booked him for a litter offence. ‘Hi, Ben. Charged any window cleaners recently?’
‘Shut up,’ said Fry. ‘And get in the back.’
Cooper hesitated at the passenger door. ‘There’s some sort of sticky mess on the scat,’ he said.
‘You two,’ said Fry, losing patience. ‘You two arc 6otA going to be a sticky mess on the floor in a minute. Now, will you —’
‘I know. Get in the car. What’s so important? Have we got another body or something?’
For a trained response driver, Diane Fry wasn’t coping well in the snow today. She accelerated too hard and braked too suddenly. Now and then, Ben Cooper could feel the wheels start to slide a little and braced himself for a collision with the kerb or a car coming in the opposite direction. But she always seemed to correct the steering just in time. At the top of the High Street, she turned left at the lights into Clappergate, away
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from the pedestrianized shopping area. They passed the front of the railway station and the spire of All Saints parish church, where someone had built a snowman in the churchyard. It had been made to look like the vicar, with a black T-shirt and a circle of white cardboard for a dog collar, and marbles to create glittering eyes.
‘Where arc we going?’ said Cooper.
‘Back to West Street first, said Fry.
‘We’re going the wrong way.’
‘I’m avoiding the hill.’
‘Yes - if you drive like this on the straight, you’d never make it up the hill, would you?’
‘There are three things you need to know,’ said Fry, without smiling. ‘One, we have an identification on the Snowman, who turns out to be an RAF investigator called Nick Easton.’
‘Right.’
‘Second, we’ve had a couple of goons from the Ministry of Defence Police at West Street this morning. It was the MDP
o
who had been trying to trace Easton at the air museum.’
Cooper thought that was quite enough to take in at once. But it sounded as though there was even more. ‘And what’s the third thing I need to know?’ he said.
‘The third thing you need to know,’ said Fry, ‘is that, if you don’t like my driving, you can get out and walk.’
‘Oh. Right.’
Fry turned up past the High Peak College campus. Though it was uphill here, it was a gentle, winding incline, unlike the precipitous approach to the West Street divisional headquarters.
‘Your mate’s still missing,’ said Gavin Murfin from the back seat, as if trying to cheer Cooper up.
‘What mate?’
‘Eddie Kemp. I checked his record. He’s got quite a bit of form, hasn’t he?’
They reached the top of the hill and worked their way through the back roads towards West Street. At least Fry had learned to find her way around the town now. It was no longer foreign territory to her, as it had seemed to be for a long time after she had transferred from the West Midlands. Some officers at
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West Street had called her ‘the Bitch (rum the Black Country’ in the early days. Cooper hadn’t heard that title tor a while. He hoped Fry herself had never heard it.
Sergeant Jane Caudwell and PC Steve Nash had driven up from the Ministry of Defence Police headquarters in Essex. Dianc Fry-had taken an instant dislike to Caudwell. She couldn’t explain what it was about her whether it was the dimples in her cheeks when she smiled, or the muscles that bulged in her broad shoulders when she took off her coat. Her sidekick, Nash, Fry managed to forget within moments. He sat in the background, saying nothing, not even ‘hello’. DCI Tailby had come in for the meeting as well as DI Hitchens.
‘Nick Raston was an investigator with the RAF Police,’ said Sergeant Caudwell. ‘We’re arranging for his wife to make a formal identification, but we don’t think there’s any doubt. He’s very well known. They called him “Magic Nick” Easton, because of his speciality.’
A photograph was passed round showing an RAF policeman in a blue uniform. It was clear to Fry that he and the Snowman were one and the same person. The attached personal details included a description of his tattoo.
‘A speciality?’ said Tailby, who looked even more unhappy today. But he always looked unhappy when his Sundays were disturbed.
‘He was a children’s entertainer in his spare time,’ said Caudwell. ‘His party tricks were very popular with the kiddies, I’m told. The top brass loved him — lots of opportunities for good PR, establishing friendly relations with the local community and all that.’
Paul Hitchens appeared to be on the verge of making a joke, but he looked at Caudwell and Nash and changed his mind.
o
‘What case had Easton been working on?’ asked Tailby.
‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that at the moment,’ said Caudwell.
Tailby stiffened and drew himself up to a greater height. He was several inches taller than Caudwell and two levels higher in seniority, but it didn’t seem to make much difference.
‘I think we’re going to have to know, don’t you?’ he said.
2SO
