The Kill Call

trough stood by the side of the lane, a trickle of water still issuing from a pipe in the wall, as it must have done for centuries.
    For a few minutes, they ploughed through the usual small talk. Cooper had wanted to prise Fry away from the office, disentangle her from any of her crime scenes, and get her on neutral ground where they could talk about something other than work. Eyam had been the best place he could think of, without sounding too unlikely.
    But he was finding it hard going. Fry constantly steered the conversation back to a safe topic. Of course, the murder of Patrick Rawson had absorbed her attention for the past week. It had opened her eyes to subjects she hadn’t been aware of before, too. It was bound to be in her mind.
    ‘So what about the wife?’ said Cooper, finally giving in to the inevitable. ‘Deborah Rawson?’
    ‘She’ll be charged with conspiracy to murder. She didn’t kill her husband herself, but she arranged it, at least.’
    ‘And it was well planned, too.’
    ‘She’s a woman,’ said Fry. ‘She would have worked it all out in her mind, run through the scenario over and over, imagined what it would be like, and how she would feel afterwards. It wouldn’t have been some spontaneous impulse to violence, with no thought or emotion behind it. That’s a man’s type of crime.’
    ‘You think anyone is capable of murder, don’t you?’ said Cooper.
    ‘Yes.’
    Cooper had parked the Toyota near St Lawrence’s Church, and they strolled through the churchyard as Fry told him the story. St Lawrence’s boasted a large sundial over the chancel door, and a small group of visitors stood in front of it, checking the time and trying to figure out the Roman numerals. At some time, a motto had been inscribed in Latin on the supporting stones. It was almost worn away, but Cooper could just make out in the right light: Ut umbra sic vita – ‘As the shadow passes, so does life’.
    ‘So Deborah Rawson contacted Naomi Widdowson and told her when her husband would be visiting Derbyshire?’ he said.
    Fry nodded. ‘Yes. Naomi had been phoning Sutton Coldfield, trying to get hold of Patrick Rawson to give him a piece of her mind. Deborah got talking to her, and decided to use her. It’s all backed up by the phone records. She gave Miss Widdowson her husband’s mobile phone number, so she could arrange to meet him. It seems Naomi told him she had some horses for sale.’
    ‘Thoroughbreds, ideal for their meat?’
    ‘Exactly.’
    Cooper looked at Fry’s face to read her expression. She sounded almost approving of the attention to detail that had gone into Deborah Rawson’s planning. But the satisfaction in her eyes might just have been her contentment at being able to discuss work, when she’d feared some kind of social occasion.
    ‘It all hangs together,’ said Fry. ‘Rawson had told Melvyn Senior that he’d have some horses that would need transporting later in the week, and he’d also phoned Hawley’s abattoir to book them in for slaughter. As far as Rawson was concerned, the deal was all set up.’
    When the tourists had moved on, the only sound in the churchyard was the wind stirring the branches of the trees. Cooper still thought it was strange that the only plague victim buried here was the rector’s wife. The dead bodies were hardly likely to be infectious – they would already have been abandoned by plague-carrying fleas in favour of living hosts. The same sort of thing had gone on everywhere in the Middle Ages, though no amount of corpse-dumping would have saved a doomed town when the plague swept through Europe.
    He realized that Fry was looking at him oddly, a faintly derisive smile suggesting that he was behaving in exactly the way she expected. Cooper wondered if this idea was going to work, or whether she would lose patience with him and walk away. The situation seemed so fragile.
    ‘I don’t understand why Rawson went back to horse dealing when he had his other enterprises,’ he said, desperate to regain her attention.
    ‘Well, he was getting himself into financial difficulties with the new ventures,’ said Fry. ‘He’d stretched himself too far, that was his problem. The house in Sutton Coldfield was fully mortgaged to raise capital for the meat-distribution business. But with the way the housing market has been, the property was worth less and less, and interest rates were going up. That outbreak of trichinosis would have ruined R & G Enterprises.