The Kill Call

like a spare part, as Alicia Forbes looked Cooper up and down. She’d experienced this moment so often.
    ‘Do you have any animals yourself?’ she asked him.
    ‘Just a cat,’ he admitted, patting the horse’s neck.

    ‘Oh.’ Then she looked at his hand. ‘And you’re not wearing a wedding ring.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘I just wondered – I know not all men wear them, even when they’re married.’
    ‘So I’ve heard.’
    ‘So … are you? Married?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘You must be, what … thirty by now? Isn’t it time to settle down?’
    ‘Well, it’s not quite so simple.’
    ‘Mmm. I suppose not. Still – a single man, living alone with a cat. It could give the wrong impression.’
    Just then, a powerful odour filled the yard. Not just the pervasive background smell, but something much more pungent and immediate.
    ‘Diane, watch out,’ said Cooper.
    But he was too late. Fry felt the soft impact of warm, steaming lumps of fresh horse manure splattering on to her trousers and covering her shoes. For a second, she was so shocked that she couldn’t move. And the plops just kept coming. How did one animal manage to produce so much at one go?
    As if by magic, Mrs Forbes herself had re-appeared to witness the moment.
    ‘Oh, I’m so terribly sorry,’ she said. ‘It appears you were standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
       
    ‘These hunting people,’ said Fry angrily as she got back into the Peugeot. ‘Honestly, talking to them is like flogging a dead –’
    She stopped, realizing the stupidity of what she’d been about to say. As she started up the engine, Cooper got into the passenger seat. Fastening his seat belt, he wafted a hand in an exaggerated gesture.

    ‘Diane,’ he said, ‘I hope you don’t mind if I open the window? Only, it’s a bit –’
    ‘Yes,’ said Fry. ‘I know.’
       
    Back at the office, Cooper found a place to hang his damp coat and fetched himself a coffee from the vending machine. Hardly coffee, really – but it was hot.
    He stood for a moment watching Irvine and Hurst busy at work in the CID room. He was remembering again his first ever visit to Eyam, with the school party. He recalled that he’d brought back a souvenir from the village museum. Cooper smiled when he pictured it. His mother had hated the thing, and didn’t even want it in the house. She paid no attention to his explanation. Eyam was most famous as the Plague Village, right? So what else would you choose as a suitable souvenir to commemorate the Black Death? It was obvious, really. A black, plastic rat, with red eyes and a long, scaly tail.
    The young Cooper had thought it was a fine example of Rattus rattus , the Black Rat – now one of the rarest mammals in the UK, thanks to its more successful cousin, the brown rat. The souvenir rat even came with its own information leaflet, explaining that this was the little beast that had spread from Asia to Europe in the Middle Ages, bringing its little gift of the bubonic plague. In dark corners of barns and warehouses it could be active at all hours, and ate almost anything it could find, its family groups organized on a hierarchical basis, dominated by one strong individual. They carried not only the plague, but typhus, rabies, salmonella, hantavirus, Weil’s disease … oh, and trichinosis, the pork roundworm. Thank God the natural mortality rate of rats was ninety per cent.
    Cooper recalled very clearly standing outside the Plague Cottage that first time, reading the names of the dead on the plaque. It was all very well for people like Diane Fry to scoff at Eyam’s fame as the Plague Village, to laugh at the idea of souvenir rats and tableaux of people in night shirts with their necks covered in bubos. But for him, there was one fact which had made the whole story different, and much more personal. According to the well-documented history of Eyam’s plague year, the very first family to fall victim to the Black Death had been Coopers.
       
    Fry had been only a few minutes late for her appointment to see Detective Superintendent Branagh. Yet when she entered the superintendent’s office, she felt a bit like the naughty child sent to see the head teacher for breaking wind in class.
    The superintendent’s office was on the upper floor of Divisional HQ, looking down on Gate C and the back of the East Stand at Edendale Football Club. That view seemed to have become a status symbol among the senior management team. It was also one of