For once, she wanted to tell someone about it. Normally she preferred to keep things to herself, but tonight she felt as though she would burst if she couldn’t talk. She needed to get the words out at least, to make them seem real to herself. But who could she call? Who could she share something like this with?
Fry looked at the numbers on her phone for a few minutes, rejected some possibilities, then dialled.
‘Jamie?’ she said when the ringing was answered.
‘Yes. Is that Diane? What’s up? I’m not on call.’
‘No, it isn’t work,’ she said. ‘Well, not really.’
She could almost see DC Jamie Callaghan frowning. She sounded uncharacteristically uncertain, even to herself. Callaghan would never have heard that tone before. Since he was a detective constable at EMSOU’s Major Crime Unit, she was his immediate supervisor.
‘Are you OK?’ he said.
Fry could hear voices in the background. It sounded as though Callaghan was in a bar already, perhaps just starting a night out with his mates, or maybe a date. She wondered who he was with and wished she could see him.
‘I’m fine,’ she said.
And then she explained to him why she wasn’t. Callaghan listened to what she had to say and whistled quietly when she’d finished.
‘Bad Apple?’ he said.
‘I don’t know yet.’
She’d thought of that, of course. Derbyshire Constabulary employed a confidential system for members of staff to report suspected wrongdoing by their colleagues. No one had yet come up with a clever acronym for it. So that was how it was officially known, and the name said it plainly. Bad Apple.
On the other hand, the term ‘whistle-blower’ was never spoken. It had been banned under force policy because it might be offensive to those who reported wrongdoing by their colleagues. The preferred term was ‘professional standards reporter’.
‘If you want a friend...’ said Callaghan tentatively.
‘Thanks, Jamie,’ she said.
Fry knew he didn’t mean it in the usual way of friendship. ‘Friend’ was the technical term for a colleague or Police Federation representative who was allowed to accompany her in disciplinary interviews.
‘Though you might be better with a Fed rep,’ he said.
‘You’re probably right.’
‘Let me know how it goes anyway.’
‘If I’m allowed to.’
Fry ended the call. He was right: she would probably be better asking for a Police Federation representative as a friend. After all, there was no way of telling who had reported her and what for. It could be anyone, including Jamie Callaghan.
She looked at her phone and thought about calling her sister, Angie. But what would be the point? Angie might be her only blood relative, or the only one she acknowledged, but as a friend she was pretty much useless.
Fry blinked in surprise as she remembered that she now had two blood relatives since the arrival of Angie’s baby, Zack. She still hadn’t got used to that idea.
There wasn’t much for her to do at home in the evening, except re-watch old films on Netflix. She avoided reading the papers or watching the TV news. There was too much about politics and political scandals. Politicians often lectured the police on the importance of transparency, integrity and ethics. But she supposed they were well beyond irony now.
Fry found half a bottle of Chablis in the fridge and poured herself a glass. She spent the rest of the evening wondering what it was she’d done wrong.
And she spent most of that night going over and over the incidents in her mind, trying to work out which one of them she’d been reported for.
8
Monday
Ben Cooper had heard talk of replacing the old E Division headquarters in West Street, Edendale, with a new building. In fact, people had been talking about it for the past thirty years or so.
Too many decades of mouldering paperwork, half-smoked cigarettes and junk food had left their mark, and the 1950s building was considered unfit for purpose now. Whenever he entered the CID room, the rows of computer screens looked strangely anachronistic. Downstairs, the custody suite was due to close soon. Conditions at West Street were unsuitable for prisoners, though officers and staff would have to continue tolerating them for a while longer.
Every day the same kind of reports crossed Cooper’s desk. Details of some of those thousands of dysfunctional people who cluttered up the police stations and courts.
So what was new this morning? A scattering of overnight burglaries and assaults outside pubs and nightclubs. An early morning raid had been conducted on an address in Edendale, resulting in two arrests and the seizure of a quantity of Class-II drugs. And there had been several complaints from tourists over the last few days about youths throwing stones at their cars on the descent into Hartington, the latest incident resulting in a smashed windscreen and bad publicity for the tourism business.
A memo was on his desk from a team that had been set up to review recent rape convictions, in case significant evidence had been ignored or not disclosed to the defence. They were asking for files from cases his department had dealt with during the last five years. That would take time.
An operation was still ongoing to target the use of Peak District holiday homes as pop-up brothels by slave gangs. A gang master would rent a secluded property, install a group of trafficked women, then move on somewhere else after a month or so, before anyone became suspicious about what was going on. A difficult one to deal with without an early notification when a new brothel popped up.
What else was there? An email in his inbox informed him that an officer serving in Edendale Local Policing Unit had been shortlisted in the Police Twitter Awards for Best Tweeting Individual Police Officer. Apparently, there were sixteen categories, including Best Tweeting Police Horse and Best Tweeting Police Dog. Old-fashioned bobbies like his father, Sergeant Joe Cooper, would be turning in their graves at the thought of community policing by smartphone.
Cooper leaned back in his chair and fingered the lanyard with his identity badge, staring at a shelf of box files with the Derbyshire Constabulary starburst logo on them. His office was in a flat-roofed 1970s extension, with the inevitable damp stains on the polystyrene ceiling tiles.
Down in Scenes of Crime, Gary Atherton’s bloodied clothes were hanging in a locker to air-dry before being packaged in paper bags. Recovery of DNA evidence was vital. The CSIs would have gathered everything from the scene, though. A flake of paint, a plant seed, a trickle of soil, a fragment of broken glass, a tiny scrap of paper. Any of them could play a crucial role in confirming the identity of a suspect.
Meanwhile, on Kinder Scout, the search for Faith Matthew had resumed at first light. Cooper expected news soon. The SARDA dogs were bound to find her.
In the CID room, Ben Cooper’s team were sitting in front of their computers under diffused lighting from panels set into the ceiling. In one corner were a series of blue screens where no one was working. Half hidden by a pillar in the middle was Gavin Murfin, his civilian investigator, once a fixture in the department as an old-school DC.
Cooper’s sergeant, Dev Sharma, had proved more than capable of taking responsibility and running the team of DCs. Since his arrival in Edendale from Derby, Sharma had taken on a lot of the workload and Cooper had come to rely on him heavily.
It wouldn’t last, of course. Nothing ever did in this job. DS Sharma was here in North Division to gain experience and add a few paragraphs to his CV. Cooper didn’t have any illusions that he’d be keeping Dev for long. His DS was destined for better things.
Cooper moved quietly into the middle of the room and was rewarded with the familiar sight of Murfin dipping his fingers into a paper bag for an Eccles cake he’d bought on the way into work. He was speaking to DC Luke Irvine, seated at the opposite desk.