‘Yes?’ ‘Well, there are other instincts, too.’
‘You couldn’t bring yourself to be too closely involved in a criminal act?’ said Tailby. ‘Is that right?’ ‘All my training was against it, you see. All my
beliefs. How could I? I was taking such a risk already.’ Maggie’s face betrayed a moment of appeal, a deep uncertainty. ‘Do you understand?’
Cooper looked away from the appeal. That was the crucial issue, in the end. Maggie Crew had waited at the Hammond Tower, torn between fear for the safety of her daughter and her horror at what Ros was doing out there on the dark moor. She hadn’t wanted to be there, but she couldn’t leave. Two powerful instincts had been battling inside her, and no doubt she had paced backwards and forwards at the foot of the tower, staring helplessly into the darkness, smoking cigarette after cigarette. Cooper could picture the unfinished
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butts tossed away, still glowing as they flew into the night. How many might Maggie have smoked during that time? Many of the cigarette ends would have landed among the trees on the slope, in the deep undergrowth. But not all. Some of them had landed on the ledge below the tower.
‘And what exactly was it Ros intended to do? Did she tell you?’
‘Oh, she didn’t just intend to do it. She actually did it,’ said Maggie. ‘She prepared her plan beforehand. She had two homemade petrol bombs hidden behind some loose stones in the wall of the tower. She had even collected some bits of rubbish and shoved them into the hole - empty drinks cans, chocolate wrappers, you know the sort of thing. She said nobody would bother to look in the hole when they saw the rubbish. I suppose she was right.’
‘Well, almost,’ said Cooper, thinking of Mark Roper and his preoccupation with clearing up after other people.
‘That makes me an accomplice,’ said Maggie. ‘I knew what she intended to do, and I helped her to do it. Technically, I’m guilty of conspiracy to cause an explosion.’
Neither of the police officers said anything. At that moment, it seemed the least of her concerns.
‘Ros had put petrol in two Evian water bottles. I don’t know who taught her how to do that. But then, I don’t know how she was brought up. I don’t even know who her adopted parents were. I don’t know anything about her at all, even though she was my daughter. I might
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have been able to put that right, in time. But they denied me the chance.’ ‘Who do you mean by “they”?’ ‘The men at the farm. The dogfighting people. They killed Ros.’ ‘Are you sure? Did you see it happen?’ ‘I didn’t see it. I heard it.’ ‘Tell us.’ ‘Something must have gone wrong at the farm. I heard the first fire bomb go off, then the second, though it wasn’t as loud. But for some reason Ros didn’t get away as quickly as she meant to. The men came out of the shed with their dogs and they chased her back up the hill towards the tower. She was coming back to meet me, and I was supposed to keep her safe. But she never stood a chance. Oh, she might have been able to outrun the men, to escape among the trees in the darkness. But there were the dogs.’ ‘If Ros never made it to the tower…’ ‘I remember hearing the voices of the men shouting. And the dogs barking and snarling in the dark somewhere. I didn’t know what was happening, and I couldn’t see anything. Then there was a scream ‘ Maggie stumbled to a halt. ‘The only other thing I remember is the man running at me out of the darkness, and then the knife and the pain …’ She looked at Tailby. ‘What actually happened to her? Can you tell me?’ ‘Your daughter fell off Ringham Edge, very near the tower. She ran off the top of one of the Cat Stones trying to escape from the dogs.’ ‘I see,’ said Maggie. She took a few seconds to digest
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the idea, as if trying to fit it in with her mental picture. ‘It’s ironic, isn’t it? It was all because of the dogs. It was the dogs that she was trying to save.’ ‘I’m afraid those particular dogs were trained to kill,’ said Tailby. ‘We seized six pit bull terriers from various addresses when we made our arrests. Now they will have to be destroyed anyway.’ ‘So it was the fall that killed her.’ Maggie took a deep breath. ‘Will the GPS carry forward a prosecution on a murder charge? Or will the men plead guilty to manslaughter? I’m sorry, that’s a lawyer speaking again.’ ‘Unfortunately,’ said Tailby slowly, ‘we believe the fall didn’t kill her outright. Your daughter didn’t die straight away. The pathologist thinks she was still alive for a while as she lay on that ledge. She had dragged herself a foot or two. The debris under her fingernails included gritstone sand from where she had been lying.’ Maggie’s face went white, and the confidence in her eyes died. ‘She was still alive, then. And I left her.’ ‘You weren’t to know that,’ said Cooper. ‘I left her there to die.’ The DCI looked at Cooper sharply. But Cooper felt he understood Maggie at last. He knew there was nothing to stop you being consumed by guilt when you failed to protect someone who relied on you. ‘There was nothing you could have done,’ he said. ‘I abandoned her again,’ said Maggie. ‘And this time she’ll never come back, will she?’ They allowed Maggie a rest period. They had plenty of time to keep her in custody before she had to appear
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in court. More evidence was needed yet, before they could decide how many murder charges she would face. ‘Why did you associate yourself with the animal rights group?’ Tailby asked her later. ‘I wanted to find out where Ros had gone, why she hadn’t got in touch. I couldn’t remember clearly enough, and I thought the details had become distorted, as they do in a nightmare. Most of all, I couldn’t believe that she was dead. I thought she had dropped me because I was no use to her any more. And with Jenny Weston dead, those other women were the only connection to Ros I had left. I’m afraid I pestered them until they let me join in their activities.’ ‘How did they react to you?’ ‘They felt sorry for me, I think. That made me angry. But I needed them - I needed the information I thought they had about Ros. On the other hand, some of them had heard that I was attacked near Ringham Edge Farm. They wondered whether I had been attacked by the dogfighters. None of them ever dared to ask me outright, but I think it was that which earned me acceptance.’ ‘But they didn’t know what had happened to Ros?’ ‘No. And if they knew what Ros had planned to do, they wouldn’t have told anybody about it. They have their own loyalty, you see.’ ‘Perhaps they just thought she had moved on again somewhere else, to undertake some other mission. She seems to have seen herself as some kind of animal rights commando,’ said Cooper. ‘But they heard about the latest body, and they knew
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perfectly well who it was. It seems I was the only one in ignorance. I had gone along to the cattle market still hoping. I was so blind - but only because I didn’t want to give up hoping.’ ‘Hoping that Ros would turn up?’ ‘I thought she might have appeared at the cattle market - it was her sort of thing, direct action. The plan was to slash the tyres on the vehicles of the people that had been targeted. That’s why we were all given knives. They almost didn’t let me have one, you know. It was a kind of sign of acceptance. Ros would have been pleased to see me there.’ ‘Even though you were actually committing a crime yourself this time, Maggie.’ She nodded. ‘You see which instinct won? Besides, it was already too late for anything else by then. Too late for the old Maggie Crew. You can’t go backwards. You can’t get parts of your life back, once they’re dead.’ Keith Teasdale and five others had been arrested, despite the distractions at the cattle market. They were all believed to have been involved in the dogfighting ring at Ringham Edge Farm. Under questioning, Teasdale told the story of the night Ros Daniels had staged her single-handed fire-bomb attack and the chaos that had followed as men and dogs spilled out on to the hill in a mad chase lit by flames from the burning pickup. Teasdale had admitted that he and Warren Leach had made a search of the area near the Hammond Tower at first light next morning and had found the body of
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the young woman on a ledge under the most northerly of the Cat Stones. They had moved it deeper into the cavity to conceal it, he said. At the same time, Yvonne Leach had stumbled across Maggie
