Dying to Sin (15 page)

‘By the way, did you get anything from the IND?’

‘Hold on, let me check my notes.’ Cooper flicked back through his notebook. ‘OK, Section 8 of the Asylum and Immigration Act. The law makes it a criminal offence to employ a person who is subject to immigration controls and has no permission to work in the UK. The only statutory defence is if the employer can show that they carried out checks on the documents of potential employees. The confusing area seems to be the A8 countries, Diane.’

‘The accession states.’

‘Yes. The Czech Republic, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Latvia and Slovenia. Individuals from those countries are entitled to come to the UK and work, but they have to register with the Home Office. Once you’ve been working legally in the UK for twelve months you have full rights of free movement and you no longer need to be on the Worker Registration Scheme.’

‘Twelve months?’

‘It’s a critical time period, isn’t it?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘The thing is, some employees don’t bother. It works well for the larger firms, but not for the smaller ones who employ a couple of people. And this isn’t exactly Bernard Matthews.’

‘The turkey man?’

‘My contact says Bernard Matthews employs a thousand Portuguese workers in Great Yarmouth. But that’s a different kettle of fish. There are translators, bi-lingual trainers, everything done right. Small-scale employers are the problem. The paperwork is too much trouble for them, not to mention the cost. I imagine a lot of small farmers might think they can get away without paying seventy pounds to apply for a certificate. Besides, there’s the forgery issue. A worker brings along a standard letter from the Immigration Service and a forged passport, and a small employer doesn’t look twice. I was told to watch out for Ernest Xavier Ample.’

‘Who on earth is Ernest Xavier Ample?’

‘E.X. Ample,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s the made-up name the forgers take off sample work permits. No imagination, some people. Or perhaps they think it’s a normal English name.’

‘For heaven’s sake. So we could be looking at a procession of Slovaks, Lithuanians and Latvians passing through Pity Wood?’

‘Something like that,’ said Cooper. ‘Many of them might have gone on to be legit later, though, if they changed employers.’

‘Are there any gaps in the farm records? Periods that aren’t accounted for?’

‘No, but the accounts don’t come right up to date, of course. They end nine months ago. There was a period of time after Raymond Sutton gave up the farm and before the builders moved in. Only a few months, but it might just be in our time frame.’

‘And the farm was empty for that time?’ asked Fry.

‘Yes, and I bet there were plenty of people around Rakedale who knew it.’

‘Damn it, that doesn’t help us at all. Unless forensics can give us some evidence to narrow down the time of death, we’re going to have to concentrate on identifying the victims and establishing a link between them.’

‘Anyway, the most recent enterprise at Pity Wood seems to have been a poultry business,’ said Cooper. ‘That can be quite viable, I believe. But it’s no wonder the Suttons’ enterprise failed. They weren’t producing enough birds to make a realistic profit. It was hardly worth their while running the sheds.’

‘Is there much expense involved in raising poultry?’

‘A lot of overheads when the birds are housed indoors – heating, bedding, all their feed and antibiotics. But the main cost here seems to have been the wage bill. The way the Suttons ran the enterprise must have been pretty labour intensive. No capital to invest in machinery, I suppose.’

‘Or the way Tom Farnham ran it.’

‘Yes.’

‘So what about the wages? There must be a list of employees’ names?’

‘No, damn it,’ said Cooper. ‘Just initials. No indication of who they were, what they did, whether they were male or female. The only fact I can work out is that they seem to have employed a dozen people at any one time. But the initials change quite often, so the turnover of staff must have been quite high. It was unpleasant work, I suppose – killing, plucking and gutting.’

Cooper gazed out of the window, trying to make the facts fit. How did the number of workers represented by these wage bills correlate with the output from the poultry production units? Well, the answer was that it didn’t. Those workers must either have been sitting around doing nothing for a large part of their time – or they must have been doing something else entirely.

14

By the middle of the afternoon, the low sun was painting more colour into the landscape. As Cooper left West Street and drove down the hill into the centre of Edendale, the clouds over the eastern hills were developing yellow and pink tinges, and the moors were no longer such a dingy brown.

Friday was market day in Edendale. There were crowds doing their pre-Christmas shopping among the market stalls. Stout men with ruddy faces and waistcoats, tall men with long white sideburns, women in tweed skirts and headscarves – the sort of people you never saw at any other time, even in Edendale. It was almost as if they were employed by the council to give an authentic Dickensian flavour to the town for the festive season. Or perhaps they were members of some esoteric club, the Pickwick Papers Re-enactment Society.

But Cooper knew that was his new, town-dwelling self speaking. He knew who they were – these were the small hill farmers, the inhabitants of the more isolated homesteads, who travelled into town for market day.

By the time he reached the market square, it was already nearly four o’clock, and the market was being packed up for the end of the day. A procession of Ford Transits and Renault Trafics squeezed through the side streets, blocking every access while they loaded. Some of the stalls were clearing rapidly, their owners anxious to get home to their fires. Others took longer, stallholders staggering backwards and forwards in green and red Santa hats, shouting banter to each other. ‘I can manage on my own, don’t worry about me, I’ll be all right. You’re too old to be carrying these heavy boxes.’

Cooper found an empty slot to park the Toyota, thinking smugly that it wouldn’t have been quite so easy if he’d arrived in town an hour earlier. From here, he could easily walk the half mile to The Oaks.

He passed the town hall, its façade boasting four decorative pillars. The building had been edged with stones carved in a wavy pattern, and there were so many of them that local people had nicknamed their town hall ‘The Wavy House’.

His feet tangled for a second in the tattered remains of some party poppers discarded on the pavement. Office parties would be going everywhere tonight, as they had been last night – and would be tomorrow night too, of course. By the morning, council workers could expect to have far more than a few party poppers to clear up.

Within minutes of him arriving, the streetlights were coming on, and it was dark in the corners of the market square. Workers were stripping the awnings and dismantling the tubular steel stalls, clanging and chattering, wheeling racks of clothes over the cobbles. The dipped headlights of cars swept by from the roundabout. A tractor came towards him with a yellow warning light flashing, towing a trailer to collect the dismantled stalls.

When he entered the lounge at The Oaks to see Raymond Sutton, the other residents fell silent, watching him. He supposed they thought he was just a visitor. Perhaps they took him for Raymond’s grandson or something. They’d be asking Raymond questions about him as soon as he left. With a sinking certainty, Cooper thought it was probable that some of these old dears never got a visitor of their own from one year to the next.

The Oaks reminded him of the Old Vicarage, the nursing home his own mother had been in towards the end. On the surface, there weren’t all that many similarities. Residents of The Oaks were just old and needed some help with their day-today living. They were the frail and forgetful, the tired and confused, the ones who just couldn’t cope and had no one to look after them. They probably went on outings and had bingo evenings and sing-songs. Isabel Cooper had never had any need for those things.

‘We’ve had a bit of an issue with Raymond this afternoon,’ said the care assistant, Elaine, when she let him in. ‘He got a bit upset.’

‘What was wrong?’

‘It’s difficult to say. We have a couple of care workers here who are from Lithuania. They’re nice girls, but Raymond doesn’t like it when they speak to him. I think it’s because he doesn’t understand them properly. It must be awful not to understand what’s going on.’

‘I feel like that myself sometimes.’

‘He’s all right now, anyway. He soon calms down.’

‘Does Mr Sutton have any old photo albums, do you know?’ asked Cooper. ‘Photos from his time at the farm?’

‘Not that I know of. Only women keep photo albums, don’t they? I can’t see Raymond sitting around in the evening sticking pictures of family weddings and christenings into an album.’

Now that he looked at Raymond Sutton more closely in the light, Cooper could see that the old man’s skin was dry, and faintly yellow. He was reminded of the kitchen at Pity Wood Farm, the tint of the walls and the smoky stains on the ceiling. Mr Sutton would have fitted into the Yellow Room naturally, almost as if he’d decorated it in his own image.

Perhaps some kind of liver problem had caused this unhealthy colour. He made a note to ask one of the staff about Mr Sutton’s physical health. Heartless as it might seem, no investigation team wanted their chief witness dying before he could provide a full statement.

Chief witness? Raymond Sutton might yet turn out to be the principal suspect. All the more reason to be concerned about his health.

‘Do you remember me, sir? I’m Detective Constable Cooper, from Edendale Police. I came to see you the other day, with my inspector.’

‘I don’t get many visitors, lad,’ said Sutton. ‘How would I forget?’

Cooper mentally crossed his fingers that Mr Sutton was having a good spell. If he believed he couldn’t forget, that was a positive sign, wasn’t it?

‘Don’t you have any family left, Mr Sutton?’

‘Some cousins in Stoke. They might get my money when I go, but they won’t get the farm, will they?’

‘No, you’ve already sold the farm.’

Cooper sat alongside him.

‘Your brother died, didn’t he? Derek?’

‘Aye. He’s gone over, has Derek.’

‘That was before you sold the farm, Mr Sutton.’

The old man nodded slowly. ‘We could see he was tappy already by then.’

‘Tappy?’ repeated Cooper.

‘Approaching his end.’

Cooper searched his memory for the word, and came up with an image of a wounded animal going to ground in the woods to die.

‘Sir, did anyone else die at the farm? Women?’

‘Women?’

‘Did some women die?’

Sutton looked at him closely. ‘Are you a Christian?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘A proper Christian?’

‘Yes, sir.’

He genuinely felt it was true. But Cooper hoped he wouldn’t be asked when he last went to church on a Sunday. Like many people he knew, he’d got out of the habit. Weddings, funerals and christenings – that was about it these days. His mother had been the one keen on church attendance, so he and Matt and Claire had always gone to St Aidan’s regularly as children. Sunday school, too. Bible stories and choir practice, Whit walks and visits by the Church Army with their free badges. But he suspected that had been as much because it was the respectable thing to do, rather than on account of any particular devoutness on his mother’s part.

It was probably that factor that led him to be a bit facetious sometimes when other people’s beliefs seemed to be just
too
extreme.

‘So you know that Hell burns,’ said Sutton. ‘Hell burns with an agony like no other.’

‘Yes, sir. And there’s no butter in Hell.’

Sutton stared at him, failing to smile at the joke, failing even to get the allusion. Cooper immediately wished he could take the words back. He felt embarrassed, realizing that Raymond Sutton might never have been the type for reading books, except one. Certainly not shamefully disrespectful parodies like
Cold Comfort Farm
.

Still, his brain kept throwing up images from the Gibbons book. The preacher, Amos Starkadder, hectoring the Church of the Quivering Brethren – ‘
Ye’re all damned!
’ And Brother Ambleforth, whose job was to lead the quivering, conducting the congregation with a poker to put them all in mind of hellfire.

Cooper wondered irreverently whether Raymond Sutton might get into the role on Christmas Day, if asked to pull a cracker by one of the female residents. ‘
Hush, woman … Tempt
me not wi’ motters and paper caps. Hell is paved
wi’ such
.’

‘So you’re like me, and you don’t believe in evil spirits?’ asked Sutton suddenly.

‘What? Ghosts, you mean?’

‘Not ghosts so much. More of … well, perhaps a presence in the atmosphere of the house.’

‘I’m not sure. Perhaps, in certain circumstances.’

‘When something dreadful has happened.’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you been to the old house?’

‘Yes, Mr Sutton.’

‘I always swore I wouldn’t take anything away from the place. I wanted it all burned, destroyed. I wanted someone to come in with a bulldozer and a big bloody skip, and cart it all off. It was cursed.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Sutton looked at him, working his mouth nervously. ‘There was one thing, though. There was the good book. Our family Bible.’

‘I saw it,’ said Cooper.

The old man gripped his arm. ‘Is it still there?’

‘Do you want me to see if I can get it for you?’

‘Yes.’ His grip relaxed, to Cooper’s relief. ‘Can you do that?’

‘I’ll have to ask my supervisor. But I’m sure it’s still safe.’

‘Thank you. You’re a good lad, coming to see me.’

‘Mr Sutton, I need to ask you about any employees you had on the farm in the last four years.’

‘Employees?’

‘You had a poultry production business. Do you remember the birds?’

Cooper noticed his voice rising, the way people’s voices did when they were talking to someone who was deaf or stupid, or foreign. Was Raymond Sutton deaf? There was no sign of a hearing aid, but that proved nothing. Small items like hearing aids and spectacles went missing very easily in residential care homes. False teeth too, sometimes.

‘We raised poultry, yes. We had thousands in the big sheds,’ said Sutton. ‘Did you want to buy some birds? You’re too late. We got rid of them. All the lot.’

‘No, I want to ask you about your employees. Can you remember the names of anyone who worked for you at the farm during that time? During the last four years?’

Sutton hummed quietly. It occurred to Cooper that he might not actually know what year it was now, so the question might be meaningless.

‘I brought the farm records book,’ he said. ‘It might bring back memories. See if you can think of a few names to go with these initials, look.’

Sutton glanced at the book for a moment, and sighed. ‘The service round here is terrible. I’d kill for a cup of tea.’

As he signed himself out at the door a few minutes later, Elaine smiled at him.

‘Was Raymond a bit better?’

‘Yes, a bit. I was trying to jog his memory.’

‘It works sometimes. He’s a bit unpredictable. It depends how tired he is.’

Cooper looked at the collection of old ladies on their chairs in front of the TV set.

‘Some of the residents will be going home to their families for Christmas, I suppose?’ he asked her.

‘Yes, some. But not all.’

‘Are a few of them too ill to leave?’

‘Yes, and then there are those who don’t have families. Well, not families who want to see them at Christmas, anyway.’

‘I see.’

Cooper stood outside for a few minutes, looking at the windows of The Oaks. He had no idea when family and community had started to fall apart, but he had a feeling his grandparents wouldn’t have recognized society the way it was now. In their time, old folk had been looked after, instead of being allowed to spend their final years abandoned and alone. He had known, deep down, that the disintegration of family life was happening everywhere – not just in the big cities, but right here in the villages that had always relied so much on a sense of community.

Of course, he saw the results every day among the people he had to deal with in his job. Children running out of control on the streets, young people walking away from home to lives full of drugs and destitution. Single mothers everywhere, trying to raise families on their own. Mentally disturbed individuals who either lived outside society, or ended up in prison. Old people dying, neglected, their deaths unnoticed for months by their family or neighbours, or even by the postman. It would never have happened at one time, he was sure.

Of course, people had died for quite different reasons back then.

Back in the town centre, the streets were full of light – the white bulbs of the Christmas trees attached to the buildings, the occasional orange streetlamp, the light from shop windows falling on the pavements. Beneath the lights, the last stragglers were on their way to the car parks, some of them setting off across the county after a day at the cattle market. School children were hanging around outside the chip shops with their friends, celebrating the last day of term.

The hotel on the square had a stream of smoke drifting from one of its chimneys, and a flashing tree in an upper window. It was a better display than the official tree in the park across the way. A yellow Sixes bus went by, the slogan ‘Be a dirty stop-out’ on the back.

It was really going cold now, and Cooper thought he felt the first touch of rain.

That night, Matt took his brother to their local pub, the Queen Anne. It was one of the oldest pubs in the Peak District, dating back to the early seventeenth century, it was said, and reputedly haunted by the friendly ghost of a landlord who died in the cellar tending his ales. But all the best pubs had at least one ghost, didn’t they?

The wooden bar was stained black, and a line of stools stood in front of it. The food at the Queen Anne was traditional enough to satisfy even Matt – home-made steak-and-ale pie, haddock and chips, chicken and chips, T-bone steak. There was practically dancing in the streets when T-bone steak came back on the menu after the BSE scare. The doom mongers had predicted it was gone for ever – eating meat off the bone being considered far too risky for men who spent their days operating high-powered machinery with sharp blades and handling bad-tempered animals that could kill with a single kick.