Diane Fry looked up at the sudden noise. She’d hardly been listening to the recording, had been miles away, carried by her memories, out of Edendale and way beyond Derbyshire. She realized that the room had gone dark. There was just a desk lamp still burning as the voice played over and over. Killing is our natural impulse. Fry hit the ‘pause’ button, and the voice died.
‘Diane, are you OK?’
It was Liz Petty, passing CID on her way out of the building from the scenes of crime department. It was an odd direction to take. But Fry did that herself at night sometimes, choosing the route that felt safe rather than the logical one.
‘I’m just on my way home,’ said Petty.
‘Working late?’
‘I couldn’t leave the evidence until morning. But it’s all logged in and securely stored now.’
‘Good.’
Petty looked at the single lamp and the tape player.
‘You’re working a bit late, aren’t you?’
‘Like you, there were just a few things I had to do.’
She hoped the SOCO would leave, but instead she came closer, letting her bag rest on the floor.
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‘You were listening to the recordings of his phone calls again, weren’t you? I recognized the sound of the voice changer.’
‘So?’
Petty didn’t seem to notice her tone, but kept moving closer. Fry felt herself being observed. Too close, she was. Too close.
‘Diane, why do these calls upset you so much?’ asked Petty.
‘Upset me? They don’t upset me. What do you mean?’
‘Well… disturb you, then. They disturb you, don’t they? More than they do anybody else here.’
Fry couldn’t meet her eye. She was fighting the urge to confide in Petty. She had never talked to anyone about it before, had never found anyone she thought she could talk to, or who would understand.
‘It’s what he says in his calls. It makes me think of a child,’ she said.
Petty frowned. ‘He doesn’t mention a child, does he?’
‘No, not really.’
‘Children are always the worst…’ But Fry could tell from her voice that she hadn’t understood.
‘Not children - a child,’ she said. ‘It was my first murder case, back when I was serving in Birmingham. I was still in uniform, only twenty-three years old. But that doesn’t protect you.’
‘No.’
‘She was eight years old, and she’d been reported missing. It was the summer, during the school holidays. We were told she’d been playing outside and had disappeared. I was sent to the house with CID and some other uniforms. The parents were absolutely distraught. But the DI insisted on searching the property. I kept thinking, “Why are you treating the parents like this when their child has been taken from them?”’
Petty pulled up a chair and sat next to her. She was too close, but Fry didn’t care right now.
‘You found the little girl?’
Fry nodded. ‘She was in a shed, covered over with some
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old sacking tied up with garden twine. Her skin was already turning black, and her face was covered in maggots. The pathologist said she’d been dead for at least three weeks. Her parents had killed the child and left her to rot. Then they panicked when a social worker rang to make an appointment to check on her. The child was on the “at risk” register.’
‘Jesus, how awful.’
‘And you know what? Forensics said that the body had been disturbed several times.’
‘Disturbed?’
‘Someone had been going back to take a look on a regular basis. They could tell by the pattern of staining from her body fluids on the sacking, and from the fact that the twine had been retied several times. We weren’t able to use it in court, because we had no way of telling which member of the family had been doing it. It could have been the father or the mother or maybe even the twelve-year-old son.’
‘And that was your first one?’ said Petty.
‘That’s why I remember it so well. I remember the sound that the maggots made as they moved on her face. And I remember the smell in that shed. Stagnant water and vinegar. Sweet, but not like the scent of flowers. Sweet like rotting meat.’
‘So when this guy talks about decomposition …?’
‘Yes, that’s what it means to me: an eight-year-old child decomposing in a shed in her parents’ back garden in Balsall Heath, with someone gloating over her corpse every day, as if it were some sordid little game. And you don’t know how much that makes me want to kill him.’
Cooper woke in the middle of the night, convinced he could hear the sound of bones breaking, a skull crunching under pressure. With his heart thumping from the sudden wrench out of sleep, he rolled over on to his side and opened his eyes. Two green spots glowed in the darkness of his bedroom.
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‘Oh God, Randy, that’s disgusting. Take your mouse somewhere else, if you’re going to eat it.’
