Stephen Booth - The Devil’s Edge

As he crouched in the garden, Cooper noticed something strange. It stood out on the perfectly trimmed grass. It was only a fragment of stone. But if it had lain here for long, it would have been thrown up by the mower.

He worked his way carefully across the lawn to the drive. There was another bit of stone, and another. A small trail of them, leading from the back fence towards the house. It was as if the Devil’s Edge itself had been here, and left its tracks behind. Only small chips and splinters, a mere scattering of gritstone dust. But it seemed out of place amid the neatness of the trimmed grass and swept gravel.

Cooper looked up. The edge looked much the same. Ragged and broken, split into cracks and fissures, still dotted with the figures of climbers drawn to their favourite playground. He assumed that it looked the same from one day to the next, but it was impossible to be sure.

He shook himself, trying to shrug off the feeling that something had passed through the garden even as he stood there. A presence both invisible and cold. Like someone walking over his grave.

Last night, the Barrons had met everyone’s worst nightmare, the fiends who invaded their home and destroyed their lives. No wonder these offenders were being referred to as the Savages. They seemed to come from outside civilised society, and were ruthless in their use of violence. No home was safe any more.

Cooper bagged the fragments of gravel and began to walk back towards the house, unsettled by the same dread that everyone had, the fear of never being safe in your own home.

At the gate, he stopped and looked up at the edge again. This time he saw it not as a playground for rock climbers, but as the battered wall of a stone fortress. The Devil’s Edge had the air of a battlement that had withstood centuries of siege. Cracked and broken, but still standing firm, holding the invaders at bay. Or was it?

That afternoon, after the working-group session had ended, Fry had to make her way through the northern outskirts of Nottingham to reach the M1. Then it was three junctions north up the motorway before heading across Derbyshire via Chesterfield. It was the most direct route, and she preferred driving through the town. The only alternative was a tortuous crawl through country lanes, which was fine if you enjoyed scenery.

It was the sense of dislocation that was bothering her. One minute she’d been in inner-city Birmingham, confronting violence and dealing with gang members, recalling all too vividly her time with West Midlands Police, in the days before she transferred to yokel land. Then suddenly she’d been back here, in the midst of the rural idyll, bird shit on her car and straw sticking to her shoes. And not only that, but sidelined too. Somehow she’d found herself in this horrendous limbo, a world of business speak, living in sheer torture. What had she ever done to deserve this?

At least she had learned a few figures to use. Sixteen thousand officers and police staff were employed across the East Midlands region, serving over five and a half million people in an area of sixteen thousand square kilometres, half the size of Belgium. She had no concept of how big Belgium was, but it made a change from measuring size in comparison to Wales or a football pitch, which also meant nothing to her. Statistics were good. They had a nice, clean feel, free of the messy ambiguities and uncertainties that came with the package when you were dealing with human beings. If you trotted statistics out at the right moment, they impressed people. And they were grateful, because you gave them something they could write down and memorise. It allowed them to convince themselves that they hadn’t just wasted the last two hours of their life. Just as Fry was trying to convince herself now, in fact.

During the course of the day, someone had also claimed that the population of the East Midlands region was growing thirty-three per cent faster than elsewhere in England. That ‘elsewhere’ had worried her. It didn’t seem to mean anything. It wasn’t the same as ‘thirty-three per cent faster than anywhere else in England’. That would be more specific, a claim that could be checked against the official figures. But ‘elsewhere’? Where was that, for heaven’s sake? Elsewhere was nowhere. Elsewhere might be some place, but it was nowhere definite. So the region was growing faster than the Isles of Scilly, maybe? Or the Outer Hebrides?

It was a vagueness that bothered her as she drove back towards Derbyshire, crossing the M1 junction at Heath. She couldn’t make use of a fuzzy claim like that. She would be challenged on it immediately. Now she was starting to feel cheated. Who had perpetrated that fraud? Which member of the Implementing Strategic Change working group? She had the urge to go back and grab whoever it was by the lapels and make them justify the statement. By the lapels? Yes, she was sure it must have been a man. A man wearing a suit and a brightly coloured tie. Tomorrow she would identify them and sort them out.

Her heart sank at the thought. Tomorrow. Another day of brown-paper workshop. And it was still only the middle of the week.

Next week she had to organise a Challenge Day to examine the various options. Damn it, she could hear the comments now. She could imagine the derision that would be flying around the CID room in Edendale, feel the buckets of scorn dripping on her head as she invited her former colleagues to her Challenge Day. Gavin Murfin would laugh so much he’d choke on a pork pie or have a heart attack.

Fry stared ahead at the approaching Derbyshire signs. How on earth had she got herself into this mess? Her dreams and ambitions in the police service had never involved becoming mired in jargon, or trapped in working-group meetings. Right now, she felt as though her career was already in its grave and being buried under an avalanche of consultation documents.

By the end of the day, a mantra had been drummed into her. Joint thinking, joint working. It echoed around her skull right now, as she drove towards Derbyshire.

Of all the phrases she might want in her head, that wasn’t the one. During her time in E division, there were so many things that hadn’t been said, relationships left unexplained. She wondered if anyone would bother about her, now that she’d been sidelined. Or would they just forget her as quickly as they could, let someone slip in and replace her quietly and completely, as if she’d never been there?

If only she knew what they really thought of her. If only once someone in Edendale had said: We’ll be sorry to see you go.

Things were changing at Bridge End Farm. Well, that was nothing new. The farming industry had been in a state of change for decades. But now the pace was speeding up so much that it had become a revolution, instead of evolution.

Dairy farmers like Matt Cooper were leaving the industry every week. It had become inevitable, ever since supermarkets reduced the price per litre of milk to the same as the cost of producing it. It had become impossible to make a living from milk production. Instead of the UK being self-sufficient, a large percentage of milk supplies were imported from Denmark or the Netherlands. Presumably those were countries where the market still allowed dairy farmers to earn a livelihood.

Bridge End Farm stood five miles out of Edendale, in a stretch of the Eden Valley where the land was good. The farm was reached down a rough, winding track that was dry and dusty in the summer, full of potholes that had been hastily repaired with compacted earth and the odd half-brick. When winter came, the first heavy rains would turn the track into a river, washing mud into the farmyard as water came rushing down the hillsides in torrents.

But now, in August, the tyres of Cooper’s Toyota threw up clouds of dust as he bounced the last few yards and rattled over a cattle grid into the yard.