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.’
9
There was one more important person who Fry hadn’t met up with yet. She was about to put that right, but with mixed feelings. She’d spent all afternoon answering questions from Gareth Blake and Rachel Murchison, hour after hour with people watching her for a reaction every time she turned round. She had never imagined how exhausting it would be, what relief she’d feel when she was finally allowed to escape. And this was the only first stage of the whole ordeal. She knew there was first worse yet to come.
‘Not brought your farm boy with you, then? Nice Constable Cooper?’
Angie Fry sat across a table in a bar on Broad Street, close to Diane’s hotel. It had to be a bar, because Angie hadn’t offered to show her where she lived. And Diane hardly dared to ask. She was convinced that her older sister lived with a man, a totally unsuitable man who Angie knew she would disapprove of.
Diane frowned across the table. She had a glass of spritzer in front of her, while Angie was drinking something out of a bottle that she couldn’t remember the name for.
‘He’s not my farm boy. Not my Constable Cooper.’
‘Oh? I thought he was part of your team.’ Angie held up a hand with the first two fingers entwined. ‘Like that, you and him, aren’t you?’
‘This is nothing to do with him, or anyone else back in Derbyshire,’ said Diane. ‘This is just me, and it’s personal.’
Angie had the grace to look faintly embarrassed.
‘Okay, Sis. I’m sorry. I was just trying to keep it light, you know.’
It was obvious that Angie had cleaned up her act since Diane first made contact with her again. She seemed to have more than one set of clothes, at least, and her hair was tidier. Diane no longer felt quite so embarrassed to be seen with her in a respectable bar. Whether Angie was clean in every sense, Diane still wasn’t sure. But then, it was a question she couldn’t ask either.
Even now, she sensed a lot of unfinished business with Angie. There were so many things they hadn’t talked about. A gulf still existed between them, a chasm so wide that it could never be bridged now. The relationship they’d had when they were teenagers back in Warley — well, that was long buried in the past. It was the only thing they had in common, and it was the one subject they would never talk about.
‘Besides, Ben Cooper is Acting Detective Sergeant now.’
