Cooper shook his head. If that sort of thing happened in Edendale, if the world ever changed so much, he would have to think about leaving, finding somewhere else to live. Scotland, maybe. The Faroe Islands. St Kilda. He had no idea where.
But, right now, the Peak District felt like a sanctuary. Well, at least a place where people killed each other for a reason.
Speaking of which — he would have to face Liz when he got back to Derbyshire. He had no idea what she was going to say to him about this trip. But he felt sure she’d been working on it all day.
Driving northwards out of Birmingham, Cooper saw hills in the distance, touched by the colour of a slowly setting sun. He wanted to just sit and watch the hills for a while, like a man who’d been given a glimpse of paradise. It already seemed years since he’d seen real hills.
But he was heading towards them now. So he put his foot down, and kept going.
24
Diane Fry tapped the steering wheel of her car as she watched the dusk fall in Digbeth. It had turned into another warm evening. Humid as only a city could be. A stale smell bubbled off the pavements, and the factory walls oozed a sour, grey fluid, as if the city’s industrial lifeblood was being sweated right out of the brick.
One thought kept going through her mind. Was this really what she wanted to get herself into? Things were starting to get very complicated now. Soon events would reach a point where there was no going back, and she was afraid she might not recognize the time when it came.
She glanced at her sister’s expressionless profile. In fact, they might have reached that point already.
Diane realized she’d lost count of how many rules she’d broken. It no longer mattered, though. She was a civilian, after all. Not a part of the enquiry team, just the IP, the victim betrayed by the system, the one person whose actions couldn’t be predicted or controlled. The strange thing was, breaking all the rules had made her feel more alive than at any time she could remember in her life.
Angie was looking at her now, with that faint, sly smile on her face.
‘This is really cool, isn’t it?’
Diane tried not to show what she was thinking, even to her sister. She always had that lurking fear that her feelings might be used against her.
Best change the subject. This long half-hour sitting in her car might be the only chance they had to talk.
‘Sis,’ she said. ‘There’s one thing I’ve always wanted to ask you.’
‘Yes?’
‘After you left home, all those years ago, did you…go to somebody?’
‘What, to a bloke? No.’
‘I thought there must have been someone you fell for.’
‘I’ve been with men here and there, over the years,’ said Angie.
‘No one you fancied particularly?’
‘Get real, Sis. You don’t go with a bloke because you fancy him. You go with him because he’s there, because there’s nothing better on offer. Or because you want to get your own back on his girlfriend.’
‘So you were alone all that time, then?’
Angie shrugged. ‘I’ve always been on my own, one way or another.’
‘But — ’
Diane stopped. She didn’t really want to hear the answer to her next question. Why would she want to have her suspicions confirmed, to reinforce that nagging feeling that the relationship between them had never been an equal one? As a teenager, she had worshipped her older sister, been devastated when Angie ran away from their foster home and never came back.
But she must have known, if only at the back of her mind, that Angie didn’t care as much about her in return. She would never have left in the first place, would she? She would never have stayed out of touch for so long. She would definitely have found some way to let her little sister know where she was all those years. But she hadn’t done that. There had been nothing, only that silence, the pain of not knowing.
Diane knew that if she hadn’t figured this out for herself by now, she would have to be stupid. But figuring it out and accepting it were two different things. It was easy to sink yourself into a delusion, and ignore the evidence to the contrary.
So whatever Angie’s reasons now for being around, they surely weren’t because she cared about her sister’s welfare. Angie didn’t think of them as a partnership, as two people working together. She had always been on her own, she said. And she was on her own now.
Which meant that Diane was on her own, too. No one could ever share what went on inside her head, the dark world she really lived in, re-imagined from those fragmentary memories of her past.
‘The car is black, that’s good,’ said Angie. ‘Not too flashy. No one will take any notice of us.’
‘Two women sitting in car at night? We might attract the wrong kind of attention.’
‘Well, okay. Try not to look too attractive, then.’
‘At least I actually have to try.’
Angie smiled. ‘Cow.’
Diane nodded. That was better. That was the way it always used to be. Sisters together.
‘And, Sis…’ she said.
‘What?’
‘No heroics. They never work. All you do is leave somebody else with a mess to clean up.’
‘I wasn’t planning on any heroics,’ said Angie.
‘That’s your trouble. You don’t plan things, you just do them.’
‘A lot you know about me, then.’
‘I know you’re a junkie bitch.’
‘Sod you, filth.’
Diane felt her resolve harden. Her sister always knew which buttons to press.
That night, some kind of event was taking place at the Custard Factory — an exhibition opening at the Vaad Gallery, or a performance poetry night. The parking area on Heath Mill Lane was full, the wall of crushed cars surrounding and mocking the smart town cars and four-wheel drives. Tonight, the message was clear: You might be someone’s pride and joy now, but this is the way you’ll all end up, every one of you. Get used to it.
Diane still wasn’t sure what she hoped to achieve. She didn’t expect to get any answers tonight. There was too much fog obscuring the truth — a fog of her own making, she supposed. But all the more impenetrable for that. Still, there were times when you had to do things without any hope of a measurable outcome. Action was a release, a way of finding out more about yourself, if not about the rest of the world.
Earlier, she’d picked up a copy of the Birmingham Evening Mail, and found the story she’d been expecting on the front page. She read through a series of tributes to former Detective Constable Andrew Kewley from his colleagues, including one from the Chief Constable, who had never even met him. Kewley had become a hero, now that he was dead.
The details she was looking for were sparse. Police were appealing for witnesses. They were also looking for the rider of a motorcycle seen leaving the scene at the time of the murder. She had given them that lead herself. But what she hadn’t done was tell the Major Incident Unit everything she and Andy had talked about the previous day. She felt sure there were individuals in West Midlands Police who knew more about Kewley’s connections than she did, anyway.
‘S-Man and Doors,’ said Angie. ‘What do they call this gang again? The one Marcus Shepherd and Darren Barnes are in?’
‘The m1 Crew.’
‘M1? As in the motorway?’
‘I expect so.’
‘Unless it’s after the rapper.’
‘Rapper?’ said Diane. ‘You’ve lost me.’
