The Kill Call

interviewing the other hunt stewards, Fry had two witnesses to the fact that Tarrant had been absent from steward duty until later, around the time that she’d seen him on the road. She thought of the protestor who had been injured during the hunt and had identified Adrian Tarrant as her assailant. Tarrant had come fresh from killing Patrick Rawson, and the assault had probably come all too easily to him.
    Now Fry knew what sort of animal Adrian Tarrant was. The sort whose instinct was to kill. Once the scent of blood was in their nostrils, they were likely to attack anything that crossed their path.
       
    ‘He’s saying nothing,’ said Hitchens, when she took a break. ‘And I’d anticipate that he doesn’t intend to.’
    ‘I agree,’ said Fry.
    ‘No explanation for how his prints came to be on the gate?’
    ‘None offered.’
    ‘I’m not surprised.’
    Fry did at least have a clearer picture now of what had happened to Patrick Rawson. Earlier, she’d imagined him running across the field in his waxed coat and brown brogues, and had wondered where he’d been running to. But it had been more a question of what he was running away from. Sean Crabbe had just been the final element in deciding Mr Rawson’s fate.
    And that reminded her it was Sean’s turn to face his fate now. The CPS would be making a decision early next week on what charges to bring against him. Fry found herself hoping that he’d avoid a custodial sentence. Of all the people prison would do no good for, Sean Crabbe had to be top of the list.
    ‘So what are we going to do now, sir?’ asked Fry. ‘We don’t have any other evidence against Adrian Tarrant.’
    ‘I suggest you have another go at Naomi Widdowson,’ said Hitchens.
    ‘Why?’
    Hitchens smiled. ‘Because, according to Tarrant’s colleagues at the haulage company, Naomi is his girlfriend.’

34
     
     
    That evening, David Headon needed to take only one glance at the badge found during the search at Eden View.
    ‘The ROC,’ he said. ‘Where did you get that?’
    ‘The Royal Observer Corps, right?’ said Cooper.
    ‘That’s it. Did you know I was a member?’
    ‘No, I didn’t. You’re just the sort of person I’d expect to know about these things.’
    Headon was an old friend of his father’s, a man of about the same age as Joe Cooper. He’d visited Bridge End Farm a few times when Ben was a teenager, and he could remember Headon talking endlessly about annual camps at RAF stations around the country.
    ‘All the ROC posts were closed in 1991, and we were stood down completely a few years later,’ said Headon. ‘There were quite a few of us, you know. Eighteen thousand observers, until the cutbacks started in the sixties. The Corps did a brilliant job during the Second World War, tracking German air raids. Then, when the Cold War started, the observers were needed again. We had posts all over the country. There was even one at Windsor Castle, in the coal cellar.’
    ‘What did the ROC do, exactly?’ asked Cooper.
    ‘What do you think?’
    ‘Observe, I suppose.’
    ‘That’s right. Observe and report.’
    ‘I thought I recognized the logo. I was at the National Arboretum the other day.’
    ‘Ah, you saw the ROC grove. So how were the trees doing? Still waterlogged?’
    ‘No. They’re small, but alive.’
    ‘I’m glad.’
    ‘The trees had labels with this logo. They said “7 Group Bedford, 8 Group Coventry”. For some reason, the labels stuck in my mind. It’s the emblem, I think. It’s quite distinctive, and not immediately obvious what it’s supposed to be.’
    Headon stroked the emblem on the ROC badge. ‘He’s an Elizabethan beacon lighter, who used to warn of Spanish ships approaching the coast.’
    ‘Yes, I found that on Google.’
    ‘Well, that’s pretty much the role the observers carried on, though during the Second World War it was German planes they were tracking. A series of observer posts could follow an aircraft’s flight path right across Britain, the way they did when Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland in 1941.’
    ‘Aircraft recognition, then,’ said Cooper.
    ‘That was it, for long time. It was what a lot of the blokes that I knew came into the Corps for. But that job went out when aircraft got too fast for us. By the 1960s, it was becoming a bit impractical. A low-flying enemy aircraft could have entered UK airspace, flown to London, dropped its bombs and been on the way home again, all while the observers were