Kill Call (32 page)

First, she eyed Gavin Murfin. Murfin grumbled, but would never stick his head above the parapet. DC Becky Hurst and DC Luke Irvine were young, they hadn’t been here too long, but they might be intimidated by Branagh into blurting out whatever she wanted them to say.

Of course, it might have been another DS on the division. Rivalry wasn’t unknown in E Division, though she couldn’t think who she’d offended. Not recently, anyway.

She looked further down the room. Cooper was the man who’d actually offered her his support, made quite a point of it, in fact. Had he been feeling guilty, trying to deflect suspicion? Or was he actually biding his time, waiting for her to slip up, looking for a chance to take the credit for himself? She knew he resented the fact that she’d gained promotion ahead of him. Maybe he’d never got over it, and had been seething ever since. Fry wondered if Cooper was really that devious. When he offered support to her face, was he stabbing her in the back at the same time?

She drew in a deep breath. A bit of extra oxygen could make the brain sharper, keep her alert. And she needed to be alert right now, more than ever. Fry had never felt so isolated. And she didn’t know where the threat might come from.

Perhaps she was being left to handle this suspicious death on the assumption that she’d mess up and strike another black mark on her PDR. But responsibility didn’t work like that in the police service – she was supposed to be supervised by more senior officers, and if things went monumentally wrong, they would be expected to take a share of the blame. The best thing she could do would be to refer upwards as often as she could, ask advice, consult her DI on the most minor decision, make sure he was fully informed at every stage. And record it. That was important. Keep a log of every action, and who she’d discussed it with.

But wait. Was that what they wanted her to do? Were they hoping that she would lose confidence, that she would prove herself incapable of taking responsibility, devoid of initiative, unable to take the smallest decision on her own? Hitchens couldn’t have planned that, it was too clever for him, too devious. But Branagh …

On the other hand, she could just be getting paranoid. And, if she was, did that mean that they weren’t all out to get her?

Fry sat at her desk, watching everyone else leave the office to go home, back to their families, off to meet their girlfriends, get drunk, or watch TV. They all sounded like alien activities that she was excluded from.

What the hell was going on? Right now, her week couldn’t get any worse than it already was.

When Fry finally got back to her flat in Grosvenor Road later that evening, her answering machine was blinking. When she pressed the ‘play’ button, there was the briefest of messages. And from that moment, things did get worse, after all.

‘Di – call me as soon as you can. It’s important.’

The caller didn’t need to leave a name. It was Angie.

There was no mistaking death when you saw it. Cooper had seen two dead bodies already this week, but it was so much worse when it was personal.

The cat had curled up in his usual spot by the central heating boiler in the conservatory. He looked so relaxed and peaceful that he could have been asleep, at first glance. But the stillness was too unnatural, the lack of even the slightest stirring of the fur as he breathed.

And, of course, Cooper had never arrived home before without Randy running to greet him. He didn’t even need to go to the conservatory to know that something was badly wrong.

He knelt and stroked the long black fur. The cat was stiff. He’d died some time during the day, while Cooper was at work. He’d died alone, which was the worst thing he could imagine. It was what he dreaded for himself, dying alone and in the dark.

‘Sorry, Randy,’ he said, barely able to get out the words as a rush of guilt overcame him. He should have been here.

Though the light had gone, Cooper found a spade and dug a hole in the garden behind the conservatory, underneath a beech tree. Randy had spent a lot of time here. Not hunting much lately, just sitting and watching the birds, enjoying the sun. Giving him a permanent place here was the least he could do.

Somewhere in the darkness, among the beeches, a male tawny owl called. It was the eerie full-volume hoot, hu … hu-hooooo, made only by the male. The owl must be establishing a territory here, at the start of the new breeding season.

As he straightened up from the grave and knocked the last of the soil off his spade, Cooper thought he glimpsed a dim shape, winging silently into the trees.

Fry was discovering that there were some things you couldn’t keep buried. Her sister had been a sort of talisman in her life, a symbol of the high points and low points. Well, no. Mostly the low points, it had to be said.

Since Angie had walked out of their foster home in the Black Country as a teenager, Diane had spent years trying to track her down. It had been her reason for coming to Derbyshire in the first place. Yet when they had finally been reunited, the taste of success had been a sour one. Diane had found that her sister was no longer a person she could trust.

‘You must have realized that I got mixed up in some things that I didn’t mean to,’ said Angie on the phone that night.

‘Obviously. The drugs –’

‘I don’t mean the drugs. Well, not the drugs on their own. There’s a whole world that heroin gets you into. You’ve no idea, Diane.’

And Diane had to accept that she really didn’t have any idea. She’d never thought of herself as naïve. How could she be? But there were things about her sister that she didn’t understand. She supposed that she never had understood them, really. It was probably that mystery, the constant hint of wickedness and the unknown, that had led her to worship Angie as a teenager. Not just sisterly love, after all. She had been drawn to the scent of danger like a moth to a flame. And Angie had, too. In that way, they were the same.

For a moment, Diane wondered whether her sister was involved in some gigantic conspiracy against her. Had she been seething with jealousy and hatred all these years? Was she determined to bring Diane down, one way or another? If she was, she was doing a damned good job, and Diane felt helpless to fight her intentions.

‘I was recruited,’ said Angie. ‘First by the bad guys, then by the good guys. It’s not always easy to tell the difference, though. Funny, that.’

‘You’ve been working for the drugs squad?’ said Diane. ‘As an informant.’

She realized it had been a suspicion that she’d been suppressing. She could easily have believed anything of her sister, but not that. The evidence had been there, in front of her nose, but she’d refused to believe it, had never even tried to confront it.

‘SOCA,’ said Angie. ‘The Serious and Organized Crime Agency.’

‘I know who SOCA are.’

‘You were very slow, Di. Your nice Constable Cooper figured it out long ago.’

Diane gritted her teeth. She was realizing another truth that she ought to have accepted a long time ago. Not only was her sister someone she couldn’t trust; worse, Angie had become someone she no longer knew.

‘How did Ben Cooper come into it? I never understood that.’

‘Oh, don’t take it out on him,’ said Angie, sounding faintly less sardonic. ‘He was only trying to help. It’s what he does. You must have noticed.’

Fry was within a second of putting the phone down. But she knew that she couldn’t leave a question hanging. It would torment her for days.

‘Angie, what is it you want?’ she said.

‘I want you to come back, Diane.’

‘Back? Back where?’

‘To Birmingham, of course. You know it’s where you belong.’

‘Damn it, Angie, you know perfectly well why I left Birmingham.’

‘’Course I do. But that doesn’t stop it being the place where you belong.’

That night, Fry couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t the first night it had happened, and it wouldn’t be the last. But tonight, as soon as she was alone in her bedroom, the darkness began to close in around her. That darkness was full of her memories. It moved in on her from every side, dropping like a heavy blanket, pressing against her body and smothering her with its warm, sticky embrace. Around her, the night murmured and her flesh squirmed.

She’d always known the old memories were still powerful and raw, ready to rise up and grab at her mind from the darkness. Tonight, once again, dark forms seemed to loom around her, mere smudges of silhouettes that crept ever nearer, reaching out towards her.

And then she seemed to hear a voice in the darkness. A familiar voice, coarse and slurring in a Birmingham accent. ‘It’s a copper,’ it said. Taunting laughter moving in the shadows. ‘A copper. She’s a copper.’

The reality of the horror was years behind her now, and the only wounds still raw were those in her mind, where they were exposed to the cold winds of memory.

She breathed deeply, forcing her heartbeat to slow down. Control and concentration. Yet she could feel the sweat break out on her forehead. She cursed silently, knowing what was about to come.

These were memories too powerful to be buried completely, too deeply etched into her soul to be forgotten. They merely writhed in the depths, waiting for the chance to re-emerge.

Bodies could be sensed, further back in the darkness, watching, laughing, waiting eagerly for what they knew would happen next. Voices murmured and coughed. ‘It’s a copper,’ the voices said. ‘She’s a copper.’

She remembered movements that crept and rustled closer, fragmented glimpses of figures carved into segments by the streetlights, the reek of booze and violence. And then she seemed to hear the one particular voice – that rough, slurring Brummie voice that slithered out of the darkness. ‘How do you like this, copper?’ And the taunting laughter moving in the shadows.

Then she was falling, flailing forward into the darkness. Nothing could stop the flood of remembered sensations now. ‘How do you like this, copper?’

Then suddenly it was all over. Until the next time.

30

Journal of 1968

And that’s the thing about memories. They come back to you in the darkness or in the daylight. They arrive like strangers at night, they appear out of the shadows in the heat of the sun. Or they walk up to you, smiling, in the rain.

No matter how guilty you feel, you know the truth when you come face to face with it. You know it by its eyes, and its voice. You know it so well that you don’t need to ask its name.

And then what do you do? What would you do? No one knows until it happens, until the call comes and you do whatever is needed.

1968. A year of revolution? Well, maybe. But every spasm of rebellion was ruthlessly crushed. Russian tanks rolling into Prague, students facing riot squads outside the Sorbonne, Boss Daley’s police clubbing hippies on the streets of Chicago.

But that was the 1960s to me. The world on a knife edge. It was the U2 incident, the Bay of Pigs, the Six Days War, the building of the Berlin Wall. American B-52s circling constantly just outside Soviet airspace, ready for the first strike.

But the one thing I remember most about events in the outside world is something that everyone else seems to have forgotten. That January, a B-52 Stratofortress crashed in Greenland, spilling its load of nuclear warheads across the snowy wastes. When I read about that, I imagined the aircraft coming down a few miles to the east, in Soviet territory. US bombs falling on Kamchatka. And it could have happened so easily. Across the world, fingers were on the button, and World War Three hung on a hair trigger.

Often, when I was out there in the fields, I could feel Jimmy alongside me, walking in the midst of a shadow, even on the sunniest day. And we’d talk about this subject a lot, the way that things worked out. I’d tell him about the feeling of guilt. The guilt of being the one who survived.

Of course, a lot of people have died since Jimmy. But it’s different when you’ve seen them die, when you know their last sight of the world was your own face, that your reflection was caught in their eyes as they took their last breath.

And worse, when you wonder every day if they believed it was you that killed them.

You know, it took me a while to be sure that it wasn’t me. But I remember the exact moment. It was the night I saw them on the street, the two of them, just leaving the Bird in Hand. I could see straight away that they’d forgotten Jimmy. They’d managed to put his death in the past, the way I never did.

Arm in arm, they were. A laugh, a kiss, and something more than that. There was a terrible anger that came up inside me then. It burned like a flame, and it never went out. It blazed inside me like a nuclear core, scorching through my heart and my blood, contaminating a part of my brain with its fallout.

They had made me guilty. I could never forgive them for that. They had made me feel responsible for Jimmy’s death, and they made me tell lies. Why had I listened to Les, just because he was number one? Why had I thought that life was too short, that we could all die tomorrow, so none of it mattered?

That was the moment I changed. In that one, bright, devastating flash, I realized what I had to do. No matter how long I had to wait, I knew who the person was that I needed to kill.

31

Saturday

A series of gritstone buildings stood at the end of a long drive, guarded by a locked gate. Fry could see nothing grand about any of the buildings, nothing to justify their secluded position. This was hardly Chatsworth House, or any other stately home.

‘Take a closer look,’ said Cooper, passing her the binoculars.

‘What is this place?’

‘The hunt kennels.’

‘The Eden Valley Hunt?’

‘Right,’ said Cooper. ‘This is where the hounds are kennelled.’

Many of the structures were single storey, their slate roofs darkened by rain. A couple of vans with muddy wheel arches stood in the yard. Fry could hear the distant sound of barking dogs.

‘The huntsman and kennel man live on the premises,’ said Cooper. ‘The building to the right is the flesh house.’

‘The what?’

‘Well, you know about the flesh run?’

‘Jesus, do I want to?’