Fall Down Dead

19

Diane Fry waited patiently, watching her interviewer take his time. She had no problem with awkward silences. She used them herself, and had never felt any compulsion to fill the void by blurting out information. If Martin Jackson hoped that was going to work, he was wrong.

‘So, your sister,’ said Jackson at last. ‘She travelled to Sheffield from the West Midlands, didn’t she?’

‘Apparently.’

‘And formed associations that were... shall we say... undesirable?’

‘I don’t know anything about those years Angie spent in Sheffield.’

‘And you might say that those sorts of associates were inevitable, given her drug habit.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘It’s very relevant, though, isn’t it?’

‘Is it? Relevant to what?’

He didn’t give her an answer. ‘And how much do you know about what your sister has been doing in the meantime?’

Now it was Fry’s turn to interpret her interviewer’s tone of voice. There was no doubt from his manner and the sudden tension in his posture that this was a crucial question.

‘Not very much,’ she said warily.

‘Do please share what you can,’ he said.

‘She turned her life around,’ said Fry. ‘In fact, my sister was recruited by the National Crime Agency as an informant.’

‘We know that. It was why she didn’t want to be contacted by you in Sheffield. Your interference might have damaged a major operation by the NCA.’

‘I wasn’t aware of it at the time,’ said Fry. ‘I only discovered her involvement with the NCA later.’

‘Your sister told you, of course.’

‘Yes.’

‘She shouldn’t have done that.’

‘Perhaps not.’

‘Did she share any confidential information with you?’ asked Jackson.

‘No, not at all.’

‘Are you sure of that, DS Fry?’

‘Yes, absolutely.’

‘So did you ever meet a man named Craig Reynolds?’

‘I don’t know the name.’

‘That’s not an answer to my question.’

‘If I don’t recognise the name, I can’t tell you whether I’ve met him,’ said Fry.

‘As it happens, Craig Reynolds is the father of your nephew, Zack.’

‘Oh, him. My sister mentioned him a few times, but I don’t believe I ever heard his surname. And no, I never met him.’

Fry waited to be asked whether she’d had suspicions about Craig, but the question didn’t come. There would have been only one thing she could say. There were times when it was better not to know.

Over the past months, she’d formed an image in her mind of Angie’s boyfriend, Craig, the father of her child. She knew he drove a Renault hatchback and was involved in some kind of business that brought him to Nottingham occasionally. She was sure it was dodgy, probably illegal. But she deliberately hadn’t asked.

Then Craig had disappeared suddenly from Angie’s life. The next time she arrived at Diane’s home in Wilford, Angie was in a new relationship. His name is Sunil Kumar. Everyone calls him Sonny. And there was a kind of mother-in-law in the background too, referred to as Manjusha, who didn’t mind looking after the baby. Free childcare was a useful extra.

Craig? Angie had said. I couldn’t have left Zack with him for the day, let alone his mother. She’s a drunken old slag.

Fry still didn’t know what else was coming from Martin Jackson. But she was aware that not long ago an officer had faced allegations of breaching the Standards of Professional Behaviour in respect of ‘honesty and integrity’ and ‘discreditable conduct’ after he was found guilty of three charges of fraud.

So she decided to take the initiative.

‘What exactly is it we’re here for?’ she said. ‘Are you looking for a reason to suspend me?’

Jackson sat back in his chair and observed her like an interesting specimen in a zoo.

‘As you may know, very few police officers or members of staff are suspended from duty,’ he said. ‘The force policy is to seek to redeploy officers to low-risk roles instead. Any decision to suspend is made by the DCC and is reviewed monthly.’

‘And the tendency is for officers to resign while they’re suspended.’

‘That’s sometimes the case. You should also be aware that if an officer is allowed to resign while suspended, the constabulary provides a reference with the words “Resigned while under investigation”. All cases are taken to conclusion, even if an officer has resigned, so that the individual’s details can, where appropriate, be included on the College of Policing’s Disapproved Officer Register.’

‘I understand all that.’

‘Interesting. Very few officers have occasion in their careers to even think about the possibility of suspension, let alone look into the consequences.’

‘I remember all this from my training,’ said Fry.

‘So it hasn’t been on your mind?’

‘Is there a reason why it should have been?’

Again he didn’t answer, but turned a page of his notes. Fry began to feel frustrated, as she did in an interview room when a suspect deflected every question with a ‘No comment’.

‘So let’s turn our attention back to your sister,’ said Jackson, and her heart sank. ‘When exactly did she tell you what she’d been involved in?’

Ben Cooper arrived at the mortuary at Edendale District General Hospital, wondering if Chloe Young could show Darius Roth’s theory to be wrong. There must be some evidence, one way or the other, to establish whether Faith Matthew simply fell to her death or was pushed. If there was nothing from the post-mortem, he would be entirely dependent on forensic evidence from the scene.

At work, Young’s hair was always tightly wound into a bun, two ponytails tied close together and secured with pins. She was still wearing her green mortuary coverall but had taken off the mask and cap, and was peeling off her gloves as he entered her office.

‘Well, it’s tricky,’ she said. ‘There’s an extradural haematoma resulting from a skull fracture, which was the immediate cause of death.’

‘I’m interested in the position of the injuries on her body,’ said Cooper.

‘I know. As I suspected at the scene, the victim’s injuries are consistent with her falling while her body was twisting to the side. She fell with most of her weight on the right arm and leg, which were underneath her body. There are serious internal injuries, as well as the fracture of the skull, which could have caused her death on its own. But those are grouped on the right side too.’

‘And on the left side?’

‘The left side of her body is damaged in a relatively minor way,’ she said. ‘Mostly contusions from the rock, and a break in the left femur.’

‘I see.’

‘So cause of death is a combination of multiple trauma, internal injuries and the skull fracture. I’m not sure that really helps you.’

‘Is it possible she fell in that way?’ asked Cooper.

Chloe Young shrugged. ‘Well, I’m afraid so. All I can say is that she was turning to the side for some reason. Inconclusive, perhaps. But that’s often the way it is, Ben.’

‘It’s OK.’

Young looked at him with a half-smile. ‘What were you hoping for, Ben?’

‘To be perfectly honest,’ he said, ‘I was hoping for something that looks suspicious but isn’t conclusive enough to confirm murder and oblige me to call in the Major Crime Unit.’

‘Well, that’s lucky,’ she said. ‘Because, as far as I’m concerned, that’s exactly what you’ve got.’

The conversation with her sister was one Diane Fry had been hoping to forget. At her flat in Wilford, she’d shared her yuk sung chicken and vegetarian spring rolls with her unexpected visitor, conscious at first of an unusual awkwardness. Then Angie had sat back and taken a deep breath.

‘There’s something I should have told you a long time ago,’ she’d said. ‘About a part of my life I’ve always kept from you.’

Diane had immediately experienced the sinking feeling in her stomach that her sister was uniquely able to provoke.

‘Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter.’

But Angie had shaken her head firmly. ‘You have to listen, sis. It’s too late to do any harm now.’

‘Are you sure about that?’

She’d been convinced her sister was about to tell her some shady truths about her previous boyfriend Craig, the father of Zack. But that wasn’t what Angie had in mind.

‘It goes back a long way,’ she’d said, ‘to when you first found me — or rather, when your friend Ben first found me.’

‘What?’

That had been a painful part of their history. It had changed Diane’s life, and not always in a good way.

‘You don’t need to remind me of that.’

‘In all this time, you’ve never asked me what I was doing in Sheffield,’ said Angie. ‘I know you wanted to skate over all that and go back to the way things were in Warley. But that just wasn’t possible, sis. Not after everything that had happened to me in the meantime. Didn’t you ever wonder?’

Of course she’d wondered. Yet Angie was right — it was an aspect of her sister’s life that she’d pushed determinedly to the back of her mind. She’d tried to pretend that Angie was the same person she’d lost sight of years ago, even though the truth was staring her in the face.

‘It didn’t seem important,’ she said.

Angie had laughed then. ‘Liar. You just didn’t want to know, in case it compromised your principles. I kept quiet then, but it had to come out. And there are reasons I have to tell you now.’

The chicken had lost its flavour by that point in the evening. Diane had felt trapped in her own apartment, with no means of escaping whatever her sister was about to inflict on her.

‘The fact is,’ said Angie, ‘I fell in with some very bad people in Sheffield. The worst kind you can imagine. I was an idiot, of course. I was at risk all the time. But then I did something even more dangerous — I got recruited as an informer. That was when Ben Cooper traced me. It almost caused disaster for a major operation the NCA were planning.’

‘The NCA?’

‘As in the National Crime Agency.’

‘I know who they are. Angie—’

But her sister had held up a hand to stop her interrupting. ‘I’ve got to tell you now, Di. Because there’s a good chance I’m going to need your help.’

Fry sighed at the memory. Angie was almost her only family, and a police officer’s family connections were scrutinised closely. The PSD probably knew all about her.

Jackson hadn’t asked about her biological parents, though. Her mother was long since dead, or so she’d been told. Her biological father... now he was a different matter. If Martin Jackson didn’t know about him, it was significant.

What it signified, Fry couldn’t quite work out for now. She would have to puzzle it over later.