Dying to Sin (20 page)

‘Mr Sutton didn’t take much away with him, did he?’ said Cooper.

‘Not much,’ said Goodwin. ‘Just a few personal things. There’s an awful lot of rubbish to clear out, as you’ve probably seen. It won’t be a quick job. But that was the deal – it was one of the reasons I got the property at a good price. It was sold “as is”. I understand the owner was in care, so everything had to be disposed of anyway.’

‘Can you recall anything that was removed, sir? Anything out of the ordinary? There must have been a few items that were present when you viewed the property, but which had gone when you took possession.’

The solicitor was silent for a moment, except for a thoughtful mumbling.

‘Nothing that seemed to be of any value,’ he said. ‘It’s not exactly the sort of place you’d expect to be stuffed with antique furniture, is it? Or, if it ever was, they sold anything of value years ago. I gathered the farm had been failing for some time.’

‘Yes, I believe so.’

‘Then there was nothing, really, Detective Constable. Nothing that I wouldn’t have wanted to get rid of, anyway.’

Then he began to laugh, and Cooper looked at the phone as if it had done something weird. ‘Would you like to share the joke, sir?’

‘Well, I’m sure this can’t be what you mean,’ said Goodwin, still chuckling. ‘But obviously, they took the severed head.’

19

Fry took a moment to steady her breathing, shocked by the unexpected surge of panic that had turned her stomach over for a few seconds. It was a totally irrational feeling. She’d thought the same herself many times, hadn’t she? She was like a fish out of water in E Division. In Derbyshire, come to that. Her home was back in the city, away from these people she would never understand and couldn’t tolerate.

It was just hearing the sentiment put into someone else’s words that had hit her like a blow to the solar plexus. It was a statement of the obvious. Yet she loathed the idea that Detective Superintendent Branagh had sat in a meeting this morning and expressed the thought to her managers. She hated the intrusion of someone like Branagh reading her file and summing her up so easily. It was illogical, of course. But no less hurtful for that.

‘Oh, no need to be sorry, sir,’ she said quietly. ‘No need for
you
to be sorry at all.’

That fear of being an outsider had haunted her all her life. At school, in her various homes in the Black Country, and even when she’d studied for her Criminal Justice and Policing course at UCE. As a child, she hadn’t realized that everyone dreaded finding themselves on the outside, not a part of the gang. She thought it was her own particular weakness of character that drove her to seek acceptance from her peers.

It made her wince now to think of her teenage self, hanging around in the corridors of her comprehensive school, trying to attach herself to a group. It was only as an adult that she’d learned it was the same for most kids of her age. Some were so desperate to belong that it became a question of any gang that would have them.

Being a member of the herd was a primal instinct – probably the deepest, most powerful instinct of them all.

‘If you do go, Diane,’ said Hitchens, ‘we’ll miss you.’

‘They called him Billy,’ said Cooper, the moment Fry entered the CID room. ‘Screaming Billy Sutton. But of course he probably wasn’t a Sutton. He could have been anybody. Anybody at all, Diane.’

Fry jumped as if she’d been shot. ‘What the hell are you talking about, Ben?’

‘The landlord of the Dog Inn said something about a Billy. At first, I thought he might have meant another brother, or a son. But there’s no indication of a William Sutton. So this must be him.’

She had never seen him so animated. He was running around the office like an excited puppy, yapping at anyone who would listen. But what
was
he yapping about?

‘Ben, slow down. Explain yourself properly.’

Cooper looked hot and breathless, as if he’d been running. ‘It’s like Dickie of Tunstead, you see. There’s a place called Tunstead Farm, up in the north of the county near Chapel-en-le-Frith. Now,
that
one is quite famous. There’s some doubt whether it’s male or female, but locally it’s always been known as Dickie. A previous owner of the farm was murdered in his bed in an ownership dispute –’

He paused to take a breath, and Fry held up a hand like a traffic officer, speaking louder to drown him out.

‘Ben, stop.’

‘The Suttons must have managed to keep this one quiet, though,’ he said. ‘It was known about locally, but everyone seems to have been reluctant to discuss it. Superstition, of course. Careless talk, the Scottish play, all that sort of stuff.’

‘For God’s sake, will you just stop? Stop!’

‘Screaming Billy was supposed to …’ Cooper finally ground to a halt and looked at her in amazement. ‘Why are you shouting at me, Diane?’

Fry took his arm. ‘Ben, sit down and shut up for a minute. Take a few deep breaths.’

He opened his mouth to speak, but she snarled at him, and he closed it again quickly. He sat down.

‘All right, that’s better,’ she said.

‘Can I speak yet?’

‘Just collect your thoughts first. I’m getting the impression you have something to tell me that you think is important. But so far you haven’t managed a word of sense. Not a word.’

‘Oh. Are you sure?’

‘There was somebody called Billy, and somebody called Dickie, and one of them was screaming. That’s all I got. The rest of it was gibberish.’

Cooper wiped a hand across his forehead. ‘I’d better start again.’

‘I’ll fetch you some water. And I suggest when you do start again, you start from the beginning.’

When Fry came back from the cooler with a cup of water, Cooper was looking much calmer, but he was still fidgeting in his seat, impatient to pass on his information.

Fry found she couldn’t stay irritated with him, after witnessing his burst of enthusiasm. It took years off him, made him seem like that eager young DC she’d encountered when she first arrived in Edendale. That had been her initial impression of him. He’d changed a lot since then. The mark of what life had thrown at him, she supposed.

For just one second, a disorientating second, Fry felt the two of them might actually have something in common. But it was so little that they shared. Far too little.

Fry watched him take a drink of water. ‘All right, go ahead.’

‘I’d better explain Dickie of Tunstead first,’ said Cooper. ‘I suppose you’ve never heard of him.’

‘You suppose right.’ Fry pulled up her chair. ‘I’m sitting comfortably.’

‘Tunstead Farm is in a village called Tunstead Milton near Chapel-en-le-Frith, over in B Division. Local legend says that an owner of the farm was murdered in his bed during an ownership dispute with a cousin who’d taken the place over while the real owner was away fighting in the wars.’

‘And this was a very recent event, I suppose? Like, seventeenth century or something?’

‘Sixteenth.’

‘Of course.’

‘But the point is, they still have his skull. His head was preserved and kept at the farm. It’s what’s known as a “screaming skull”. You’ve never heard of them?’

‘No again,’ said Fry. ‘But you’re starting to interest me now.’

‘Dickie of Tunstead is quite celebrated. He’s been written about often. These days, no one is sure whether it’s a male or female skull, but locally it’s always been known as Dickie, so that’s the name it goes under still. There are others around the country, in rural places, where people have believed in the power of the screaming skull.’

‘Don’t start losing me, Ben. Stay in the realms of sanity.’

‘I’ll try.’ Cooper took another drink. ‘Well, the belief is that removing Dickie’s skull from Tunstead will bring bad luck. They say it’s been removed three times over the years – as a result, crops failed, a barn collapsed, livestock died, the house was damaged in a storm. The skull has been thrown in the river, buried in the churchyard, and stolen by thieves. The thieves were so disturbed by things that started to happen to them that they returned the skull to Tunstead.’

‘And this thing really is just a skull?’

‘I’ve seen photos of it. It’s just a yellowing old skull, holed and fragmented at the back as if it had been struck with a hammer at some time.’

‘We can establish cause of death in that case, then,’ said Fry. ‘Pity we can’t do it for more recent deaths.’

‘Dickie of Tunstead possesses supernatural powers to prevent anyone moving him out of his home,’ said Cooper, with a note of awe in his voice. ‘When the skull is left in place, everything goes right at the farm. He even acts as a guardian, warning when strangers approach. His real claim to fame was getting the course of the railway altered.’

‘Oh, come on. Railways are fairly solid and practical,’ said Fry.

‘It was in the nineteenth century, when they were building the Buxton to Stockport line. There was a compulsory purchase order for land belonging to Tunstead Farm. The railway company wanted to build a bridge and embankment on the land, but building work collapsed, and men and animals were injured. Engineers said the ground was unstable, but local people credited Dickie. In the end, the company diverted the line, and the new bridge was named after him. It’s still there, Diane. The bridge is real, and so is the skull.’

‘All right. And there was one of these skulls at Pity Wood Farm?’

‘Mr Goodwin says so. He was shown it, when he viewed the property. But it was one of the few things that had been taken away when he completed the purchase.’

‘A severed head inside the farmhouse.’

‘Yes, Diane.’

‘And this poor, gullible Manchester solicitor was told some ghostly legend about it, to keep him quiet?’

‘Well, there was definitely a skull,’ said Cooper.

‘So does Mr Goodwin know where the head went?’ asked Fry. ‘Has Raymond Sutton got it?’

‘In the bottom of his wardrobe at the care home? Hardly, Diane.’

‘Where, then?’

‘Mr Goodwin says the man who took it away claimed to be the farm manager.’

‘Tom Farnham?’

‘The very same.’

‘Let’s go, then.’

‘Right. Oh, Diane – aren’t you supposed to be on missing persons?’ said Cooper.

‘Sod missing persons. They can stay missing.’

Cooper had forgotten that there were areas in this part of the Peak where the viability of farming was already borderline even before the fall in prices, before foot and mouth even. It was obvious when you drove through. Many of the dry-stone walls were badly maintained, farms had scrap heaps of old machinery standing in their yards, and there was a generally unkempt feel to the landscape. Foot and mouth had shown how much tourism and farming depended on each other in a place like this. A rural way of life that had disappeared from most of England had survived here until quite recently.

Cooper recalled his father telling him about farms out this way that didn’t have electricity or running water until maybe twenty years ago. The 1980s, the decade of prosperity.

He bet most of the country wouldn’t have believed how people lived their lives, here on the fringes of the Pennines. ‘It’s not as if we’re living in a Third World country,’ they’d say. ‘There are cities only a few miles away, for goodness’ sake. You can practically see Manchester over that hill. Hi-tech industries and café society, a huge airport sending jet liners all around the world. How can anyone be living without electricity?’

But these local communities were conscious of the changes taking place around them. More conscious than most, he guessed.

Fairies and elves, spells and charms had been an integral part of life of the countryman, who wouldn’t have understood the causes and effects of droughts and floods, crop failures, or sickness in his livestock. Witches were blamed for evil in the Middle Ages, Celts had worshipped the head.

Lost in his own thoughts, Cooper only became aware of the nature of the silence when they were halfway to Rakedale.

‘What’s wrong, Diane?’

‘Nothing,’ she said.

He hated it when she said ‘nothing’ like that. Her tone of voice meant anything but ‘nothing’. It told him that he damn well ought to know what was wrong, without him having to ask her.

‘Come on, what’s the matter?’

‘I told you. Nothing.’

Well, at least that meant it wasn’t his fault. She’d never been shy about telling him when he’d done something wrong. Quite the opposite. So someone else had upset her.

‘This business with the skulls – is it what Mrs Dain meant about “the old religion”?’ asked Fry eventually.

‘That would be Old Religion – capital “O”, capital “R”.’

‘I doubt it’s in my dictionary, Ben, all the same.’

‘Actually, I think she might have been referring to a series of TV programmes that were made back in the seventies. The producers claimed to have found a community in the Dark Peak who still worshipped the old gods.’

‘Just a minute – I suppose that would be Old Gods, capital “O”, capital “G”? Are we talking Paganism here?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Cooper. ‘In fact, the people involved were mostly practising Christians, I think. No, it was said to be a sort of respect for traditional beliefs that didn’t conflict with their Christian practices. They believed in the old Celtic gods, but never mentioned them. The programme interviewed someone who called herself a “guardian”. She talked about a scattered community who still believed in the old ways. They didn’t name the small mill town she came from – but most local people could have a good guess.’ ‘That’s nearly thirty years ago. The world has changed a lot since then.’

‘Yes, even in … well, even in the Peak District.’

He turned on to the A515 towards Newhaven. Not far away from here was Arbor Low – a sort of flattened version of Stonehenge, a circle of megaliths laid out like a clock face. When he’d walked up there on a school trip once, Cooper had thought the stones looked as though they’d been blown down by the wind. But their teacher said it was more likely they’d been deliberately knocked over by Christian zealots who disapproved of the stones’ religious significance.

Religious significance? Arbor Low was built more than four thousand years ago, wasn’t it? Now, that was the
real
Old Religion.

‘Do you think Raymond Sutton knew about the bodies buried on his farm?’ asked Fry. ‘You’ve talked to him, Ben, what do you think?’

‘I think he might have had a suspicion,’ said Cooper. ‘But no more than that – just a suspicion that something bad had happened.’

‘Involving his brother?’

‘I don’t know. He talks about Hell a lot. Somebody is going to be damned.’

‘So here’s a scenario,’ said Fry. ‘One or both of the Sutton brothers killed these women, either during some barking mad pagan rituals in Derek’s case, or out of religious mania in Raymond’s case, because they were damned and needed to be punished and sent to Hell.’

‘Well …’

‘Whatever. I’m vague on the details yet. But word got out in the area – as it was bound to do round here. Rumour, rumour. Gossip, gossip.’

‘And then people just kept quiet?’

‘Well, in my scenario, Dixon of Dock Green turns up at the farm to see what’s what.’

‘PC Palfreyman?’

‘Yes, PC Bloody Palfreyman. “Evening, all,” he says. “What’s this I hear about you two lads committing a couple of nasty murders? We can’t be having that, you know. I might have to give you a clip round the ear for being naughty boys.”’