The Kill Call

calls?’
    ‘No. Besides, how would that tell you where I was? I use my mobile all the time. I don’t even have a land-line at home.’
    Fry shrugged. She wasn’t going to get drawn into a discussion on that one. The less that certain members of the public knew about what was possible and not possible, the better. The cleverer ones already knew too much about fingerprints and DNA from watching re-runs of CSI .
    ‘You didn’t watch any daytime TV?’
    ‘Nah. I don’t watch much these days, except the football. There’s too much else to do.’
    ‘So no one else was at home with you?’ said Fry.
    Widdowson hesitated, suspecting that he might have detected a trap. ‘Mum, of course. She’s practically housebound.’
    ‘Your sister was out, then.’
    ‘I suppose she must have been.’
    ‘You help her with the horses, don’t you?’
    He didn’t like the change of subject. But that was fine.
    ‘Yes, sometimes.’
    ‘So you must ride, too. Which horse is yours? Bonny or Baby?’
    He laughed scornfully. ‘No way. You wouldn’t get me on one of those things. I do a bit of work to help out, that’s all.’
    ‘So your sister must have been out riding on her own that morning.’
    Widdowson stared at her.
    ‘I don’t have anything else to say.’
    ‘Thank you,’ said Fry. ‘That’s all I wanted to know.’
       
    DI Hitchens listened to Fry’s theory carefully. She could tell that he wanted to believe her, and didn’t want to see some huge hole in her case.
    ‘So Patrick Rawson and Michael Clay were drawn to Derbyshire deliberately, for the purpose of revenge,’ he said, knitting his fingers together, which in him was a gesture of satisfaction.
    ‘Patrick Rawson, certainly,’ said Fry.
    Hitchens looked at her, surprised. ‘These Widdowson people carried out their own sting operation. Having got Mr Rawson into the area, they then intended to kill him. Isn’t that what you mean?’
    ‘No, I don’t think so.’
    ‘You think Naomi Widdowson is telling the truth? It was an accident?’
    ‘I don’t think Miss Widdowson intended to kill Patrick Rawson,’ said Fry carefully.
    Hitchens unlocked his fingers. ‘Let me get this straight. She admits that she made a phone call to Mr Rawson, arranging to meet him at the field barn on Longstone Moor that morning at eight thirty.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘She gave a false name, and claimed to have a number of horses for sale. Unfit horses, unsuitable for riding. But Thoroughbreds, to tempt him.’
    ‘Thoroughbreds that had clean passports. No Section Nine declaration.’
    ‘So they could go for human consumption.’
    ‘Yes.’
    Hitchens looked at her interview notes, as if he thought he might be missing something. ‘And her story is that she went to the meeting alone, on horseback.’
    ‘Because it was more anonymous, and easier to make a getaway.’
    ‘Right. And all she intended was to give Mr Rawson a scare. In her own words, “to teach him a lesson”. But when she galloped her horse at him, Mr Rawson tripped and fell. The horse spooked and reared, and he got kicked in the head. That’s it?’
    ‘Pretty much,’ agreed Fry.
    ‘In her account, there were no witnesses.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘And without a witness, it would be difficult to prove that it happened any differently. It could have been an accident.’
    Fry nodded. ‘It’s funny,’ she said. ‘We started off with the assumption that Patrick Rawson’s killing was the result of some human relationship that had gone wrong.’
    ‘Well, that’s usually the case, Diane.’
    ‘Yes. But, in the end, it turns out that Rawson died because of the nature of someone’s relationship with an animal. That’s a new one on me.’
    ‘And me.’
    ‘The trouble is,’ said Fry, ‘Naomi Widdowson obviously knows nothing at all about what happened to Michael Clay.’
    ‘So are we accepting Miss Widdowson’s account?’ asked Hitchens.
    ‘No, we’re not,’ said Fry. ‘Because we know that she wasn’t on her own.’
    ‘She’s shielding someone, then. Her brother?’
    ‘I don’t think so.’
    Fry took the postmortem photos of Patrick Rawson’s head injury from her case file and lay them on Hitchens’ desk.
    ‘Mrs van Doon has completed her analysis of the injury pattern,’ she said. ‘As we can see, the depression in the skull is basically the shape of a horseshoe, which would substantiate Naomi Widdowson’s story. But this area here, where the pattern has been obliterated – that was