from Sheffield or Barnsley would be the first visitors, he’d heard. Then a local derby with Buxton or Matlock.
He didn’t follow the Edendale soccer that closely, but it was useful to be aware of big matches from a policing point of view. Also, it helped to know when you wouldn’t be able to find anywhere to park your car on a Saturday.
Liz Petty had dashed over from Buxton, still in her blue sweater, and met him for lunch in May’s Cafe off West Street, in a lane running steeply downhill to Edendale’s Clappergate shopping centre.
He’d first met her when she was a SOCO in E Division, and they’d abseiled into a disused quarry together looking for evidence. She’d been bundled up in overalls and a water-proof jacket then, with a red helmet pulled over her eyes. But he remembered a conspiratorial smile as she came alongside him on the face of a quarry, the smile shared by rock climbers. Her face had been flushed with cold and excitement, and her eyes shone with pleasure from under her helmet. That was the moment he realized he wanted to know her better.
Things had moved slowly after that, as these things did. It was only on his birthday one year that he began to see their relationship differently, when among the cards left on his desk was one from Petty, signed ‘Hugs, Liz’. Their initial date had followed soon after that, dinner at the Raj Mahal in Edendale, and their first chaste kiss, her skin cool and slightly damp from the rain.
He really cared for her now, and he’d always taken it for granted that he would get married and settle down one, day, probably have a couple of kids, just like Matt. Was Liz the one he would be married to when that happened?
‘Acting DS?’ she said. ‘Wow. But a permanent promotion would be great.’
‘Yes, of course it would.’
‘That would help a lot.’
Cooper sensed there was something else that she wasn’t saying. One of those female subtexts that he was supposed to pick up on, a message he should understand without being told. What could it be?
Liz glanced at him, and looked away. And he felt as though he’d just failed an important test.
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
