Fry didn’t answer. She didn’t like being forced to justify her private life, even to her sister. She had grown accustomed to not having to justify herself to anybody.
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‘Surely you must need to get out of this place occasionally?’ said Angie. ‘I mean, look at it.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘It’s so depressing. Jesus.’
‘You said that.’
‘Well, it is. Come on, Di, couldn’t you do a bit better for yourself than this on a detective sergeant’s salary?’
‘Maybe. But there’s not much choice around here. Property is so expensive.’
‘And you don’t even have a bloke,’ said Angie. ‘Or do you?’
‘Not at the moment.’ ‘Not even nice Constable Cooper?’
‘You’re joking.’
Angie sucked some chocolate off a praline. ‘Hey, Di, you’re not gay, are you?’
‘What?’
‘Just asking. You said yourself we had a lot to learn about each other.’
Fry smoothed her hands on the T-shirt she was carrying. ‘Tell you what, Angie, let’s go out together.’
‘Tonight?’
‘Well, tomorrow - are you up for it?’
‘Damn right,’ said Angie. ‘Let’s hit the high spots of Edendale. Let’s get totally rat-arsed!’
‘We can go out for a meal.’
‘What?’
‘We can have dinner at a restaurant. A couple of glasses of wine, perhaps. Then we can relax a bit.’
‘It takes more than a couple of glasses of wine to help me relax,’ said Angie.
Fry felt her face harden and her jawline tighten. She tried to control her expression, but knew she wasn’t succeeding.
‘The restaurants shouldn’t be busy at this time of the week,’ she said. ‘We can get somewhere quiet, relax and talk.’
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‘Are you sure there’s nowhere we can go clubbing?’ ‘You’re too old to go clubbing.’ Angie laughed. ‘Too old? You cow.’
She chose another chocolate, got bored with the doctor and clicked the remote to find something more interesting.
When Ben Cooper finally got home that night, he decided he must be so exhausted that he was hallucinating. In the reflection of the fluorescent light in the kitchen, he thought he saw a single eye pressed up against the rain-soaked window. It was a hard, grey eye surrounded by a patch of wrinkled skin, crumpled against the wet glass, with water trickling around it in two small streams.
He froze with his finger on the light switch. His first instinct had been to turn it off again so that he could see what was outside, instead of being distracted by the reflection of himself standing in his own kitchen, his mouth hanging open like an idiot. But he waited until everything came properly into focus and his brain began to work again. Halfway up his kitchen window, there was a snail.
He supposed it had been following the stream of rainwater - though what it hoped to find on his window, he couldn’t imagine. Its antennae waggled left and right, as if it couldn’t quite figure out where it was.
Cooper tilted his head to see the creature better. Its underside looked like the pursed lips of a long-dead corpse.
‘You’re going the wrong way,’ he said.
He watched it for a moment longer, then looked at his watch, remembering the appeal for sightings of Mansell Quinn was due on the local TV news. He drew the blind, and turned to find Randy smiling at him from the floor, eyes half-closed and his front paws paddling on the tiles.
‘Yes, I was talking to you, obviously,’ said Cooper. ‘Who else would I be talking to?’
He began to relax, shrugging off the uneasy feeling he’d
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experienced when he entered the flat. It was just a wet, lost creature that had been watching him from the night, after all.
The blow came out of the darkness like a stab of lightning. It caught Simon Lowe in the back of the head and half stunned him. He staggered for a few seconds on the edge of a grave, his brain bouncing painfully against his skull, unable to make sense of what had happened. He knew the wall of the church was only a few yards away, but he couldn’t see it. He saw only blurred streaks of light shooting across his vision. He knew there must be someone behind him in the churchyard, but his muscles had lost the power to turn his body or lift his head. There were other people, too, dozens of them laughing and shouting, back there in the warmth of the pub. But he couldn’t hear their voices. Simon heard only a faint whistling in the air, a sound which seemed to go on almost for ever, until the second blow fell.
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15
Wednesday, 14 July
The incident room staff at West Street had been maintaining a sequence chart. It showed what was believed to be the order of events leading up to the murder of Rebecca Lowe, and following it. It also revealed the gaps which the enquiry team’s efforts had so far failed to fill.
Some time during the morning, the analyst had removed two items from the chart and replaced them with additional information. Each entry had a time, a description of the information and its source.
‘I can’t help worrying that we’re relying too much on doubtful intelligence to dictate the direction of the enquiry,’ said Ben Cooper, running his eye over the chart. ‘There ought to be some trace and interview tasks for us to handle, at least.’
