Grosvenor Avenue when she came to Edendale. It was depressing, but in a tangible sort of way. It contained no painful memories or associations, no significant possessions from her old life she’d thrown them all away.
But Angle’s arrival had changed that. The flat was no longer empty of feeling. It was starting to fill up with random recollections, incidents from her childhood that she’d long since forgotten or buried in her subconscious. They were
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reappearing now in the sound of a half-familiar phrase of Angie’s, or in the tone of her voice, or a gesture of her hand that hadn’t changed since she was a teenager. They were creeping into the corners of the rooms and hanging in the air small things in themselves, but capable of catching her off guard with a jolt of remembrance. Some of the memories made her smile, but others took her breath away with the pain they caused.
She closed the window of the sitting room to keep out the pollen, had a shower and washed her hair, hoping for an allergy-free atmosphere for a while. But still she sneezed and her eyes ached. She used tissue after tissue, screwing them up and throwing them in the bin. Sometimes, she screwed one up just for the sake of it, because it made her feel a bit better.
‘God, is it that bad?’ said Angie, after watching her sister for a while.
‘Yes.’
‘Can’t you have a jab for it or something?’
‘It’s too late for that. I’ve got some tablets, which might help. But otherwise, you’ll just have to watch me suffer.’
‘You can still eat, can’t you?’
‘If I don’t try to breathe at the same time.’
‘Because we’re going out tonight, you know.’
‘I hadn’t forgotten. It’s all booked.’
Angie watched her throw another tissue towards the bin and miss. Fry remembered that there was a genetic link to hay fever. Allergies ran in families.
‘Angie, did you ever have hay fever as a teenager?’ she said.
‘Nope. Why?’
‘I just wondered. It was one of those things I couldn’t remember.’
‘You didn’t catch it from me, if that’s what you’re suggesting.’
‘I couldn’t have caught from you. It’s an allergy.’
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‘Well, there you go. I never had an allergy in my life.’ Fry sniffled. ‘Something else we don’t have in common, then.’
After he’d delivered the tape and film to the incident room at West Street, Ben Cooper realized it was time for him to go off duty. No overtime today.
His face felt itchy, and he brushed at his cheeks and forehead, suspecting they were covered in thunder flies, attracted by his sweat. There always seemed to be one week of the year, in the middle of July, when the flies moved in from the fields and invaded the town in swarms. Walking down Clappergate and the High Street became an ordeal; it was a mistake to leave any parts of your skin bare outdoors. Even in the office, they were impossible to avoid. They were attracted to computer screens, and he often found them sitting among the black letters as he typed, like stray commas. No matter how many he squashed under his thumb, another would appear in a different part of the text.
Closing the windows failed to keep the flies out. There were too many of them, and they were too small. Every draught of air through an open door brought more in, and anybody entering from outside carried dozens of them on their clothes and in their hair. By the end of the working day, all Cooper wanted to do was get home and have a shower, in the hope that he could get rid of the itchiness.
He went into the men’s toilets and splashed cold water on his face. Drying himself with a paper towel, he looked in the mirror, seeking the black specks he’d imagined were crawling in his hairline and sitting in the folds behind his ears. But he could see nothing.
As soon as he entered his flat, Cooper heard the bang made by Randy coming in through the cat flap. But instead of marching straight into the sitting room, the cat stayed in the
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kitchen. It was an unusual enough break in routine for Cooper to go to see if he was all right.
The cat was sitting quietly near his bowls, but he wasn’t eating. His long, black fur was gummed up on one flank. Randy kept himself very clean usually, and was never happy when he couldn’t untangle his coat.
‘Blimey, you’re a bit of a mess,’ said Cooper. He put his hand to the patch of fur, and it felt sticky. It also glistened strangely in the kitchen lights.
Cats might be intelligent, but they hadn’t learned the basic rule of forensic science: Locard’s Principle, the fact that every contact left a trace. A snail had left its slime on Randy, and no doubt had taken away a few cat hairs sticking to its mucus. If it was dead, its murderer could be identified by the traces they’d left on each other.
As he cleaned the cat, Cooper’s thoughts turned to DNA, the holy grail of trace evidence. The national DNA database had gone live in 1995 and every week now the Forensic Science Service laboratory in Birmingham matched more than a thousand profiles taken from crime scenes, solving crimes up to thirty years old. Soon, the database would hit its target of three million profiles.
Like many police officers he knew, Cooper was in two minds about the development of such a vast database. There was no doubt it was a valuable tool for catching criminals, but it was too easy to believe that DNA evidence was foolproof. The larger the database, the greater the chance of somebody being wrongly linked to a crime. And for Cooper, it felt a little too much like the beginnings of a Big Brother society he didn’t really want to be part of.
He gave Randy a quick rub with an old towel and let him go. The cat looked clean, but he probably still carried minute traces of snail, if anyone cared to look closely enough. The lab needed only tiny amounts these days.
Cooper wondered what it had been like in 1990, before
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the DNA database was created. Frustratingly, the practice of routinely taking buccal swabs from charged suspects hadn’t been adopted until 1995, so Mansell Quinn hadn’t been sampled when he was charged with Carol Proctor’s murder. Even a recent Home Office ‘sweep’ to collect samples from convicted prisoners had come too late. It had never reached Quinn as he waited for release in his cell in LIMP Sudbury.
