‘A funny way of doing it, sir.’
Hitchens shrugged. ‘I don’t know. A special insight into the death business? Maybe he intended to defy expectations and take over Hudson and Slack one day. He could have been planning to take the firm in a different direction.’
Fry squinted uneasily at the DI, but realized he was joking.
‘He was Richard Slack’s son,’ she said. ‘He could have inherited his father’s ruthless business streak, but it got twisted somewhere along the way. And instead, everyone ended up feeling sorry for him.’
‘Everyone, Diane?’
‘Well, Billy McGowan must have felt some sympathy for
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him. If someone like McGowan was willing to keep quiet about Vernon’s arrangement with Professor Robertson, then Vernon must have had something about him that I couldn’t see.’
‘I suppose so.’
Fry looked at the door of the interview room. ‘That still doesn’t explain why the old man killed him. Why did he do that?’
On the other side of the door, Abraham Slack sat looking at the triple-deck tape machine with a dead stare, devoid of emotion. Even the tapes had ceased to record his silence.
Ben Cooper was in the kitchen of Greenshaw Lodge when Fry found him later that day. He’d been watching the house gradually become sparser and more empty as the forensic team carried away items for examination. In the sitting-room display cabinet, he could still see the photograph of Abraham Slack and his family, though the SOCOs’ lights reflecting off the glass made the individual figures impossible to identify.
‘There was something about the way Vernon spoke,’ he said, when Fry negotiated the safe path to reach him. Cooper was trying to get his thoughts clear in his own mind, and Fry was the only person he thought might understand.
‘Shouldn’t you still be in hospital?’ she said.
‘They’ve stitched me up and given me a tetanus jab. There was no point in staying there any longer.’
She looked at his bandaged foot. ‘No bones broken or anything? I’ve seen such horrible stories about animal traps.’
Cooper shook his head. ‘The trick is to lie still and minimize injury. Animals don’t know that, so they end up tearing their own legs off.’
Fry grimaced. ‘What do you mean about the way Vernon spoke?’
‘When I talked to him, he never once said “I” or “me”. It was always “we” or some passive form, like “There’s a job to be done”. Most people would have said “I’ve got a job to
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do”. But when Vernon spoke, he made it sound as if none of it was anything to do with him personally. It was as though he was distancing himself from the whole thing.’
Cooper looked at Fry to see if she was listening. She was studying the marks of the shotgun pellets in the wall, where Abraham Slack had loosed off his first, and wildest, shot. The cartridge case had been found in the hallway, near the foot of the stairs.
‘It’s exactly what Dr Kane said about some of the phrases used in the phone calls,’ he said. ‘An unconscious form of denial, suggesting underlying guilt.’
‘So Vernon made the phone calls?’ said Fry.
She was trying to sound as though it was a minor detail. But Cooper knew that the calls were very important to her.
‘Yes, Diane. I think they’ll find a voice changer somewhere among all that stuff they’ve taken out of the house. Or maybe in Vernon’s car.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘He was at the councillor’s funeral in Wardlow, you know. That was a Hudson and Slack job, and Vernon was one of the drivers. It might have looked odd for one of the mourners not to go into the service, and someone might have noticed that. But the drivers wait outside the church. Vernon was ideally placed to make that call.’
‘What about the call from the crematorium, though? That funeral was being conducted by a firm from Chesterfield. It wasn’t Hudson and Slack’s job.’
‘But the one before it was theirs, Diane. There was a half hour turnaround at the crematorium. The limousine drivers from the previous funeral were just waiting for the mourners to finish inspecting the floral tributes. They were away out of the gates long before we arrived.’
Fry had been looking at the pellet marks too long now. She couldn’t even have been seeing them any more.
‘And Vernon was there?’ she said.
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‘I’m sure he must have been driving one of the limos that day.’
She looked at Cooper then with an eager expression, as if there was something she needed from him.
‘Ben, he said there was going to be a killing. What killing did he mean?’
Cooper frowned. ‘I don’t know. There’s only one person’s death you can fully control, isn’t there? There’s just one form of dying that has an unambiguous meaning. That’s when you take your own life.’
‘You think that’s what he planned to do?’
‘People don’t get to choose how they die. With one exception: suicide. It’s the only way we can have any control over our own death. The only way we can give the end of our lives any meaning.’
Cooper knew that suicide was often an act of anger against people who were close to the victim but had failed to recognize their despair. Or it could be aimed at those who caused the despair in the first place. In its way,
