‘My dad got me a Derby County kit,’ said Murfin. ‘But they never signed me up to play at Pride Park.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Never mind. Go on.’
Farnley glanced at the wall. There was a photograph of him in action at a gig, sweating at the microphone, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and clutching a red Fender.
‘Then I went to Johnny Roadhouse Music on Oxford Road, here in Manchester, and I got my first electric guitar,’ he said. ‘A Rossetti Lucky Seven cutaway. That must have been about 1960. I remember it so well — it was like a bad copy of a Gibson, seemed to be made of tea-chest plywood. I didn’t know any better back then.’
‘But you’ve been in Canada most of your life,’ said Murfin.
‘Yes, we live in Port Hope.’
‘I don’t know where that is.’
‘On Lake Ontario, east of Toronto. Jonathan was interested in it because it’s only thirty miles from a city called Oshawa, which is a popular movie location. He said it was used for making X-Men and It. And The Handmaid’s Tale.’
‘I suppose I must have seen it on screen, then.’
‘Do you watch horror films, Mr Murfin?’
‘Only the ones that aren’t too scary.’
‘Jonathan likes them gory,’ said Farnley. ‘He talked about a few of them when we had breaks from rehearsal.’
‘And so you came back to Manchester,’ said Murfin.
‘We come back a lot. We came over right after the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017. You know, at the Ariana Grande concert?’
‘Oh, aye. Terrible.’
‘So while I was here, I decided to set up a new band, and Jonathan Matthew answered an advert for auditions.’
‘Apparently he needs money,’ said Murfin.
‘No, he’s got money.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘So he says.’
‘Do you know where he’s getting it from?’
‘I couldn’t say.’
Murfin glanced around the practice room and sniffed. He thought he could smell hippies.
‘Where’s the rest of the band?’ he said.
‘We’ve got rehearsals later in the week,’ said Farnley.
‘A gig coming up, I heard.’
‘You heard right.’
Murfin stroked the neck of a guitar resting on a stand. As Farnley watched, he strummed a finger across the strings. He wasn’t sure what chord that was. It definitely wasn’t an ‘F’.
‘What was that song you were playing when I came in?’ he said.
‘It’s called “A Rocket Ride”. It’s one of my own.’
Murfin sniffed again. ‘Right. No wonder I didn’t recognise it, like.’
16
Martin Jackson took a drink of tea and leaned back in his chair; Diane Fry had refused anything but water. She felt like a spy being interrogated by her captors, afraid that anything they gave her might be spiked with a truth drug. A ludicrous image, but that was how her mind was working.
‘We’ll take standards four and nine together, shall we?’ said Jackson after a while. ‘“Use of Force” and “Discreditable Conduct”.’
‘I will behave in a manner, whether on or off duty, which does not bring discredit on the police service or undermine public confidence in policing,’ she responded.
She could see he was surprised now. Fry was quite surprised too that the exact sentence had come into her mind without having to look at the booklet.
‘Very good,’ he said.
‘Are we going to go all the way through the Code of Ethics, or do you have anything specific to put to me?’
He looked at his papers.
‘Well, DS Fry, there is a complaint of assault on file. What do you know about that?’
‘Geoff Pollitt?’ said Fry in shock. ‘I didn’t think—’ Then she saw the puzzled expression cross his face and she stopped speaking.
‘Who is Geoff Pollitt?’ he said.
Fry shook her head. ‘Sorry. It was nothing. What were you asking me?’
‘Are you feeling all right, DS Fry? Would you like to take a break? I’m happy to finish my tea while you compose yourself.’
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Fine. You were saying...’
‘A complaint of assault. From a fellow police officer.’
‘Oh.’
She ran her mind back over the interactions with her colleagues. Some of them hadn’t been friendly, it was true. But assault?
‘Perhaps I could refresh your memory. An inspector with the Leicestershire force?’
‘Leicestershire? But I’ve never...’
And then it came back to her. A memory of a course she’d attended at Sherwood Lodge, the Nottinghamshire Police headquarters, attended by officers from throughout the East Midlands. A session in a nearby pub afterwards. The Seven Mile Inn. She could remember the pub, but the officer’s name escaped her. Mick something? Or was it Dick?
‘Inspector Rick Shepherd,’ said Jackson. ‘Do you remember now? His nose was broken in a pub car park.’
‘I’d forgotten he was an inspector,’ admitted Fry.
‘Yes, a senior officer. But it doesn’t seem to matter to you, does it?’
‘It was self-defence,’ said Fry. ‘A sexual assault.’
‘Really? There’s no complaint of that nature on file.’
‘I didn’t report it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Sometimes you just have to deal with these things yourself and move on,’ said Fry.
Jackson grunted. ‘That’s not what we encourage, as I’m sure you’re aware.’
She shrugged. How could she explain to this man? How could she tell him that she detested the thought of all the fuss and the questions and the paperwork, and the stares and whispers of other officers? She would have done anything to avoid that. But her feeling was hard to put into words. At least, not the kind of words that would make sense in this room.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t follow procedure,’ she said. ‘Sometimes it happens.’
‘Noted.’
Diane Fry remembered that evening well. She’d been starting to feel suffocated — and not just by the heat, or the airlessness of the conference room. The suffocation went much deeper. It was a slow choking of her spirit, the draining of life from her innermost being. In a few more minutes, she would be brain-dead. Heart-dead, soul-dead, her spirit sapped, her energy levels at zero. It was purgatory.
She’d spent two days in Nottinghamshire Police headquarters at Sherwood Lodge, watching someone whose name badge she couldn’t read sticking Post-it notes on a sheet of brown paper that had been Blu-tacked to the wall. The Post-its were all the colours of the rainbow, which apparently had some significance.
It was called a brown-paper workshop. She was part of the Implementing Strategic Change working group, discussing co-operation between neighbouring forces. Her task after the working-group sessions was to write demand management reports on control-room processes for all five regional forces.
These working-group sessions were supposed to be interactive. That meant she couldn’t entirely escape joining in. At strategic moments, she had found herself blurting out phrases that sounded right. Methodical workforce modernisation. Greater interoperability. She tried to say them while other people were shouting out suggestions, so that her words were swallowed in the general verbiage. The best place to hide a tree is in the forest.
She’d been sitting next to an inspector from the Leicestershire force. They’d all had to do ten-second introductions at the start of the session. Tell us who you are and what you hope to get from today. Cue a bunch of po-faced lies.