Stephen Booth - The kill call

‘Diane must need to talk to someone, some time.’

‘Maybe it’s just me, then.’

‘Yes, Ben.’

He sighed. ‘I really thought we were starting to get on a bit better, too. When she first transferred to E Division, I made an effort to be her friend. But something went wrong, and I’m not quite sure what. Now she only seems to see me as a threat.’

‘It’s all about control,’ said Petty.

‘Control?’

‘For some people, control is very important. More important than anything else. They’d rather give things up than feel they’ve let somebody else take control from them. It makes people very defensive.’

‘Well, it’s too much for me. How do I get myself into these situations?’

‘By being you, I guess, Ben.’

‘Who’d be me, then?’

‘You have to get her out of the office,’ said Liz. ‘She can’t relax while she’s at work. You can see it in her face, all the time. What does she do when she’s off duty?’

‘I don’t really know,’ admitted Cooper.

He heard an exasperated sigh on the other end of the phone. ‘Why not? What do you talk about in the office, apart from the job?’

‘Well, it’s usually Gavin doing the talking,’ said Cooper. ‘So — football, telly, the problems with teenage children… Food.’

‘Does Diane never mention what she’s done the night before, or at the weekend?’

‘No.’

‘I despair.’

‘It’s not my fault.’

‘You have to show an interest, Ben.’

Cooper thought back to when Fry had first arrived in Edendale as the new girl. He’d done his best. One game of squash, which had gone OK — except that he’d won, which hadn’t pleased Fry. And one visit to the dojo, which had gone very badly indeed.

Since Fry’s promotion, there had never been any question of them socializing. He’d always assumed that she didn’t want it, that she deliberately kept a distance between herself and the rest of the officers in CID. But what if there was a different reason?

He could see it was true that she was having a hard time. If it had been him, if he was going through a really bad week at work, he would have taken a long walk on the moors, whatever the weather. There was nothing like a good blow to clear the mind and make you feel better. There wasn’t any point in suggesting it to Diane Fry, though. Or was there?

‘So what do I do?’ he asked.

‘I told you, Ben. Get her out of the office.’

‘I’d better go now. She’s back.’

When Fry came out of her interview, she found herself looking at her colleagues differently. Who had said what to Superintendent Branagh? Where did the disloyalty come from?

First, she eyed Gavin Murfin. Murfin grumbled, but would never stick his head above the parapet. DC Becky Hurst and DC Luke Irvine were young, they hadn’t been here too long, but they might be intimidated by Branagh into blurting out whatever she wanted them to say.

Of course, it might have been another DS on the division. Rivalry wasn’t unknown in E Division, though she couldn’t think who she’d offended. Not recently, anyway.

She looked further down the room. Cooper was the man who’d actually offered her his support, made quite a point of it, in fact. Had he been feeling guilty, trying to deflect suspicion? Or was he actually biding his time, waiting for her to slip up, looking for a chance to take the credit for himself? She knew he resented the fact that she’d gained promotion ahead of him. Maybe he’d never got over it, and had been seething ever since. Fry wondered if Cooper was really that devious. When he offered support to her face, was he stabbing her in the back at the same time?

She drew in a deep breath. A bit of extra oxygen could make the brain sharper, keep her alert. And she needed to be alert right now, more than ever. Fry had never felt so isolated. And she didn’t know where the threat might come from.

Perhaps she was being left to handle this suspicious death on the assumption that she’d mess up and strike another black mark on her PDR. But responsibility didn’t work like that in the police service — she was supposed to be supervised by more senior officers, and if things went monumentally wrong, they would be expected to take a share of the blame. The best thing she could do would be to refer upwards as often as she could, ask advice, consult her DI on the most minor decision, make sure he was fully informed at every stage. And record it. That was important. Keep a log of every action, and who she’d discussed it with.

But wait. Was that what they wanted her to do? Were they hoping that she would lose confidence, that she would prove herself incapable of taking responsibility, devoid of initiative, unable to take the smallest decision on her own? Hitchens couldn’t have planned that, it was too clever for him, too devious. But Branagh…

On the other hand, she could just be getting paranoid. And, if she was, did that mean that they weren’t all out to get her?

Fry sat at her desk, watching everyone else leave the office to go home, back to their families, off to meet their girlfriends, get drunk, or watch TV. They all sounded like alien activities that she was excluded from.

What the hell was going on? Right now, her week couldn’t get any worse than it already was.

When Fry finally got back to her flat in Grosvenor Road later that evening, her answering machine was blinking. When she pressed the ‘play’ button, there was the briefest of messages. And from that moment, things did get worse, after all.

‘Di — call me as soon as you can. It’s important.’

The caller didn’t need to leave a name. It was Angie.

There was no mistaking death when you saw it. Cooper had seen two dead bodies already this week, but it was so much worse when it was personal.

The cat had curled up in his usual spot by the central heating boiler in the conservatory. He looked so relaxed and peaceful that he could have been asleep, at first glance. But the stillness was too unnatural, the lack of even the slightest stirring of the fur as he breathed.

And, of course, Cooper had never arrived home before without Randy running to greet him. He didn’t even need to go to the conservatory to know that something was badly wrong.

He knelt and stroked the long black fur. The cat was stiff. He’d died some time during the day, while Cooper was at work. He’d died alone, which was the worst thing he could imagine. It was what he dreaded for himself, dying alone and in the dark.

‘Sorry, Randy,’ he said, barely able to get out the words as a rush of guilt overcame him. He should have been here.

Though the light had gone, Cooper found a spade and dug a hole in the garden behind the conservatory, underneath a beech tree. Randy had spent a lot of time here. Not hunting much lately, just sitting and watching the birds, enjoying the sun. Giving him a permanent place here was the least he could do.

Somewhere in the darkness, among the beeches, a male tawny owl called. It was the eerie full-volume hoot, hu… hu-hooooo, made only by the male. The owl must be establishing a territory here, at the start of the new breeding season.

As he straightened up from the grave and knocked the last of the soil off his spade, Cooper thought he glimpsed a dim shape, winging silently into the trees.

Fry was discovering that there were some things you couldn’t keep buried. Her sister had been a sort of talisman in her life, a symbol of the high points and low points. Well, no. Mostly the low points, it had to be said.

Since Angie had walked out of their foster home in the Black Country as a teenager, Diane had spent years trying to track her down. It had been her reason for coming to Derbyshire in the first place. Yet when they had finally been reunited, the taste of success had been a sour one. Diane had found that her sister was no longer a person she could trust.