Stephen Booth - Dying to Sin

‘Detective Superintendent Branagh has been studying the department carefully before she takes up her new role,’ said Hitchens. ‘She’s gone into everything very thoroughly — detection rates, targets, staff records. As Mr Jepson said, she’s very thorough. Very thorough indeed.’

‘A ferociously efficient administrator. That’s what he called her.’

‘Oh, yes. Well, that was accurate, too.’

Hitchens seemed to be gathering his thoughts. A uniformed PC knocked on the door and stuck his head in, but Hitchens waved him away with an abrupt gesture.

‘Superintendent Branagh asked for copies of all the PDRs for everyone. All of us. Me, too. She doesn’t believe in people getting stale and falling into a routine. She says an officer who gets into a rut is an officer going nowhere.’

So perhaps the doom mongers were right. Fry pictured some of the older CID officers, such as Gavin Murfin or DS Rennie. A shake-up would come as a shock to some of them.

‘Has she got some changes in mind?’ she asked.

Hitchens nodded. ‘She’s going to produce a set of proposals for the department. But it’s safe to say that some moves are on the cards.’

‘Moves?’

‘Transfers. A few shifts in areas of responsibility. Maybe a promotion or two, Diane.’

He was trying hard to sound positive, but Fry could see through it. She wasn’t fooled by flannel, and her DI should know it by now.

‘I take it there was something specific about me?’ she said. ‘You were talking about me during this meeting?’

‘Well, you were mentioned,’ admitted Hitchens, his eyes flickering nervously like a guilty suspect in an interview room. He looked as though he was starting to regret sending the PC away, after all.

‘And what did Detective Superintendent Branagh make of my Personal Development Review? Has she got something in mind for my future? Will I actually be allowed to know what’s being said about me some time?’

‘There will be individual interviews, of course. Everything will be discussed with you fully. You’ll have an opportunity to have your say at that time.’

‘But …?’ said Fry.

‘It’s all still up in the air, Diane. There’s nothing absolutely definite …’

‘But …?’

Hitchens sighed. ‘Superintendent Branagh was asking — did I really think you fitted in here? She wondered if you might be more suited to another division. I’m sorry, Diane.’

Cooper consulted his notes, reminding himself of what he’d missed doing. Time seemed to be going by so fast, what with one thing and another.

He saw that he hadn’t suggested a search of the old caravan at Pity Wood Farm yet, as he’d meant to do. Maybe that wasn’t too urgent, because the forensics team probably wouldn’t get round to it for days anyway. He added a note to fit in a visit to the heritage centre some time, to see if they had anything on Pity Wood. Old photos could reveal such a lot.

Then Cooper noticed that he’d never spoken to anyone at the auctioneers, Pilkington’s, to ask them whether they’d been approached about a farm equipment sale. There must be something planned for the disposal of all that machinery and the other stuff at Pity Wood. It wouldn’t all fit into the skip.

Cooper thought about the interior of the house, the few items they’d recovered that might be of relevance. The farm records, some jars of crystallized saltpetre, a single Sani Bag. And he supposed the family Bible should be included. But might there be something important that was no longer present, so they just weren’t seeing it? The impression of a Marie Celeste , abandoned intact, could be quite misleading.

He looked at his phone. Fry had been called in to see the DI, and neither of them had looked too happy. Besides, she was supposed to be chasing mispers now, so he supposed he was a free agent for a while. Initiative was called for. He reached for the handset.

‘Mr Goodwin, did you ever meet the previous owners of Pity Wood Farm?’ asked Cooper, when he managed to get through to the Manchester solicitor.

‘Oh, no. It was all done through the estate agent. The farm was already unoccupied when we visited for a viewing. I know they were called Sutton, but we had no personal contact. Just the usual exchange of contracts.’

‘Mr Sutton didn’t take much away with him, did he?’ said Cooper.

‘Not much,’ said Goodwin. ‘Just a few personal things. There’s an awful lot of rubbish to clear out, as you’ve probably seen. It won’t be a quick job. But that was the deal — it was one of the reasons I got the property at a good price. It was sold “as is”. I understand the owner was in care, so everything had to be disposed of anyway.’

‘Can you recall anything that was removed, sir? Anything out of the ordinary? There must have been a few items that were present when you viewed the property, but which had gone when you took possession.’

The solicitor was silent for a moment, except for a thoughtful mumbling.

‘Nothing that seemed to be of any value,’ he said. ‘It’s not exactly the sort of place you’d expect to be stuffed with antique furniture, is it? Or, if it ever was, they sold anything of value years ago. I gathered the farm had been failing for some time.’

‘Yes, I believe so.’

‘Then there was nothing, really, Detective Constable. Nothing that I wouldn’t have wanted to get rid of, anyway.’

Then he began to laugh, and Cooper looked at the phone as if it had done something weird. ‘Would you like to share the joke, sir?’

‘Well, I’m sure this can’t be what you mean,’ said Goodwin, still chuckling. ‘But obviously, they took the severed head.’

Fry took a moment to steady her breathing, shocked by the unexpected surge of panic that had turned her stomach over for a few seconds. It was a totally irrational feeling. She’d thought the same herself many times, hadn’t she? She was like a fish out of water in E Division. In Derbyshire, come to that. Her home was back in the city, away from these people she would never understand and couldn’t tolerate.

It was just hearing the sentiment put into someone else’s words that had hit her like a blow to the solar plexus. It was a statement of the obvious. Yet she loathed the idea that Detective Superintendent Branagh had sat in a meeting this morning and expressed the thought to her managers. She hated the intrusion of someone like Branagh reading her file and summing her up so easily. It was illogical, of course. But no less hurtful for that.

‘Oh, no need to be sorry, sir,’ she said quietly. ‘No need for you to be sorry at all.’

That fear of being an outsider had haunted her all her life. At school, in her various homes in the Black Country, and even when she’d studied for her Criminal Justice and Policing course at UCE. As a child, she hadn’t realized that everyone dreaded finding themselves on the outside, not a part of the gang. She thought it was her own particular weakness of character that drove her to seek acceptance from her peers.

It made her wince now to think of her teenage self, hanging around in the corridors of her comprehensive school, trying to attach herself to a group. It was only as an adult that she’d learned it was the same for most kids of her age. Some were so desperate to belong that it became a question of any gang that would have them.

Being a member of the herd was a primal instinct — probably the deepest, most powerful instinct of them all.

‘If you do go, Diane,’ said Hitchens, ‘we’ll miss you.’

‘They called him Billy,’ said Cooper, the moment Fry entered the CID room. ‘Screaming Billy Sutton. But of course he probably wasn’t a Sutton. He could have been anybody. Anybody at all, Diane.’