next, Ben?’

He hesitated, conscious of dangerous ground in front of him, but too late to avoid putting his foot right in it.

‘I’ve got to phone Diane Fry.’

Liz was silent for a few moments, staring out of the window. Cooper watched her, fingering his mobile phone, wondering when it would be safe to start dialling. Though her face was turned away from him, he could practically see the conflict going on in Liz’s mind. It was visible in the tenseness of her shoulders, in the way she fiddled with the buttons of her coat, in the ragged breaths that steamed up the damp window. She knew it was the job, and she was aware of its importance to him. But even so …

Finally, she turned back to him.

‘As long as we can go and sit in the pub while you do it, Ben,’ she said. ‘Then at least I won’t have to sit here twiddling my thumbs.’

Fry was back in the office when she took Cooper’s call. While picking mince pie crumbs from the carpet next to her desk, she listened carefully to his account of his visit to The Oaks.

‘And what was it that made you go there this morning, Ben? I didn’t quite understand that part.’

‘It was the baptism service, Diane. “To follow Christ means dying to sin.”’

‘I’m not big on the Bible, Ben. I’ve read it, of course. But I always tended to skip the miracles and go for the begetting, and the killing of the first born.’

‘That wasn’t what I meant.’

Fry decided to leave it at that. Some things were always going to be inexplicable. It was the nature of communication between human beings. Or between her and Ben Cooper, anyway.

‘So what did this sweet old lady tell you?’ she asked.

‘A lot of stuff that wasn’t relevant,’ admitted Cooper.

‘Oh, surprise me.’

‘But I think there were a few snippets that might be of interest. I’ll need to check them out, of course. Get some corroboration.’

‘In case Granny is just wandering in her mind, as I warned you.’

‘I don’t think she was. She seemed quite lucid, though a bit too talkative.’

There was a burst of noise in the background — laughter, female. Fry tried to picture the scene, but couldn’t quite fill it in. She could see Cooper himself, sitting perhaps with a drink in front of him, casual and relaxed, surrounded by his friends. In Fry’s mind, the friends were many, but vague and faceless.

‘Go on, then, Ben.’

‘Well, according to Mrs Greatorex, there was more going on at Pity Wood Farm than farming. She said there were often too many people there — far more than there should be on a farm, and not always at harvest time. It would confirm the impression I got from the farm accounts. And they weren’t always men, she says. Mrs Greatorex claims everybody knew this.’

‘So the Three Wise Monkeys are exactly what I thought, then.’

‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil?’

‘Yes …’ Fry hesitated. ‘No — that isn’t quite right, is it? They’re just sticking to the third part.’

‘Meaning they must have seen and heard things. They’re just not willing to talk about them.’

‘Right. That’s the way people are around here, isn’t it?’

Somebody seemed to be speaking to him now, distracting him from the call. Fry had the impression that he might have put his hand over the mouthpiece for a moment to muffle the conversation with his friends.

Of course, these people might not be what Cooper himself would call friends, but just acquaintances, the sort of people he sat with in the pub. Familiar enough to spend time with during his off-duty hours, without having to know anything about them, except what they drank when it was his turn to get a round. That kind of relationship was very shallow, wasn’t it? Not something to regret that she didn’t have herself.

‘Perhaps,’ said Cooper. ‘But that saying is originally from a carving in a Japanese shrine. The three wise