Dying to Sin

before I ever got to work on them. In fact, Tom Farnham got a guy he knew to process a few gallons for them to use, so they’d have no trouble persuading themselves to believe it. But the bottom had gone out of the diesel business by then. Farmers got too scared of the Excise.’

‘But why there? Why Pity Wood Farm?’

‘Farnham was the man who came up with the idea. And, I have to give him his due, Pity Wood was a perfect set-up for what we wanted. A remote farm, where no one would notice the smell. Lots of smells on a farm, eh? And plenty of empty sheds, plus space to bury the waste. Perfect. All we needed was labour. Well, labour that didn’t ask any questions. That was where Martin Rourke came in. It was my speciality. I had the contacts with people in the import business.’ He grinned. ‘Human imports, I mean. Obviously.’

‘Cheap imported labour.’

‘But so what? It’s only like getting your telly from China, or your clothes made in India. The whole world runs on cheap labour now. It’s a fact of twenty-first-century economics. The only difference is that people don’t care as long as they can’t see it happening. Sweat shops in Asia are fine, but let someone like me employ a few economic migrants and the law comes down on me like a ton of bricks.’

‘I think the correct term would be illegal immigrant.’

‘Whatever. It’s the same, no matter what you call them. But if it happens here, some entrepreneur like me taking advantage of cheap labour to run a going concern, then people get all outraged. What a scandal, they say. It’s practically slavery. All that sort of crap. But those workers live a lot better here than they do in Bangladesh, you know.’

‘Or Slovakia.’

‘Slovakia?’

‘Don’t you remember a woman called Nadezda Halak? She was from Slovakia.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t remember their names, for heaven’s sake. They got their wages in cash, and we provided accommodation, but that’s as far as our obligations went. They didn’t stay around for long, any of them. They’d get a toe-hold in this country, or in the UK, and off they’d go to work in a sandwich factory or something. We were providing a service, really. The government ought to have been giving us a grant.’

‘You were using these people to manufacture illegal drugs, at great risk to themselves,’ pointed out Fry. ‘There’s no way you can even attempt to justify that.’

‘We all take risks in life,’ said Rourke. ‘If we think it’s worth it. Don’t you take risks, in your job?’

‘The difference,’ said Fry, ‘is that I know what risks I’m taking.’

With the tapes turning slowly, Raymond Sutton talked. He didn’t appear to be talking to Hitchens and Cooper, or even to the tape recorder, but to some voice inside his own head — a voice which seemed to be answering him at times.

‘When you’re young, you don’t think you’re ever going to die,’ he said. ‘But sometimes, when you’re old, it can’t come too soon.’

Cooper leaned towards Sutton. ‘Your brother, Derek — you remember we talked about his superstitions?’

‘Eh?’

‘Derek had some funny beliefs, didn’t he? You said he was a bit fey, like your mother.’

‘You never knew our mother.’

‘You told me, Mr Sutton. Remember?’

Cooper wanted to take hold of his arm and shake it until the old man remembered. Though he held himself under tight control, Sutton seemed to read the shadow of a threat in his face and flinched away.

‘All kinds of bad luck came along. But it was only to be expected. It was what I warned them all about.’

‘What do you mean?’

Sutton stared at him. ‘The bad luck. All those disasters. Derek said there would be bad luck when Billy left the farm. He said it had been known for generations. There was a terrible row when I chucked Billy out.’

‘You got rid of the skull?’

‘Yes. Damned thing. It was damning us all. I told Derek, it was an evil thing, and it had to go. The house was cursed, cursed by the Devil, and my brother was one of his dupes. It had to go.’

‘There must have been arguments.’

‘Arguments, aye. Blazing rows. Derek wouldn’t hear of it, and we stopped speaking of the thing altogether after a while. One night, when he was asleep, I took it out of the wall, and I smashed it up and I burned it in the incinerator, and I scraped out the ash and I drove out to Carsington Reservoir, and I tipped it in the water. And Billy was gone. For he that is dead is freed from sin.’

‘How did your brother respond when he found out?’

‘He was raving. He was never stable, Derek. Never followed God. He’d strayed off the path. God rest his soul, but he was a lost cause.’

‘We found traces of potassium nitrate in your kitchen — that’s saltpetre. And other ingredients used in a recipe for a Hand of Glory. Have you heard of it?’

‘Ah, he was always on with his messing. Meddling with things he knew nothing about. Tempting the Devil, I called it. I wouldn’t have none of it. I threw his stuff out if I found it, or chucked it down the sink. He started trying to hide things from me, but I smelled him out. The stink of evil is never forgotten.’

Cooper remembered the kitchen at Pity Wood Farm, the dripping sink and the unidentifiable jars in the fridge sitting next to the builders’ milk. There had certainly been a stink that he might never forget. Whether it was the stink of evil he supposed was open to interpretation.

‘I don’t know what you want,’ said Sutton, suddenly agitated. ‘What is it you want?’

‘Mr Sutton, it was the head, wasn’t it? It had nothing to do with a Hand of Glory. After you threw Billy out, your brother wanted a head.’

Sutton focused on him nervously, his eyes watering now, and Cooper thought he would lose him altogether in the next few moments.

‘I believe in what I believe. But Derek’s faith lay elsewhere. If you believe in something — really believe it — you’re prepared to take your belief to the extreme.’

‘What are you saying, sir?’

‘She was dead already. Dead as can be. Derek said it wouldn’t hurt her. The body is only the shell, when the soul has moved on to a better place.’

‘And so you dug her up and removed her head?’ said Hitchens, aghast. ‘I can’t believe it.’

‘No, no. Well, it was already … detached, more or less.’

Cooper recalled stories of riots at gallows sites, when the families of hanged criminals fought the anatomists’ men for corpses. People had different reasons for wanting possession of a body, or parts of it.

‘Derek said we needed another one,’ said the old man finally. ‘But he was wrong. It never worked, did it?’

And Cooper sat back, suddenly exhausted. He hadn’t realized how tense he’d been, the amount of nervous energy he’d been expending on willing the old man to speak, to stay aware for the amount of time he needed him to.

‘No, Mr Sutton,’ he said wearily. ‘It didn’t work.’

Raymond Sutton looked around the room, his eyes becoming vague as they met the light from the window. Tears glinted in his lashes and settled slowly on to his cheeks.

‘I want you to go away now,’ he said. ‘I want everyone to go away.’

Cooper caught himself shaking uncontrollably by the time he left the interview room. He couldn’t face the idea of crossing the car park from the custody suite and walking back up to the CID room to transcribe his notes, as if everything was perfectly normal. So he sat for a few minutes in his car instead.

He couldn’t conceal the fact that he’d found the interview with Raymond Sutton unbearably upsetting. But at least he knew why — and it wasn’t just some pathetic tendency to sympathize with the underdog, as Diane Fry would have suggested. Raymond Sutton’s rambling about his home being cursed had reminded him too strongly of his own mother at the height of her illness.

Specifically, it reminded him of one traumatic incident that had taken place just before the family had faced