Lost River
Stephen Booth

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2010

Copyright © Stephen Booth 2010

Stephen Booth asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007243488

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2010 ISBN: 9780007290604

Version: 2019-01-04

For Lesley, as always

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

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Keep Reading

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

1

Monday

On the banks of the river, Ben Cooper was running. His breath came ragged and hot in his throat. The sweat ran into his eyes. All around him, water rushed over stones, pale rocks gleamed under the surface, wet slabs of limestone caught the glare of sunlight trapped in a narrow valley. As he splashed at the edge of the water, he saw shimmers of steam rising from the wet grass, bursts of foam on the edge of his vision. And he saw long streams of blood, swirling in the current like eels.

A hundred yards away, someone had started to scream. The noise echoed off the limestone cliffs, and shrieked among the caves and pinnacles of the dale. He wanted to put his hands over his ears to block out the noise, to stop the pain of the screaming.

But he knew it would never stop, would never be out of his head again.

Behind him, other people were running. He could hear them stumbling and gasping, crashing into trees, cursing each other. The outlines of the Twelve Apostles swayed against the sky above him, jagged stone spires bursting from the hillside like teeth.

Cooper stopped to swipe the sweat from his eyes, wondering whether he was seeing anything properly. The sun reflecting off the water created impenetrable shadows and glittering fringes of light, caught strands of grass waving below the surface like hair. A fish popped up to the air, another jumped and splashed across the river. Water foamed around an obstruction, a shape lying deep on the gravel bed.

Cooper shook his head. Who was screaming? Why didn’t someone tell them to stop? There were enough people here by the river. Scores of people. Dozens of families had been drawn into Dovedale by the hot May bank holiday weather. Sensing the sudden burst of excitement, they milled aimlessly on the banks like panicked sheep. In the distance, he could see them lining the stepping stones in a dumb row.

Nearby, a man stood on the bank, his hands raised, water dripping from his fingers. Cooper had the mad impression that he was some kind of priest, performing a blessing. High on an arch of rock another figure hunched, silhouetted against the sky, his face invisible. A predator on its perch, scanning the valley for prey.

In the water, Cooper saw another rock. More rocks everywhere, lying half in and half out of the river, worn as smooth as skin. Pale, wet skin, everywhere in the water. What chance did he have of distinguishing anything? No chance. No chance, until it was too late.

He looked up again. Was it really someone screaming? Or was it just a bird, startled from its roost in the birches on the limestone edge? A whole flock of birds screeching to each other, over and over, a cacophony of despair. It felt as though the rocks themselves were screaming.

He breathed deeply, tried to focus, forced himself to be calm. Now wasn’t the time to lose his head. He was a police officer, and everyone was looking to him to do something. He lowered his eyes, and kept running. Still there was too much light glaring off the water, too many shadows, too much random movement. The roots of an ash tree covered in algae crouched at the edge of the water. A broken branch lay like a severed limb.

There were shouts up ahead now, and the sound of an engine. Voices calling questions, and shouting instructions. Finally, someone was trying to take charge of the chaos. He stumbled into the water, splashed spray in a wide, glittering arc. The coldness of the water was a painful shock, a blast of ice on his hot skin. He missed his footing on a wet stone, slipped, found himself crouching low over the water, staring at a broken reflection of his own face.

No. Not his own face. It was smaller, motionless – a white face, hair floating, the blood washed clear by cold, crystal streams, a green summer dress tangled on the body like weeds. A green shroud of weeds barely stirring in the water.

He plunged his hands into the river and grasped the limp arms. With a heave, he drew the body up out of the water, into the air, and held the cold form in arms, hardly daring to look at the white face. The limbs flopped, her head lolled back on her neck. Water cascaded from the folds of her dress and oozed from the sides of her mouth.

Finally, Cooper raised his voice.

‘Here,’ he called.

And then the screaming stopped. The limestone gorge fell silent. And there was only the roar of rushing water – the endless sound of the River Dove, never stopping, continually washing clean. A torrent of water, purifying death.

Cooper turned towards the bank. And that was when he saw them. They were standing close together, but apart from the crowd, as if the onlookers had instinctively drawn away. Two adults, and a boy of about thirteen. He stared at them in despair, his mouth moving but no words coming out.

Their isolation, the tense attitude of their bodies, the desolation of their expressions – they all told him the same story. This was the dead girl’s family.

2

Well, the tourist authority would love it. They’d be sending out the ice-cream vans and unfolding the awnings at the tea rooms. For once, summer had come early in the Peak District.

The thought was no consolation to Detective Sergeant Diane Fry, as she sat in her car on a hot street in Edendale. The windows were open, but there wasn’t enough breeze here to ruffle her hair, let alone to cool the clammy interior of a black Audi. She cursed herself for having parked with the front seats in full sun, so the heat had been focused on the fake leather like a laser aimed through the windscreen. She couldn’t even use her air conditioning without risking the battery. Now the heat was rising all around her in a mist, steaming up the mirrors. Another half hour of this, and she might spontaneously combust. That was, if she didn’t die of boredom first.

She thumbed the button on her handset.

‘Anything happening?’

‘Not yet. It’s all quiet.’

‘Okay, thanks.’

Fry sighed, glanced in her rear-view mirror, and shifted uncomfortably in her seat. The Audi was a new car, since she’d finally got rid of the battered old Peugeot. But she hadn’t been able to tear herself away from black. These days, everyone seemed to go for silver grey or metallic blue, but personally she tended to agree with Henry Ford – anything, so long as it was black.

Of course, it wasn’t the best choice when the summer decided to start early, with a heat wave at the end of May. Black seemed to absorb every last drop of heat.

What she needed was movement. Her foot on the accelerator, a breeze whipping past the windows. The air con going full blast. She wouldn’t really care where she was heading, if only she was moving. Out of this housing estate, out of the town of Edendale, and into the Derbyshire countryside for the sake of a cool breeze on the hills. She never thought she would hear herself say it.

A voice crackled.

‘Still nothing. Shall we call it a day?’

‘Not yet.’

‘I’m dying here, Diane.’

‘I’ll make sure you get a good funeral, Gavin.’

In the CID car, DC Gavin Murfin and young DC Becky Hurst would really be getting on each other’s nerves by now. Murfin would be dropping crumbs on the floor and sweating, and Hurst would be talking too much and spraying the interior with air freshener. One of them would probably kill the other, if she made them sit in the sun any longer. Fry pictured the contest. If she had to place a bet, her money would be on Hurst. She was younger, faster, and meaner.

Fry looked up the street again at a suggestion of movement. An old man walking an ancient dog. Neither of them was moving at more than half a mile an hour. The dog was black, like her car. Its head drooped as it slowly put one foot in front of the other on the pavement, heading towards the corner shop at the end of the street.

They weren’t what she was watching for. Her target was a fair-haired man in his late twenties, wearing a baseball cap. Intelligence said that he was living in one of these houses halfway along the street, a typical Devonshire Estate council-owned semi. But she was starting to think he might have moved home.

‘I’d better start making a note of what music I want,’ said Murfin.

‘What?’

‘At my funeral. I don’t want any of this happy-clappy, cele-brating-his-life sort of stuff. I want everyone to cry when I go.’

‘Gavin, can we keep the chatter to a minimum, please?’

She heard him sigh. ‘Okay, boss.’

In the last few months, Fry had found herself thinking about moving home, too. She wasn’t sure whether it was the new car, or all the other things that she had to think about, particularly the major decisions she had to make. Decisions that she’d been putting off for weeks.

Whatever the reason, her flat at number 12 Grosvenor Avenue had begun to feel narrow and confining, as if she was living in a cell. The detached Victorian villa, once so solid and prosperous, had started to flake at the edges, the window frames warping with damp, tiles slipping off the roof during the night and frightening her half to death with their noise.

‘Is this him, Diane?’

Fry watched a white baseball cap emerge from behind an overgrown privet hedge on to the pavement.

‘No, it’s female.’

‘Oh, yeah. You’re right. Female, and suffering from a recent fashion disaster.’

Despite herself, Fry smiled. ‘You being the expert, of course, Gavin.’

She could hear another voice in the background. Hurst, giving Murfin some earache.

‘Becky says I’m being sexist,’ said Murfin. ‘So I’m going to have to go and kill myself.’

‘Fair enough.’

Fry looked at the row of council houses, wondering about the kind of people who lived here, rent paid out of their Social Security benefits. Some of them hardly seemed to care about the conditions they brought their children up in.

When she’d first moved into her flat, there had been a private landlord – absent, but at least a real person who could be spoken to occasionally. Last winter, the property had been sold to a development company with an office somewhere in Manchester and an automated switchboard that put you on hold whenever you phoned with complaints.

It was a shame. When she looked around the other houses in Grosvenor Avenue, she saw what could be done by a responsible owner. But the present landlords didn’t worry about their steady turnover of tenants, who were mostly migrant workers with jobs in the bigger Edendale hotels, and a few students on courses at High Peak College. The former tended to disappear in the winter when the tourist season was over, and the latter were gone in the summer. Fry had been the longest surviving tenant for two or three years now. No doubt the owners wondered why she was still there. She was starting to wonder that herself. It was probably time to say goodbye to the mock porticos, and the flat on the first floor, with its washed-out carpets and indelible background smells.

But where would she go if she left Grosvenor Avenue? Well, that was yet another decision – one she wasn’t equipped to make right now. She had far more important things to think about. Subjects that would dominate her thoughts, if she let them. Decisions that would change her life for ever.

Fry swore under her breath and turned up the fan to coax a bit more action out of the air con. When she first joined the police, back in Birmingham, she hadn’t anticipated how much of her time would be spent sitting in cars. And always uncomfortably, too – wearing a uniform that didn’t fit because it was designed for a man, strapped into a stab-proof vest that pinched her skin in awkward places because…well, because it was designed for a man.

And then, when she moved to CID, she’d been too excited to take in what everyone told her – that she’d spend just as much time in car. And when she wasn’t in a car, she would be sitting at a desk, filling in forms, compiling case files, answering endless queries from the Crown Prosecution Service. Like so many other police officers, she lived for the moment when she got a chance to get out of the office. Well, maybe she had the answer to that. Perhaps she had a road trip coming up.

Recently, she’d been working hard to get back in physical condition, to regain all those skills that she’d learned under her old Shotokan master in Dudley. If you didn’t train regularly, you lost those skills. But now her body was tuned and fit again. Her natural leanness was no longer taken as a sign of poor health. As for her mind…well, maybe there was still some work to do.

Then her phone rang. Though she’d been getting desperate for something to happen, Fry was actually irritated. She checked the caller ID and saw it was Ben Cooper. It had better be important.

‘Ben?’

‘She’s dead, Diane.’

‘Who is?’

The connection was very bad. His voice was intermittent, crackly and fragmented like a message from outer space. Detective Constable Cooper calling from Planet Derbyshire.

‘The little girl. The paramedics tried to revive her, but she was dead.’

‘Ben, I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘I tried, Diane. But she was already –’

‘You’re breaking up badly. Where are you?’

‘Dovedale. It’s –’

But then he was gone completely, his signal lost in some valley in the depths of the Peak District. Dovedale? She had an idea that it was way down in the south of the division, somewhere near Ashbourne.

Fry frowned. Just before Cooper was cut off, she thought she’d heard a siren somewhere in the background. She dialled his mobile number, got the unobtainable tone. She tried again, with the same result. No surprise there. So she used her radio to call the Control Room.

‘An incident in Dovedale. Have you got anything coming in?’

She listened as the call handler found the incident log and read her the details. There was no mention of DC Cooper, just a series of 999 calls recorded from the public at irregular intervals, probably as people got signals on their mobiles. Units were attending the scene, along with paramedics and ambulance. One casualty reported. She supposed it would all become clear in due course.

‘Thank you.’

When she thumbed the button again, she got Gavin Murfin’s voice yelling for her.

‘Diane, where are you? He’s on the move, on the move. Your direction. Repeat, your direction. Have you got a visual?’

‘What?’

Fry looked up and saw movement on the pavement a few yards ahead of her position. But it was only the old man coming back towards her, flat cap pulled over his eyes, dog lead in one hand, plastic carrier bag in the other. The dog dug its heels in and stopped to water a lamp post.

‘Nothing. Nothing in sight here.’

‘He’s long gone,’ said Murfin. ‘He was legging it. Didn’t you see him?’

‘No.’

While his dog performed its business, the old man stood and stared at her defiantly like some ancient accusing angel.

‘Bloody Hell, Gavin,’ said Fry. ‘We’ve lost him.’

For the past half hour, Cooper had been listening to the yelp and wail. The modern tones of emergency response vehicles, howling up the dale one after another. The noises merged inside his head with an echo of the screaming. The noise still bounced off the sides of his skull in the same way it had rico-cheted among the caves and pinnacles of Dovedale.

He still didn’t know who had screamed. Perhaps it was the mother. Or it might just have been some random bystander, reacting with horror to a glimpse of a body in the water. A small, white face. Long streams of blood, swirling in the current like eels…

‘Their name is Nield.’

The tall uniformed sergeant was called Wragg. Cooper remembered him vaguely, and thought he’d probably turned up at a couple of major incidents in E Division when he was still a PC. He was fairly recently promoted, and was based at Ashbourne section now. He was wearing a yellow high-vis jacket over his uniform, and had removed his cap to reveal close-cropped fair hair. He looked harassed, but it might just be the heat.

‘Local?’ asked Cooper.

‘Yes, by some miracle. Among all these crowds, you’d think it’d be city people who suffered an incident like this. You know, the sort who’ve never actually seen a river before. Folk who don’t think you can drown in water unless there’s a sign telling you so.’

‘You’ve seen too many tourists.’

‘You got that right,’ said Wragg. ‘I never want to catch duty on a bank holiday again, I can tell you. Do you know how long it took me to get my car through those jams? You won’t be able to move down here later.’

‘That will be somebody else’s headache.’

‘I wish.’

Cooper was leaning against Wragg’s car. He had a clear view up the gorge towards the weirs, and beyond them, the pool where he’d pulled the body out of the water.

‘How old is she?’ he said.

‘Eight.’

‘She’s only eight years old?’

‘Yes.’

‘She was here with her parents. How the hell did it happen?’

‘They say their dog went into the water to fetch a stick. A golden retriever, it is. It seems the girl ran in after the dog. Only the dog came out.’

Cooper shook his head in despair. ‘Where are the parents now?’

‘Gone with her to hospital.’

‘They surely don’t think she’ll be revived. Do they?’

Wragg shaded his eyes with a hand as he watched some members of the public being shepherded away from the scene.

‘You don’t give up in these circumstances,’ he said. ‘That’s the very last thing you do.’

Events had moved pretty quickly once the girl’s body had been recovered from the water. Cooper had carried her to the bank and laid her on the grass. Then a woman had come forward from the crowd of bystanders, saying she was a nurse. Cooper had handed over resuscitation efforts to her, and she kept it going until the fast-response paramedic arrived, closely followed by the ambulance and Sergeant Wragg and his colleagues from the Ashbourne section station.

‘We’ll need a statement from you, of course,’ said Wragg.

‘But it will do later. We’re trying to catch as many witnesses as we can among the public before they disappear.’

‘Of course.’

‘But there doesn’t seem any doubt it was an accidental drowning.’

‘There was blood, though,’ said Cooper. ‘Blood in the water. She had an injury on her head.’

‘She probably fell and hit her head on a stone. That would explain why she drowned in such a shallow depth.’

‘“Probably“?’

‘There’s hardly going to be any trace evidence,’ said Wragg irritably. ‘The stone is somewhere out there being washed by thousands of gallons of water every second. We’ll see what eye-witness statements say, but I think you’ll find that’s it.’

‘Yes, all right.’

There had been no blood on the girl when he’d picked her up. But Cooper remembered seeing the wound now, an abrasion and broken skin on her forehead. The toughest thing he’d ever done was putting that body down, handing the little girl over to someone else. It felt like abandoning her to her fate. For some ridiculous reason, his instinct had been telling him he was the only person who could save her.

It was strange what your mind could do in a crisis. Sometimes, the rational part of your brain cut out altogether and you acted entirely on instinct, with no conscious thought involved. But occasionally your mind presented you with odd flashes of information that didn’t even seem to be relevant at the time.

Right now, Cooper was remembering images from the last hour or so. Paler rocks under the surface, streams of blood swirling in the current like eels. Jagged limestone spires at crazy angles. A dead, white face with floating hair. And a man with his hands raised, water dripping from his fingers.

‘Anyway, the Nield family…’ said Wragg, consulting his notebook. ‘Father is a supermarket manager in Ashbourne. Mum is a teacher. There’s a boy, about thirteen years old, name of Alex. They’re all in a state of shock, as you can imagine.’

‘And the girl?’ said Cooper.

‘What?’

‘The girl. You haven’t mentioned her name. She must have a name.’

Wragg looked taken aback.

‘Of course. Her name is Emily – Emily Nield. She’s eight years old.’

‘Thank you,’ said Cooper. ‘That’s what I wanted to know.’

He was aware of the noise of tourist cars rattling over the cattle grids out of Dovedale. Streams of scree had spilled from Thorpe Cloud like ash from a small volcano, slithering slowly towards the valley bottom. Two spaniels splashed in the water, scattering the mallards.

Many visitors were still clustered on the smooth, green slopes of the lower dale, where the limestone grassland had been grazed short by rabbits and sheep. Some were making their way down to the car park from the slopes of the dale, where they’d been exploring the woods or the limestone pinnacles and caves.

Suddenly, Cooper pushed himself away from the car.

‘Just a minute.’

‘Where are you going?’ asked Wragg.

But Cooper didn’t bother answering. He ran over to the car park and began to dodge between the groups of people, searching for a face. Some of them stared at him as if he was mad. But he was sure he’d seen someone he recognized. It was just a glimpse, a face half turned away in shadow, but the angle of a cheek and the tilt of a head were distinctive. It was a face he remembered for a reason, one that should mean something important.

He stopped two women getting into their Land Rover Discovery.

‘Excuse me, did you happen to see…?’

But he didn’t know what he wanted to ask them, and they hurriedly slammed their doors, fearing that he was some lunatic.

Cooper stopped, shaking his head. Maybe he was mad. But that face had been important, if only he could pin down its meaning.

Frustrated, he walked slowly back to the police vehicles. The River Dove was returning to its normal state after the excitement. Small brown birds with white bibs hopped from stones and plunged into the water after food. Dippers, they were called. It was said that crayfish and freshwater shrimps lived in this river. The water gave life to so many creatures. But it could take life away, too.

‘DC Cooper, are you okay?’ asked Wragg.

‘Yes. Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘You’re shivering.’

‘Oh, I’m just cold.’

Wragg stared at him with a baffled expression. He wiped the sweat from his own face with a handkerchief and squinted up at the glaring sun.

‘Oh, yeah. Chilly day, isn’t it?’

Cooper didn’t reply. He couldn’t tell Wragg what he really felt. It sounded too ridiculous. But right now, he felt chilled to the bone.

3

And that was it. The entire operation blown in a few seconds of inattention. Fry turned off the engine of the Audi, got out and stood on the pavement, waiting for Murfin and Hurst to join her.

‘What went wrong, boss?’ asked Murfin. He looked exhausted and irritable, perspiration standing out on his forehead.

‘I missed the signal,’ said Fry.

‘That’s tough.’

He exchanged glances with Hurst, who stood in the background, unsure of her position, or what she was expected to do now. And who could blame her, when she was given this kind of poor leadership?

Fry couldn’t stand the quizzical look the Murfin was giving her. As if she never made mistakes like everyone else. Well, she had to admit this was going to be an expensive mistake. Expensive in time and resources. And even more expensive in terms of damage to her career, when Detective Superintendent Branagh got to hear about it.

From the moment she arrived in E Division, Branagh had made it clear that she wasn’t DS Fry’s biggest fan. Now she had just proved to the Super that she couldn’t even organize a simple drugs surveillance. Piss-up and brewery would be words on Branagh’s lips. Damn it, this was the worst thing that could have happened. And it was all Ben Cooper’s fault.

Emily Nield had been taken to the Royal Derby Hospital, which had a new Accident and Emergency department off the Uttoxeter Road, just outside the city. Cooper found her family sitting in A&E. Through a window, he could see a doctor already speaking to them, with that practised shake of the head that conveyed bad news. In this case, probably the worst news it could possibly be.

Cooper waited a few minutes, watching hospital staff come and go. He was unsure of his reception, and didn’t want to rush in where he wasn’t welcome. But he needed to know the worst. And somehow he also needed to make contact.

The father of Emily Nield had his back to the window, but Cooper could see he was a man in his forties, with short dark hair turning grey at the temples. He was dressed in the style that some politicians adopted when they were trying to look casual for the cameras. A blue shirt with the cuffs turned back on strong-looking wrists, cream chinos that were now stained around the knees. The mother’s face was red and puffy, half hidden by a tissue. Cooper wondered where the boy was. Hadn’t there been a teenage boy with them?

He caught the attention of the doctor as she came out and identified himself.

‘Yes, I’m afraid Emily Nield was declared dead on arrival. Very sad.’

‘Thank you. Can I speak to the parents?’

‘If they’re willing.’

Finally, he judged the moment was right, and went into the room to introduce himself.

‘I’m very sorry,’ he said.

There had been so many times that those three words had seemed to convey very little. They were said without sincerity, with only self-interest in mind. But right now, they seemed to mean no more than the amount of breath he’d used to inhale before he said them. What words could you say to parents who’d just seen their youngest child die in front of their eyes?

He always hated meeting people for the first time in circumstances like these. It was impossible to know from looking at them what sort of people they had been before they were broken, before their world was turned upside down for ever. They might have been people full of joy, the kind who took the greatest delight in life, their expressions always lit up by smiles. No one would know that from their faces now. In just a couple of hours, the pain had been etched too deeply into their faces, the light in their eyes had been dimmed too far. Sometimes that light never returned.

It was always worst for parents, too. No parent should have to be present at the death of a child. It was contrary to the natural order of things. And Emily Nield had been, what – eight years old? To Cooper, it felt like a tragedy beyond measure. He had no words that could express to the Nields the way he felt.

Mr Nield stood up and shook his hand in an awkward, solemn way. Nield was a tall man, an inch or two taller than Cooper when he was standing. The slight hunch of his shoulders suggested he was uncomfortable about his height.

‘We need to thank you,’ he said.

‘No. There’s no need, sir. I did nothing.’

His thanks made Cooper’s throat tighten with a surge of emotion that he struggled to hide.

‘You tried,’ said Nield. ‘You did your best for our little girl. Yes, you did your best. No one can say more than that in this world.’

Cooper smiled. But when he looked the man directly in the eyes, his smile faded. He recognized him now. This was the man he’d seen on the bank of the River Dove, hands raised as if in blessing. Yet a few minutes later, Nield had been standing in a little group with his family. Cooper wondered if his sense of time had been distorted during the incident. He would have to find out from Sergeant Wragg how long it had taken from the girl entering the water, or from the alarm first being raised. Possibly events had seemed to happen much faster than they really did.

‘I’m Robert Nield, by the way,’ said the man. ‘This is my wife, Dawn. Our son Alex is here somewhere. I think one of the staff took him out of the way of…Well, they’ve all been very kind. They couldn’t have treated us better.’

‘I’m Detective Constable Cooper.’

‘You’re a policeman. We actually didn’t realize that, did we, love?’

Mrs Nield shook her head. She hadn’t spoken yet, but at least her face appeared briefly from behind the tissue.

‘I’m a detective with Derbyshire Constabulary.’

‘We know a few of your people,’ said Nield, ‘but I don’t think I’ve come across you before.’

‘I’m based in Edendale, sir.’

‘That would explain it. We’re Ashbourne people.’

‘Yes, I know.’

Nield looked at him curiously, as if he too was searching for an elusive memory, a connection that he wasn’t quite making. Cooper was used to that look from people he’d never met before. Often they’d known his father, a long-serving police sergeant of the old school who’d practically been the centre of the community in Edendale. Sergeant Joe Cooper was known to thousands, even now. And those who’d never met him in life knew of his death.

Well, it would come to Nield later, when he was thinking straight again. He could deal with it then.

‘I don’t know what arrangements have been made, but I could run you home,’ said Cooper. ‘My car is just outside.’

‘That’s good of you. I’d completely forgotten, but I left our car behind when we came in the ambulance.’

‘In the Dovedale car park?’

‘Yes.’

‘If you like, we can drop your wife and son home, then I’ll take you to pick up your car. How does that sound?’

‘Excellent.’

‘As long as you feel up to driving. If not, I can arrange for it to be taken care of.’

‘No, I’ll be fine. We’ll find Alex, and we can be off.’

‘I keep thinking “if only we could turn back the clock”,’ said Dawn Nield as they walked to Cooper’s Toyota. ‘Just a few minutes, or a few seconds. If only I’d been watching Emily more closely, if we hadn’t been throwing the stick for Buster, or we’d chosen to go somewhere else that day instead of Dovedale. Robert said it would be crowded on a bank holiday. That was why we went early. If we’d set off a bit later, we might not have been able to park the car, or there might have been more people around when it happened…’

‘Love, there’s no point in tormenting yourself,’ said Nield.

‘No, you’re right.’

Dawn wiped her eyes and looked briefly at Cooper. He read everything in that fleeting glance. While she might tell her husband he was right, those were no more than the words that came automatically from her mouth. What was happening inside her head was a whole world away. He knew she would never stop tormenting herself, could never rid herself of the endless ‘what ifs’. That list of possibilities would run through her mind in a constant loop, the moments when history might have been changed, playing over and over again like scenes from a film she had never actually watched. For the rest of her life, she would still be asking herself: What if?

The drive back to Ashbourne on the A52 took only twenty minutes. Cooper was glad it wasn’t a longer journey. The atmosphere in the car became uncomfortable as the Nields fell silent, each of them absorbed in their own thoughts. He’d tried to fill in some of the silences himself, but there was a limit to how much you could say in these circumstances without starting to sound ridiculous and insincere.

Ashbourne was a town built mostly of red brick, which made it look totally different from the limestone and millstone grit of Edendale to the north. This was clay country, softer than the White Peak, less forbidding than the bleak moorlands of the Dark Peak.

At school, in Geography lessons, Cooper had learned the significance of the boundary of Red Triassic rock which ran from Ashbourne to Thorpe, leaving the limestone gorge of Dovedale in startling contrast on the other side.

Perhaps it was all that red brick, but somehow the town felt unfamiliar to Cooper, as if he had already left his comfort zone. The Pennine hills were in his blood, and nothing could replace them. If he were ever to move, even the few miles to Ashbourne, it wouldn’t feel like home.

As he drove into the town, Cooper could see the last stages of construction work taking place on Clifton Road, where a new hospital was due to open next year. He wondered if it would have its own A&E department, whether it would have made any difference if Emily had got to hospital a few minutes quicker.

But he recalled the body he’d held in his arms, the futile attempts to resuscitate her on the riverbank. Surely she had already been dead when she came out of the water?

The boy was very quiet. At least the mother had let some of it out in that burst of emotion. But Alex was dumb. He was a slim youth, a bit under-sized for thirteen perhaps. He had dark hair like his father’s, but allowed to grow long, so that it fell over his face. His mother occasionally tried to push it back into position, and each time the boy flinched away from her. Alex had dark eyes, too, that gazed into Cooper’s every time he looked in his rear-view mirror.

Shock took people in different ways, of course. It was slightly disturbing, though, the way the boy kept looking at him and saying nothing. It was as if he was trying to weigh up Cooper’s trustworthiness, wondering whether he could share some secret with him. It was highly likely that he found it impossible to talk to either of his parents at that age. What thirteen-year-old could? A stranger to talk to might be exactly what he needed.

But how did you communicate to a thirteen-year-old boy that he was welcome to talk if he wanted to? Probably you didn’t. Teenagers were like animals, weren’t they? You had to wait until they came to you.

The Nields lived on the Shires Estate, off Wyaston Road. Executive homes with a view of the countryside where the road turned into a steep hill before curving to a dead end just short of the A52. At the bottom, children were playing football in the road. You didn’t see that too often.

The Nields’ house looked to be ten or twelve years old, with carriage lamps and hanging baskets, an oriel bay window and two half-timbered gables. It was set back from the road behind a neatly trimmed beech hedge, and a paved driveway led up to a double garage.

A house like this was usually described in estate agents’ adverts as a period-style detached residence. Cooper turned and looked at the view beyond the end of the close – Peak District hills on the horizon, including the distinctive pyramid shape of Thorpe Cloud. A detached residence in a much sought-after area, then. Lucky Nields.

He dropped Dawn and Alex off at the house, reassured to see a member of the family waiting anxiously for them on the drive. Nield explained that it was his wife’s sister, come up from Derby to be with her.

‘Thank you,’ said Nield, when Cooper returned him to the car park in Dovedale. ‘I don’t know how to thank you enough.’

‘There’s really no need, sir.’

Cooper watched Nield drive away in his silver VW Passat.

The car park was almost empty now, and access to the dale itself sealed off by police tape. Beyond the tape, Cooper could see Sergeant Wragg’s yellow high-vis jacket down by the river. But he felt reluctant to go near the water. The thought of its noise and icy coldness made him shiver. The image of water foaming over a weir caused his skin to crawl with apprehension.

Shading his eyes with his hands, Cooper gazed into the distance for the furthest glimpse of water he could get before a curve in the dale hid the Dove from view. He knew that the river rose way in the north, on the slopes of Axe Edge, close to the Leek to Buxton road. It ran roughly southwards for forty-five miles to join the Trent. For much of its course, it ran with one bank in Derbyshire and the other in Staffordshire. Which meant, strictly speaking, that his jurisdiction as an officer of Derbyshire Constabulary ended in the middle of the water, about halfway across the stepping stones.

He pictured the Dove widening as it reached Hollinsclough and flowed beneath the reef knolls of Hollins Hill, Crome Hill, Parkhouse and Hitter into the tourist village of Harrington. It was after Hartington that the valley became a gorge, the meadows ending abruptly at Beresford Dale. Wolfscote Dale, Mill Dale, and then the northern entrance into Dovedale itself, where more than a million visitors a year came to admire the wooded slopes and white limestone rocks carved by nature into towers, caves and spires.

South of here, the Dove was joined by the River Manifold before flowing through the lowlands of Southern Derbyshire on its way to the Trent at Newton Solney.

Past those stepping stones, on a curve of the river, was a series of rocky outcrops, all with picturesque names. Dovedale Castle, the Twelve Apostles, Lovers’ Leap. They were picked out on maps and photographed by tourists as they strolled along the banks of the river in the summer. Pickering Tor, Tissington Spires, the Rocky Bunster. One of the most prominent features was a natural arch on the eastern side of the dale. For some reason, whoever had named these rocks had suffered an imagination failure at this point. According to the Ordnance Survey map, this was called simply the Natural Arch. A bit disappointing, really. You would have expected the Devil’s Bow or the Mouth of Hell.

Cooper tried to sort out his memories, to clarify what he’d seen in Dovedale, and what he hadn’t. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get an image of Robert Nield out of his head, hands raised, water dripping from his fingers.

But the image only flashed across his memory. With it came another, much stronger recollection. The feel of a cold, limp body. Not yet stiff, but icy. The coldness of the freshly dead.

Above the weirs, the river looked too shallow for anyone to drown in. Anyone but a small child, anyway. Downstream, the water was deeper between the weirs. The current formed deceptive pools. How had the Nields managed to choose a stretch of river where the water was that bit deeper, the crowds were sparser, and everyone seemed to be looking the other way?

But that was the way it went with these things. A combination of circumstances that no one could have predicted, and this was the outcome.

Cooper started the Toyota and turned north towards Edendale. He found he wasn’t even convincing himself. A combination of circumstances? Or was it something more?

The cold eating into his bones could not be explained by the weather.

4

And how do you feel about it now? It was a question Diane Fry expected to be asked at any moment. It was, after all, a question that she’d asked herself many times, trying to analyse her own feelings, to make an inventory of the emotions as they welled up inside her. Pain, fear, horror. An awful sense of loss. And some other emotions so deep and nameless that they didn’t fit into any inventory. It didn’t matter what questions they asked her. No neat list would contain those feelings, no analysis could pin them down.

She recalled that rainy Monday morning in March, when she’d found Detective Inspector Gareth Blake standing in her boss’s office at E Division headquarters in Edendale. She hadn’t recognized him at first, as she automatically held out her hand, seeing a man who wasn’t much above her own age, his hair just starting to recede a little from his forehead, grey eyes observing her sharply from behind tiny, frameless glasses.

‘Diane,’ he said.

And then she’d remembered him. It was the voice that did it. She and Blake had worked together years ago, on the same uniformed shift in the West Midlands. But he’d been ambitious and got himself noticed, earning an early promotion. He was more mature now, better dressed, with a sharper hairstyle. The reek of ambition still hung in the air around him, though.

So what was Blake’s specialty now?

Cold case rape enquiries. Well, of course.

And then there had been Rachel Murchison, smartly dressed in a black suit and a white blouse, dark hair tied neatly back, businesslike and self-confident, but with a guarded watchfulness. A specialist counsellor, there to judge her psychological state.

Some of the phrases leapt out at her from the conversation that had followed.

‘Obviously, we don’t want to put any pressure on you, Diane.’

That was Blake, pouring a meaningless noise in her ear.

‘It’s understandable that you feel a need to be in control. Perfectly normal, in the circumstances.’

Murchison’s contribution. Well, Fry hadn’t wanted this woman telling her whether she was behaving normally or not. She didn’t want to hear it from anyone else, for that matter.

Just the sound of her name from Blake’s lips had brought back the memories she’d been trying to suppress, but which would now forever bubble up in her mind. She remembered how both of them, Blake and Murchison, had watched her carefully, trying to assess her reaction.

In the days that followed, others had seemed to be watching her in that some careful manner. But they could never comprehend the painful attempt to balance two powerful urges. The need to keep her most terrible memories safely buried now had to be set against this urge she’d suddenly discovered growing inside – the burning desire for vengeance and justice. No one could understand that. Not even Ben Cooper.

DC Ben Cooper had already been the darling of E Division when she arrived in Derbyshire. She’d been told how wonderful he was, what areas he was the expert in, the heights of knowledge he’d attained that no one else could possibly aspire to. She’d heard his name mentioned so many times before she actually met him that she’d already formed a picture of this Mister Perfect, the detective everyone loved, the man most likely to stand in her way. The picture that entered her mind was of a six-foot male with broad shoulders and perfect teeth, smiling complacently.

When he entered the CID room that first day back from leave, he could only have lived up to expectations if he’d been walking on water, or floating in a golden glow and trailing a string of haloes from his angelic backside. DC Ben Cooper had been set up for her to despise from the outset. No one liked a goody-goody.

But things had changed since then. Fry knew better than anyone that he was no Mister Perfect.

For years, her instinct had been to concentrate totally on her work. And that was a familiar story. She was no different from all the washed-up people everywhere, all the fools who’d ever messed up their lives or destroyed their relationships. Work was safe ground, a place where personal feelings could be put aside, shrugged off with her coat at the door of the office. The trouble was, right now she could feel the safe ground shifting under her feet. She was still as dedicated to the job as she’d ever been. But she had a suspicion the job wasn’t quite so loyal to her any more.

Fry was waiting to be called into Superintendent Branagh’s office, back at E Division headquarters in West Street, Edendale. She felt like a naughty school girl sent to see the headmistress.

‘Michael Lowndes,’ said Branagh, when she was finally summoned. ‘What went wrong?’

There was no point in trying to make excuses. Branagh had eyes that could look right through you.

‘I took my eye off the ball, ma’am.’

‘Obviously. You were supposed to follow him to the meeting, and take the main players out. You were in position, and so was your team. We only put together this operation so that Lowndes would lead us to the others.’

‘We failed,’ said Fry.

‘We?’

Fry swallowed. ‘I failed.’

Branagh sat back in her chair and studied her for a few moments. ‘Diane, we’ve been patient with you for a while now,’ she said.

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘We’ve given you some leeway, allowed you plenty of space. But you have a decision to make, and it’s time you made it. I believe it’s starting to affect your performance.’

‘I wouldn’t say that.’

‘Have you some other explanation?’

But Fry hadn’t. She couldn’t blame anyone else but herself.

‘DS Fry, I want you to make a decision here and now. I don’t like to put pressure on you in these circumstances, but I have wider issues to consider.’

Fry looked at her, wondering if she would be as terrifying herself if she ever reached the dizzy heights of such a senior rank. Not that it was likely.

The last time Fry had sat in this office was when DI Gareth Blake and the specialist rape counsellor Rachel Murchison had arrived from the West Midlands, bringing the news of a DNA hit that would enable them to re-open the enquiry in which she was the victim. A cold case rape enquiry. All they needed was her decision, whether she wanted to go ahead with a fresh enquiry, or close the book and put the whole thing behind her.

Blake’s words still echoed in her mind. She’d been turning them over and over since that day.

‘When we get a cold case hit, we consult the CPS before we consider intruding into a victim’s life. We have to take a close look at how strong a case we’ve got, and whether we can do something to strengthen it.’

‘With the help of the victim.’

‘Of course. And in this case…’

‘In my case. This is personal. Don’t try to pretend it isn’t.’

‘In your case, we had a very credible witness report from the victim. From you, Diane. Everything is on file for this one. We have an e-fit record in the imaging unit, and a copy of everything has been kept by the FSS. But the bottom line is, we got a DNA match.’

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.

It was so easy to believe that DNA evidence was foolproof. Yet the larger the database, the greater the chance of somebody being wrongly linked to a crime. For some, it was too much like the beginnings of a Big Brother society they didn’t really want to be part of.

‘The time is now,’ said Branagh. ‘Do we have a decision?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Excellent. I’m granting you indefinite leave of absence.’

Branagh made a note in a file on her desk.

‘Of course, since we don’t know how long you’ll be away from the division, there’ll be an appointment to Acting DS in your place.’

Leaving Branagh’s office, Fry pulled out her mobile and dialled a number.

‘Dad? Will you be at home tomorrow? Yes. I’m coming to see you.’

Ben Cooper turned right and dropped the Toyota down a gear to go up the steep street. Edendale was one of only two towns that sat within the boundaries of the Peak District National Park. At Buxton and other towns, the line on the map took wide sweeps around them and back again, to exclude them from national park planning restrictions. But Edendale sat too deep within the hills to be excluded. It lay in the middle of a valley running west to east, halfway between the Hope and the Wye. The River Eden came down from the hills and meandered its way through the town before escaping to the east. Because of its position, every road in the town led upwards, out on to the moors.

Castleton Road climbed past close-packed residential areas that spiralled up the hillsides, houses lining narrow roads that took sudden twists and turns to follow the humps and hollows of the underlying landscape. Further out, the houses became newer as they got higher, though they were built of the same stone. Finally, the housing petered out in a scattering of small-holdings and small-scale dairy farms.

For the moment, Edendale was constrained in its hollow by a barrier of hills. But the pressure of housing demand might force it to expand some time – either southwards into the gentle limestone hills of the White Peak, or north towards the bare gritstone moors of the Dark Peak.

By the river in the centre of town, the Buttercross area was where Edendale’s antique shops clustered. This was the oldest and most picturesque part of the town, including Catch Wind and Pysenny Banks, where the stone-walled streets were barely wide enough for a car and the river ran past front gardens filled with lichen-covered millstones.

In this area, his sister Claire’s shop stood empty now, the ‘To Let’ signs up, and all its stock sold off. There wasn’t much hope of a sale at the moment. It was hardly the only empty shop in town anyway. Time moved a bit more slowly here than in other parts of the country, and the recession had come along late, its ripple effects hitting the Eden Valley some months after the stone that had been dropped into the water of the UK economy.

At the height of the recession, twenty per cent of retail property had stood vacant in the city of Derby. In the north of the county, smaller market towns like Edendale had survived for a while on their tourism business – thanks to all those people who’d decided to spend their holidays in Britain rather than fly to the Maldives. And now, while the papers talked about the green shoots of recovery, the shutters were still up in Edendale’s High Street.

But Claire Cooper was ready to make a fresh start. She was a ‘glass half-full’ sort of person, and saw it as an opportunity. Even Matt might be pushed and cajoled into adopting a more optimistic outlook than he’d expressed for a long time.

At E Division, Gavin Murfin would be retiring in a few years’ time, finally able to claim a full pension at the end of his thirty years’ service. Gavin’s eldest was due to get married soon. He’d probably be a grandfather before long. But what would he do with himself in his mid-fifties, a career in Derbyshire Constabulary behind him, and too much time on his hands? It was funny how that happened in someone’s life. Time turned them into a person their friends didn’t recognize and had no connection with. Old colleagues who’d depended on each other’s support for years suddenly found they had nothing in common, no way even of sharing the office gossip. You couldn’t talk about work to a civilian. And all of that could be a brutal wrench for some officers. Too cruel a rupture.

Cooper had a sudden vision of himself in twenty years’ time, overweight and middle-aged, slouching around the CID room at Edendale, checking his watch to see if it was time to go home yet, setting a bad example for the younger DCs, grumbling about always missing out on promotion. He could become another Gavin Murfin.

No, surely not.

But some things never changed. Every division was still struggling to meet all its targets. Sanctioned Detection Rate, Crime Reduction Figures, PDR Completion Rate, Public Confidence Measure. The list seemed endless and unattainable.

Number 8 Welbeck Street lay just across the river from the town centre, close enough for him to walk to work if he wanted to. It benefited from a conservatory, and long gardens between Welbeck Street and the shops on Meadow Road. Unfortunately, his landlady Mrs Shelley, who lived next door, was becoming dottier and dottier, and he wasn’t sure how long he had left before her acquisitive relatives took over the two houses. No doubt they had their own plans.

He did still have a cat, though. Not the original black moggy who had come with the ground-floor flat as a sitting tenant. The poor chap had died one night in his sleep, and the flat had felt very empty without him.

Cooper’s new cat had chosen him one day when he visited the Fox Lane animal sanctuary. She had hooked him with her claws as he passed her cage, and refused to let go. One look into her anxious bright green eyes had left him with no option.

Now she was very much at home in Welbeck Street, enjoying the freedom of roaming the back gardens. He was gradually getting used to seeing tabby stripes instead of long black fur.

It had taken him ages to name the new cat. Naming an animal seemed such a simple thing. It wasn’t like choosing a name for a child, when something that suited a gurgling baby also had to be cool enough to avoid bullying when a child reached its teens, and appropriate for a responsible adult who didn’t want to sound like a porn star.

Claire had told him that a cat was the Celtic equivalent to the mythical two-headed dog Cerberus, the guardian at the entrance to the Underworld. So he’d toyed with some names from Celtic mythology. Brigid, Mari, Morgan, Rhiannon. Wikipedia had come up with a whole list. But none of them had seemed right. They sounded too much like witches.

He’d decided that the name ought to represent something of the area, the landscape that meant so much to him. Living in town, he missed the countryside, particularly his old home at Bridge End Farm. It ought to be something that reminded him of good things, the name of a hill or valley. Not a bleak peat moor from the Dark Peak, but something gentler.

The answer had come to him as he sat looking at the cat, gazing into her green eyes. He had an image of the wonderful panorama from Surprise View above Hathersage. It was a view that summed up the Peak District. On one side was the edge of the Dark Peak, with its twisted gritstone tors and the ramparts of Carl Wark. On the other side lay the White Peak, densely wooded slopes, limestone dales, picturesque villages. Ahead, there was a view right up the valley to Castleton, and on the horizon the hump of Mam Tor, the shivering mountain. The Hope Valley. Perfect. Now his cat was called Hope.

Cooper’s phone chirped. He’d finally bought an iPhone, though it was a cheap one he found on eBay. He spent far more time playing with it than he ought to. He’d turned it to vibrate while he was with the Nields. Now there were lots of messages waiting for him. One was from his brother, Matt.

‘Ben, can you call? I need to talk to you about something. It’s…well, it’s a bit of a family problem. So call, can you? Or come to the farm.’

Then there was a spell of silence before the call ended. No, not actually silence. If he pressed his ear to the phone, he could hear the sounds of the farm in the background. A dog barking, birds singing, cows lowing like a stage chorus as they headed in for milking. He pictured Matt crossing the yard behind the herd, forgetting that he had the phone clutched in his huge hand as he shoo’d an awkward beast through the gate. Cooper could have listened to it for ever. But finally there was a faint curse, and dead air.

And there was Liz. A voicemail message, simply to say Hi, Ben. Did you get my text? Love you.

No call from Diane Fry, which was unusual. No last-minute instructions, telling him how to do his job while she was away.

He wondered what the problem was with Matt. Or with the family. That was what he’d said. That meant Kate – or more likely one of the girls, Amy and Josie. Matt was forever worrying about them, fretting over how they were doing at school, and what sort of friends they were making. Last time, it had been some concern about the youngest, Josie, just because she had an imaginary friend and talked to herself a bit. Then, Matt had convinced himself she was in the early stages of schizophrenia, the illness her grandmother had suffered from for so long. But that seemed to have passed over now, so it must be something else.

Well, he would find out sooner or later.

A beep announced another text coming in.

‘Oh, for God’s sake –’

Cooper breathed deeply, surprised by his sudden burst of irritation. His anger had no apparent target. It was just a text message. But the sound of the beep had been enough to cause a momentary surge of temper, a flush that passed rapidly across his temples. He took a few more breaths to calm himself, and checked his phone.

It was Liz again. That would be the fifth or sixth text from her today. Some people had nothing better to do with their thumbs.

The previous text had said: CU 2nite? xox

Liz had gone on to Twitter, too. Cooper suspected she was getting a bit obsessed with it. Sometimes, when he was with her in the pub, she would tweet on her mobile phone. Just to let her friends know that she was…well, with him.

The new text said: so? 2 busy? :o

Cooper thought that when they invented the English language, they should have included punctuation marks to indicate irony and sarcasm, instead bothering with stuff like semi colons, which no one ever used. Subtleties of tone were completely lost in a text message. It was so hard to tell what mood someone was in when their voice was inaudible.

Recently, Liz had been complaining that he was always too busy with work. She was a civilian Scenes of Crime officer, recently transferred to B Division in Buxton, which meant they didn’t see each other in working hours any more. They’d been going out together for months now, and were pretty much considered a serious item. Marriage hadn’t been mentioned out in the open. Not yet, anyway. But she’d met his family, and he’d been for dinner with her parents in Bakewell. It felt like there was an irresistible impetus to their relationship, which could only end in one way.

The trouble was, when they did get engaged, he was pretty sure Liz would announce it first on Twitter.

Well, at least Liz didn’t blog, so far as he knew. Blogging was a minefield for a serving police officer. All over the country, bosses were getting paranoid after the chilling honesty and politically incorrect opinions of bloggers like Inspector Gadget and Night Jack. Attempts to preserve anonymity had been rejected by the High Court. A blog could get you into real trouble.

Cooper gave in to the psychological pressure and put down his phone to open a tin of Whiskas. Everyone had their own idea of priorities.

When Hope was satisfied, he poured himself a beer from the fridge and went back to his phone. He really didn’t feel like going out tonight. In fact, he felt so unwell that he might be coming down with summer flu or something. Swine flu, even. You never knew.

Sorry, wiped out. Tomorrow, ok? xxx

He knew it wouldn’t suit. He waited a while, sipping his beer and stroking the cat. But there was no reply, and finally he nodded off in front of the TV. He woke three hours later, realizing it was nearly bedtime.

‘This is no good, Hope.’

He lay awake that night, expecting flashbacks. He didn’t usually have trouble sleeping, the way he knew some of his colleagues did. It was those who lived alone that seemed to be unable to switch off from the job. A house full of kids didn’t give you any option, he supposed. A family around provided all the support and distraction you could need. Far better than a reliance on alcohol, or worse.

But that wasn’t his problem. It never had been before, except on rare occasions. So why was he lying here afraid to fall asleep, nervous of the dreams that might come in the darkness?

He had an appointment for a meeting with Superintendent Branagh in the morning. Now was not the time to suffer anxiety attacks.

Diane Fry knew she was only imagining the sirens. They were nothing more than a noise inside her head, an echo of the monotonous internal shriek that had been going on for days.

Mostly, during the daytime, she hardly noticed it. As long as she kept busy, and there were people around her, provided there were other sounds, the background din of normality…well, then she was fine. Absolutely fine. It was in the quiet moments that she heard it. Distant at first, like the high-pitched hum of an electric motor.

But gradually, it would grow nearer, forcing its way to the front of her mind, until the scream was loud enough to shatter her thoughts into fragments, like a glass splintered by a singer’s high note. Then her head would throb with the noise, until her brain banged against the inside of her skull and the pain was intolerable. Once her concentration was destroyed, she could think of nothing but the shriek, feel only its pounding. It took over her whole body. It had her at its mercy.

The nights were the worst, of course. Always the worst. Any bad thing that ever happened in her life – well, it was always a lot worse in the dark, in the cold hours before dawn, when the world seemed to recede into the darkness and leave her totally alone. Then she had to listen to the radio, turn on the TV for the Jeremy Kyle Show, anything…anything to avoid the silence. She had to drive that noise back into the distance.

Fry turned over, pumped her pillow. Well, she supposed the sirens could be real. Edendale wasn’t exactly crime free. More likely, though, it was some idiot who’d wrapped his car round a tree on the bend at the top of Castleton Road.

And then there were the voices. Voices that were coming gradually nearer. Right now, they were almost inaudible in the distance, like someone talking on the other side of a hill. She knew those voices would grow closer when she arrived in Birmingham. Then they would be too close. So close that they’d be right inside her head.

Immediately, she felt the sweat break out on her forehead. She cursed silently, knowing what was about to come.

Now that she was alone, the darkness would begin to close in around her, moving suddenly on her from every side, dropping like a heavy blanket, pressing against her body and smothering her with its warm, sticky embrace. Its weight would drive the breath from her lungs and pinion her limbs, draining the strength from her muscles.

Her eyes stretched wide, and her ears strained for noises as she felt her heart stumble and flutter, gripped with the old, familiar fear.

Around her, the night murmured with unseen things, hundreds of shiftings and stirrings that seemed to edge continually nearer, inch by inch, clear but unidentifiable. Next, her skin began to crawl with imagined sensations.

She had always known the old memories were still powerful and raw, ready to rise up and grab at her hands and face from the darkness, throwing her thoughts into turmoil and her body into immobility. Desperately, she would try to count the number of dark forms that loomed around her, mere smudges of silhouettes that crept ever nearer, reaching out to nuzzle her neck with their teeth and squeeze the air from her throat. Two, three…she was never sure how many.

And then she seemed to hear a voice in the darkness. A familiar voice, coarse and slurring in a Birmingham accent. ‘It’s a copper,’ it said. Taunting laughter moving in the shadows. The same menace all around, whichever way she turned. ‘A copper. She’s a copper.’

5

Tuesday

In the CID room at Edendale next morning, the rest of the team were already hard at work over their reports when Cooper arrived. DC Luke Irvine and DC Becky Hurst were at the desks closest to his, and they nodded to him when he came in, their eyes full of questions.

Irvine and Hurst were the newest members of E Division CID, and they made Cooper feel like a veteran now that he was in his thirties. After a few years as beat and response officers, they’d been rushed into CID. That was an indication of the shortage of experienced staff. An entire new generation was coming into the police service, all Thatcher’s children, born between 1979 and 1991. They had quite a different attitude to the older officers like Gavin Murfin.

They were eager to impress, too – anxious to get every last detail right in their reports and case files before their supervisor saw them. He had to give credit to Diane Fry for that. She had the new DCs with their noses to the grindstone. No one wanted to get on the wrong side of her.

Cooper supposed he might have been like Luke Irvine once, when he first got a chance to take off the uniform and work as a detective. Young and eager. How times had changed.

‘DC Cooper. I hear it was rather a disturbing incident yesterday. Are you all right?’

The sudden stir in the room was accounted for by the arrival of their DI, Paul Hitchens, and Superintendent Branagh. Cooper found Branagh looming over his desk dressed in a black suit and white blouse, like a funeral director. Her shoulders were broad enough to carry a coffin on her own, too.

Cooper stood up. ‘Yes, ma’am, thank you.’

‘Your line manager should make sure you defuse. I know you weren’t on duty, but even so. Then off to HR Service Centre – Care First, or a trained colleague supporter for a de-brief.’

‘No, really. Thank you, ma’am, but I’m fine.’

‘Well, everyone needs counselling services now and then. Perhaps a little leave? No? All right. Well done, anyway. Don’t forget – see me in my office at nine.’

When Branagh had left, DI Hitchens put his hand on Cooper’s shoulder.

‘You do have to be aware of the fallout, Ben.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The psychological fallout.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘So don’t bottle it up. There are systems in place. Critical incident support. DS Fry should take care of it.’

Cooper nodded, accepting the good intentions, but hoping that no one would mention it again. Diane Fry had other things on her mind anyway.

‘They say it’s like falling off a horse,’ said Murfin a few minutes later.

‘What is?’

‘Trauma. Getting over a traumatic incident. The thing to do is go back and put yourself in the same circumstances again. It’s like when you fall off a horse – you have to get straight back on. Otherwise, you just get more afraid of doing it. It kind of builds up in your mind, the idea that you’ll fall off every time. If you leave it long enough, it turns into a proper phobia, like.’

Cooper felt a surge of irrational anger, as if Murfin’s comment was the final straw.

‘Gavin, you’re not a psychiatrist. You don’t know what the Hell you’re talking about.’

Murfin looked surprised at his irritability. But then he seemed to accept it, and looked thoughtful.

‘Well, it couldn’t be exactly the same circumstances,’ he said. ‘Not in this case, I grant you that. But the principle is the same. Trust me.’

‘Thanks a lot, Gavin.’

‘No matter what anyone said to him, now was not the time to be showing any signs of weakness. It certainly wasn’t the time to be taking leave from work, or asking for counselling. This was his one opportunity to prove himself – and if he didn’t come up to scratch, he wasn’t likely to get another chance. His failure would be marked down in his personal assessment, and reflect on him for ever.

So he had to suck it up. He mustn’t let anyone see that he was affected in any way. Act normal. Be strong. That was the only way.

But Cooper had to admit to himself that he didn’t feel entirely up to scratch. There was a slight tremor in his hands that hadn’t been there before. When someone dropped a stapler in the office that morning, he jumped as if he’d been shot. That wasn’t like him at all.

Fry had only come into the office to clear her desk. She watched Cooper get up and leave the CID room as nine o’clock came round. He was off for his appointment with Branagh.

‘Gavin,’ she said, ‘did Ben meet the family of that girl who drowned? Has he mentioned it to you?’

‘Well, he hasn’t, as it happens,’ said Murfin. ‘He hasn’t talked about it much. But, yes – I hear he went to the hospital in Derby. Even drove the family home afterwards.’

Fry sighed. ‘He’s getting personally involved.’

‘I couldn’t say.’

‘Very loyal, Gavin.’

She dumped some files in her ‘out’ tray. They weren’t all dealt with, but someone would pick them up when she’d gone.

‘This family. I suppose they’re another lost cause of his.’

‘No. A nice, respectable middle-class family, from what I hear. You should try reading the bulletins.’

Fry scowled. ‘How can you tell when a family is nice and respectable?’

‘When the kids are well behaved. Respectful. I like that.’

‘Oh?’

Murfin seemed to sense the way she was looking at him.

‘What?’

‘Oh, nothing.’

‘Anyway – compared to my lot, some middle-class kids are a marvel. I wish somebody would write a parenting manual telling us how to turn out teenagers like that.’

Fry looked up as Cooper came back from the Super’s office.

‘Acting DS?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I suppose…’ said Fry, struggling to find the right words to camouflage her doubts. She wasn’t sure what she supposed. And she wasn’t sure whether she cared, really.

‘I’ve got the experience, Diane,’ he said, defensively.

‘Gavin has more than you.’

Fry knew it was a ridiculous thing to say, even before the sentence had left her mouth. The prospect of Gavin Murfin as Acting Detective Sergeant was so bizarre that it made the choice of Ben Cooper seem all the more preferable, even to her.

‘Well, look after the kids, won’t you?’ she said.

‘Of course.’

And she supposed he would. In fact, Cooper would probably ruin them for anything worthwhile in the course of a week. He’d pollute their minds by encouraging them to empathize, improvise, trust their instincts. Some nonsense like that. She’d have her work cut out to undo the damage when she came back from Birmingham. It might take her years to get them back in shape.

Fry sighed. Oh, well. God had sent Ben Cooper to her as a challenge, there was no doubt about that.

‘I need to hand over this case to you. The drugs enquiry on the Devonshire Estate.’

‘To me?’

‘Yes, to you. Acting DS Cooper.’

‘Right. That would be Michael Lowndes?’

‘He’s our initial suspect. But we believe he’s low level. We haven’t pulled him in because we want to identify the main players. We had an abortive surveillance operation yesterday. You heard about that?’

‘Yes, Diane.’

‘Our information was that he was due to meet up with his bosses yesterday to make one of his regular payments. But we slipped up, and lost him on the estate. He could have had somebody waiting to pick him up, we don’t know. You’ll need to see if you can get another shot at it. Okay?’

‘Fine, I’ll give it a go.’

Fry handed him the file reluctantly. She felt as if she was handing her purse to a mugger, and advising him how to spend the money.

‘Diane, is it true you’re going –’

‘To Birmingham, yes.’

‘I hope it goes well.’

‘Thanks. Whatever that means.’

‘Yeah.’

Fry turned away. The trouble was, no matter how clumsily he did it, Ben Cooper was always sincere.

Before she left the office, Fry relented and went over to give him some advice. Tips on how best to handle the team while she was away. Cooper nodded politely, even made a few notes. As if he actually thought she knew what she was doing.

‘And don’t worry about the thing yesterday,’ she said. ‘I know what you’re like, Ben. But it was an accident, pure and simple. Not your responsibility. Don’t get involved. Turn in your statement, and forget about it.’

‘Right, Diane,’ he said. ‘Understood. Have a good trip.’

When Fry had picked up her things and left, Cooper called Murfin over. He was munching on a chocolate bar – what he called his second breakfast.

‘Yes, new boss. What can I do for you? Pick up Michael Lowndes and give him the old rubber hose treatment, or what?’

‘No, Gavin. I want you to get PNC print-outs for all the registered sex offenders in the Ashbourne area.’

Murfin stopped chewing. ‘Are you looking for someone in particular?’

‘Yes,’ said Cooper. ‘And I’ll recognize him when I see him.’

To reach the A515 from Edendale, Cooper had a circuitous drive across Tideswell, Miller’s Dale and Blackwell. One of the pleasantest drives in the Peak District, but he barely noticed it. The A515 was the road south, down out of the White Peak to Ashbourne.

Three-quarters of an hour later, Cooper was sitting down on a rather chintzy sofa in the Nields’ lounge, facing a fireplace with a polished oak surround containing a living-flame gas fire – one of those things that were supposed to provide the impression of an open fire, but without any of the mess. Photographs of the family stood on a display mantel. At one end of the room, double doors stood open into a dining room with another bay window overlooking the rear garden. And, in the distance, he had another view of Thorpe Cloud.

‘Have you lived here long, Mr Nield?’ he asked.

‘About two years.’

‘But you’re local, aren’t you?’

‘Oh, yes. We lived in Wetton before we came here.’

Cooper nodded. Wetton was a small village about ten miles northwest of Ashbourne, close to Dovedale itself.

‘And you’re a supermarket manager, is that right?’

‘Yes, I manage an independent here in Ashbourne, called Lodge’s. Do you know it?’

‘I’ve heard of it, I think,’ said Cooper.

‘Well, that’s something. A lot of people don’t even realize there are independent supermarkets any more. We’re a bit of a dying breed.’

‘It’s good to have independent businesses. Ashbourne is lucky.’

‘Times are changing, I’m afraid. That sort of view sounds like pure nostalgia from a commercial point of view. There are too many supermarkets in Ashbourne now. The opening of Sainsbury’s was the last straw. We can’t all survive in this economic climate.’

‘Do you think you’ll close, then?’

‘Probably,’ said Nield. ‘In the next year or two, perhaps sooner.’

‘And will you be able to get a job at one of the other stores?’

He shook his head. ‘I doubt it. I come from the wrong culture, you see. When the big chains take you on, they want to turn you into a Sainsbury’s person, or a Tesco’s person, or whatever it is. They need to own your soul, to make sure you’re a team player. I’ve had too many years outside their culture, you see. I’m tainted by too much independence.’

Mrs Nield had disappeared into the kitchen as soon as Cooper arrived. Not because she wanted to get out of his way, but because it seemed to give her something to do. Another woman was in there, slightly younger. Her sister.

‘For one thing, I’m a big believer in sourcing local produce, wherever possible,’ said Nield, perching on an armchair. ‘Take bottled water. The Co-op here sells its own Fairbourne Springs, which comes from Wales. Somerfield’s now, they stock water from Huddersfield and Shropshire.’

‘Instead of…?’

‘Well, Buxton spring water. That’s what we sell at Lodge’s. Locally produced, you see. Of course, we used to stock Ashbourne water, but that went the way of all things, when Nestle closed the factory. It’s like everything else. Too much competition.’

Cooper was conscious that he was filling in time, besides letting Robert Nield talk about something other than the death of his daughter. But he was waiting for Mrs Nield to return before he asked his real questions.

‘Where is your own store, sir?’

‘Out on the Derby Road. You know where you turn off to the Airfield Industrial Estate? We’re there. We used to be in the centre of town too, of course. But rents got a bit high for us.’

Mrs Nield brought a tray of cups in. Proper cups and saucers, something he never bothered with at home.

‘Mr and Mrs Nield,’ said Cooper as she poured the tea, ‘I’m sorry to ask you questions at a time like this. I know you’ve made statements for Sergeant Wragg, but could I ask you to go over again what happened in Dovedale yesterday?’

Dawn sat in the chair next to her husband, and grasped his hand for reassurance.

‘We didn’t really see what happened. Not exactly,’ said Dawn. ‘We told the sergeant. It must have happened very quickly.’

‘Yes, I understand that,’ said Cooper.

Nield nodded. ‘I understand why you need to know, DC Cooper. Or could we call you Ben?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘It seems that our dog, Buster, ran into the water to fetch a stick. Emily ran in after the dog.’

‘Who threw the stick?’

‘We’re not sure. One of the children.’

‘And you saw Emily go into the water?’

‘Not really. We were chatting on the bank. I think I was watching out for Alex – he tends to wander off on his own, you know. The next thing I knew, someone shouted, and when I looked round Buster was coming out of the river, shaking himself, spraying water everywhere. And then we realized we couldn’t see Emily.’

He paused, appeared to be doing his best to recall events accurately.

‘Go on, sir.’

‘Well, I suppose it was a minute or two before we realized what had happened. We thought she was just hiding behind a rock or something. Children play like that, don’t they? But…she wasn’t playing.’

Dawn had brought out the tissues again while her husband was speaking. Cooper was beginning to feel uncomfortable, but there was an important point here.

‘If I’ve got this right, Mr Nield, you didn’t actually see Emily go into the water, and you didn’t see her fall or hit her head on a rock?’

‘I suppose that’s true. But that’s what happened, isn’t it? Well, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, I’m sure it was,’ said Cooper, because that was what you said in these circumstances. ‘One more thing – did you happen to see anyone near your daughter in Dovedale? A stranger?’

They shook their heads.

‘No,’ said Nield. ‘Well, there were a lot of people around. All of them were strangers, I suppose.’

‘But no one in particular showing an interest in her?’

‘Not that I remember. Dawn?’

‘No, sorry,’ she said. ‘What is this about? These are strange questions to be asking. I don’t understand them.’

‘I’m just trying to clear up the details.’

Mrs Nield rose unsteadily and left the room. Cooper took a drink of his tea, found it was already starting to get cold.

‘She’ll be all right,’ said Nield. ‘It takes a bit of time.’

‘I know.’ Cooper looked out of the window at the outline of Thorpe Cloud. ‘By the way, what was Alex doing when the accident happened?’

‘Taking photographs, I think,’ said Nield. ‘We bought him a digital camera for his birthday. He loads them on to his computer and creates effects with them. He has some software. I’m not sure what they call it…’

‘Photoshop?’

‘That’s it. He’s very creative, you know.’

‘So what was he taking photos of in Dovedale?’

‘I don’t really know. Rocks, water, trees.’

‘Not people?’

‘No. He isn’t really interested in that. He likes to look for patterns. You know – the bark on a tree, moss on a stone, sunlight through the leaves. He makes images from them, and uses them as background on his computer screen.’

Nield smiled at Cooper.

‘There are a lot worse things that a boy of his age could be doing, aren’t there?’

‘Yes.’ Cooper smiled back. ‘I was thinking, Alex might have caught a few people in the background. If he was taking photographs of the river, for example. There were so many people around that day, it would be hard to avoid them altogether.’

Nield frowned. ‘Well, I suppose so. But he would edit them out. Why are you so interested?’

How to explain to him? How to tell the father that he would like to track down some more witnesses to what had happened? Independent witnesses, whose memories might not yet have been distorted. Well, he couldn’t. Cooper hesitated for a few moments, then backed off.

‘Oh, no reason. Just in case there were any loose ends.’

Nield was still frowning, but before he could ask whatever question was on the tip of his tongue, his wife came back into the room. She looked better, as if she’d splashed cold water on her facer and combed her hair. It always helped, somehow.

‘How is Alex?’ asked Cooper.

‘A bit quiet,’ she said. ‘Do you want to talk to him?’

‘Well…’

‘He’d be glad to see you. He quite took to you yesterday.’

‘Really?’

‘He said he thinks your job must be interesting.’

Cooper suspected that Alex Nield was probably just another teenager who’d watched too many episodes of CSI and The Wire to have an accurate picture of what police work was all about in Derbyshire.

‘Go on up,’ said Nield. ‘He’s in his room. Second door on the left. He’ll only be playing on his computer.’

‘You’re sure you don’t mind? He’s a minor. Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t talk to him without one of you being present.’

Nield laughed. ‘You’re not going to interrogate him, are you? It’ll do him good to talk to someone outside the family. And it might get him away from that computer screen for a few minutes.’

Cooper looked at Mrs Nield, who nodded. Well, it was against procedure, but he was doing it at the request of the family. It would be a private conversation, not an interview with a witness. As long as he kept it that way, he’d be fine.

On the first floor of the Nields’ house, he found a galleried landing, and counted the doors to five bedrooms. One door stood open, and when he glanced in he saw a desk, laptop, bookshelves, a small filing cabinet. Two of the others had small ceramic name plaques on them. He knocked on the door bearing Alex’s name in Gothic lettering, and got a muffled ‘yeah’. He took that as an invitation to enter.

The boy was sitting at a desk in front of a PC screen, his legs curled round the seat of his chair. On the screen, Cooper saw a graphic representation of a medieval castle with individual buildings inside its walls – a barracks, a stable, a granary and warehouse.

‘What is it you’re playing?’

‘War Tribe. It’s a morpeg.’

‘Oh, okay.’

Alex snorted, as if he was used to adults just pretending they understood what he was saying. But Cooper thought he might have a bit of an advantage.

‘An MMORPG,’ he said. ‘A Massive Multi-player Online Role-Playing Game.’

‘Mm. Yeah.’

‘They’re usually programmed in PHP, aren’t they? What browser are you using?’

‘Safari.’

‘That’s good.’

Alex gave him a sly sidelong look. Cooper decided it was the moment to shut up. It was best not to push his luck too far. The boy would open up, if he wanted to.

Cooper noticed he was using a War Tribe mouse mat with a screen shot from the game.

Hanging on the side of the wardrobe was a white T-shirt with the slogan Cranny Up, Noob!

‘Where did you get the mouse mat?’

‘Uh, they have a Café Press website. You can get all kinds of stuff there.’

‘Right.’

He felt like adding ‘cool’. But it might, or might not, be the wrong expression this month.

Down one side of the screen was an inventory of resources – iron, wood, wheat – and a list of the troops available. He saw that this particular castle contained three thousand axemen and a thousand mounted knights.

‘Are you online a lot?’

‘You have to be, to build up your cities and watch out for attacks. Anyway, if you’re offline too long you go yellow, and you get kicked from your tribe.’

‘Right. And that would be a bad thing.’

‘Of course. You’ve got to be in a tribe.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Anyway, I’m not online as much as the big players. Some of the guys play on their mobiles,’ said Alex.

‘Oh, okay. But not you?’

‘My phone is too old. It’s rubbish.’

‘Maybe your dad will buy you a new one.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘So what’s your log-in name?’

Alex narrowed his eyes. ‘You’re not going to ask me for my password, are you? That’s wrong. Besides, it’s illegal.’

‘Illegal?’

‘In the game. You can get banned for sharing your password.’

‘Why?’

‘People try to bend the rules all the time. They try anything to get an advantage. Even blackmail.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘Oh, yeah. Big players threaten to catapult your cities unless you give them resources.’

‘A protection racket.’

‘That’s illegal too, though.’

‘Well, I don’t want to know your password. I only wondered what you call yourself.’

‘I’m Smoke Lord.’

‘Really? But you don’t smoke, do you?’

‘What, cigarettes? Of course not. It means your cities will be smoking ruins after I’ve attacked them.’

‘With your catapults?’

A lock of dark hair fell over his face as he turned to stare at the screen again.

‘I’m a Gaul,’ he said. ‘I have fire catapults.’

‘And attacking people and setting fire to their cities isn’t illegal?’

‘Don’t be stupid. It’s the whole point of the game. It’s called War Tribe. It’s a war game.’

‘Yes, that was a stupid question,’ admitted Cooper. ‘I think I must be out of my depth.’

‘I guess so.’

Cooper stood up. ‘Do your parents not mind you playing on the computer all the time?’

Alex snorted. ‘They keep a check on me, if that’s what you mean. They’ve got a lock on it. Parental controls. And while I’m at school, Mum comes into my room and checks my browser history, to see what sites I’ve been looking at. Can you believe that?’

‘Mum likes to be the one in control, does she?’

‘Too true. You ought to see her at meal times.’

Cooper could sense the boy starting to close up. He decided it wasn’t the best time to ask Alex about the photographs he’d taken in Dovedale. He left the teenager to his game and went back downstairs.

‘Thank you, Mr and Mrs Nield. I think I’ve bothered you enough. I’m sorry to have intruded.’

‘It’s all right,’ said Dawn. ‘It helps to talk, to have things to do. You’ve got to keep busy at a time like this. There’s no point in turning inwards.’

Cooper could see that she was the sort of woman who would put her energies into organizing things, into organizing anyone who came within her orbit. But the danger was that the grief would hit her later – perhaps at the funeral, or in the long, dreadful weeks to come. He searched for something to say that wouldn’t sound too trite.

‘Well, be thankful that you still have your oldest child.’

‘What?’ she said.

‘Alex.’

‘Oh. Yes.’

There was an awkward moment when they looked at each other in embarrassed silence, neither having any idea what to say.

Cooper knew that he’d been taking advantage of his position with the Nields. They would probably have reacted quite differently to a police officer who didn’t happen to be the man who’d tried to save their daughter’s life. They wouldn’t have talked so readily, been willing to answer those questions all over again without suspicion. But he’d pushed their gratitude as far as he could. It was time for him to leave.

But Mrs Nield touched his arm as he paused on the door step.

‘Ben – you’ll come to the funeral, won’t you?’ she said.

Cooper said goodbye to the Nields, and found his way out of Ashbourne. He thought back to the few minutes he’d spent with Alex. The boy was clearly absorbed in some other universe that his parents probably knew nothing about, and wouldn’t understand if they did. Interesting that so many things were illegal, or against the rules in the War Tribe universe. But he supposed there must be plenty of people who set out to be bullies, cheats and liars. Just like real life, in fact.

On the way out of town, Ashbourne’s confusing one-way system took him past the fire station. The alarm was sounding at the station. Two retained firemen jogged up the road, and a third arrived on a bicycle.

He wondered if Alex Nield’s online world had an imaginary fire brigade that would rush to put out the conflagrations caused by imaginary fire catapults. He supposed not. It was far too exciting to watch your enemies burn. As any teenage boy knew, destruction was so much fun.

6

Nearly two hours after leaving Edendale, Fry turned off the M6 at the Gravelly Hill interchange, the vast tangle of flyovers and slip roads known everywhere as Spaghetti Junction. In a couple of minutes she was on the Aston Expressway, eating up the tarmac on those two final miles of motorway that led right into the heart of the city.

It was morning rush hour. That was something she’d forgotten. She was sitting in a sea of carbon monoxide all the way from Sutton Coldfield to the Bull Ring. Tasting those fumes made Fry conscious of how she’d begun to acclimatize to her new home in Derbyshire. Up there in the hills, you could actually smell the air. You knew you were breathing oxygen.

In a way, the Expressway was a perfect introduction to Birmingham. It seemed to sum up all the city’s quirks and contradictions. This was the only stretch of motorway in the country with no central reservation. Instead, it had a seventh lane in the middle, which worked in opposite directions at peak times – a tidal-flow system, controlled by arrows on the overhead gantries. According to legend, one of these gantries used to contain a pipeline carrying vinegar from one part of the HP Sauce factory to another across the Expressway. Once, the pipeline had sprung a leak, and the paintwork of dozens of passing cars had been ruined by vinegar rain. Or so the story went. It could just be a bit of Brummie folklore.

It was difficult to sum Birmingham up, though. Fry had heard many cliches about the place. Workshop of the Empire, Venice of the North, city of a thousand trades. Oh, and birthplace of heavy metal. Well, that last one was probably right. It probably dated from the time when four lads from Aston decided to become Black Sabbath. Ozzy Osbourne was some kind of god in these parts. They had even preserved the terraced house in Lodge Road where he grew up and first got himself into trouble as a disaffected youth.

She switched on the radio, and tuned it to BBC WM, where the Breakfast Show was just finishing. The presenter’s voice sounded familiar. He was another former student of UCE, one of the local success stories they often talked about. She couldn’t remember his name.

When her phone rang, she recognized Gareth Blake’s voice straight away. It was that voice, those smooth tones, that had told her they intended to re-open her rape case.

‘Diane, can you talk?’

‘Yes, I’m hands free.’

‘Good. Are you in Birmingham?’

‘On the Expressway,’ said Fry.

‘Brilliant. I’m really pleased that you made this decision, Diane.’

‘In a way, it was made for me.’

‘Oh? You’re not feeling under any obligation, are you? We haven’t put any undue pressure on you?’

That was typical of Blake. Covering all the bases, trying not to put a foot wrong. No one could ever claim that DI Gareth Blake hadn’t gone by the book.

‘No, don’t worry. I’m on board.’

‘That’s good, Diane.’ He sounded relieved. ‘We’ve set up a meeting with the team this afternoon at two o’clock. In Lloyd House. You know where it is?’

‘Gareth, I worked in Birmingham, remember?’

‘Of course, of course. Well…Colmore Circus. You’ll find it. The other thing is – Rachel Murchison would like to touch base with you before the meeting. Talk to her, won’t you? The sooner the better. She’s waiting for your call, Diane.’

Fry exited the Expressway and found her way via back streets through Aston and Newtown. Aston Cross was unrecognizable without the familiar background of the HP Sauce factory. Its old site was now just an expanse of soil and rubble.

Her last posting in the West Midlands had been here, as a detective constable based at Queens Road. D1 OCU, the Operational Command Unit for Aston. The building still looked the same. Marked police vehicles stood out front. Round the back, she knew, parking places were marked in strict hierarchical order from the entrance – Chief Superintendent, Superintendent, DCI, Chief Inspector, right down to the IT department.

She wondered if every cell in the custody suite still had the Crimestoppers number printed on a wall just inside the door. Somebody must once have decided that a prisoner in the cells might use his one call to report a crime. Hope sprang eternal, even in a custody suite.

Fry frowned at the boarded-up wreck of a pub under the shadow of the Expressway. She couldn’t recall its name, or whether she’d ever drunk there when she worked at Queens Road. Maybe they’d tended to go into The Adventurers a few yards down from the nick. Some memories were just lost, she supposed.

Driving up Aston Road North reminded her of a snippet passed on by one of the lecturers over coffee during her course in Criminal Justice and Policing at UCE. Apparently, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had lived on this very road when he was a poor medical student, helping out a local doctor. That was pre Sherlock Holmes, of course. She might even remember the name of the doctor, if she tried not to think about it.

This was part of her old patch when she was in uniform, and later as a divisional DC. She ought to know this area well, but things had changed. New buildings had gone up, entire streets had disappeared.

Worse, every pub she remembered in this area seemed to have closed. The Waterloo in Wills Street, the Royal Oak on Lozells Road, even the Cross Guns in Newtown. All gone, and more besides.

But Birmingham had always been a work in progress. The city’s oldest buildings came down faster than new ones went up. The old Bull Ring shopping centre had been state of the art, not many decades ago. The early seventies, maybe? The late sixties? But the place had already been looking tired when Fry herself had hung around its walkways and escalators as a teenager. Now the city had a new Bull Ring. Borders and Starbucks, and the rippling metallic girdle of Selfridges, known to locals as the Dalek’s Ballgown. Award-winning, that Selfridges design. A sign of Brum’s arrival in the twenty-first century. But how many years would it last, before Birmingham decided to move on, ripped it down and stuck up something new?

She checked her watch. She was early yet. Not that they would mind her arriving a bit sooner than expected. They would probably be delighted. She could imagine them chuckling with excitement in the hall, fussing around her, patting her arm, ushering her into an armchair while the kettle boiled. But she wasn’t quite ready for that yet.

Beyond the underpass at Perry Barr, she turned into the One-Stop shopping centre and parked up. Inside the mall, she walked past Asda and Boots, and out into the bus station.

She had studied for her degree in Criminal Justice and Policing at UCE, the University of Central England, right here in Perry Barr. From the bus station, she had a good view of her old alma mater, though it had now been renamed Birmingham City University. She could see the Kenrick Library and the golden lion emblem high on the main building of the City North campus.

Instead of going back to her car, she crossed to the other side of the bus station and walked towards Perry Barr railway station, past a few shops that stood between here and the corner of Wellington Road – The Flavour of Love Caribbean takeaway, Nails2U, the Hand of God hair salon.

But there was no point in avoiding the call. She was caught up in the machine now, had voluntarily thrown herself into the mechanisms of the criminal justice system, and she had no escape.

‘Diane, are you well?’ said Murchison, answering her phone instantly, as if she had indeed been sitting at her desk waiting for it to ring.

‘Yes, I’m fine.’

‘I just wanted a few words with you, before our meeting this afternoon.’

‘You just wanted to make sure I was actually on my way, perhaps?’

‘No. I think you’ve made the commitment now. I’m sure you won’t change your mind. But if you do –’

‘I won’t,’ said Fry.

‘All right. Well, I know you might be feeling isolated and vulnerable at the moment. But don’t forget, you’re not alone in this. We’re all on your side. Any support you need is available, twenty-four hours a day. Anything you want to talk about is fine. Don’t hold it back. Call me, any time.’

‘Thank you. That’s very kind.’

‘Don’t worry, Diane. It’s my job.’

Fry winced, wondering if she had just received the hand-off, the subtle reminder that this wasn’t a personal relationship but a professional one. She supposed that counsellors, like psychiatrists, had to be wary of relationships with their clients, and draw firm boundaries. Some of the people Murchison dealt with must be very needy.

Below her, the yellow front end of a London Midland City train whirred into the Birmingham platform of the station.

‘There’s a lot of noise in the background,’ said Murchison. ‘Where are you?’

‘Perry Barr.’

Murchison was silent for a moment. Fry thought she had shocked her in some way. But Perry Barr wasn’t that bad, was it?

‘Diane, is there a particular reason you’re in Perry Barr?’

‘Yes, a personal one.’

She thought she could hear Murchison shuffling papers.

‘May I ask…?’

‘I’m visiting someone. Family.’

‘Oh. That would be…your foster parents?’

‘Well done.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘I know it’s all right. I don’t need your permission to visit them.’

‘No, no. Of course not.’

Tm just calling in for a cup of tea. So you can tell Gareth Blake I’m behaving myself.’

Murchison laughed. Fry thought she heard relief in her voice.

‘I’ll tell him. And we’ll see you later, yes?’

‘Of course. After I’ve checked into my hotel.’

Fry watched people hurrying down the concrete steps to the platform and getting on to the train. She thought about following them, getting on the train and riding past Aston, past Duddeston and right into New Street. As if she could ride by everything, without even a glance out of the window, and start all over again.

But she stood for too long at the top of the steps, and the train pulled out, the noise of its motor dying as an echo on the brick walls.

‘Diane,’ said Murchison finally, ‘everything will be all right.’

Fry ended the call, and looked around. Opposite her stood three tower blocks surviving from an early 1960s attempt at low-cost housing. A number 11 bus emerged from Wellington Road in a burst of exhaust fumes. A strong smell of burning rubber hung on the air from the plastics factory on Aston Lane.

She walked under the flyover and emerged on the Birchfield Road side. Kashmir Supermarkets and Haroun’s mobile phones. Money-transfer services and lettings agencies for student flats. Outside Amir Baz & Sons boxes of vegetables were stacked on the pavement. Fry stopped to look at some of the labels. Bullet Chilli. Surti Ravaiya.

Now she felt lost. Nothing seemed to be recognizable. The street signs still pointed to UCE, but there was no point in following them. When you got there, you would find it had ceased to exist. Its name had been consigned to history.

The disappearance of so many landmarks gave her a strange sense of dislocation. Birmingham had been changing behind her back while she’d been away. This was no longer the place that she’d known. The Brum she saw around her was a different city from the one that she’d left. It was as if someone had broken into her previous life when she wasn’t looking and tried to wipe out her memories with a wrecking ball and a bulldozer.

But then, it was probably true the other way round. She wasn’t the same person who’d left Birmingham, either.

The Bowskills were the family she’d lived with the longest. She’d spent years in the back bedroom of their red-brick detached house in Warley. She’d been there when Angie ran away and disappeared. And she’d stayed with the Bowskills after her sister had gone. She’d needed them more than ever when she no longer had Angie to cling to.

And those times in Warley had been happy, in a way. Fry clearly remembered window shopping with her friends at Merry Hill, touring the Birmingham clubs, and drinking lager while she listened to the boys talking about West Bromwich Albion. Jim and Alice Bowskill had done their best, and she would forever be grateful to them. There had always been that hole in her life, though. Always.

There had been other homes, of course. Some of them she remembered quite well. She particularly recalled a spell with a foster family who’d run a small-scale plant nursery in Halesowen, and another placement near the canal in Primrose Hill, where the house always seemed to be full of children. But those families were further back in her past, too far upstream to re-visit.

Jim and Alice Bowskill now lived in a semi-detached house with a vague hint of half-timbering, located on the Birchfield side of Perry Barr, the close-packed streets in a triangle bounded by Birchfield Road and Aston Lane. As she drove towards it along Normandy Road, Fry had a good view of the Trinity Road stand at Villa Park, reminding her that Aston was only a stone’s throw from this part of Perry Barr. Here, everyone was a Villa fan.

There seemed to be home improvements going on everywhere in these streets. She saw an old armchair standing by the side of the road, bags of garden rubbish lined up at the kerb.

Most of these houses had been built at a time when the people who lived in them weren’t expected to own cars. So there were very few garages and hardly any off-street parking. It took her a few minutes to find somewhere to leave her Audi.

Jim Bowskill was wearing his Harrington jacket. Well, surely not the original Harrington – the one she always remembered seeing him in. It would have been worn out by now. But he was a man who had never been without a Harrington. He once told her he’d started wearing one as a mod in the 1960s, and just found that he never grew out of them. When he reached his mid fifties, he’d thought for a while about having a change. But then he’d seen Thierry Henry wearing one in the Renault adverts, and that was it. The current Harrington was a classic tan colour, with the Fraser tartan lining and elasticated cuffs. Seeing it made Fry feel an intense burst of affection for him. It was probably just nostalgia – a vague memory of hugging a coat just like that.

He was a lot greyer than she remembered him. Slightly stooped now, too.

‘Hello, love. It’s good to see you. We haven’t seen much of you since you left to go to Derbyshire. Having a good time away from us, I suppose?’

He said it teasingly, but Fry felt sure there was more than a hint of genuine reproach. She immediately felt guilty. She thought of all the reasons she’d given herself over the past few years for not keeping in touch with her foster parents, and all of them seemed petty and contrived. Fry supposed she’d only been trying to justify her reluctance to herself. But she shouldn’t have made Jim and Alice the victims of her self-justification.

‘No, I’m sorry. I’ve been so busy.’

‘We understand.’

Fry knew from the tone of his voice that he saw the lie, and forgave her. And that just made her feel even more guilty.

Jim Bowskill had been sorting out his blue recycling box for the weekly refuse collection.

‘How do you like it here?’ asked Fry.

‘Oh, it suits me. The house isn’t too big, so it’s easy to maintain. And there are lots of shops. We didn’t have the One-Stop shopping centre when you were here before, did we?’

‘Yes, Dad. It’s been there for fifteen years.’

He nodded. ‘And there are plenty of bus routes, if I need to go anywhere. So, all in all, it’s very handy.’

The Bowskills moved from Warley to Perry Barr some time after she left home to live on her own. She wasn’t sure why – though Alice’s family was originally from this part of North Birmingham, so maybe it was another case of nostalgia, a woman drawn back to the past by those lingering memories.

In a way, this part of Perry Barr had come full circle. When the indigenous white community had first started selling their houses, the Indians had moved in. As the Indians became more prosperous, they’d moved on to other areas, and Pakistanis had come in. When the Pakistanis sold their houses, the Bengalis had replaced them. And now here was Jim Bowskill, living in his double-fronted semi off Canterbury Road, explaining that it was easy to maintain and handy for the shops, and close to a bus route, if he needed it. And it was in the heart of Perry Barr’s Bengali area.

Fry knew better than to talk about the Asian community round here. If you looked for an Asian community, you wouldn’t find it. Instead you’d see a whole series of Asian communities – Pakistanis, Bengalis, Hindus. And even within the nationalities, the complexities of caste and locality were impossible for an outsider to sort out. In some parts of the country, there were entire populations who had come from a handful of villages in one small region of Pakistan. The more you learned, the more you realized how undiscriminating the very word Asian was. It was a pretty big continent, after all. And she knew that no one around here would readily call themselves Asian. It was an outsider’s term.

And everyone knew there was a pecking order among the different ethnic groups. The cycle that had played itself out in Perry Barr over the years was repeated in other parts of Birmingham. Newly arrived immigrants lived in the poorest streets, until they could to move on to better areas and bigger houses. These days, the leafy avenues of Solihull were full of Hindu millionaires.

Once an Asian parent had explained it to her:

‘In the old days, we thought we would come here, send some money back and eventually go home. But the new generation don’t see it that way. A lot of people don’t consider this the host country any more, they consider it their home.’

‘But sometimes the old country is home, too, isn’t it?’

He smiled. ‘Yes. Sometimes when people say “home” you have to ask which home they’re talking about.’

Alice Bowskill looked frail. She wasn’t that old, really. But time hadn’t been kind to her. Nor had the years spent worrying over other people’s children.

Fry hugged her.

‘Mum.’

Jim smiled at them both, delighted to see them together.

‘Do you still support West Brom, Diane?’ he said.

‘Me?’ said Fry. ‘I never did, not really.’

‘It was just because the boys did,’ said Alice with a sly grin. Fry almost felt like blushing.

‘Not the Blues, surely?’ said Jim, missing the significance of his wife’s comment.

Of course, Jim Bowskill was another Villa fan. She wondered if that was part of the reason for the Bowskills moving to Perry Bar, so close to Villa Park? There were pubs round here where a Blue Nose would be torn apart at first sight.

But she wasn’t a Birmingham City fan. She wasn’t actually from Birmingham. She wondered how long it would be before some Brummie looked at her sideways and uttered the immortal phrase: ‘A yam-yam, ain’t you?’

There was no point in trying to deny it. People in these parts were acutely sensitive to the differences in accent that marked you out as Black Country. In a way, she was as much of a foreigner in Brum as she was back in Derbyshire. ‘Not from round here’ might as well be permanently tattoo’d on her forehead.

The Black Country was the name given to the urban sprawl west of the city of Birmingham. It encompassed old industrial towns like Wolverhampton, West Bromwich, Dudley, Sandwell and Walsall. And many smaller communities, too – like Warley, where Fry had lived with her foster parents, and which was nothing but a string of housing estates tucked between Birmingham and the M5 motorway.

In some ways, those small Black Country communities were far worse than the estates of inner city Birmingham. Some of them were completely cut off, isolated by the collapse of the manufacturing industries from the affluence evident in the new apartment blocks, the new Bull Ring shopping centre, stacked to the roof with consumer goods and designer labels. It was in places like West Bromwich, rather than Birmingham itself, that the BNP were getting a foothold. It was there they found the disaffected white working classes, desperate to find a voice.

Jim sighed. ‘Moved allegiance altogether, I suppose. It’s Derby County, then. Tragic’

‘Dad, I don’t even like football.’

There weren’t many people like Jim and Alice, who would be willing to take on other people’s children, especially when many of those children were deeply troubled and disruptive. It took a lot of dedication and commitment. A lot of love.

She wondered about some of the other foster children who’d passed through the Bowskills’ lives. There must have been many of them. She supposed that most of them kept in touch better than she ever had. It had been too easy for her to forget the debt she owed them. She’d been too quick to put everything behind her when she moved from the West Midlands, cast the good aside with the bad when she started a new life in Derbyshire.

Fry remembered the Bowskills reluctantly producing her birth certificate when she needed to register at college. They themselves had obtained it from her social worker, by special request. Only her mother’s name had been on the certificate, the space to record the father left blank. It seemed her parents had never married, so the surname she carried was her mother’s, not that of an adoptee.

Then she thought about the one child the Bowskills had adopted. Perhaps tired of saying goodbye to those they’d cared for over the years, they had fought to keep one particular boy, a few years younger than Fry. He was called Vincent, a quiet boy born to an Irish mother and a Jamaican father. He had been with Jim and Alice after Fry had left to set up home on her own and pursue her career in the police. The Bowskills’ last commitment, the one final object of their love.

The children’s charity Barnardos had said recently that there was too much focus on trying to ‘fix’ families, when it would often be in the best interests of the children to put them up for adoption straight away when there was a problem. And by ‘straight away’ they meant at birth. Parents who’d failed to care properly for older children would not be allowed to bring up younger ones. It seemed to Fry that there was a definite logic in the argument.

And yet, Vincent Bowskill had made the wrong friends, been attracted to a way of life the Bowskills deplored. Something had still gone wrong, despite their best efforts. Despite what the experts said, could there be some genetic influence that would always flow in the blood? Blood, they said, was thicker than water.

Or maybe it was because there was no easy way for a boy like Vince to fit into a society that liked to put everyone in a category.

Fry knew that mixed-race people were an elephant in the room – the fastest-growing ethnic minority in Britain, more numerous than black Caribbean or black African. Yet it was only in the 2001 census that they were given an ethnic category of their own. They were obvious to anybody living in a large British city, yet invisible at a political level. In multiculturalism Britain, the fact that more and more people were having children across racial divides was an inconvenient truth. It didn’t fit with the concept of neat communities of black, white or Asian.

And that could be a problem for boys like Vincent Bowskill. These days, black and white kids tended not to call each other racial names. But the mixed-race kids got it from both sides. Many of them were fated to spend their entire lives searching for an identity.

‘So how is Vince?’ she said, as Jim sat down with her.

‘Oh, you know – fine.’

‘Really?’

‘Well, to be honest, he’s always been a bit of a worry to us. But he does his best. He’s a good lad, at heart.’

‘He isn’t involved with a gang, is he?’

‘No, no. Well, we don’t think so.’

Fry realized Jim Bowskill might find it difficult to tell what sort of circles his adopted son moved in. When Vincent came here to visit, he wouldn’t be displaying his gang tattoos and waving a gun around. He’d be well behaved, polite.

And maybe…just maybe, he’d actually turned his life around and moved on. It was possible to do that.

‘Should I look him up while I’m here?’

‘Vince?’ Jim looked doubtful. ‘Oh, you don’t have to, Diane. But –’

‘I’ll see if I have time.’

‘All right.’

She knew she had to broach the one subject they hadn’t touched on, the one the Bowskills were shying away from.

‘You know why I’m here in Birmingham, don’t you?’ she said.

‘Yes, you told us. The case.’

‘You’ll let us know how it goes, won’t you?’ said Alice.

‘Don’t stay out of touch, Diane.’

She sounded even frailer than she looked. Fry hoped Alice wasn’t worrying herself too much about something she couldn’t do anything about.

Fry looked out of the bay window into the street. All the people passing were Bengalis. She hadn’t seen a white face all the time she’d been here.

‘Dad,’ she said, ‘what’s Surti Ravaiya?’

‘Oh, it’s a type of Indian eggplant. You serve it stuffed.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Why? Are you developing an interest in cooking?’

‘No.’

Jim Bowskill looked at her oddly. ‘You know, you haven’t changed, Diane.’

She turned back to the room. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I remember you when you were a teenager. You were always a very distant girl – so self-contained. It was hard for anyone to get you to open up. No matter how hard we tried, Alice and me, we never really understood what you were thinking, or feeling. You’re the same now. You’re still that teenage girl.’

‘I’m sorry, Dad. I don’t know what to say.’

‘Do you remember that friend you had at school? Janet Dyson. Your best friend, she was.’

Fry shook her head. ‘Janet…?’

‘Dyson. Pretty girl, with long dark hair. Her father ran the taxi firm.’

‘I don’t remember her.’

‘You must do,’ said Jim. ‘She was your best friend. You used to walk out of school holding hands sometimes. It was very sweet.’

‘How old was I?’

‘Eight or nine.’

‘It’s too long ago, Dad.’

‘I can’t believe you’ve forgotten. We remember everything about you.’

‘Well, you must have kept a photograph album. She’ll be in there, this girl. I bet you’ve been getting it out to remind yourselves before I arrived.’

‘No, no.’ He tapped his temple. ‘It’s all up here. All we have are our memories. They’re what make us the people we are.’

Fry was puzzled. ‘Why are you bringing this girl up now?’

‘Janet Dyson? Well, we wondered why you fell out with her. You suddenly stopped being best friends with her, and we never found out why. You wouldn’t tell us. We thought, well…now that so much time has passed, we thought you might tell us what happened.’

‘Dad, I have no idea.’

He sighed. ‘Still the same Diane.’

‘Dad, honestly – I have no idea. I can’t remember what happened. It can’t have been anything very important, can it?’

‘If you say so, love.’

After a while, Fry looked at her watch and decided it was time to prise herself away. Refusing all offers of more tea, she got up to leave, then hesitated in the doorway.

‘So…is there a photograph album?’

‘Well, I think so,’ said Jim. ‘Do you want to see it?’

She thought for a moment, mentally recoiled as she imagined the album’s contents. Happy, laughing snaps of herself and Angie, skinny teenagers in jeans and puffa jackets. Sunburned on holidays in Weston-super-Mare, dressed up in their best frocks for some cousin’s wedding.

‘Another time, Dad,’ she said.

On the corner of Trinity Road stood a masjid, a community mosque. This was the one that had originally been named the Saddam Hussein Mosque, after the Iraqi leader donated two million pounds to build it. During the first Gulf War, the masjid had been fire-bombed, and excrement wrapped in pages of the Koran had been pushed through the letter box during prayers. So elders had decided to change the name, and now it was simply Jame Masjid, the main mosque.

Just behind it, Fry could see the little parade of shops where Burger Bar Boys in a Ford Mondeo had sprayed bullets from two MAC-10 machine pistols, killing Letisha Shakespeare and Charlene Ellis as they left a New Year party, and putting the city firmly in the headlines.

She supposed it was natural for her to worry about Jim and Alice Bowskill living in this area. Everyone worried about their parents. For a moment, she wondered if she ought to check whether they were registered with the Birchfield Dental Practice or the Churchill Medical Centre, if they used the post office here, or the one in Perry Barr. But it didn’t really matter.

Fry turned on to Trinity Road and headed towards Aston. In the few hundred yards drive between the Jame Masjid and Villa Park, she passed the Ozzy Osbourne birthplace. The mosque, football, and heavy metal. Well, that came as close to summing up Birmingham as anything she could think of.

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