The Kill Call

officers and other professionals she worked with day in and day out, people trained to say exactly the right thing in all circumstances. You could rely on Ben Cooper not to do that, at least.
    Fry sighed. Of course, Cooper had been right about her antipathy to hunting. She didn’t think it was just some kind of class thing, though. At least, she hoped it wasn’t. Though hunting was often associated with class privilege and social hierarchy, there had always been a lurking violence at the heart of the sport that turned it into a kind of blood ritual.
    When she was a studying at UCE, there had been fellow students who had been deeply involved in animal rights protests, including the campaign against fox hunting. Some of them were the sort of people whose instinct was to be anti everything, but the propaganda had been pervasive, the leaflets handed out, the posters of mutilated animals pinned to the notice boards in the Students’ Union.
    To Fry, it had been obvious that the demand for a ban on fox hunting in Britain had as much to do with class politics as a love of animals. As any eighteenth-century farm labourer transported for killing a hare could have told you, the hunt was always about the relative status of human beings.
    The impression most people had of fox hunting came from its depiction in art. There, hunting had always been portrayed as the preserve of the few, a jealously guarded conspiracy.
    There was a painting Fry had seen in the National Gallery once, on a visit to London. A portrait of Lord Somebody or Other, Master of the Hounds. He had been painted dressed in a black hunting outfit, his dark shadow accompanying him in the background, like the spectre of death. His boots had been polished to a high gloss, and he gripped the silver handle of a riding crop as though he was just about to thrash a servant rather than his horse. To the observer, his expression suggested that he was regarding an incompetent groom who’d just dropped a brush.
    When Fry had studied the label, she realized that his lordship must have been perfectly happy to appear arrogant and potentially violent, since he had given the portrait to the National Gallery himself. Hunting art had always been frank about the cruelty of the sport. These days, everything was about presentation and image. Would there have been the same demand for a ban if hunting had a better image in art?
    Yet every stately home and every country pub still had hunting prints rotting from their frames. That bloody symbolism survived.
       
    Cooper stepped outside into the back yard at Welbeck Street, and turned his face up to the rain, wiping a spatter of water from his face. On Sunday, it had been raining at the National Memorial Arboretum, too. Trickles of water had formed on the memorial at the end of The Beat, streaking the surface of the stone. They looked so much like tears that even Matt Cooper had been silenced by the symbolism. Ben had pulled up his collar, hunched his shoulders inside his coat, and regretted ever agreeing to come.

    ‘They’ve done it nicely, though,’ Matt had said. ‘Good job.’
    ‘Yes, nice.’
    Claire gave Ben an odd look then. What was that look supposed to mean? Ben could never really understand what his sister was thinking, the way he could with Matt. Did she share his own reaction? Did their brother’s hearty matter-of-factness have the same effect on her – that sinking feeling of grief and loss that was rammed home by the simple act of watching someone read an inscription on a plaque?
    Yes, they’d done it nicely. Written their father’s final epitaph in a few strokes of engraving. Sergeant Joseph Cooper, Derbyshire Constabulary, killed on duty . Recorded for ever. Permanently set in stone.
    ‘There are so many,’ said Claire. ‘You don’t realize, do you?’
    Ben had gazed around the site at all the memorials to hundreds of thousands of service personnel who’d died for their country. Surely one police sergeant who had been kicked to death by drunken yobs on the streets of Edendale was a unique individual, even among so many deaths?
    A few months ago, Ben had been asked to join an organization called COPS, one of those convenient acronyms that police services across the country were so fond of. Its initials stood for Care of Police Survivors. Last July, he’d attended their annual service of remembrance, complete with a fly-past by a police helicopter and a cavalcade of motorcycles ridden by the Blue