The Kill Call

caused by a later injury. Mrs van Doon thinks a blunt-ended weapon.’
    Hitchens examined the photos closely. ‘Interesting. So someone finished Patrick Rawson off.’
    ‘That’s our murderer,’ said Fry. ‘It’s whoever the second person was who went to that meeting with Naomi Widdowson. It’s the person she’s shielding. And it’s someone who had a reason for making sure that Patrick Rawson was dead.’
       
    Cooper knew only too well how an overnight resolve could dissipate completely by morning. You went to bed with your mind full of determination, and by the time you got up your willpower was as mushy as the muesli in your breakfast bowl. Things seemed so much less important in the cold light of day. Easier, surely, to let it all go by and get on with life.
    But that morning, a couple of hours before dawn, he had already been wide awake and planning how he would carry out his intention.
    ‘You’re getting really good at these interviews,’ said Cooper in the CID room.
    ‘I always was good,’ said Fry.
    ‘No, I mean – you really knew how to handle the Widdowsons. They’re going to give more away about what happened at any moment.’
    ‘If they have anything more to give away.’
    Cooper turned. ‘What? Do you think they might be genuine?’
    ‘I’ve no idea, Ben.’
    ‘Oh.’
    Cooper wasn’t quite sure how Fry had managed to make him feel in the wrong when all he had tried to do was pay her a professional compliment.
    ‘You know,’ he said, ‘if something’s bothering you, you should talk about it.’
    Fry looked at him, a cool expression on her face that he couldn’t read. Sometimes, it seemed to be an expression that she put on entirely for his benefit, a mask that he wasn’t supposed to penetrate.
    ‘Ben,’ she said, ‘if I was going to talk to someone about what’s bothering me – it certainly wouldn’t be you.’
    Cooper sat back, feeling the physical force of her rebuff.
    ‘OK. It’s up to you.’
    ‘Yes, it is.’
    ‘I’m being serious, Diane.’
    ‘No, you’re being ludicrous. There’s a difference.’
    ‘I’m sorry you feel like that,’ said Cooper. ‘Because I wanted to ask you something.’
    Just then, Gavin Murfin came into the office with a report in his hand.
    ‘Fingerprint section have got their, er … fingers out at last,’ he said, with a grin. ‘They’ve got us a result on the prints lifted from the gate in that field where Patrick Rawson died.’
    ‘And …?’ said Fry, completely forgetting Cooper.
    Murfin scanned the report. ‘Adrian Tarrant, aged thirty- two. HGV driver, with an address in Eyam.’
    ‘He has a record? If his prints were on file, they should have made the match long before now. Days ago.’
    Murfin shook his head. ‘They weren’t on file until today,’ he said. ‘He was arrested this morning, during a meeting of the Eden Valley Hunt.’
    ‘What?’ said Cooper. ‘We were there.’
    ‘Well, you must have missed it. It seems Mr Tarrant was identified by a female hunt saboteur as the person who assaulted her during an incident on Tuesday. He was arrested and brought here for processing. DNA sample and fingerprints taken, as per routine.’
    ‘And when they put his prints into the system, they got a match.’
    ‘Bingo,’ smiled Murfin.
    ‘Adrian Tarrant,’ said Fry. ‘I knew it was him.’
       
    Adrian Tarrant had been employed by one of the haulage companies whose lorries rumbled constantly backwards and forwards to the opencast quarries on Longstone Edge. Fry reflected that he might well have seen her as he passed along the haulage road in a cloud of dust. But she wondered whether his job might not give an alibi for eight thirty on Tuesday morning, when Patrick Rawson was killed.
    That was, until she discovered Tarrant had been sacked by his employers the previous week, for turning up over the alcohol limit once too often.
       
    The house in Eyam was already guarded by uniformed officers standing at the gate. It was a small, stone-faced council house, not much more than a two-up, two-down, with a tiny kitchen and bathroom. According to the neighbours, Adrian Tarrant shared the house with another man, possibly a cousin, who worked as a long-distance lorry driver and was currently away on a job.
    Fry could see from the state of the house that this was likely to be true. A couple of days’ washing-up stood on the kitchen drainer, newspapers and empty beer cans decorated the carpet in the sitting room.