Fall Down Dead

16

Martin Jackson took a drink of tea and leaned back in his chair; Diane Fry had refused anything but water. She felt like a spy being interrogated by her captors, afraid that anything they gave her might be spiked with a truth drug. A ludicrous image, but that was how her mind was working.

‘We’ll take standards four and nine together, shall we?’ said Jackson after a while. ‘“Use of Force” and “Discreditable Conduct”.’

‘I will behave in a manner, whether on or off duty, which does not bring discredit on the police service or undermine public confidence in policing,’ she responded.

She could see he was surprised now. Fry was quite surprised too that the exact sentence had come into her mind without having to look at the booklet.

‘Very good,’ he said.

‘Are we going to go all the way through the Code of Ethics, or do you have anything specific to put to me?’

He looked at his papers.

‘Well, DS Fry, there is a complaint of assault on file. What do you know about that?’

‘Geoff Pollitt?’ said Fry in shock. ‘I didn’t think—’ Then she saw the puzzled expression cross his face and she stopped speaking.

‘Who is Geoff Pollitt?’ he said.

Fry shook her head. ‘Sorry. It was nothing. What were you asking me?’

‘Are you feeling all right, DS Fry? Would you like to take a break? I’m happy to finish my tea while you compose yourself.’

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Fine. You were saying...’

‘A complaint of assault. From a fellow police officer.’

‘Oh.’

She ran her mind back over the interactions with her colleagues. Some of them hadn’t been friendly, it was true. But assault?

‘Perhaps I could refresh your memory. An inspector with the Leicestershire force?’

‘Leicestershire? But I’ve never...’

And then it came back to her. A memory of a course she’d attended at Sherwood Lodge, the Nottinghamshire Police headquarters, attended by officers from throughout the East Midlands. A session in a nearby pub afterwards. The Seven Mile Inn. She could remember the pub, but the officer’s name escaped her. Mick something? Or was it Dick?

‘Inspector Rick Shepherd,’ said Jackson. ‘Do you remember now? His nose was broken in a pub car park.’

‘I’d forgotten he was an inspector,’ admitted Fry.

‘Yes, a senior officer. But it doesn’t seem to matter to you, does it?’

‘It was self-defence,’ said Fry. ‘A sexual assault.’

‘Really? There’s no complaint of that nature on file.’

‘I didn’t report it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Sometimes you just have to deal with these things yourself and move on,’ said Fry.

Jackson grunted. ‘That’s not what we encourage, as I’m sure you’re aware.’

She shrugged. How could she explain to this man? How could she tell him that she detested the thought of all the fuss and the questions and the paperwork, and the stares and whispers of other officers? She would have done anything to avoid that. But her feeling was hard to put into words. At least, not the kind of words that would make sense in this room.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t follow procedure,’ she said. ‘Sometimes it happens.’

‘Noted.’

Diane Fry remembered that evening well. She’d been starting to feel suffocated — and not just by the heat, or the airlessness of the conference room. The suffocation went much deeper. It was a slow choking of her spirit, the draining of life from her innermost being. In a few more minutes, she would be brain-dead. Heart-dead, soul-dead, her spirit sapped, her energy levels at zero. It was purgatory.

She’d spent two days in Nottinghamshire Police headquarters at Sherwood Lodge, watching someone whose name badge she couldn’t read sticking Post-it notes on a sheet of brown paper that had been Blu-tacked to the wall. The Post-its were all the colours of the rainbow, which apparently had some significance.

It was called a brown-paper workshop. She was part of the Implementing Strategic Change working group, discussing co-operation between neighbouring forces. Her task after the working-group sessions was to write demand management reports on control-room processes for all five regional forces.

These working-group sessions were supposed to be interactive. That meant she couldn’t entirely escape joining in. At strategic moments, she had found herself blurting out phrases that sounded right. Methodical workforce modernisation. Greater interoperability. She tried to say them while other people were shouting out suggestions, so that her words were swallowed in the general verbiage. The best place to hide a tree is in the forest.

She’d been sitting next to an inspector from the Leicestershire force. They’d all had to do ten-second introductions at the start of the session. Tell us who you are and what you hope to get from today. Cue a bunch of po-faced lies.

After a lunch the first day, she’d accepted his invitation to go to the pub again when the second day’s session finished, without much thought of the consequences. They’d gone to the Seven Mile Inn, close to Sherwood Lodge. Fry knew she mustn’t drink and drive, so only one glass of wine would be acceptable. God forbid that she should get breathalysed by her colleagues on her way back to Derbyshire.

She remembered waiting in the garden of the Seven Mile Inn, checking her phone and seeing 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.

‘A boyfriend?’

‘No, my sister.’

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 anything that stood still long enough.

She’d struggled to get her companion’s name right, and he’d taken off his badge when they left Sherwood Lodge.

‘Rick Shepherd. I’m stationed in Leicester.’

‘Of course. I remember.’

Then he was smiling at her again, one eyebrow raised. Some unspoken message was being conveyed. Fry knew what the message was. She ought to respond, knew deep down what she should do. She ought to act, before it went any further.

And yet, a great weariness had come over her. None of it really mattered, did it? Perhaps there might be a moment when she felt something, a brief response that was more than the deadly worthlessness she’d been feeling for the past few weeks. Rick Shepherd wasn’t the greatest thing she’d ever met. But he was there, he was available, and she had his attention.

He took another drink, laid a hand on the table, toying with a coaster, seemed to search for a line of conversation. He didn’t wear a wedding ring, but that meant nothing. People slipped them on and off like raincoats these days. And many couples chose to live together for years without bothering to marry. He could have a partner back in Leicester. Would he tell her, if she asked? Did she want to know?

But then she recognised in his conversation the exact tenor of complacency and laziness, a lack of concern about accuracy and rigour. Just the sort of qualities she hated.

Fry had finished her drink and stood up. Her companion hastily drained his beer, picked up his jacket and his phone, suddenly eager to leave. They walked back towards the pub car park together and stopped when they reached her Audi. Rick leaned casually on the roof.

‘I’m sure we could work closely together, you and me,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think? A bit of mutual assistance, Diane? I know a nice, quiet spot in Sherwood Forest where we could explore our personal merger options. I can promise you I always come up to my performance targets.’

He was standing a bit too close now. Well inside her personal space. Fry felt herself tense. It was that instinctive reaction she couldn’t control, an automatic response of her muscles triggered by a suppressed memory. She always knew it would happen. But she couldn’t explain the reason for it, not to someone like Rick Shepherd.

He was close enough now for her to smell the beer on his breath, the deodorant clinging to his shirt. Fry was frozen, her limbs so stiff that they hurt. A long moment passed, when neither of them spoke or breathed. Just when it seemed that nothing would happen, he made his move. And Fry felt his hand touching the base of her spine.

It was already dark when Fry drove back into Edendale and turned into Grosvenor Avenue. When she pulled out her key to enter her flat, she noticed that she had streaks of blood on her hands. Strange that she hadn’t see it while she was driving back from Nottinghamshire. Her mind must have been on other things.

She’d closed the door, shrugged off her jacket and headed for the shower. Blood on her hands. That was something not everyone could cope with. But right at that moment, it felt good. For her, the sight of blood was exactly the right thing.

Sitting in the interview room at Ripley, it dawned on Diane Fry that Rick Shepherd must have waited. Waited until he realised she wasn’t going to make a complaint, perhaps waited until he heard that she was already under investigation. And then he’d put the boot in.

‘When was this complaint made?’ she asked.

Jackson rustled his papers. ‘A month ago.’

‘But the incident referred to was — when?’

He couldn’t meet her eye. ‘Three years previously.’

‘Why wasn’t that reported at the time?’

‘Inspector Shepherd’s original version of events was that he tripped over a kerb in the pub car park and struck his face on the bonnet of his own car. You were listed as the only witness to the injury.’

‘But the inspector has since changed his account for some reason?’

‘Yes.’

‘I see.’

It was a small moment of satisfaction. The case was weak, and Jackson knew it.

But she was certain of one other thing. He wasn’t going to leave it at that.

‘And of course we have to present the main issue, DS Fry,’ he said.

‘Which is?’

‘A personal relationship. To be specific, your relationship with Angela Jane Fry.’

Fry felt a sudden sinking sensation in her stomach. ‘Angela...?’

‘Yes,’ said Jackson, smiling again. ‘Your sister.’