Dying to Sin (33 page)

33

Wednesday

Fry was already tired when she sat down at her desk next morning. She was supposed to produce a full report for the chiefs on her visit to the Garda Síochána, an analysis of the level of co-operation, and whether she’d made any useful contacts. Fry knew that any report to be read by senior management should use two positives to every negative, if it was going to give the right impression. Three was good, too. But never four – if you used four, it started to sound like sarcasm.

Well, on this occasion, a few bullet points would satisfy them. They wouldn’t want to know too much about Garda Lenaghan, would they? The identification of Orla Doyle should be enough to focus the interest.

Fry had now made two positive IDs on the bodies found at Pity Wood Farm, though not without a bit of good luck. She hoped her efforts would be properly appreciated. It wasn’t her fault that the skull didn’t belong to Orla Doyle. Everyone in the office this morning was talking about Victim C, which was the last thing she needed.

She found a copy of a file on her desk. There were photographs, so far out of proportion that they looked huge and disorientating. The Forensic Science Service laboratory had performed wonders getting fingerprints from Nadezda Halak’s hand, processing the sloughing skin sufficiently to provide a strong possibility of a match if her prints were on record. It couldn’t have been easy, teasing out an identifiable print from a fragment of rotting hand. The entire thumb was gone, and so were half of the index and middle fingers. The skin that remained had been decomposing and so fragile that it had to be soaked in alcohol to toughen it up and draw out the water.

But under twenty times magnification in the scanning electron microscope, traces of damage to the bones of the hand were just about visible, along with fractures at the surface where the cartilage had been attached to the central arch. Magnified a hundred times, the damage was unmistakable – linear fractures ending in a small region of crushed bone. There were no signs of healing, which indicated that the fracture had occurred perimortem – at, or just before, death.

Instead of finishing her report, Fry phoned the Forensic Science Service and asked to speak to one of the chemists who was dealing with evidence from the abandoned meth lab at Pity Wood.

‘Yes, methamphetamine production in a makeshift laboratory is a very dangerous activity, unless you have training as a chemist,’ she said.

‘I think we can take it that the people involved at Pity Wood didn’t have that training, Doctor.’

‘Well, if an operator without proper training allows the red phosphorus to overheat – due to lack of adequate ventilation, perhaps – then phosphine gas can be produced. If it’s produced in large enough quantities, the gas usually explodes. Technically, the conclusion would be auto-ignition from diphosphine formation, caused by the overheating of phosphorus.’

‘Thank you.’

Fry put the phone down. Training as a chemist? The idea was enough to make anyone laugh. Illegal workers like Nadezda Halak, paid a pittance and hardly daring to go out in daylight for fear of being seen? Their instructions would have been basic, their understanding of what they were involved in even less, perhaps.

In other circumstances, Fry would have said that it was a mistake to assume innocence, just because an individual was dead. It was possible to be guilty and a victim at the same time. But she could never believe it of Nadezda and her fellow workers at Pity Wood.

* * *

Cooper came in, accompanying DI Hitchens after a visit to Edendale District General Hospital, where Raymond Sutton was being treated.

‘Mr Sutton isn’t in good shape,’ said Cooper, chewing his lip nervously. ‘They’re very worried about him on the ward. He wasn’t strong to start with. If one of the care assistants hadn’t been passing his room, he would have been dead a few minutes later.’

‘Nobody’s blaming you, mate,’ said Murfin.

‘We gave him a bit of a hard time, put too much pressure on him. He’s an old man, after all.’

‘Gavin’s right, Ben,’ said Hitchens. ‘No one is blaming you.’

‘Are you sure, sir?’

‘Yes, absolutely.’

As the DI left, Fry put her phone down and caught up with the news.

‘Raymond Sutton? Poor bloke. I suppose this is your fault, Ben.’

Cooper slumped in his chair, crushed into silence.

‘Me, I blame the scapegoats,’ said Murfin. ‘They’re always responsible for anything that goes wrong, I find.’

‘Shut up, Gavin.’

‘Yes, boss.’

‘So who is this Victim C that everyone’s talking about?’ asked Fry. ‘Any theories?’

‘There were undoubtedly male workers at the farm,’ said Cooper.

‘Another migrant who met a sticky end?’

‘Well, who else?’

‘The mysterious Alan,’ said Fry. ‘Haven’t we been told that he disappeared seven or eight years ago? I know everyone tries to claim that he left home because he didn’t get on with his brothers, but we have no proof of that.’

‘You’re right,’ said Cooper.

‘You know I’m right, Ben. You’ve known from the moment that Alan was first mentioned that he didn’t just leave home. You understand these people better than me. But I remember you saying that they could be protecting someone.’

‘Yes, I did say that.’

‘Well, I’ll ask you again: protecting who?’

Cooper hung his head. ‘I don’t know, Diane. Perhaps the whole family. Perhaps the village. I really don’t know.’

‘We ought to have been making some effort to trace Alan Sutton, don’t you think?’

‘It didn’t seem a priority before.’

‘But things change, Ben,’ said Fry. ‘Around here, things change all the time.’

Cooper saw Murfin wink at him as he got up to attend his personal interview with the new superintendent. He was first man over the top, and he looked like a condemned criminal on his way to the scaffold, trying to stay cheerful but knowing he was doomed.

It was a bit like the family at Pity Wood Farm. Yes, Cooper felt sure the Suttons must have thought they were doomed. Cursed, anyway. Aside from the personal problems between the brothers, plague and pestilence had followed the changes in farming over the last couple of decades. BSE, foot and mouth, and now bird flu – each one like a dark cloud on the horizon that could break into a storm at any moment and wipe an entire industry away.

Already, the threat had come very close. The foot-and-mouth outbreak of 2001 hadn’t quite reached the Peak District. But there were farms a few miles south, on the border near Sudbury, where cattle and sheep had been slaughtered in the mass cull. And then along came H5N1, the strain of avian flu virus that could be carried by wild birds. Any day a poultry farmer might look up into the sky and see a flock of geese, or a skein of mallards, and wonder whether they were bringing the disease north.

Yes, there had been new enterprises at Pity Wood, but some of them were of a nature that the Suttons hadn’t understood. They had no idea that the world had changed so much around them that illegal drug manufacturing was the only way for their farm to make a profit. Ironically, it could be seen as the sort of thinking the government was trying to encourage – moving away from traditional farming to new and exciting ways of exploiting the assets of their property.

Of course, the Suttons’ big mistake had been inviting Tom Farnham in. He must have looked like a saviour at the time, promising all kinds of things, including a bright new future for Pity Wood Farm, new ways of earning income, enough money to put the farm back on its feet.

But Farnham had been the worm on the carcase of a dying animal. He’d exploited the still-warm flesh for his own short-term ends. The money had gone into his own pocket, not to the Suttons, or to safeguard the future of Pity Wood.

‘Those poor women,’ said Cooper when he heard the full story of Nadezda Halak and her coworkers from Fry. ‘They were following the instructions they’d been given, without any idea of the horrendous risks they were running.’

‘They certainly didn’t understand what the chemicals were, or how harmful their effects could be,’ said Fry. ‘And why
would
they suspect? They saw a collection of ordinary household products, bought over the counter, or from the supermarket shelf. Why would they think those products could be lethal?’

‘I bet they didn’t care, anyway. They just knew they were paid much better for that job than for picking carrots.’

‘You sound unusually cynical.’

‘Well, it’s another case of “Monkey See, Monkey Do”.’

‘What are you talking about, Ben?’

‘It’s a saying that refers to somebody learning a process without any understanding of how or why it works. You made me think of it before, with your thing about the Three Wise Monkeys. If something seems to work, we do it, and we don’t ask why it works. It’s the origin of most superstitious rituals, too.’

‘Oh, I think I see. The Joneses next door killed a cow last year, and they had a good harvest. So we’ll do the same.’

‘And, before you know it, sacrifice has become an annual ritual. But the thing is, to most people those beliefs are just superstition. We might go through certain rituals ourselves, but we don’t really believe in them. Touching wood, crossing our fingers, throwing salt over our shoulders …’

‘Counting magpies? Horseshoes nailed to the door?’

‘Exactly. It’s important to find ways of warding off evil in our lives. If you get it wrong, or upset the spirits, all kinds of bad things can happen. That’s what people believe.’

And screaming skulls, he thought. They could ward off evil, too – provided you treated them right. Cooper recalled touching the yellow sheath of bone at the back of the skull recovered from Tom Farnham’s garage. It had been cool and smooth, worn thin by age – and by reverent handling.

Most importantly, they were supposed to be left where they belonged. You should
never
move a skull.

‘None of these women seem to have stayed very long at Pity Wood,’ said Fry. ‘One minute they were there, the next they were gone. Perhaps they didn’t like sharing the house with preserved body parts. I can’t blame them.’

‘The Slovak, Nadezda Halak – have you got her photograph there?’

‘Yes.’

‘She’s smiling, isn’t she?’ said Cooper.

‘Some people do. It means nothing. You have to look more closely.’

Cooper squinted and studied the picture again. ‘No. She still looks happy.’

He put the photo down on his desk, and he sat looking at it for a few minutes after Fry had left.

Yes, Nadezda Halak did look happy. So what? She’d been one of those people who managed to keep smiling through the worst times of their lives. It seemed extraordinary that someone could smile and smile, and yet be so desperate. But it happened. It was as if they feared a word of sympathy or concern would crack their world apart, and only a smile could hold it together. That smiling façade became a defence, a wall to keep out the world and prevent anyone intruding into their secret misery. But why had no one been close enough to Nadezda to see behind that smile?

Then Cooper thought of something he’d meant to ask. ‘By the way, Diane, you’re not leaving, are you?’

To his astonishment, she grabbed his sleeve roughly. He flinched at the sudden awareness of her potential for violence. He knew it was in her, but he saw it so rarely that he’d managed to forget.

‘What do you know?’ she hissed.

‘Nothing. It was just something Gavin said. Gossip probably.’

‘Was anything said about me while I was in Ireland?’

‘No, Diane. Well, not that I’m aware of. You know I’m the last person to find out anything.’

She let go of his sleeve. ‘That used to be true. I’m not sure any more.’

Cooper brushed his sleeve straight, staring at her in amazement. He had no idea what had provoked that outburst.

‘What do you mean, Diane?’

She looked around the room, and leaned closer to whisper in his ear. ‘This information about the operating meth lab? Did you, by any chance, get that from my sister?’

It was one of those moments when Cooper knew it was pointless trying to lie. Fry had him fixed with such a concentrated stare that she would notice even the slightest flicker of an attempt to conceal the truth.

‘Yes, Diane, I did. She –’

Fry interrupted him. ‘I don’t want to hear the sordid details. I just want you to know that when I got home today, she was gone.’

The door opened, and Murfin came out of his interview with the new superintendent looking dazed and in need of a stiff drink or two.

Fry straightened up, trying to make everything appear normal.

‘How did it go, Gavin?’ she asked.

Murfin looked at her. ‘How did it go? All I can say is – the goat survived, but the bishop will never be the same again.’

An hour later, Fry stood up at the conclusion of a meeting with Superintendent Branagh and the other senior officers. At least they’d established with a fair percentage of certainty how Nadezda Halak had died. Results now available from the Forensic Science Service laboratory were consistent with damage to her soft tissues from an explosion of phosphine gas. The tiny fractures to the bones of Nadezda’s hand were probably the result of a futile attempt to protect herself from the debris hurled out by the explosion.

The function of Orla Doyle at Pity Wood Farm wasn’t confirmed yet. There was a general assumption that could be made from her history in Dublin. Garda records showed Orla to have been a street girl from the age of sixteen. Fry didn’t like assumptions, but she had no contrary evidence to present.

There was also no evidence to show how Orla Doyle had died, at least without possession of her skull. If only the skull recovered from Tom Farnham’s garage had been hers, there might have been some progress.

Fry strongly suspected that Martin Rourke had killed her, possibly when she’d tried to leave her employment. That wasn’t allowed, and injury or death were occupational hazards. She would dearly like to gather enough facts to make a case for a murder charge against Rourke, but she didn’t know where to turn for leads.