Diane, that’s all I can do.’
Fry stared at him, wondering whether he’d gone completely off the rails since he retired. Leaving the job took people in different ways. It seemed as though Kewley might have developed some kind of conspiracy obsession, or paranoid delusion. Probably he couldn’t cope with the fact that he was no longer on the inside, not a member of the tribe any more. It was that primal instinct again. A desperation to belong. A craving to be part of the game.
Kewley took a breath, looked anxious at his own outburst.
‘By the way,’ he said, ‘who’s dealing with your case now?’
‘Gareth Blake.’
‘Blake? I remember him when he was a young DC, fresh behind the ears. Pain in the neck he was then. I don’t suppose he’s changed much?’
‘I couldn’t say. We worked together for a while, but that was years ago.’
‘Gareth Blake…a DI now, isn’t he? In fact, I hear he’s well on his way to making DCI in the not too distant future. Yes, he’s definitely got his foot on the ladder, that one. He wouldn’t want anything to muck up his pristine record at this point, would he?’
Fry looked at him. ‘What are you saying? Has Blake got something to hide?’
Kewley touched the side of his nose — a conspiratorial gesture that he somehow managed to make look obscene.
‘You know what they say — the higher a monkey climbs up the tree, the more you see of his arse.’
He laughed, and turned away. It was a signal that she wouldn’t get any more out of him on that subject. Not right now, anyway. She might need some kind of pressure she could bring to bear. But that was for another day.
‘I’ll leave first,’ said Kewley. ‘If you could just give it a few minutes.’
‘Fine.’
Fry turned her back, so that she didn’t watch him leave. The head of a broken angel lay at her feet, its blank eyes pressed into the grass, face mottled with damp. A magpie hopped among the graves. An airliner growled overhead towards Elmdon. Counting the seconds till she could get away from this smell, she waited alone in the cemetery.
Half an hour later, Fry stood on the corner of Thornhill Road in Handsworth, and watched Andy Kewley’s car turn off the road under a line of maple trees. He pulled up to a set of blue gates on Golds Hill Road. After a moment, his BMW disappeared as it entered the car park behind the Victorian police station.
Thornhill Road, Handsworth. F3 OCU. Why did numbers and letters stick in her mind so well? By the time she’d put in thirty years’ service, she’d have a brain clogged with acronyms.
Her phone rang.
‘Did you track him?’
‘Yes, he went into the nick on Thornhill Road.’
‘I thought he looked shifty.’
‘Where are you now, Sis?’
‘Still at the Metro station.’
‘I’ll pick you up in a few minutes.’
Angie was a stranger to Andy Kewley. After he left the cemetery, Angie had tailed Kewley back to the Jewellery Quarter Metro station. He hadn’t expected to be followed going back. Just one stop north, he’d got off again at Soho Benson Road station, where he’d collected a blue BMW from the car park and driven up Factory Road towards Solo Hill and the white dome of the Gurdwara Nishkam Sewak Jatha.
Diane had picked his BMW up travelling on Soho Road. By then, she’d been pretty sure where he was heading.
She walked back down Thornhill Road, past the glass walls of the Community Roots enterprise centre, and emerged on to Soho Road, the heart of Birmingham’s Little India. It was solid with traffic, all the way down from the Gurdwara. The next block was full of Asian shops: Bollywood Connections, Karishma Jewellers, the State Bank of India. A group of Indian girls sat on the wall outside the City College annexe. A Muslim with a long beard came out of Handsworth Library clutching a handful of Urdu books.
Fry hadn’t felt herself to be so much in a city for a long time. Even the maple trees had something urban about them. There had been a pub here, the Frighted Horse. An M amp;B house, she was sure. But the building on the corner was boarded up, plastered with posters for a kick-boxing contest. She supposed the pub no longer fit so well among the sari shops, costume jewellers, and halal chicken takeaways.
A few hundred yards down, old men in snow-white turbans and grey beards stood outside the Sikh Gurdwara. Fry thought the complex added a bit of architectural class to Soho Road. They said that anyone could walk in at lunchtime and sit down in front of a metal dish full of chapattis and chickpeas. Inside the Gurdwara, the pages of the Sikh scriptures, the Guru Grantb Sahib, were recited continuously around the clock, every day of the year.
She picked up a leaflet that someone had tossed aside near the bus shelter. It listed the Five Evils, the pancadokb of Sikh Scripture — the major weaknesses of the human personality. Only five? She turned the leaflet over. Oh yes — the common evils far exceeded five in number, it said. But these were the main obstacles in man’s pursuit of the moral and spiritual path. Kam, krodb, lobh, moh and ahankar. Lust, rage, greed, emotional attachment, and ego.
Fry dropped the leaflet into a litter bin. They were weaknesses, all right. All of them. Maybe she should go into the Gurdwara and listen to some readings from the Guru Granth Sahib. She might learn something.
But there was another weakness that wasn’t mentioned, one that she was as prone to as anyone else.
Too much trust.
12
Examining Fry’s desk for some files he needed, Cooper came across the latest issue of Grapevine magazine, produced by the British Association of Women Police. He picked it up, feeling a bit guilty about even looking at it, since he was a man.
According to an item on the cover, West Midlands Police had been included in The Times list of the ‘Top Fifty Places Women Want to Work’ for the third year running. Well, if it was such a great organization to work for, why had Diane Fry bothered coming to Derbyshire?
But he knew the answer to that. He’d known it within a few days of meeting her, after her transfer to E Division. She’d blurted out the truth one afternoon on a hillside overlooking a Peak District village. He hadn’t known what to say to her then. He wouldn’t really know what to say now.
He wondered how she was getting on in Birmingham, whether she would call anybody in Edendale to keep them up to date. Who was there that she might call? Not him, anyway.
In Ashbourne, the Nields looked less glad to see him than they had before. Of course, they’d heard about the anonymous letter, although they didn’t get the Eden Valley Times here in Ashbourne. Cooper had found that out as soon as he phoned them. They’d been trying to get hold of him for hours, they said. Their messages were probably on his desk somewhere.
‘A disturbed person,’ said Robert Nield, when Cooper was seated in their lounge. ‘An attention seeker. It’s very sad, really.’
‘They need help,’ added Dawn, wiping her hands on a kitchen towel. ‘When you find out who it is, they should see a psychiatrist.’
Cooper wondered what Mrs Nield had been busying herself with. He bet there was always something that needed doing. And if it didn’t, she would do it anyway. Keeping herself occupied.
‘That’s the trouble,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how we can go about finding who sent the letter — unless you have any ideas yourselves?’
They shook their heads in unison.
‘No idea,’ said Nield.
‘No disgruntled members of staff, perhaps? Somebody you sacked recently?’
‘I don’t often sack people. Staff members leave occasionally, but of their own accord. We’re quite a little
