Sisters. It was that one word that had finally repulsed her. She had no sisters here. Not Kim Armstrong, nor any of her associates. Not Maggie Crew, nor any of the other women she was obliged to be polite to during the course of her job. They were not sisters, not even friends - merely acquaintances, or colleagues. It was the claim of sisterhood that she could not stomach, that made the bile rise in her throat. Fry opened her bag and slipped the creased photograph out of her credit-card holder. She had only one sister, and this was her. This young woman would now be a stranger, as unrecognizable to Fry as the homeless druggies of Sheffield were. Their relationship was a dead thing, a fragment of the past, yet still remembered and treasured. Carefully, Fry put the photo back. The things that people craved were so strange. The longing for what would do you no good at all was utterly incomprehensible.
Sisters? Like daughters, sisters were something special, not to be taken lightly. No, ma’am. You were not Diane Fry’s sister, and you never would be.
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At one time, there had been far more prehistoric remains on Ringham Moor than there were now. But local people hadn’t always seen the value of their ancient monuments. Stones from the henges and burial chambers had disappeared over the years, to be built into the dry-stone walls that separated the moor from the fringes of the farmland. It was ironic, now, to see the vast heaps of unwanted stone that lay in the abandoned quarries.
Reaching the top of the slope, Ben Cooper turned and reached out a hand. Diane Fry hesitated, then took it, accepting his help over the last bit of the hill.
‘Are you all right?’
‘A bit stiff, but exercise is what I need,’ she said. ‘If you’re sure.’
They had both needed the fresh air. Cooper had been shut up in the office for much too long, struggling to make sense of a mountain of paperwork, the grinding anticlimax that always followed the conclusion of an enquiry. He knew Fry had been imprisoned in her dismal flat, with only the walls to look at and her own thoughts for entertainment. Cooper had intended to
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arrange a day out walking with his friends, Oscar and Rakki. But instead he had found himself asking Diane Fry. No doubt it was another mistake. He hadn’t done much that was right recently.
‘Maggie Crew will get the appropriate psychiatric treatment,’ he said. ‘Appropriate to her condition.’ ‘That’s good; said Fry. ‘I suppose.’
‘She had lost the ability to relate to the world. It’s just that there was nobody close enough to her to notice.’ They were two hundred yards from the Nine Virgins.
Cooper could feel the first real chill of winter creeping across the moor, insinuating itself into his clothes and settling on his spirits. So many things had changed since the beginning of the month. Autumn had passed in a glance, the wind stripping the trees, baring their thin branches to the sky. The rain that had fallen in the last few days had turned the leaves underfoot into a black sludge, slippery and treacherous, full of worms and pale, wriggling insects.
‘Bloody screwed-up women,’ said Fry. And Cooper saw her smile, but he turned away quickly so that she wouldn’t see him noticing.
Mist lay in the valley below Ringham, long tendrils fading the colours of the hillsides and the trees. As the sun rose on the valley, it reflected from the surface of the mist, creating a pale bowl of light, from which the tower of the church in Cargreave emerged like the battlements of a drowned castle.
Yesterday, Cooper had heard that Owen Fox had resigned from the Ranger Service. He had decided to make way for a younger man, it was said. Cargreave
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Parish Council was advertising a vacant seat, but there was no competition to fill it - a candidate favoured by Councillor Salt and her ruling group would be coopted to make up the numbers. The house in Main Street, with its wonderful view from the kitchen window, had a ‘For Sale’ sign outside. ‘What is that tower?’ asked Fry, gazing across the dying bracken to Ringham Edge. ‘They call it the Hammond Tower. It’s named after some member of an aristocratic family, the people who owned Hammond Hall. The Duke built it so that everyone could see it for miles around. A symbol of his own power and importance, I suppose.’ ‘It’s where Maggie’s daughter was supposed to meet up with her on the day she was killed.’ And it’s where Maggie came back to. She hadn’t given up hope that Ros would reappear, even long after she was dead.’ Cooper looked at Diane Fry. She was too thin, and the wound on her cheek had turned red and did nothing for her looks. She was arrogant and infuriating, too. But sometimes she seemed to know what was right. ‘Maggie Crew left her cigarette ends there,’ he said. ‘But Mark Roper cleared them away.’ ‘Another obsessive.’ ‘All the time you spent with Maggie Crew, Diane. Did you not realize she smoked Marlboro?’ ‘No.’ They began to walk towards the stone circle. Their feet crunched through the leaves as if they were walking through three inches of fresh snow. Cooper walked
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I slowly, to let Fry keep up. But at the edge of the clearing around the Virgins, he stopped. ‘Diane ‘ ‘Yes?’ ‘The transfer. It’s all fallen through, has it?’ ‘Looks like it. But another job will come up.’ ‘Sure. Welcome back, anyway.’ ‘What?’ ‘I always thought you were one of the team, that’s all.’
Fry shook her head in total disbelief. ‘Ben, you are such a prat.’ That’s what Helen Milner had said to him too, though in different words. There was an awful lot of work for him to do if he was to stand a chance of rescuing any of his relationships. Cooper pulled a lump of fungus from the trunk of a birch. It was one of the white, obscenely shaped ones, but now it was starting to darken and decay, releasing tiny, soft spores into the air. ‘Who was it you were looking for, Diane? In Sheffield?’ Fry jerked as if he had kicked her injured leg. ‘How the hell do you know about that? Is my private life public knowledge now? Why do you have to pry into things that don’t concern you?’ ‘It’s my nature, I guess. I’m sorry.’ Fry sighed. ‘If you must know, it was my sister,’ she said. ‘Your sister? The heroin addict? But I thought you hadn’t seen her for years.’
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‘Sheffield was where her friends said she’d gone when she disappeared.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Why the hell do you think I came here? Did you think I wanted to live in sheep-shagger country? This was the closest posting I could get to Sheffield.’
Cooper nodded, not wanting to argue just now. ‘And have you found her?’
Fry grimaced. ‘I don’t think Angie is there. I’m looking in the wrong places. Angie would never let herself get to the same state as those people I saw. She is my sister, after all.’
