The Kill Call

29

‘So,’ said Branagh when Fry had settled in a chair in her office. ‘DS Fry, do you think you have the full support of your team?’

Fry felt herself grow tense. She’d tried to prepare herself before she came into the superintendent’s office, but this wasn’t the question she’d been expecting. Branagh might look like a bruiser, but this was surely fighting dirty.

‘Has someone said -’

Branagh shook her head. ‘Whatever discussions might have gone on with other members of staff, they’re confidential. Just as our discussion is this afternoon.’

‘Of course.’

‘DS Fry, I know you came here after a distressing incident in Birmingham, when you were with the West Midlands force.’

Fry swallowed. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘The management team here were impressed with you. Hence the quick promotion. But since then…’

‘I’ve worked very hard for this division,’ said Fry. ‘I hope my work has been appreciated.’

‘Indeed. But to go back a few steps… After the incident, you began the standard counselling process. But there’s a note here that you abandoned the counselling sessions before they were complete. A personal matter.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Yet the earliest reports on you said that you were suffering no ill effects from the incident. Your supervisor even suggested that the experience might have made you a stronger person. “Baptism of fire” was a phrase used. He described you as “solid as a rock”.’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course, that report was written by a man,’ said Branagh.

‘I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t understand.’

‘My own view,’ said Branagh, ‘is that no one is strengthened by an experience like the one you went through.’

And then the superintendent did something even worse. She leaned forward and smiled. A friendly, understanding smile that made Fry’s heart sink.

‘Diane, I do appreciate that it must have been very traumatic. Impossible just to put it behind you and forget all about it.’

And suddenly it was first-name terms. Fry steeled herself. There was no doubt about it now. Something horrible was about to happen.

Liz Petty phoned Cooper on his mobile in the office. He glanced around, but there was no one near enough to overhear.

‘How did it go with Diane Fry?’

‘Not good. In fact, she told me to keep my nose out of her business and stop trying to interfere in her life.’

‘She was a bit cool on the idea, then?’

‘You might say that.’

‘Mmm,’ said Liz doubtfully.

Cooper wondered what that sound meant. ‘She doesn’t really have a private life, you know. She talks about work all the time.’

‘Does she really never talk about anything properly? Anything that matters?’

‘No. Well, not to me.’

‘What happened to that sister?’

‘Angie? She was here for a few months, then she disappeared again. Besides, Angie was always bad news.’

‘Diane must need to talk to someone, some time.’

‘Maybe it’s just me, then.’

‘Yes, Ben.’

He sighed. ‘I really thought we were starting to get on a bit better, too. When she first transferred to E Division, I made an effort to be her friend. But something went wrong, and I’m not quite sure what. Now she only seems to see me as a threat.’

‘It’s all about control,’ said Petty.

‘Control?’

‘For some people, control is very important. More important than anything else. They’d rather give things up than feel they’ve let somebody else take control from them. It makes people very defensive.’

‘Well, it’s too much for me. How do I get myself into these situations?’

‘By being you, I guess, Ben.’

‘Who’d be me, then?’

‘You have to get her out of the office,’ said Liz. ‘She can’t relax while she’s at work. You can see it in her face, all the time. What does she do when she’s off duty?’

‘I don’t really know,’ admitted Cooper.

He heard an exasperated sigh on the other end of the phone. ‘Why not? What do you talk about in the office, apart from the job?’

‘Well, it’s usually Gavin doing the talking,’ said Cooper. ‘So – football, telly, the problems with teenage children… Food.’

‘Does Diane never mention what she’s done the night before, or at the weekend?’

‘No.’

‘I despair.’

‘It’s not my fault.’

‘You have to show an interest, Ben.’

Cooper thought back to when Fry had first arrived in Edendale as the new girl. He’d done his best. One game of squash, which had gone OK – except that he’d won, which hadn’t pleased Fry. And one visit to the dojo, which had gone very badly indeed.

Since Fry’s promotion, there had never been any question of them socializing. He’d always assumed that she didn’t want it, that she deliberately kept a distance between herself and the rest of the officers in CID. But what if there was a different reason?

He could see it was true that she was having a hard time. If it had been him, if he was going through a really bad week at work, he would have taken a long walk on the moors, whatever the weather. There was nothing like a good blow to clear the mind and make you feel better. There wasn’t any point in suggesting it to Diane Fry, though. Or was there?

‘So what do I do?’ he asked.

‘I told you, Ben. Get her out of the office.’

‘I’d better go now. She’s back.’

When Fry came out of her interview, she found herself looking at her colleagues differently. Who had said what to Superintendent Branagh? Where did the disloyalty come from?

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 naive. 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.