The Kill Call

Their hopes of public acceptance of horse meat would have been wiped out in a stroke.’
    ‘I can just imagine the headlines,’ said Cooper. ‘So Rawson was going back to his old living?’
    ‘It had done well for him in the past, and he’d managed to keep just the right side of the law, despite everything. Patrick Rawson was a man confident of his own abilities. And Naomi Widdowson came forward and offered him the perfect deal at exactly the right time. The psychology of it was very clever.’
    ‘That doesn’t sound like something Naomi would figure out.’
    ‘No, of course she didn’t.’ Fry sounded exasperated, as if she thought he wasn’t really listening. ‘It was all planned by Deborah Rawson.’
    ‘Oh, right,’ said Cooper.
    They were passing a corner by the Riley Graves, one of Eyam’s macabre little tourist attractions. The majority of plague victims were buried in unknown graves, but here was a memorial to John Hancock, who’d died at the height of the plague. The inscription was just about legible, despite some cracking to the gravestone.
    As I doe now, So must thou lye . Remember, man, That thou shalt d ie .
    ‘But why would Rawson’s wife set him up like that?’ said Cooper.
    ‘She’d convinced herself that her husband was having an affair. She overheard some argument between him and Michael Clay over payments that were going out through one of their business accounts.’
    ‘Rent for the house? Eden View?’
    ‘Yes. Deborah put two and two together, and came up with the conclusion that her husband had a love nest in Derbyshire, and that explained why he was in the habit of spending longer away from home than seemed necessary for business purposes.’
    ‘I see.’
    Cooper saw that many of the names on adjacent gravestones to John Hancock’s were members of the Hancock family. The plague had taken old and young, grandparents and children. None had escaped. As a result, John Hancock’s wife Elizabeth had buried almost her whole family here in the course of a week, struggling through the fields every day with a diseased corpse for the protection of the village. Self-sacrifice and the acceptance of suffering weren’t fashionable ideals any more, were they?
    ‘I think that was the first sign I had that she was lying,’ said Fry, breaking into his thoughts again.
    ‘What was?’
    ‘Aren’t you listening, Ben? When Deborah insisted she’d never had any suspicions about Patrick. It didn’t fit with the picture of the man I’d built up.’
    ‘A charming rogue, with a smooth tongue and a casual disregard for the truth.’
    ‘Exactly. Deborah Rawson would have been mad not to wonder occasionally whether she could trust him. But when I asked her, she exaggerated the lie too much. She would have been better telling me a small part of the truth.’
    ‘You’re getting very cynical about people, Diane,’ said Cooper, as they walked on.
    ‘I always was,’ said Fry. ‘Always.’
    She was right that he was having difficulty listening to her. This wasn’t what he’d come to talk about, and her manner was making him nervous. She was freezing up minute by minute.
    ‘The trouble was, Deborah had it completely wrong,’ said Fry. ‘It was Michael Clay who was making the payments, supporting his brother’s illegitimate daughter. That’s the poison of suspicion. Anything you hear can seem like evidence.’
    Cooper nodded as they headed back to the village square. A powerful smell of cooking food hit him. Food. That would make a difference.
    ‘So Patrick Rawson’s death only happened on our turf because of the existence of Eden View and Michael Clay’s niece?’ he said.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘But Naomi Widdowson insisted in interview that Rawson’s death was an accident, didn’t she?’ said Cooper. ‘She said they just wanted to scare him, to pay him back for all the distress he’d caused to her, and scores of people like her.’
    ‘That might have been what Naomi thought,’ said Fry. ‘Her boyfriend Adrian Tarrant is quite a different matter. I knew I recognized him at the hunt meeting, when he was acting as a steward. Just the sort of person the hunting fraternity don’t need if they want to improve their image, Ben.’
    ‘Fair enough.’
    ‘And Deborah Rawson made quite a separate deal with him. She paid him three thousand pounds.’
    ‘Three thousand pounds? It’s not much, really.’
    ‘It is, if you think you’re going to get away with it. And Adrian Tarrant thought