Dying to Sin

3

It was more than just a shed. When you got right up to it, the building that Fry had pointed out was more like a vast, corrugated-iron tunnel. When Cooper walked into it, he felt as though he was entering a cathedral, with airy space all around him and light filtering down from the roof, shafts of it striking through cracks in the iron sheeting. Water dripped somewhere ahead of him, and the sides gleamed with patches of damp as he moved.

Many of the older farms in this area still used wartime Nissen huts for storage, relying on the fact that they were built to last a long time and took many years before they finally collapsed from age and neglect. But this thing was bigger than any Nissen hut Cooper had ever seen. A hundred feet long at least, with central posts holding up the ridge of the arc high above him. The structure was open to the elements at both ends, but the middle was dry and sheltered.

Inside, he found two tractors parked on a concrete base alongside a pick-up truck. More vehicles stood outside – a lorry fitted with a winch, an old Escort with a pig trailer attached to the tow bar. The equipment stored in here included an interesting yard scraper made from twenty-four-inch tractor tyre sections. Matt would love that. Cheap, but effective.

Heaps of old tyres lay around the yard, and the vehicles were overshadowed by a huge fortress of silage bags. At first glance, the bags looked like plastic boulders painted black, with strips of loose wrapping stirring in the breeze. Cooper pictured them in summer, with bumble bees buzzing around the stack, attracted by the sweet smell of the silage. But a shiver of cold air reminded him that it was December, and the silage shouldn’t still be standing here, untouched.

Outside, the sides and roof of the shed were starting to turn from their original yellow to rust red. The branches of a hawthorn tree scratched restlessly against the sides – the only sign of life in the abandoned farmyard.

Behind the farmhouse stood a typical skeleton of an open Dutch-style barn, its timbers supporting only a few tatters of roof. He could see that the ridge of the house sagged in a couple of places, and the windows at the back were hung with dusty curtains. A grimy caravan stood in what might once have been the garden. Ancient bales of hay were visible through a ragged hole in the wall of a stone byre.

Another range of old stone buildings was practically in ruins. Cooper found himself inhaling whiffs of a powerful smell here and there as he moved around. A hint of ammonia suggested the presence of a number of cats. Farm cats, that lived outside and prowled the barns and sheds for rodents, doing a job of work.

Beyond the Dutch barn, a few yards down the slope, he found a series of dilapidated poultry sheds. They weren’t all that old, but had never been maintained properly. He peered through a dusty window, expecting rows and rows of battery cages. But there were none to be seen. So the sheds must have been deep-littered with straw for the birds, unless the cages had been removed.

Cooper was already starting to find this place depressing. Parts of Bridge End Farm might be deteriorating because there was no money for maintenance and repairs. But Bridge End was a model of modernity, compared to Pity Wood.

He turned his attention to the house itself. Limestone, with those distinctive gritstone corners called quoins. Some of the walls had been rendered with cement to combat the effects of the weather. But, judging from the scabrous patches where the render had flaked off, the weather was winning. In fact, it had been winning for some time. This farmhouse had thrown in the towel.

If there were any answers to how the body had ended up in that shallow grave a few yards away, they would most likely be found inside the house. Cooper enquired who’d taken possession of the keys, and he eased open the back door.

In the hallway, the first thing he saw was a huge, black family Bible, laid out on a table like a warning.

Fry knew she had to get control of the scene and protect any forensic evidence – though what kind of evidence might have survived the slow decay and partial demolition of Pity Wood Farm she couldn’t imagine.

These were the critical hours. If any evidence did turn up, she had to be able to demonstrate chain of custody. It was so important to look ahead to the possibility of a trial some time in the future. If the prosecution didn’t have chain of custody, it presented a gift to the defence. No matter what happened between now and that hypothetical date, her present actions could cast doubt on an entire investigation or provide it with a solid foundation.

The SOCOs had a rule of thumb. If an item of potential evidence was vulnerable, if everyone was going to walk over it on the way in and out of the scene, it should be removed or protected. If it was out of the way, it could be left in place. There could be evidence that had already been walked over several times on the way in and out.

So those builders had to be kept clear, to minimize any contamination to that they’d already caused. The digging operations had to be done in a controlled manner – someone would have to keep an eye on the diggers and stop them wandering around the farm.

And those vehicles parked up on the muddy track and in the entrance to the yard … well, it was already too late, probably. No matter what action she took now, there was no way she could turn back time.

‘Sutton,’ said Murfin breathlessly, breaking into her thoughts. ‘Sutton.’

‘What?’

‘The previous owners of the farm. Name of Sutton. Raymond is the brother now residing in a care home back in town – we don’t know which yet, but we’ll find out. He’s quite elderly, in his late seventies, we think. There was a younger brother, Derek, who died about a year ago.’

‘Not bad, Gavin.’

‘Thanks. Unfortunately, we can’t find any sign of anyone else in the household at that time, other than the two brothers. We’ve checked the electoral register, and they were the only two adults listed.’

‘So no women?’

‘No women,’ said Murfin. ‘Just peace and quiet.’

Inside the farmhouse, Cooper found the rooms to be a strange mixture of conversion and preservation. Passing from one room to another for the first time was an unpredictable experience. Some spaces were littered with building materials and tools left behind by Jamie Ward’s workmates. Sacks of sand and cement, piles of breeze block, buckets, a ladder, a couple of steel toolboxes. These rooms had been stripped of their original contents – all dumped in the yellow skip he’d seen outside the back door, presumably – and they’d been transformed into building sites instead.

Other rooms, though, had yet to be touched by anyone. Those still contained evidence of the farm’s occupants and their day-today existence – two pairs of wellington boots by the back door, a smelly overcoat still hanging in a cupboard under the stairs.

Upstairs, there were three bedrooms. It was difficult to tell which of them had been occupied most recently, since they were all equally full of junk and old clothes. The middle bedroom overlooked the yard, and it seemed darker and colder than the other two. If Cooper had been choosing a bedroom, it would have been any one but this.

The kitchen seemed to be the part of the house that was most intact. A black, cast-iron cooking range dominated one end of the room, and near it a tap still dripped in a Belfast sink, as if someone had only just failed to turn it off properly. All the furniture was still here, too – a large pine table with scarred and blackened legs, two ancient armchairs, a dresser filled with plates and cutlery.

In the corner and along the back wall, Cooper unearthed a number of less identifiable objects. He counted a dozen cardboard boxes, some standing on top of each other, the bottom one crumpling slightly under the weight. There was a heap of clothes on a chair near the cooking range and more coats and overalls hung behind the outer door. It was a Marie Celeste of a kitchen, frozen in time, preserved in the moment that the owners had finally walked out one day.

Even the fridge was still here, an old Electrolux with a split rubber seal. But that wasn’t still working, surely? Cooper opened the door, and was surprised to see the interior light come on, and feel a draught of cold air on his face. But then he saw why it was switched on. The builders had been keeping their milk in it, ready for their tea breaks. Their carton of semi-skimmed sat among some less reassuring items – jars without labels, tins that had been opened and left to grow mould, as if someone had been trying to culture penicillin. The contents of the nearest jar had crystallized and lay on the bottom, defying him to figure out what they’d originally been.

The smell was disturbing, and Cooper shut the door again quickly. The fridge responded by breaking into an unsteady hum, rattling slightly on the tiled floor.

As he moved around the house, Cooper felt the skin on the back of his neck begin to crawl. The surroundings were innocuous enough, if depressing. But the atmosphere was really bad. His instincts were telling him that something awful had happened here at Pity Wood Farm. Painful memories had imprinted themselves into the walls, the aftershock of some traumatic event still shuddered in the air.

Cooper shivered, and tried to put the sensation aside. It was the sort of feeling that he couldn’t mention, particularly to Diane Fry. He’d been accused of being over-imaginative too often to risk the put-down. Evidence was all that anyone was interested in, and he had none of that.

He might describe his feeling to Liz when he saw her – she would understand what he meant. Cooper glanced at his watch. Hopefully that might be tonight, if he was lucky. The sense of urgency that pervaded most major crime scenes was missing from Pity Wood – presumably because the body was judged to be too old. The twenty-four-hour rule didn’t apply here. Vital evidence that could disappear in the first day or so after a murder was long gone in this case. Anything that was left would be preserved down there, in the mud with the body – or here, inside the house. Better to take it slow and carefully, so that nothing remaining was missed.

That’s what he’d be thinking if he was SIO, anyway. Not that he was ever likely to reach that position – you needed to be promoted at regular intervals to achieve it. He’d probably slipped too far behind already when he failed to get his promotion to DS. He was thirty, after all, and there would be eager young officers overtaking him before he knew it. Just the way it had happened to Gavin Murfin, and many others.

Cooper looked through the kitchen window and saw DI Hitchens standing in the yard with the crime scene manager, Wayne Abbott. Right now, Abbott was doing the talking, and the DI was nodding wisely. He did that pretty well, the nodding bit. From a distance, he looked intelligent and in control, a man who knew exactly what the plan was. Cooper knew he could never look that way himself, whether from a distance or close up. He’d always just look like a confused DC who was having uneasy feelings that he couldn’t explain. Fry had told him that often enough. Keep your mouth firmly shut, Ben – that’s the best way. Don’t give them an excuse to laugh at you.

He heard a noise behind him, a faint crunch of cement dust underfoot. He turned to find Diane Fry standing in the doorway, her usual silent approach thwarted by a layer of builders’ debris. Her gaze roamed around the room, taking in the furniture and the yellowed walls. Cooper tried to think of something intelligent he could say to her, a few words that would make it look as though he’d been gathering useful evidence, rather than dwelling on eerie atmospheres.

‘Jesus,’ said Fry, before he could speak. ‘Don’t you feel as though something horrible happened in here?’

* * *

In the more distant outbuildings, there had been that powerful smell of cat urine. Yet Cooper had seen no sign of any cats as he walked round the property. He wondered what had happened to them when the Suttons left. Dispersed, like everything else, he supposed.

But everything hadn’t been dispersed, had it? Far from it, in fact. There was all that machinery and equipment in the big shed, the silage bags, the hay, and the vehicles parked in the yard.

‘You know, it would be normal practice to have a farm sale in these circumstances,’ said Cooper as they went back outside.

‘A what?’ asked Fry.

‘A farm sale. I don’t mean the sale of the buildings themselves. Before it got to that stage, they would usually sell off all the equipment – the tractors and trailers, tools, field gates, spare fencing posts. There are buyers for most things. They could probably sell the silage and the tyres, too, maybe even this shed itself. But they should have done that before the house and land were put on the market, so there was a tidy site for buyers to look at. I can’t understand why all this stuff is still standing here. It doesn’t make sense.’

Fry shrugged. ‘Perhaps they’re planning to do it later. There’s no law against it.’

‘I’ll enquire at the local auctioneers, Pilkington’s – they’d almost certainly be the people called in for a job like that.’ Cooper shook his head. ‘But it’s really bad planning to do it this way round. They should have cleared everything out first.’

Murfin stuck his head round a corner. ‘Oh, there you are. Mr Hitchens wants everyone out front for a confab.’

‘We’re coming.’

DI Hitchens was Fry’s immediate boss, the man whose job she might have to get if she planned to stay in Derbyshire E Division. But the thought of staying here wasn’t part of her future plans, and places like Pity Wood Farm only confirmed her view. There were times when she longed for the city, or even for the peculiar urban fusion that was the Black Country where she’d grown up.

Hitchens looked calm and unruffled, allowing the rain to fall on his head without flinching. As he waited for the officers to gather round him at the RV point, he wiped some moisture from his face, flashing the white scar that crawled across the middle knuckles of his fingers.

‘Well, as some of you already know,’ he said, ‘this body has been in the ground for a year or more.’