And how do you feel about it now? It was a question Diane Fry expected to be asked at any moment. It was, after all, a question that she’d asked herself many times, trying to analyse her own feelings, to make an inventory of the emotions as they welled up inside her. Pain, fear, horror. An awful sense of loss. And some other emotions so deep and nameless that they didn’t fit into any inventory. It didn’t matter what questions they asked her. No neat list would contain those feelings, no analysis could pin them down.
She recalled that rainy Monday morning in March, when she’d found Detective Inspector Gareth Blake standing in her boss’s office at E Division headquarters in Edendale. She hadn’t recognized him at first, as she automatically held out her hand, seeing a man who wasn’t much above her own age, his hair just starting to recede a little from his forehead, grey eyes observing her sharply from behind tiny, frameless glasses.
‘Diane,’ he said.
And then she’d remembered him. It was the voice that did it. She and Blake had worked together years ago, on the same uniformed shift in the West Midlands. But he’d been ambitious and got himself noticed, earning an early promotion. He was more mature now, better dressed, with a sharper hairstyle. The reek of ambition still hung in the air around him, though.
So what was Blake’s specialty now?
Cold case rape enquiries. Well, of course.
And then there had been Rachel Murchison, smartly dressed in a black suit and a white blouse, dark hair tied neatly back, businesslike and self-confident, but with a guarded watchfulness. A specialist counsellor, there to judge her psychological state.
Some of the phrases leapt out at her from the conversation that had followed.
‘Obviously, we don’t want to put any pressure on you, Diane.’
That was Blake, pouring a meaningless noise in her ear.
‘It’s understandable that you feel a need to be in control. Perfectly normal, in the circumstances.’
Murchison’s contribution. Well, Fry hadn’t wanted this woman telling her whether she was behaving normally or not. She didn’t want to hear it from anyone else, for that matter.
Just the sound of her name from Blake’s lips had brought back the memories she’d been trying to suppress, but which would now forever bubble up in her mind. She remembered how both of them, Blake and Murchison, had watched her carefully, trying to assess her reaction.
In the days that followed, others had seemed to be watching her in that some careful manner. But they could never comprehend the painful attempt to balance two powerful urges. The need to keep her most terrible memories safely buried now had to be set against this urge she’d suddenly discovered growing inside — the burning desire for vengeance and justice. No one could understand that. Not even Ben Cooper.
DC Ben Cooper had already been the darling of E Division when she arrived in Derbyshire. She’d been told how wonderful he was, what areas he was the expert in, the heights of knowledge he’d attained that no one else could possibly aspire to. She’d heard his name mentioned so many times before she actually met him that she’d already formed a picture of this Mister Perfect, the detective everyone loved, the man most likely to stand in her way. The picture that entered her mind was of a six-foot male with broad shoulders and perfect teeth, smiling complacently.
When he entered the CID room that first day back from leave, he could only have lived up to expectations if he’d been walking on water, or floating in a golden glow and trailing a string of haloes from his angelic backside. DC Ben Cooper had been set up for her to despise from the outset. No one liked a goody-goody.
But things had changed since then. Fry knew better than anyone that he was no Mister Perfect.
For years, her instinct had been to concentrate totally on her work. And that was a familiar story. She was no different from all the washed-up people everywhere, all the fools who’d ever messed up their lives or destroyed their relationships. Work was safe ground, a place where personal feelings could be put aside, shrugged off with her coat at the door of the office. The trouble was, right now she could feel the safe ground shifting under her feet. She was still as dedicated to the job as she’d ever been. But she had a suspicion the job wasn’t quite so loyal to her any more.
Fry was waiting to be called into Superintendent Branagh’s office, back at E Division headquarters in West Street, Edendale. She felt like a naughty school girl sent to see the headmistress.
‘Michael Lowndes,’ said Branagh, when she was finally summoned. ‘What went wrong?’
There was no point in trying to make excuses. Branagh had eyes that could look right through you.
‘I took my eye off the ball, ma’am.’
‘Obviously. You were supposed to follow him to the meeting, and take the main players out. You were in position, and so was your team. We only put together this operation so that Lowndes would lead us to the others.’
‘We failed,’ said Fry.
‘We?’
Fry swallowed. ‘I failed.’
Branagh sat back in her chair and studied her for a few moments. ‘Diane, we’ve been patient with you for a while now,’ she said.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘We’ve given you some leeway, allowed you plenty of space. But you have a decision to make, and it’s time you made it. I believe it’s starting to affect your performance.’
‘I wouldn’t say that.’
‘Have you some other explanation?’
But Fry hadn’t. She couldn’t blame anyone else but herself.
‘DS Fry, I want you to make a decision here and now. I don’t like to put pressure on you in these circumstances, but I have wider issues to consider.’
Fry looked at her, wondering if she would be as terrifying herself if she ever reached the dizzy heights of such a senior rank. Not that it was likely.
The last time Fry had sat in this office was when DI Gareth Blake and the specialist rape counsellor Rachel Murchison had arrived from the West Midlands, bringing the news of a DNA hit that would enable them to re-open the enquiry in which she was the victim. A cold case rape enquiry. All they needed was her decision, whether she wanted to go ahead with a fresh enquiry, or close the book and put the whole thing behind her.
Blake’s words still echoed in her mind. She’d been turning them over and over since that day.
‘When we get a cold case hit, we consult the CPS before we consider intruding into a victim’s life. We have to take a close look at how strong a case we’ve got, and whether we can do something to strengthen it.’
‘With the help of the victim.’
‘Of course. And in this case…’
‘In my case. This is personal. Don’t try to pretend it isn’t.’
‘In your case, we had a very credible witness report from the victim. From you, Diane. Everything is on file for this one. We have an e-fit record in the imaging unit, and a copy of everything has been kept by the FSS. But the bottom line is, we got a DNA match.’
DNA, the holy grail of trace evidence. The national DNA database had gone live in 1995 and every week now the Forensic Science Service laboratory in Birmingham matched more than a thousand profiles taken from crime scenes, solving crimes up to thirty years old. Soon, the database would hit its target of three million profiles.
It was so easy to believe that DNA evidence was foolproof. Yet the larger the database, the greater the chance of somebody being wrongly linked to a crime. For some, it was too much like the beginnings of a Big Brother society they didn’t really want to be part of.
‘The time is now,’ said Branagh. ‘Do we have a decision?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Excellent. I’m granting you indefinite leave of absence.’
Branagh made a note in a file on her desk.
‘Of course, since we don’t know how long you’ll be away from the division, there’ll be an appointment to Acting DS in your place.’
Leaving Branagh’s office, Fry pulled out her mobile and dialled a number.
‘Dad? Will you be at home tomorrow? Yes. I’m coming to see you.’
Ben Cooper turned right and dropped the Toyota down a gear to go up the steep street. Edendale was one of
