Lost River

8

Waiting in the lobby of West Midlands Police headquarters in Colmore Circus, Fry picked up a newspaper off the table. The Birmingham Mail. She hadn’t seen the paper for years, in fact never read a local newspaper at all now.

She found herself drawn to the personal ads. To her mind, they seemed to give a more honest glimpse into people’s real lives than any of the journalists’ stories elsewhere in the paper. As she read the ads, with their sometimes cryptic wording, she recalled an Agatha Christie play that had once been staged by the local amateur dramatic society in Dudley. A Murder is Announced. Why had she been there? She’d been dragged along against her will, she imagined. Maybe some friend or relative had been in the cast. All she remembered was the bit about a silly advert in the personal column, giving the time and date and place of a murder. Then there was some business with the lights going out and shots being fired, and a body on the floor.

She stared out of the plate glass on to Colmore Circus, a stream of traffic going past into the city. This wasn’t Little Paddocks in Chipping Cleghorn, and she couldn’t expect to see Colonel Archie or Miss Letitia walking in through the French windows. There was no vicarage here that hadn’t been turned into student bedsits. And no village shop in the shadow of the mosque.

Rachel Murchison showed her to a room on one of the upper floors of Lloyd House, through an open-plan office full of ringing telephones.

‘I just wanted to touch base before the meeting,’ said Murchison, arranging a folder full of papers in front of her.

‘Yes, I understand.’

Touching base. One of those phrases beloved by management types everywhere. Fry’s heart sank when she heard it.

Murchison was now in a navy blue suit offset with a white blouse, dark hair tied neatly back, businesslike and self-confident, but still with that guarded watchfulness. She was the specialist counsellor, there to judge her psychological state.

In any cold case rape enquiry, the police had to consult counsellors before they approached a victim, and develop a joint approach strategy. They needed to understand whether the victim had moved on and didn’t want to testify.

On the day Blake and Murchison came to Derbyshire, their approach strategy would already have been developed. They had planned their tactics before Fry even heard about the hit on the DNA database.

‘I’m just here to help. There’s no pressure. It’s all about support.’

Support. It was such an over-used word. Fry had already heard it too often. There, in that overheated room, looking out over the back of the Edendale football ground, it had the dead sound of a curse.

‘It’s understandable that you feel a need to be in control. Perfectly normal, in the circumstances.’

Rachel Murchison would be from a sexual assault referral centre. Fry knew the police would have examined the stored exhibits from her assault for blood, saliva or semen traces, with the help of the Forensic Science Service. They might have found the tiniest speck of sperm on a tape lift from her clothing. Without statements from independent eyewitnesses, the police were reliant on forensic science.

But here, there was a witness, wasn’t there? Someone had come forward after all this time. She wondered if she would get to find out who this person was.

‘I understand from our phone conversation that you were visiting family in Perry Barr,’ said Murchison. ‘Your foster parents? You keep in touch then? That’s good.’

Fry didn’t tell Murchison that she’d been guilty of failing to keep in touch as well as she ought to have done. Christmas cards, the occasional phone call. Jim and Alice Bowskill would have been justified in reproaching her, but that wasn’t their way.

Instead, she gave an answer that she felt sure would tick the right box.

‘They’re very supportive.’

‘Excellent.’

Murchison looked down at her folder. Fry was trying to avoid letting her eyes stray that way, afraid of seeing her own name leap out at her, preserved as a subject for psychological study.

‘And there’s a sister, I believe?’

Indeed there was. Angie Fry was her older sister. They’d been apart for fifteen years, but were finally reunited. If united was the right word.

‘As I’m sure you know, we were both taken into care as children,’ said Fry. ‘I was nine, and Angie was eleven.’

‘For your own protection?’

‘Social Services said my parents had been abusing my sister. They said it was both of them.’

‘So your childhood was spent in foster homes?’

‘Yes.’

At first, they’d kept moving on to different places. So many different places that Fry couldn’t remember them. It was a few years before she realized that they didn’t stay anywhere long because of her sister. Angie was big trouble wherever they went. Even the most well-intentioned foster families couldn’t cope with her. But Diane had worshipped her, and refused to be split up from her.

‘But you were separated from your sister at some point?’

‘When she was sixteen, Angie disappeared from our foster home and never came back.’

Diane had been fourteen when Angie left. It had been 1988, the year of the Lockerbie bomb, the year Salman Rushdie went into hiding and George Bush Senior became president of the USA.

The small details were impressed on Fry’s mind. The last memory that she had of her sister, Angie unusually excited as she pulled on her jeans to go out that night. She was off to a rave somewhere. There was a boy who was picking her up. Diane had wanted to know where, but Angie had laughed and said it was a secret. Raves were always held in secret locations, otherwise the police would be there first and stop them. But they were doing no harm, just having fun. And Angie had gone out that night, with their foster parents making only a token attempt to find out where she was going. Angie had already been big trouble for them by then, and was getting out of hand.

Looking back, Fry knew she had been unable to believe anything bad of Angie then. Every time they’d been moved from one foster home to another, it had been their foster parents’ fault, not Angie’s. And when Angie had finally disappeared from her life, the young Diane had been left clutching an idealized image of her, like a final, faded photograph. The memory still brought the same feelings of anger and unresolved pain. Feelings that revolved around Angie.

‘Of course, she was already using heroin by then.’

Fry wasn’t sure whether she’d said that out loud. But she could see from Murchison’s expression that she’d heard it. And again, it seemed to be the right reply, although it had slipped out without any thought this time. The room began to feel like a confessional, the place to get any of those psychological hangups off her chest.

She supposed that was the theory, anyway. So along as she could talk about it, she must be all right. If only it was that simple.

‘And what of your parents?’ asked Murchison.

‘My real parents?’ said Fry. ‘I remember almost nothing of them.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Almost nothing.’

‘But your mother…?’

‘She died, they told me. My father is just a blank. He’s not even on my birth certificate.’

Murchison nodded. ‘And how do you feel about your family now?’

‘It’s all history,’ said Fry.

‘You’re saying you’ve moved on, Diane?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘I’m glad to hear that. It’s possible to get eaten up by guilt over things that are no fault of yours. There’s no point in feeling guilty all the time. It has a very negative effect.’

‘Why would I feel guilty? There’s no reason for me to feel guilty about anything.’

‘It’s common to have irrational feelings that we can’t explain the reasons for.’

‘We?’

Murchison took no notice.

‘During this process, we’ll be trying to uncover any hidden memories that you may have, Diane.’

‘Hidden memories? Something else I’m not aware of?’

‘Those hidden memories are vital, both for their evidential value and for your own closure.’

Fry watched Murchison tidy away her folder. She wondered if the counsellor felt as though she’d got inside the victim’s head, and satisfied herself that she was psychologically fit for the ordeal to come. Did Rachel Murchison now think that she understood Diane Fry?

Looking at the clock, Fry stood up first and shook hands. A lot of what had just been said sounded like bullshit. But Murchison had been right about one thing. She did need to be in control.

Like all the best detectives, DI Gareth Blake had a sidekick. He was an Asian detective sergeant, very smart, very bright, named Gorpal Sandhu. Though he said very little, Fry observed in him the same watchfulness. Perhaps, after all, it was characteristic of everyone in West Midlands Police. If so, she had forgotten it, had never noticed it when she served in Birmingham herself.

‘So have you kept in touch with any of your old colleagues in the West Midlands, Diane?’ asked Blake after the introductions.

‘No, not with anyone.’

‘Really? Not even DC Kewley?’

‘No one.’

‘That’s a bit unusual.’

‘Perhaps. I don’t know.’

Fry thought it ought to be obvious that she’d wanted to put that part of her life behind her. Yes, it was true that her previous service with West Midlands Police was a memory she almost cherished sometimes, whenever she looked out at the primitive rural wasteland she’d condemned herself to in Derbyshire.

But that was an idealized image she’d created for herself, a long way from the reality. In fact, she had left Birmingham without a farewell to any of her colleagues. No leaving party, no parting gifts, no cards wishing her all the best in the future. She might as well have said: ‘I’m going out now. I may be some time.’

Blake and Sandhu were watching her, politely waiting until they had her attention again.

‘I’m sorry if I’m teaching my grandmother to suck eggs, Diane,’ said Blake. ‘But we do have to go through the processes.’

‘I know.’

‘At the evidential stage, the CPS have to be satisfied first of all that there’s enough evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction. That means that a jury is more likely than not to convict. Normally, if a case doesn’t pass the evidential stage, it won’t go ahead.’

‘Yes.’

‘If the case does pass the evidential stage, the CPS has to decide whether a prosecution is in the public interest. If the evidential test is passed, rape is believed to be so serious that a prosecution is almost certainly required in the public interest. Okay so far?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Now. When considering the public interest stage, one of the factors that Crown Prosecutors will take into account is the consequences for the victim of the decision whether or not to prosecute, and any views expressed by the victim or the victim’s family.’

‘Paragraph 5.12 of the Crown Prosecutors’ Code. Striking a balance between the interests of the victim and the public interest.’

‘Exactly. As I’m sure you know, the definition of rape was substantially changed by the Sexual Offences Act 2003. Offences committed before 1st May 2004 are still prosecuted under the Sexual Offences Act 1956.’

‘And under the 1956 Act, it’s a defence if the defendant believed the victim was consenting, even if the belief was unreasonable.’

‘I’m afraid reasonableness is a matter of fact for the jury. Not for us.’

‘You said the case was re-opened on the basis of intelligence,’ said Fry.

‘Yes.’

‘And now you have a suspect.’

‘Two suspects, in fact,’ said Blake. ‘Their names are Marcus Shepherd and Darren Joseph Barnes. We had an element of luck, actually. Our primary suspect had a DNA sample taken when he was arrested for robbery and possession of a firearm. Criminals don’t just commit sexual offences, but other offences too.’

‘Are they in custody?’

‘Arrested and bailed.’

‘What? They’re out on the street?’

‘Diane, you know we have to get all the evidence together that we need for an airtight case. Evidential value is crucial. But forensic techniques have improved. We’re very hopeful.’

‘We had information, credible enough to arrest two suspects,’ put in Sandhu. ‘We took fingerprints and buccal swabs as per procedure, and we got a hit on the database.’

‘From both?’

‘Just the one,’ he said. ‘But we believe they were together. The lab might be able to get a new DNA profile from the exhibits in storage. New techniques are available. Low copy number.’

‘Yes.’

DNA techniques had advanced significantly over the last twenty years in terms of sensitivity, reliability, and speed of results. They had become really important in revisiting old cases, reviewing the evidence recovered at the time. Preservation must have been good in Birmingham, because DNA deteriorated after a while. DNA evidence had to be looked at in terms of preservation. If it was kept cold and dry, it lasted an awful lot longer. It was theoretically possible to obtain DNA profiles from samples over a hundred years old, provided it was known how they’d been preserved.

Forensically, it could all go horribly wrong before it ever got into the courtroom. The collecting and handling of evidence was so important.

There had been no witnesses to the assault that she could remember, and certainly none had come forward at the time. There had been plenty of appeals, of course. Lots of trawling from house to house in the area, hours spent stopping cars that used the nearby roads, and talking to motorists, lots of effort put into leaning on informants who might have heard a murmur on the streets. All to no avail. It was an offence with no witnesses other than the perpetrators and the victim.

Apart from her own statement, the only evidence Fry had of the attack were bruises and abrasions. And those faded with time, leaving only the crime-scene photographer’s prints to pass around a jury. As for the psychological scars…well, they didn’t show up too well in court.

But now they had a credible witness report, as well as an e-fit record that had been kept in the imaging unit, and a copy of the file retained by the FSS. So where had this new witness come from?

According to Blake, this person was on witness protection. They could be putting themselves at serious risk to testify. Someone had done some smooth talking, or exerted the right kind of pressure.

Blake was busy giving her the bad news, touching on the six per cent conviction rate for rape cases.

‘I’m afraid the conviction rate in rape cases is still very low in this country.’

‘Yes, I know that.’

Blake tilted his head in acknowledgement. ‘Of course you do. And I’m sure you’re aware, too, that there’s a lot of pressure to improve conviction rates.’

‘Absolutely. The inference from the poor figures being that the police don’t take rape allegations seriously enough.’

‘Well, that’s a perception the public might take away from the statistics. We know it isn’t true, though, don’t we? Generally speaking. There are lots of other factors that make convictions difficult to achieve, especially in cases where the defendant is known to the victim.’

‘Like the fact that it’s impossible to provide objective evidence on whether consent was given.’

‘Exactly. It always comes down to one person’s word against another’s. And juries don’t like that. They want to be presented with evidence. We’re handicapped by those old-fashioned notions of people being innocent until proven guilty, and having to establish guilt beyond reasonable doubt. When it’s just a question of “he says, she says”, there’s always going to be room for reasonable doubt. One person’s truth is someone else’s lie. We all know that. It would take a poor barrister not to ram the point firmly into the heads of a jury.’

‘Or a defendant who’s not very convincing on the stand.’

Blake smiled. ‘Ah, yes. There are some people who just look so guilty that jurors will convict them whatever the evidence. But that’s the chance you take in a jury system, isn’t it?’

He was repeating himself from that meeting in Superintendent Branagh’s office. But something about their relationship had changed since then, a shifting of the dynamics had taken place, and Fry was the one at a disadvantage. She could even remember the moment it had happened.

‘You know, I don’t like to hear you call me “sir”, Diane. It was always “Gareth”, wasn’t it?’

That had been a clear signal that their relationship wasn’t going to be a professional one. They weren’t to be considered a DS and a DI working together, no longer colleagues who could safely share information fully with each other. From that moment, from the second she called him ‘Gareth’, she wouldn’t be a fellow police officer any more. He was the investigator. And she was the victim.

‘But the six per cent figure is based on reported rapes,’ he said.

‘Most of them never get to court. There’s a high attrition rate, as you know.’

‘Attrition rate?’

‘Yes.’ Blake looked embarrassed, then faintly irritated. ‘Diane, you know the jargon. Don’t try to make me feel as if I’m personally responsible for it.’

Gareth Blake might have been uncomfortable. And she had to confess to herself that she hadn’t made it any easier for him, hadn’t wanted to either. She’d taken a small satisfaction in seeing him squirm, in watching that smooth demeanour crumble for a moment. It was petty, she supposed. But gratifying, all the same. Each time, it had given her a little bit of illicit pleasure.

Yes, Blake might have felt uncomfortable. But he couldn’t know what it felt like to be on the other side of the table, to be a woman hearing a man lecturing her about attrition rates in rape cases. No amount of specialist training would give Gareth Blake that insight. He didn’t have the right kind of eyes to see it. He didn’t have the right kind of mind.

Blake shuffled his papers and closed his file.

‘Right. We’ll move on to the next stage. This afternoon, Diane, we’d like to take you back to the scene of the incident. If that wouldn’t be too difficult for you. But we would understand, if — ’

‘No. No, that will be fine.’

Fry had thought a lot about this moment, the time when she would have to see the place again. Memories were one thing. They didn’t have any concrete substance, and you could bury them, if you tried hard enough. But a place was real. You couldn’t deny the existence of a street, the wall of a factory, the hard concrete of a pavement. You couldn’t bury them in that dark hole at the back of your mind. Reality was still there when you closed your eyes.

They went to the Digbeth area in Gareth Blake’s car. He drove a Hyundai. Silver grey, she noticed. Just like almost every other car on the road, except hers. But his air conditioning worked well. On the journey across town, Fry tried to steady her breathing, to clear the buzzing in her head, the faint dizziness she’d experienced when she walked out into the open air.

It was just the unaccustomed heat, she told herself. It felt so much warmer in the middle of a city than out in the wilds of Derbyshire. Concrete absorbed the heat, acres of plate glass reflected the sun on to already humid streets. And hardly a breath of wind reached this far into Birmingham. It was blocked by the miles of suburbs to the south.

She began to dream of standing on the Lickey Hills, way up on Beacon Hill. She could feel the wind up there, whipping through her hair, cooling the sweat on her brow. She could see that view of the city from a distance, its cluster of towers faintly blurred, as if standing in a mist. A first glimpse of the Emerald City. The far-off promised land.

‘Are you all right, Diane?’

She jerked at the sound of Gareth Blake’s voice. She’d almost forgotten where she was. But suddenly she was back in the here and now, sitting in the passenger seat of Blake’s car, pulling up to the traffic lights in Deritend High Street. She saw a Peugeot dealer, the Old Crown, and the brick campanile of Father Lopes’ Chapel, which now seemed to be used as a car wash.

‘Yes, I’m fine,’ she said.

‘I thought you’d fallen asleep there for a minute.’

Fry tried a smile for his benefit.

‘Wide awake,’ she said.

‘We’re here, anyway.’

Well, this part of Birmingham hadn’t altered much. Ironic, when it was the one area that she would have been glad to see transformed. But these factory walls hadn’t changed, or those side streets full of workshops and warehouses. The pub was still there, too. The Connemara. How had that particular pub survived, when so many others had closed?

The arches of the railway viaduct were certainly the same. Black brick, chipped and scrawled with graffiti. It stood exactly as it had been built centuries ago. Well, except for the graffiti, maybe. The messages were pretty modern.

And the scrubby expanse of waste ground — that was still there, of course. Dense with clumps of weed, bounded by a barbed-wire fence. Even from here, she could see the gaps that had been prised in the fence. Someone still used this spot for their own purposes. Drug dealers, crack whores, sexual predators hidden in the shadows…

Fry took a deep breath. She was in danger of losing objectivity, letting her emotions run away with her.

‘We have your statement, of course,’ said Blake. ‘But sometimes more details will come back to you, once you have some distance from the incident. Distance in time, I mean.’

Blake and Sandhu watched her carefully, noting every movement she made, everything she looked at or reacted to. Fry was trying to fill the scene with other people, apart from herself. She hadn’t been alone then either. Far from it.

‘This witness you have,’ she said. ‘Where did she come from?’

‘She was on her way home,’ said Blake. ‘She worked for a small publisher based in the Custard Factory.’

‘The Custard Factory? Does it still exist?’

‘Oh, yes.’

Fry was surprised. By all the rules of logic, the Custard Factory was an idea that shouldn’t have survived this long. The five-acre sprawl of industrial buildings had once been the territory of Sir Alfred Bird, the inventor of custard, who employed a thousand people there. Now, old factory buildings had been restored and converted into an arts and media quarter for Birmingham’s brightest young creative talents. A bohemian community of artists, with cafes and dance studios, art galleries and holistic therapy rooms. It should never have existed. Not in Digbeth.

She supposed the Connemara would at one time have been frequented entirely by factory workers — men leaving their hot, exhausting jobs in the engineering works. Maybe employees from Mr Bird’s custard factory, too — though she imagined most of those would have been women. Perhaps they would have been covered in a fine yellow powder, the way coal miners used to be distinguishable by the black layer of dust around their eyes.

‘You had left your partner in the car,’ said Blake. ‘You were going to check the factory premises up the street here, to see if there was activity.’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Your partner was DC Andy Kewley.’

‘Yes.’

That night, she and Kewley had been in an Aston CID pool car, a Skoda Fabia. The blokes hated driving a Skoda. They always used to grumble about Traffic cops getting flashy BMWs to use as RPUs, the unmarked road policing units. Since they were unmarked, they said, why couldn’t they be shared with CID? Some hopes.

They had been just one of several units drafted in from the divisions for a big operation headed up by the Major Investigation Unit. Kewley was driving, and she was observer. She had responded to a request over their radio from the officer in charge of the operation.

Fry remembered being passed by a slightly battered red Mercedes truck. M. Latif The people’s warehouse — serving the Midlands since 1956. The Latif warehouse was in Digbeth somewhere. Bordesley Street, maybe.

And then the street had been empty. Or so it had seemed. She soon learned her mistake.

She had her personal radio in her hand when the attack came. But the first blow had numbed her arm, and she dropped the handset in the dirt without getting a chance to hit the red button that would have summoned assistance. She heard her radio crunch under someone’s foot. ‘Hey, she’s a copper.’

As if the voice in her memory had just spoken to her again, Fry turned suddenly and looked around her. A piece of wasteland wedged between a railway viaduct and a factory yard. A battered fence protecting it with rusted barbs.

It was as if this piece of ground had been preserved just for her, to create a permanent reminder of a landmark in her life.

Blake and Sandhu stood back out of the way as she walked a few yards along the fence towards the parapet of a bridge and found a flight of steps. Below her ran the River Rea, Birmingham’s forgotten river, dirty brown and flowing under factories, invisible even from the bridges, overgrown with trees bursting from the walls of the factories. The Rea was hidden under the city, imprisoned in underground culverts to prevent flooding of the industrial buildings and working-class housing of Digbeth.

The sound of the water reminded her. She was standing in the exact spot now.

So this was it.

She saw five steps down to the water, a patch of weed-covered dirt. A sagging fence, a damp brick arch. And a series of jagged shadows on the corner of the street, moving ever closer.

But the day was bright, and the sun was overhead. Those shadows were in her memory.

And then she seemed to hear that 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. The same menace all around, whichever way she turned. ‘A copper. She’s a copper’

‘Diane?’

‘Yes. Okay. I’m trying to remember.’

‘You weren’t examining the scene. You were looking towards the corner of the street.’

‘Yes. I think…’

And then the memory came to her. From among the ghosts of factory workers and custard makers, darker figures stepped from shadow to shadow, walking into the present. Or almost the present.

‘Yes, I think…’ she said. ‘I think at least one of them came out of the pub.’

‘That’s great, Diane. See, it works.’

Sandhu had taken a call on his mobile. He gestured to Blake, and they went into an anxious huddle.

‘Damn it,’ said Blake. ‘Oh, God damn it.’

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Fry.

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘Gareth?’

Blake looked at her, then away. He kicked at a stone in frustration.

‘Bad news. Really bad news. We just lost our key witness.’