you’ve got yourself into some kind of trouble? Do you owe a lot of cash? Is it for drugs?’
He remained silent, denying the tapes any response. These were facts that might come out some other way, and other members of the team were already at work in the CID room, phoning his ex-employers, former colleagues, members of his family. SOCOs and a search team were about to pull apart his house. But Tarrant wasn’t going to help. Why should he save the police time?
‘What did you use to finish Patrick Rawson off when the horse didn’t kill him?’
Fry really wanted to know the answer to that one. Her money was on the pickaxe handle that he’d been carrying when she saw him in the woods. She hoped the search would turn it up. Bloodstains were preserved well on a wooden handle. Patrick Rawson’s DNA would clinch it, even if Adrian Tarrant stayed permanently dumb.
‘How well do you ride a horse? Not well, I bet. You’re not the type.’
He didn’t rise to it. She hadn’t expected him to. In a way, he had only been doing what everyone else did, making a living by exploiting his natural talents. In Tarrant’s case, his talent was a capacity for violence.
After interviewing the other hunt stewards, Fry had two witnesses to the fact that Tarrant had been absent from steward duty until later, around the time that she’d seen him on the road. She thought of the protestor who had been injured during the hunt and had identified Adrian Tarrant as her assailant. Tarrant had come fresh from killing Patrick Rawson, and the assault had probably come all too easily to him.
Now Fry knew what sort of animal Adrian Tarrant was. The sort whose instinct was to kill. Once the scent of blood was in their nostrils, they were likely to attack anything that crossed their path.
‘He’s saying nothing,’ said Hitchens, when she took a break. ‘And I’d anticipate that he doesn’t intend to.’
‘I agree,’ said Fry.
‘No explanation for how his prints came to be on the gate?’
‘None offered.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
Fry did at least have a clearer picture now of what had happened to Patrick Rawson. Earlier, she’d imagined him running across the field in his waxed coat and brown brogues, and had wondered where he’d been running to. But it had been more a question of what he was running away from. Sean Crabbe had just been the final element in deciding Mr Rawson’s fate.
And that reminded her it was Sean’s turn to face his fate now. The CPS would be making a decision early next week on what charges to bring against him. Fry found herself hoping that he’d avoid a custodial sentence. Of all the people prison would do no good for, Sean Crabbe had to be top of the list.
‘So what are we going to do now, sir?’ asked Fry. ‘We don’t have any other evidence against Adrian Tarrant.’
‘I suggest you have another go at Naomi Widdowson,’ said Hitchens.
‘Why?’
Hitchens smiled. ‘Because, according to Tarrant’s colleagues at the haulage company, Naomi is his girlfriend.’
34
That evening, David Headon needed to take only one glance at the badge found during the search at Eden View.
‘The ROC,’ he said. ‘Where did you get that?’
‘The Royal Observer Corps, right?’ said Cooper.
‘That’s it. Did you know I was a member?’
‘No, I didn’t. You’re just the sort of person I’d expect to know about these things.’
Headon was an old friend of his father’s, a man of about the same age as Joe Cooper. He’d visited Bridge End Farm a few times when Ben was a teenager, and he could remember Headon talking endlessly about annual camps at RAF stations around the country.
‘All the ROC posts were closed in 1991, and we were stood down completely a few years later,’ said Headon. ‘There were quite a few of us, you know. Eighteen thousand observers, until the cutbacks started in the sixties. The Corps did a brilliant job during the Second World War, tracking German air raids. Then, when the Cold War started, the observers were needed again. We had posts all over the country. There was even one at Windsor Castle, in the coal cellar.’
‘What did the ROC do, exactly?’ asked Cooper.
‘What do you think?’
‘Observe, I suppose.’
‘That’s right. Observe and report.’
‘I thought I recognized the logo. I was at the National Arboretum the other day.’
‘Ah, you saw the ROC grove. So how were the trees doing? Still waterlogged?’
‘No. They’re small, but alive.’
‘I’m glad.’
‘The trees had labels with this logo. They said “7 Group Bedford, 8 Group Coventry”. For some reason, the labels stuck in my mind. It’s the emblem, I think. It’s quite distinctive, and not immediately obvious what it’s supposed to be.’
Headon stroked the emblem on the ROC badge. ‘He’s an Elizabethan beacon lighter, who used to warn of Spanish ships approaching the coast.’
‘Yes, I found that on Google.’
‘Well, that’s pretty much the role the observers carried on, though during the Second World War it was German planes they were tracking. A series of observer posts could follow an aircraft’s flight path right across Britain, the way they did when Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland in 1941.’
‘Aircraft recognition, then,’ said Cooper.
‘That was it, for long time. It was what a lot of the blokes that I knew came into the Corps for. But that job went out when aircraft got too fast for us. By the 1960s, it was becoming a bit impractical. A low-flying enemy aircraft could have entered UK airspace, flown to London, dropped its bombs and been on the way home again, all while the observers were still trying to make their minds up whether it was friend or foe. The ROC would have been wound up right then, if it hadn’t been for the Bomb.’
Cooper could tell that Headon pronounced the word ‘bomb’ with a capital ‘B’ this time, and he knew immediately what he meant.
‘The atomic bomb.’
‘That’s the baby. Believe it or not, Ben, when you were a child, me and my mates in the Royal Observer Corps were your first line of defence against a nuclear holocaust. That was the time we went underground.’
Fry knocked on the door of the DI’s office. She was feeling very pleased with herself. Almost smug, some might have said.
‘Get any more out of Naomi Widdowson?’ asked Hitchens.
‘No,’ said Fry. ‘She’s gone “no comment”, like her boyfriend.’
The DI looked at her. ‘But there’s something else. I can tell from your face, Diane.’
‘I decided to get the calls record from the phone network,’ she said.
‘But we already did that. Irvine and Hurst went through all the calls on both of Patrick Rawson’s phones, didn’t they?’
‘Yes.’
‘The only calls we couldn’t identify were to a pay-as-you-go mobile. And that was the one Naomi Widdowson used to set up the false deal.’
‘That’s right.’
‘So?’
