Dying to Sin

up to the fact that Isabel Cooper had deteriorated to the point where they could no longer keep her at home.

Above all, Cooper found that he was remembering the smell. It was as if it had seeped into his car silently and rapidly, like a lethal leak from his exhaust.

There had been a stink in the room worse than anything he had ever smelt on a farm. No cesspit, no slurry tank, no innards from a freshly gutted rabbit or pheasant had ever smelt as bad as the entirely human stench that filled the room. There was excrement daubed across the wallpaper, and on the bedclothes piled on the floor. A pool of urine was drying into a sticky pool on the carpet near to where similar puddles had been scrubbed clean with disinfectant, leaving pale patches like the remnantsof some virulent skin disease. A chair lay on the rug with one leg missing. A curtain had been torn off its rail, and the pages of books and magazines were scattered like dead leaves on every surface. A pink slipper sat ludicrously in a wooden fruit bowl on the chest of drawers, and a thin trickle of blood ran across the top drawer, splitting into two forks across the wooden handle. The drawers and the wardrobe had been emptied of their contents, which were heaped at random on the bed.

It was from beneath the heap of clothes that the noise came, monotonous and inhuman, a low, desperate wailing. When he moved towards the bed, the mound stirred and the keening turned to a fearful whimper. Cooper knew that the crisis was over, for now. But this had been the worst so far, no doubt about it. The evidence was all around him.

He leaned closer to a coat with an imitation fur collar, but was careful not to touch the bed, for fear of sparking off a violent reaction. The coat was drenched in a familiar scent that brought a painful lump to his throat. A white hand was visible briefly as it clutched for a sleeve and the edge of a skirt to pull them closer for concealment. The fingers withdrew again into the darkness like a crab retreating into its shell. The whimpering stopped.

‘It was the Devil,’ said a small voice from deep in the pile of clothes. ‘The Devil made me do it.’

The mingled odours of stale scent, sweat and excrement and urine made Cooper feel he was aboutto be sick. He swallowed and forced himself to keep his voice steady.

‘The Devil’s gone away. You can come out now, Mum. The Devil’s gone away.’

When Fry went back in to interview Martin Rourke for a second time, he’d been allowed to consult a lawyer. She was expecting a string of ‘no comments’, and a frustrating end to her trip to Dublin. But maybe things were different here.

‘Of course I remember her,’ said Rourke straight away. ‘I want to be honest with you.’

‘Remember who?’

‘Nadezda, the Slovak. She couldn’t resist trying out the crank herself. Stupid bitch. It made her careless. She was bound to kill herself sooner or later.’

‘Kill herself? You’re suggesting that Nadezda Halak died in an accident?’

‘That’s exactly what happened. It was accidental death, brought on by her own carelessness. That would be a factor, all right.’

Fry glanced at Lenaghan, who gave her a nod to go ahead.

‘Mr Rourke, tell us exactly what happened, in your own words.’

‘Well, there’s nothing much to tell. There was an explosion in the shed one day. None of us knew the chemicals were so dangerous. Nada had been standing closest to the equipment when it blew up.’

‘Nada is …?’

‘The woman you said. Halak. Nada is what we called her, for short.’

‘And she was killed by the explosion?’

‘Dead as you like. It was lucky she was the only one so near. There were other folk about, but they only got a few cuts, one or two acid burns. Nothing serious.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘Some of the workers started to panic, but Tom Farnham quietened them down. He said there was plenty of room on the farm to dispose of a body where no one would ever find it. And who would come looking for her? Like I said, those people move on all the time. They want to be untraceable.’

‘So you buried her on the farm?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the Sutton brothers didn’t object to this?’

Rourke snorted. ‘How could they? They’d done exactly the same thing themselves, three years before.’

Cooper had never felt so bad about questioning a witness. Though they’d achieved what they set out to do, there was no sense of satisfaction in getting Raymond Sutton to confirm what he suspected. It had been a knowledge that he didn’t really want to have to share, but now he couldn’t keep it to himself any longer.

In a way, he supposed he’d been hoping, deep down, that Sutton would deny it, that he’d be able to prove somehow that it had never happened. Well, it might have been better if he’d never asked. But then he would have had to live with the doubt. Cooper knew there had been no way of winning in this situation.

And there was certainly no way of achieving justice — not justice in the terms of the law, nor justice in any subjective sense. Even if Derek Sutton had still been alive, what would have been the point of punishing him? His brother was an accessory to the crime, of course. After the fact, if not before. No matter how contemptuous he’d been, no matter how many disapproving silences he’d indulged in over the kitchen table, Raymond had gone along with his brother’s superstitions, and had told no one about the skull.

Well, of course he hadn’t. Sharing a house with a crazy brother was one thing. Watching that brother get carted off to spend the rest of his life in a psychiatric institution while you were left to cope entirely on your own — that was a different thing altogether. The decision wouldn’t have been an easy one for most families, let alone the Suttons of Pity Wood Farm. In fact, there was no decision involved. Blood was blood, and you stood by your own. End of story.

Cooper finished his report and stood up. Yes, it would have been the end of the story. If only Raymond Sutton had died himself before the farm was dug up. That had been his plan, Cooper was sure.

But The Oaks had looked after him too well. Their care had prolonged his life longer than he’d expected. Physically, he was probably in better condition now than when he was looking after himself at home. So Raymond had sat in his room at The Oaks, watching the seasons change over the hills, while the sale of the farm went through, the paperwork was completed, and the builders moved in. From that moment, he must have been expecting every day to hear the news that something had been found. Each morning he must have looked for the newspapers to read the headlines, every evening he must have been the first in front of the TV for the start of East Midlands Today. And every day he must have lived in expectation of the footsteps in the hallway of his care home, the voices of strangers speaking his name.

When Raymond Sutton abandoned the farm and sold up immediately after the death of his brother, he hadn’t expected to live very long. A matter of days or weeks, perhaps. But then he’d done a terrible thing. He’d survived.

Raymond had thought he was tappy, just like his brother. Approaching his end, preparing to meet his maker. All those other euphemisms for dying. But in the end he’d lived too long to escape being called to account for his actions. How ironic that Raymond was also the only member of his family who expected to be punished for eternity.

To follow Christ means dying to sin. Raymond Sutton would die twice over.

Fry produced a series of evidence bags. They contained the items they’d found at the house in Bunratty Road, hidden behind the wardrobe in the bedroom of Martin Rourke’s daughter.

‘Was this the woman they buried four years ago?’ asked Fry. ‘Her name is Orla Doyle, an Irish national. Black hair. She would be thirty-two years old by now.’

‘I don’t know who she was,’ said Rourke.

He was starting to sweat now, Fry could see. He hadn’t felt guilty for the death of Nadezda Halak, but Orla Doyle was a name a bit closer to home.

‘You were too greedy, Mr Rourke,’ said Fry. ‘This is Orla Doyle’s passport, found in your house this morning, so you can’t try to tell us you had no connection with her. I suppose you realized from dealing with illegal