‘Ben, you’ve got a new addition to your team,’ said Hitchens.
‘Oh?’
‘She’s just on her way up from reception.’
Cooper had been waiting for a new recruit ever since he’d become DS. He’d been starting to think that it would be a long wait. Cost-cutting meant that staff wouldn’t be replaced. ‘Natural wastage’ it was called. Nobody had said anything, but he knew how these things were done. Now it seemed that he’d been wrong.
Murfin grinned at him and tapped the side of his nose.
‘Gavin, do you know something?’ asked Cooper.
‘My lips are sealed.’
‘Mr Hitchens said she. Tell me it’s not Diane Fry come back to join us.’
Murfin’s laugh was more of a hysterical bark, too high-pitched and nervous for genuine amusement.
‘Oh God. Shoot me now if it is.’
Hitchens came back into the room.
‘Ben, this is your new colleague, DC Villiers.’
Cooper stood up, ready to hold out a hand in greeting. But he froze when he saw who was with Hitchens, walking calmly into the CID room with a smile. She was a bit older, leaner, more tanned than when he’d last seen her. And there was something else different, an air of confidence, a firm angle to her jaw and a self-assurance in the way she held her head. Her pale hair was pulled back from her face now. But he recognised her immediately.
‘Carol,’ he said.
‘Hello, Ben. It’s been a long time.’
9
Riddings had originally consisted of a dozen estate workers’ cottages, built by a local land-owning duke. Not the Duke of Devonshire, for once, but some rival aristocrat. The Duke of Rutland, perhaps. One of those people.
He had also built a tiny Wesleyan Reform chapel in the village, but there was no parish church. Several villages in this area were served by All Saints down the hill at Curbar, with its four-hundred-year-old poor box and Jacobean pulpit of black bog oak.
‘It seems strange,’ said Cooper. ‘Strange that we’re colleagues now. Last time we spoke, you were in the RAF Police.’
He’d taken Carol Villiers with him from Edendale to ease her into the inquiry, and they were parked up in the centre of the village on The Green, near the horse trough. It felt odd having her sitting next to him in the car. They had gone to school together, studied for their A levels at High Peak College at the same time, got a bit drunk with a group of mates in a local pub when they received their results. She had been a good friend, to whom he’d been sorry to say goodbye. Her parents lived in Tideswell, so it was a bit of a surprise that he hadn’t heard she was back in the area.
Seeing her earlier, Cooper’s mind had been thrown back several years, to the time when he’d seen another new DC coming towards him from the far end of the CID room. She had moved with a cool deliberateness, not meeting his eye, but glancing from side to side as she walked past the desks. He remembered thinking she was far too slim – slimmer than he’d grown up expecting women to be. His mother would have said she was sickening for something. Yet she had possessed a wiry look that suggested she was no weakling, no wilting violet. And so she had proved. That had been Diane Fry.
Carol Villiers was completely different. Isabel Cooper would have approved of her, for a start. She looked strong and fit, a woman who worked out in the gym regularly two or three times a week, and never found an excuse to miss. She had an outdoor colour too, not the deathly pallor he remembered when Fry first came. And her attitude was confident, but not belligerent. He felt no hostile vibes. He knew immediately that she didn’t need to be aggressive in her style. Her self-confidence went deeper.
‘Yes, I was an RAFP corporal,’ said Villiers. ‘Here. This is me as a Snowdrop.’
She showed him a photograph of her in her uniform, with black and red flashes, her corporal’s stripes on her sleeve, an MP badge, and a white top to her military cap. The cap was what gave the RAFP their nickname.
Cooper remembered her back in their school days as a lively, sports-obsessed girl who was also surprisingly ready to let her hair down. She had been into swimming and running half-marathons, had talked a lot about some female role models who had been prominent in athletics at the time, but whose names he had now forgotten.
And she hadn’t been called Villiers in those days either. She had been Carol Parry, the daughter of Stan and Vera Parry, who ran a bed and breakfast in Tideswell High Street.
‘I knew you were planning to join the police when you left the forces,’ said Cooper. ‘But I didn’t recognise the surname. Villiers? What happened?’
‘I got married,’ she said simply.
‘Oh.’
For a few moments they sat in silence, watching Riddings quietly coming to life. Opposite The Green there were still some of the original cottages standing near the chapel. But over the years, the older part of the village had been swamped by all those expensive detached houses, their paddocks and gardens carving out the lower slopes below Riddings Edge.
Cooper looked around him at the narrow lanes, no more than a car’s width, the stones embedded in the grass verges, the women walking their dogs, the high banks of trees screening every house. It wasn’t the best place for surveillance. A stranger sitting in a car stood out like a sore thumb. Indeed, there was hardly anywhere to park without blocking up the whole village. And all those trees hiding the big houses meant you couldn’t see a thing anyway.
A visible police presence? You could drive a marked response vehicle up and down these lanes all day with its beacons flashing like Blackpool Illuminations, and no one would even see it from behind those hedges and walls.
‘I never heard about the marriage, Carol. You kept it pretty quiet. Who is he? Someone you met in the RAF?’
‘Yes, he was a colleague.’
Cooper hesitated. He caught the word ‘was’ and the tone of voice that went with it. He’d heard them often enough from the families of victims.
‘Here.’
Another photograph. Carol again. But next to her was a tall, well-built man in a similar uniform. He had taken off a pair of sunglasses, which dangled from one hand, and was staring into the camera lens with eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun. Behind them, Cooper could see the background of a military compound – vehicles, stores, a high boundary wall. The ground was dry and dusty, baked by heat. He could almost feel the grittiness of the sand on his skin.
‘That’s Glen.’
‘Your husband?’
‘Yes.’
Cooper hadn’t really needed to ask. His eyes had been drawn directly to the name badge stitched on the man’s uniform. Villiers, it said. Carol’s badge was marked Parry.
‘Before you were married, though.’
‘Yes.’
‘You look happy.’
‘We were. Very happy.’
She had certainly changed a lot, but Cooper realised he’d noticed it happening a while ago. On the few occasions he’d seen her or spoken to her in the intervening years, the old Carol Parry had developed a brisk professional air, a confidence that few of his old school friends possessed. He supposed that was what the services did for you, instilled discipline and self-confidence. Especially if you had a team looking to you for decisions, men
