The Devil's Edge (4 page)

The Chadwicks were outside, enjoying the sun, seated on garden chairs under a parasol. Mr Chadwick rose to greet him. He was a tall man with anxious eyes and a balding head shiny with perspiration.

‘Bill Chadwick. This is my wife, Retty. Marietta, that is. We call her Retty.’

Cooper showed his warrant card, even though they hadn’t asked to see it. It was odd how some people were so trusting when he said he was a police officer. No matter what was going on around them, they still felt no reason to be suspicious of strangers.

‘You’ll have heard …?’ he began.

‘At Valley View, yes. The Barrons.’

‘It’s so close,’ said Mrs Chadwick. ‘Ever so close. Just across the lane.’

They all looked instinctively towards Valley View, though it wasn’t even possible to see Curbar Lane from here, let alone anything of the Barrons’ property. Trees and the corner of a wall, then more trees. And beyond the trees, Riddings Edge. So close? Cooper wondered if the Chadwicks knew what it was actually like to have neighbours living practically on top of you, packed in cheek by jowl, so close that you could hear them clearly through the walls on either side of you. There were lots of people in Edendale who knew what that was like. His own ground-floor flat in Welbeck Street sometimes echoed to the slam of a door from the tenant upstairs, the clatter of feet on the stairs, the blare of old Mrs Shelley’s TV set next door.

‘Obviously you’re some of the Barrons’ closest neighbours,’ he said.

‘And you wondered if we might have noticed anything,’ said Chadwick. ‘Obviously. But I’m afraid we didn’t.’

‘But you were at home last night?’

‘Actually, we went out as soon as it got dark,’ said Chadwick.

‘Where to?’

‘Up on to the edge.’

‘Really?’

Cooper couldn’t keep the surprise out of his voice. He’d been warned only a few minutes earlier about the people who went up on the edge at night. But he hadn’t thought the Chadwicks were the sort of people Mrs Holland was referring to. From her tone of voice, he’d been picturing a dogging site, where people had sex in public while others watched. The growing number of such sites was a regular cause of complaints from residents in secluded parts of Derbyshire. But they didn’t attract people like the Chadwicks, surely?

‘Yes, we were out for a couple of hours,’ said Chadwick.

‘In the dark? Why?’

‘Well, it has to be at night-time. It needs to be dark, to watch properly. You can’t see anything in daylight, of course.’

‘Ah,’ said Cooper, still hoping that he was wrong.

Chadwick nodded. ‘Yes, we were watching the Perseid meteor shower.’

‘Of course you were.’

‘It was one of the best nights for viewing. A nice clear sky – but not much moon. We saw lots of shooting stars. A wonderful experience to watch them from a place like that.’

‘While you were up there, you didn’t notice anything at all?’ asked Cooper.

‘Well, we gathered there was some trouble. Lots of sirens and flashing lights disturbing the peace during the night. We don’t get that here very often. I see it in Sheffield, yes. But not in Riddings.’

‘Oh, you work in Sheffield, sir?’

Chadwick shuffled his feet and blinked nervously. A trickle of sweat ran across his temple. ‘Yes. Er … in a way.’

Immediately Cooper began to study him more keenly. It was unusual to see someone thrown into confusion by such a simple question. You either worked in Sheffield or you didn’t. Unless your job involved travelling around the country, and you were only in Sheffield sometimes. But in that case, why not just say so? What was the cause of the embarrassment?

‘I’m a head teacher,’ said Chadwick. ‘
Was
a head teacher.’

‘So you’re retired?’

‘I’m on gardening leave.’

Cooper glanced instinctively at the manicured lawn and neat flower beds around them, before he recognised the euphemism.

‘What happened?’

Chadwick shrugged. ‘I lost it. Simply as that, really. It all just became too much one day. Oh, it had been building up for a while. Quite a few years, actually, when I look back. There was a time in my career when I used to get up in the morning and think
Great, I’m going to work today
. It was exciting. I relished the challenge. I thought only about what I could achieve each day. But gradually it all changed. I began to wake up in the early hours and feel sick. Sick to my stomach at the thought of having to face school. And it wasn’t just the kids, either. God knows, they were bad enough. But there were all the whingeing staff, the stupid parents, the endless, endless hassle, everyone expecting me to do something to solve their problem, to make their life easier, to produce some magic solution out of a hat to make their child more intelligent, better behaved, more talented at music or football, or less of a bully. It was always my fault when things didn’t happen the way they wanted. And … oh God, I don’t really want to think about it. It makes my guts churn even now.’

‘So you were suspended.’

‘Not exactly. It was … a mutual arrangement. A spell away from the job, while things are sorted out. Or that’s what they said. Maybe it’s just to allow the governors time to find a new head to replace me. My deputy will be happy enough with that, I dare say. Or they could be hoping I’ll give up the fight and resign. It would save them money.’

‘I see.’

Chadwick screwed up his eyes and gazed into the distance, staring at something that Cooper couldn’t see.

‘Or maybe …’

‘What?’

‘Well, I wonder sometimes. Perhaps everyone is just waiting for me to do the decent thing, and top myself.’

Too surprised to know how to respond, Cooper watched Chadwick turn away and walk slowly into the house, as if seeking the shade. He moved like a wounded animal, creeping away to find somewhere quiet and dark.

Cooper looked at Mrs Chadwick. She smiled sadly.

‘I’m sorry. He’s been like that for a while. It doesn’t seem to get any better.’

‘Do you have any family living here?’

‘We have a daughter, Bryony. She’s seventeen, nearly eighteen.’

‘Where would she have been last night?’

‘Oh, she was out.’

Mrs Chadwick became more relaxed now that she had been steered on to a different subject.

‘Bryony got her A level results last week,’ she said. ‘So she was out celebrating with her friends from school. She’ll be off to uni in September.’

‘Good grades? All A stars?’

‘How did you know?’

‘Sometimes I think I’m the only person who never got any,’ said Cooper.

The woman was becoming more animated as she spoke of her daughter. This was a far more comfortable topic, something to be seized on gratefully when life was going wrong.

‘We wanted her to do a gap year,’ she said. ‘The way we both did ourselves when we were students. It was a terrific experience for us. And, of course, it helped us to work through in our minds what we really wanted to do with our lives. I don’t think you can do that without seeing a bit of the world, do you?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘But Bryony wasn’t interested in a gap year. She says she knows what she wants to do. She’s set out her plan, and she needs to get on with it and earn her qualifications if she’s going to meet her goals. A gap year would just be a waste of time and set back her schedule. She’s very driven, you see. Very ambitious. Obviously we’re giving her all the support she needs. We’re
very
proud of her.’

‘I’m sure you are.’

A shadow of anxiety passed across her face, and she glanced back towards the house. It was sad that a few moments of silence was enough to cause that apprehension. But she saw her husband pass in front of a window, and the concern eased.

‘She’s chosen her university herself, too,’ she said. ‘I went to Oxford. St Hilda’s. But Bryony wanted to go to Bristol for some reason. She insisted on putting it down as her first choice. Something about them having the best reputation in her subject. As I said, she’s very …’

‘Driven?’

‘Quite.’

A very slim girl with long dark hair appeared round a corner of the house. She saw Cooper, and walked quickly away again.

‘Was that your daughter?’ he asked.

‘That’s Bryony, yes.’

Mrs Chadwick escorted Cooper to his car. Usually people were only too glad to see him leave, and shut the door behind him as quickly as possible. But this woman seemed to want to linger. Did she want to talk more about the achievements of her daughter? Or was there another subject she longed to discuss, but was afraid to force on him? Something she might be ashamed of. That self-conscious, embarrassed look again. She was a person afraid of showing too much emotion, yet struggling to hold it inside any longer.

‘So what actually happened, Mrs Chadwick?’ asked Cooper.

‘Happened?’

‘To your husband?’

She nodded, and her shoulders seemed to slump, as if a great weight of tension had been lifted from her.

‘A child pushed him too far one day,’ she said. ‘A fourteen-year-old kid. Student, we’re supposed to call them, aren’t we? Cocky little devil he was, by all accounts. Everyone knew he was trouble. He just kept pushing and pushing to see how far he could go, wanted to find out what he could get away with. You know the type. You must see them all the time in your job.’

‘Yes, of course. Usually when they’re a bit older.’

‘Well, perhaps you wouldn’t see so many of them if teachers like Bill were allowed to keep proper discipline in our schools.’

Cooper knew that a lot of police officers would agree with this view. More than one of them had gone the same way as Mr Chadwick when they’d been pushed too far. There was only so much you could take, after all. Everyone had a breaking point.

‘Is your husband getting help?’ he asked.

‘Oh, yes. Regular counselling sessions. Medication for his depression. I don’t think the medication is working properly yet.’ She paused. ‘That, or he’s stopped taking it.’

Cooper glanced at her, saw the strain in her eyes. ‘It must be a difficult thing to live with.’

She smiled through a sudden welling of tears. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Yes, it is. We just hope that we can all rely on some support when we need it, don’t we?’

Cooper drove back along Curbar Lane to Valley View and took a look at the Barrons’ property with new eyes, trying to see it as a passer-by might.

One thing immediately struck him. At the front, everything seemed to have been done to advertise the fact that there was plenty worth stealing inside – electric gates with an entryphone system, a security camera pointing at the gate, little yellow signs warning of an electric fence topping the dry-stone wall. Yet at the back, the property had been pretty much left open, the fences low and the trees cleared to provide a view of the edge from the patio and balcony. Whoever designed this landscape had seen the edge as an attraction, not a threat.

He supposed most of the residents of Riddings would be commuters, or well-off retired people like the Hollands. These weren’t the seriously rich, just the affluent and comfortable. Definitely not a tourist-friendly village, though.

Many of these people would have come here from the city, seeking peace and quiet, looking for a refuge from noise and traffic – and an escape from crime. Perhaps they had encountered violence on the streets of Sheffield and Manchester, or become nervous at the stories of robberies and shootings every week in the newspapers, feared the monsters stalking their cities. So they had sought refuge in a rural haven. The village of Riddings, in the eastern edges. Secluded properties, respectable neighbours. Yet it seemed that for some of them, their monsters had followed them to their sanctuary.

Of course, everyone had monsters in their lives. Most people left them behind in their childhood, locked away safely in a fading corner of memory. Some kept them with them, all the way through their lives. Cooper was one of those people, so he knew all about it. His monsters were always close by, glimpsed from the corner of his eye, forever lurking in the darkness, breathing quietly in the silent hours of the night.

He paused outside the Barrons’ back door, watching the sunlight catching the windows, hearing the birds singing in the trees, listening to the quiet engine of the black van as it took Zoe Barron’s body away.

He knew that most people never met their monsters in the flesh.

But a few were not so lucky.

4

Handymen, gardeners, tree surgeons. The village noticeboard advertised all of their services, alongside the times of mobile library visits, instructions for the council’s blue bag recycling scheme, and a poster announcing the attractions of Riddings Show, which was due to take place on Saturday.

Cooper was waiting for his team to rendezvous and compare notes. They had arranged to meet in the centre of the village, where an ancient stone horse trough provided the central feature on a few square yards of cobbles. From here, he could see Union Jacks flying over several properties.

For some reason, many of the house names in Riddings included the word ‘croft’. There was South Croft, Hill Croft, Nether Croft. It made them sound more like remote homesteads in the Scottish Highlands than homes in an affluent middle-class Derbyshire village.

Every few yards, steel posts were sunk into the verges to prevent cars parking on the grass. In one place, someone had exercised a bit of artistic interpretation and used giant imitation toadstools instead. All the mail boxes he’d passed seemed to be decorated with illustrations of post horns or stage coaches. He couldn’t imagine that little touch on the Devonshire Estate.

Throughout the village, rose hips hung over the road, and long banks of unpicked blackberries were ripening at the wayside. What a waste.

Just beyond a sign warning of horse riders, Cooper saw a gate with a cattle grid to keep the sheep out. There might have been sheep in Riddings once, but there wasn’t much sign of them now. Apart from horses, the nearest livestock would be the Highland cattle roaming the flats above Baslow Edge, so often photographed by tourists against a backdrop of the Eagle Stone or Wellington’s Monument.

Nearby, a woman in a pink sleeveless top was kneeling on the grass weeding a flower bed, watched by a West Highland terrier. In a small orchard, speckled hens pecked among windfall apples. Life seemed to be going on as normal in Riddings.

‘The Barrons have been here for three years,’ said Gavin Murfin, sweating his way to the meeting point and peering at the scum-covered water in the horse trough. ‘One of the neighbours told me that Valley View was on the market for nearly two and a half million. I guess prices have fallen a bit since then, though.’

‘Not in this village.’

‘Oh?’

‘So where did the Barrons get the money to move into Riddings, I wonder?’

‘I know what you mean. Not forty years old yet, and three kids to bring up. You’d think they’d be on the breadline like the rest of us poor saps who have families draining every penny from our pockets. But Jake Barron is in line to take over the family business. The Barrons have a chain of carpet warehouses across South Yorkshire – Sheffield, Rotherham, Doncaster, all those places. His dad is still company chairman, but Jake is chief executive. I guess he’s taking a fair whack out of the company.’

‘Hasn’t the carpet trade suffered from the recession?’

‘No, the opposite. People have been spending their money on home improvements instead of moving house. New furniture, new carpets, that sort of thing. There’s no recession so bad that somebody doesn’t benefit from it. They say the pound stores are booming.’

Detective Constables Becky Hurst and Luke Irvine arrived together, and shared the results of their interviews with neighbours. No one had seen or heard anything, it seemed. As far as the residents of Riddings were concerned, the Barrons’ assailants had come and gone like ghosts.

‘Who has details of the Barrons’ children?’ asked Cooper.

Hurst held up a hand. ‘I can tell you that. There are three of them. Their names are, let’s see …’ She consulted a notebook. ‘Melissa, Joshua and—’

‘Fay,’ said Murfin. ‘Melissa, Joshua and Fay.’

He couldn’t resist a note of satire in his voice as he read out the names. His own kids were called Sean and Wendy.

‘But I don’t suppose they were in a position to see or hear anything. I bet none of them even went near a window to look outside.’

‘We need to keep knocking on doors, then,’ said Cooper.

Murfin wiped a hand across his brow and fumbled in his pockets for sustenance. ‘We need more manpower to do all this door-to-door.’

‘I’ve been promised there’s more coming.’

‘Some people have got out from under anyway,’ said Murfin grumpily.

‘Like who?’

‘Diane Fry, that’s who. The Wicked Witch of the West Midlands. Let’s face it, she’s just phoning it in these days. Secondment to a working group, I ask you. It should be
me
phoning it in. I’m the one who’s done his thirty. I’m the one who’s so close to retirement it’s practically singeing my arse. But look at me – still pounding the streets, knocking on doors. It’s cruelty to dumb animals.’

‘Gavin, I really don’t think you’d want to be on a working group.
Implementing Strategic Change
? Think about it.’

Murfin chewed his lip ruminatively. ‘Okay, I thought about it. And I fell asleep.’

Cooper thought of the Barrons’ house again. They were getting nothing from the neighbours, so the answers must lie at Valley View. Everything would depend on forensics from the scene, and he was missing out on that.

‘Better keep knocking on doors, Gavin.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

Murfin looked at the main street that ran through the village.

‘I’m not walking up that hill, though. Someone will have to drive me to the top, and I’ll work my way down.’

It was true that Murfin had never been cut out for country treks. No matter how many memos were sent out by management about the fitness of officers, he had been unable to lose any weight. From time to time he’d compromised by taking his belt in a notch, which had only succeeded in producing an unsightly roll of spare flesh that hung over his waistband.

His wife Jean had been putting him on diets for years, but they never worked. Now he was so near to completing his thirty years’ service and earning a full pension that he didn’t really care any more, didn’t feel the necessity to meet the fitness requirements or respond to emails on the subject. It was odd, then, that the prospect of approaching retirement hadn’t made him more cheerful. Instead, he was becoming more and more lugubrious, like an overweight Eeyore or Marvin the Paranoid Android.

A woman came past walking a terrier. Surely the same woman Cooper had seen gardening only a short time earlier.

‘How’re you doing, duck?’ said Murfin with forced brightness.

The woman glared at him coldly.

‘What are you selling?’ she said. ‘Whatever it is, we don’t want any.’

Murfin sniggered as if she’d told a dirty joke and sidled up to her to show his warrant card.

‘Police,’ he said. ‘Oh, I know – I can’t believe it either. They take anybody these days. Can you spare a minute, duck?’

‘Okay,’ said Cooper. ‘While Gavin is out ingratiating himself with the locals, let’s get some real work done.’

‘Ten to one he’ll end up being offered a cup of tea,’ said Hurst, watching Murfin with a hint of admiration.

‘Fresh coffee,’ said Cooper. ‘But if I know Gavin, it’ll be the biscuits he’s interested in.’

A car pulled alongside, a metallic blue Jaguar XF with the number plate RSE1. The passenger window hummed down, and man leaned towards it from the driving seat. Iron-grey hair swept back, a sardonic eyebrow, a loud and commanding tone of voice.

‘Police?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Cooper.

‘You know what’s going on around here, I suppose?’

‘Yes. We’re aware of it.’

‘So what are you doing about it? Anything? Or nothing?’

He didn’t wait for an answer, but put his car back in gear and accelerated off down the hill.

‘Great.’

‘Nice to know we have the support of the public,’ said Hurst as she watched him drive away.

‘When people get upset and frightened, they need someone to blame.’

‘Surely they should be blaming the thugs responsible for the crimes?’

‘But no one knows who they are, do they? So we’re the nearest target. That’s the way it works, Becky.’

‘That’s so unfair.’

‘It happens.’ Cooper glanced at her. ‘You’re going to have to get used to our relationship with the law-abiding public.’

While Fry waited in the garden of the Seven Mile Inn, she checked her phone and saw she’d missed a call from Angie. There was a voicemail message.

Hi, sis. We haven’t talked. We need to talk, you know? Call me.

She saw Mick or Rick coming back towards her with their drinks.

He smiled as he handed her a glass. ‘A boyfriend?’

‘No, my sister.’

‘Right.’

His smile became a smirk, as if he’d just been given some kind of signal. Fry gritted her teeth. Just because the call wasn’t from her boyfriend didn’t mean she hadn’t got one. But that was the way some men’s minds worked. They read an invitation in the slightest thing. She supposed it must be some instinct from their primitive past, sniffing the air to detect the presence of a rival, then mating with anything that stood still long enough.

He sat opposite her, gazing into her eyes, his mind evidently searching for the right conversational gambit. Best to stick an oar in straight away.

‘So, what do your people down in Leicestershire think about the plan for elected police commissioners?’

She lifted an eyebrow at him over her glass. For a moment, he looked pained, as if she’d just kicked him under the table. But he recovered well.

‘The scrapping of performance targets and minimum standards is okay. But locally elected police commissioners? That’s not so welcome. Everyone thinks that, don’t they?’

Fry supposed that was true. As with all kinds of amateur interference, the role of elected politicians tended to be viewed with suspicion. Most officers preferred the idea of power resting in the hands of the chief constable. After all, he or she was a police officer, a colleague who had come up through the ranks.

That said it all really. It was ‘us and them’ again. The police and the public. The constant blurring of the lines was viewed as a threat. Even creeping civilianisation was regarded as an insidious disease.

‘Politics has no place in the police service. The idea of an elected commissioner with the power to sack the chief constable makes my blood run cold. Are police numbers sustainable in the face of budget cuts? Who knows? Who wants to wait around to find out?’

With eighty-three per cent of the policing budget being spent on staffing, it seemed likely that numbers would be reduced in the coming months. More than likely. If Fry had been a gambler, she would have called it a racing certainty.

So the big idea was to save cash through structural reforms, exploring the possible mergers of specialist units and back-office functions, sharing the purchase of expensive equipment and IT systems, forensic and legal services. Any merging of functions would have to be low profile, though, and needed spinning in the right way when it was announced.

An overtime and deployment review had been under way for some time. The police authority’s audit and resources committee was already looking at ways of providing value for money in policing. The addition of government budget cuts meant an ideal opportunity to look at streamlining costs. At least that was what the management team had called it in their emails – ‘an opportunity’.

It was all spelled out in the document currently sitting on Fry’s desk back in Edendale: ‘Policing in the Twenty-first Century: Reconnecting police and the people’. Her head resounded with phrases about mobilising neighbourhood activists, implementing radical reform strategies, stripping away bureaucracy in the partnership landscape …

The partnership landscape. Well, it was certainly a different kind of scenery from the one Ben Cooper harped on about endlessly. These days, her hills were mountains of paperwork, her valleys contained rivers of jargon, endlessly flowing. The only thing her landscape had in common with the Peak District was the number of sheep involved, and the amount of shit they left behind.

She was hearing more and more buzzwords as each day passed.
Sacrifices, restraint, institutionalised overtime
.

Fry looked at her companion. She really ought to get his name right, but he’d taken off his badge when they left Sherwood Lodge.

‘You know, when you’ve been in the job for a few years, everything seems to come full circle,’ he said. ‘It’s funny to watch the pendulum swinging. Take the question of force mergers …’

Force mergers. If she ever heard that phrase again, she would probably scream. Back in 2005, HM Inspector of Constabulary had pointed out that poor information-sharing between police forces had led to serious crime that crossed regional boundaries slipping through a gap. HMIC said that the forty-three-force structure was no longer fit for purpose, and proposed the creation of ‘strategic forces’. The result had been the government’s ‘superforce‘ merger plan, which had soon been abandoned in the face of local opposition and the cost of restructuring.

Full-scale force mergers were seriously unpopular with voters. The suggestion for a huge East Midlands Constabulary covering Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire and Bedfordshire had been dropped like a hot potato. No one wanted to see their local force disappearing into an unaccountable monolith.

Now they were discussing another report, which had also declared the structure of forty-three forces obsolete. But the answer to the problem was different. They pointed to figures showing that small police forces caught more criminals than larger ones. They suggested that the current forty-three forces should be split into around ninety-five, more than twice the present number, so that police forces could properly reflect their local communities. No mention of restructuring costs there. But Fry was willing to bet the budget cuts would count that one out too.

‘What’s your task after the working-group sessions?’

‘Demand management reports on control room processes for all five forces.’

He shrugged. ‘Good luck. Control rooms will probably be contracted out, like payrolls.’