‘Where?’ ‘Totley.’ ‘That’s Sheffield, isn’t it? I think I’ve passed through
it from time to time on the way into the city. It’s the sort of place that you do just pass through, if I remember rightly. Not the sort of place you’d stop. Unless you live there, of course. Is there a reason for that question?’
‘Do you know where your ex-wife lived after the house you shared was sold?’ asked Tailby.
‘Well, I didn’t,’ said Stafford slowly. ‘But might I make an intelligent guess that it was Totley?’
‘Her neighbours have reported a man trying to find her.’
‘It wasn’t me.’
‘The afternoon of Wednesday 22nd of October…’ Stafford produced a diary. ‘I have detailed records of my movements right here, Chief Inspector. I thought you’d never ask.’
‘We’ll take the details from you when you give a statement.’
‘Fine.’
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‘Is the name Ros Daniels familiar to you?’ asked Fry. Martin Stafford shrugged. ‘I have such a lot of old
girlfriends, you know. It’s difficult to remember all their names.’
‘About twenty years old, hair in dreadlocks and a couple of rings in her nose.’
‘Hardly, dear.’
‘She was known to your ex-wife.’
Stafford shook his head. ‘Jenny was mixing in different circles from when we were married, then. I’ve no idea who the person you’re describing could be.’
‘Very well,’ said Tailby. ‘That’ll do for now.’
‘I am sorry, you know,’ said Stafford. ‘But she was nothing to do with me any more.’
When Stafford had gone, DCI Tailby seemed to want to sit for a while. Fry stayed with him, wondering if he wanted to discuss the interview, or whether he was content with his own thoughts.
‘Did you believe him, sir?’ she said.
Tailby looked at her in surprise. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘It rings true. He believes that Jenny Weston was nothing to do with him.’
‘It seems as though she’s nothing to do with anybody, really,’ said Fry. And as soon as she had said it, the irony of the sentence lodged in a corner of her chest. It was as if the words hadn’t been her own at all, but had been said by someone else about her. She was aware that her life had become completely solitary, apart from the unavoidable professional contact with her colleagues, who had soon learned not to enquire about her
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private life. She was nothing to do with anybody, really. ‘Not quite true,’ said Tailby, watching Fry curiously.
‘There’s one person out there that she has a whole lot to do with. Though maybe she never knew it.’
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18
In the end, Wednesday morning looked set to be overcast. Diane Fry had come through the Forestry Commission plantations and down past Flash Dam. She was already slightly late, but she sat in her car at the top of Sydnope Hill for a while and looked down on Matlock. She was watching the clouds come closer. They were rolling in from the east, their shadows chasing across the slopes of the hills and into the town.
Fry had worked out where the roof of Derwent Court was, deep among the other roofs. At the moment, its tiles were glittering as the clear November sun fell on the remains of an overnight frost. She was due at Maggie’s at nine. But by the time the clouds had closed in enough for her satisfaction, it was nearly five past. Fry started the car. Maggie would be annoyed that she was late, but that was tough. She didn’t want any distractions today. It was difficult enough as it was.
From here, she could see how damaged the landscape was to the east. Huge sections had been gouged and blasted from the side of Masson Hill, on the opposite side of the town. Bare terraces of exposed rock had been left by the quarrying, flat and unnatural in the slope of
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the hill. She checked the sky again for clouds. It was safe. There would be no sun on Maggie’s window now.
‘So you did come back,’ said Maggie a few minutes later. ‘I imagined I might have escaped your attentions. I thought you might have forgotten me.’
‘Never, Maggie.’
‘Oh? You remember me for my sparkling personality, do you? My intellect? My savage wit?’
Fry noticed that Maggie had rearranged the lamps in the room. The lighting was softer, less uncompromising, perhaps designed to put her visitor at ease and make her more welcome. A new chair had been placed in front of the desk - this one was upholstered in green satin on the seat and back, and when Fry sat in it she found it remarkably comfortable.
The cafetiere stood ready on the desk with cream and sugar in a ceramic jug and bowl. By such signs, Fry knew she was making progress. But it was a fragile intimacy; it could be broken in a second, by the ringing of a phone or the scrape of a chair leg.
‘I thought we were getting along fine before,’ she said.
‘Did you?’ Maggie fiddled with the lamp, tilting the shade so that the shadows played backwards and forwards across her face. Fry found the effect disconcerting, as Maggie’s good eye came first into the light, startling and white, then vanished again into the shadows of her face.
With the Weston enquiry going nowhere, it seemed to Diane Fry that her interviews with Maggie Crew
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were a kind of Eastern Front, the one place where the breakthrough might come, if there was going to be one. Maggie was their only real witness. She could identify her assailant. However she did it, Fry would have to drag those memories out kicking and screaming. So she sat here alone with this woman, struggling to get through to her, digging for her memories like a miner hitting rock.
