‘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
