The Kill Call

around him, sensing the presence of death in the water.
    This was the sort of thing he would think about at night when he went to bed. His memories would resurface from the mud of his subconscious. The invisible creatures that had swum about his feet; the rough, fibrous thing that had flapped towards the floor. And, most of all, the white face that had turned slowly towards him. A floating, blank-eyed face, staring and staring …
    Yes, those images he’d created for himself would swirl through his brain, moving in endless spirals until he drifted to sleep. He prayed they wouldn’t stay there for ever, haunting his dreams, too.
       
    That morning, Environmental Health officers had visited Le Chien Noir in Edendale. They called Fry to tell her that they had obtained an ELISA kit for detecting animal species content in cooked meat. ELISA wasn’t in the police handbook of acronyms, so Fry had to ask for an explanation. Enzyme-Linked Immuno Sorbent Assay. She was none the wiser.
    ‘The testing method is based on antibodies raised to heat-resistant species-specific, muscle-related glycol-proteins. On your information, we used the cooked-horse species kit. They’re made in the USA, and we don’t use very many that are species specific.’
    ‘And the result?’ asked Fry.
    ‘No horse.’
    ‘No horse?’
    ‘Not at Le Chien Noir.’
    When Fry put the phone down, she reflected that the people who hadn’t put a foot wrong all week were those she’d had the strongest personal reaction against. The Eden Valley Hunt had been above suspicion, apart from one rogue steward. C.J. Hawleys abattoir in Yorkshire was also operating according to all the regulations, so far as she could tell. And R & G Enterprises were a very respectable, forward-looking company, whatever you might think of the purple slabs of meat coming off their packing line.
    No, the trouble had been caused by all those individuals with their personal needs and desires, their troubled emotions and hunger for revenge. Peter Massey just happened to have waited a lot longer for his vengeance, for the day when he could finally achieve a form of justice.
    As her phone rang again, some instinct made Fry glance up at the other members of the CID team. At least two people looked hastily away. What were they waiting for? What had they been expecting her to do? She was only answering the phone.
    ‘Hello, DS Fry.’
    ‘Diane.’
    She recognized the smooth tones immediately, of course. The caller was Gareth Blake. Just the sound of her name from his lips brought back all the feelings she’d been trying to suppress since yesterday. All the activity, the need to respond to Cooper’s call from Birchlow, the visit to the mortuary, the interview with Massey … it had all served the same purpose: to avoid the moment that she knew was coming. And to suppress the memories that would now forever bubble up in her mind.
    ‘Obviously, I don’t want to put any pressure on you, Diane,’ said Blake.
    ‘No. I –’
    ‘But it would be good to talk to you again fairly soon. You know there’s a decision to be made.’
    To distract herself, Fry stared at her computer screen, saw that she had some emails, and automatically clicked on them to see what they were. It was an instinctive action, with no real thought of finding anything of interest. But she noticed a message from Superintendent Branagh, and opened it.
    Blake was continuing to talk, pouring a meaningless noise in her ear, as Fry read the memo from Branagh for the first time.
       
    Cooper had been asked to check through a copy of a statement that Peter Massey had made before his interview. It was a curious document, reading like an extract from the journal that they’d found at Rough Side Farm after his arrest. An odd glimpse into the world of 1968 and the memories that Massey had lived with for the past forty years.
    Cooper thought the words were sad and thoughtful, with no apparent attempt at self-justification. It must have been a relief for him to get it all down on paper. There was even a sense of fatalism about Massey’s conclusion:
    ‘ I thought that what they said must be wrong. At the start, Jimmy and Les and Shirley were all dead. Three of them, just the way it was bound to be. When they told me Stuart was dead, and his brother too, that was all wrong .
    ‘ But it seems there’s a third, after all. A man I never knew, or even heard of until he was dead. But I suppose he had to die. It’s fate, and