After a lunch the first day, she’d accepted his invitation to go to the pub again when the second day’s session finished, without much thought of the consequences. They’d gone to the Seven Mile Inn, close to Sherwood Lodge. Fry knew she mustn’t drink and drive, so only one glass of wine would be acceptable. God forbid that she should get breathalysed by her colleagues on her way back to Derbyshire.
She remembered waiting in the garden of the Seven Mile Inn, checking her phone and seeing she’d missed a call from Angie. There was a voicemail message. Hi, sis. We haven’t talked. We need to talk, you know? Call me.
‘A boyfriend?’
‘No, my sister.’
His smile became a smirk, as if he’d just been given some kind of signal. Fry gritted her teeth. Just because the call wasn’t from her boyfriend didn’t mean she hadn’t got one. But that was the way some men’s minds worked. They read an invitation in the slightest thing. She supposed it must be some instinct from their primitive past, sniffing the air to detect the presence of a rival, then mating anything that stood still long enough.
She’d struggled to get her companion’s name right, and he’d taken off his badge when they left Sherwood Lodge.
‘Rick Shepherd. I’m stationed in Leicester.’
‘Of course. I remember.’
Then he was smiling at her again, one eyebrow raised. Some unspoken message was being conveyed. Fry knew what the message was. She ought to respond, knew deep down what she should do. She ought to act, before it went any further.
And yet, a great weariness had come over her. None of it really mattered, did it? Perhaps there might be a moment when she felt something, a brief response that was more than the deadly worthlessness she’d been feeling for the past few weeks. Rick Shepherd wasn’t the greatest thing she’d ever met. But he was there, he was available, and she had his attention.
He took another drink, laid a hand on the table, toying with a coaster, seemed to search for a line of conversation. He didn’t wear a wedding ring, but that meant nothing. People slipped them on and off like raincoats these days. And many couples chose to live together for years without bothering to marry. He could have a partner back in Leicester. Would he tell her, if she asked? Did she want to know?
But then she recognised in his conversation the exact tenor of complacency and laziness, a lack of concern about accuracy and rigour. Just the sort of qualities she hated.
Fry had finished her drink and stood up. Her companion hastily drained his beer, picked up his jacket and his phone, suddenly eager to leave. They walked back towards the pub car park together and stopped when they reached her Audi. Rick leaned casually on the roof.
‘I’m sure we could work closely together, you and me,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think? A bit of mutual assistance, Diane? I know a nice, quiet spot in Sherwood Forest where we could explore our personal merger options. I can promise you I always come up to my performance targets.’
He was standing a bit too close now. Well inside her personal space. Fry felt herself tense. It was that instinctive reaction she couldn’t control, an automatic response of her muscles triggered by a suppressed memory. She always knew it would happen. But she couldn’t explain the reason for it, not to someone like Rick Shepherd.
He was close enough now for her to smell the beer on his breath, the deodorant clinging to his shirt. Fry was frozen, her limbs so stiff that they hurt. A long moment passed, when neither of them spoke or breathed. Just when it seemed that nothing would happen, he made his move. And Fry felt his hand touching the base of her spine.
It was already dark when Fry drove back into Edendale and turned into Grosvenor Avenue. When she pulled out her key to enter her flat, she noticed that she had streaks of blood on her hands. Strange that she hadn’t see it while she was driving back from Nottinghamshire. Her mind must have been on other things.
She’d closed the door, shrugged off her jacket and headed for the shower. Blood on her hands. That was something not everyone could cope with. But right at that moment, it felt good. For her, the sight of blood was exactly the right thing.
Sitting in the interview room at Ripley, it dawned on Diane Fry that Rick Shepherd must have waited. Waited until he realised she wasn’t going to make a complaint, perhaps waited until he heard that she was already under investigation. And then he’d put the boot in.
‘When was this complaint made?’ she asked.
Jackson rustled his papers. ‘A month ago.’
‘But the incident referred to was — when?’
He couldn’t meet her eye. ‘Three years previously.’
‘Why wasn’t that reported at the time?’
‘Inspector Shepherd’s original version of events was that he tripped over a kerb in the pub car park and struck his face on the bonnet of his own car. You were listed as the only witness to the injury.’
‘But the inspector has since changed his account for some reason?’
‘Yes.’
‘I see.’
It was a small moment of satisfaction. The case was weak, and Jackson knew it.
But she was certain of one other thing. He wasn’t going to leave it at that.
‘And of course we have to present the main issue, DS Fry,’ he said.
‘Which is?’
‘A personal relationship. To be specific, your relationship with Angela Jane Fry.’
Fry felt a sudden sinking sensation in her stomach. ‘Angela...?’
‘Yes,’ said Jackson, smiling again. ‘Your sister.’
17
At Slackhall, a small village green lay at a crossroads near the entrance to the Chestnut Centre. The remnants of an ancient chestnut tree looked as though they had been blasted by lightning, three bare, stumpy trunks stripped of bark like broken torsos. Only one side of the tree was still alive, its leaves starting to turn golden in the autumn sun.
At busy times for the wildlife park, there would be cars parked along the roadside all around this junction. But the Chestnut Centre closed at dusk during the winter months, so visitors tended to come early.
Cooper walked past the restaurant and gift shop, and crossed a deer meadow towards the aviaries, with a herd of fallow deer watching him from the hillside. There was a good view of Kinder Scout from here. He wondered if that was why Elsa had chosen it.
Signposts pointed towards polecats, pine martens and Scottish wildcats, or to the badger rehabilitation pen. There were a lot of owls here too. Barn owls, spectacled owls, snowy owls, burrowing owls and a great grey owl. He walked past the pine martens and polecats on the lower trail, sniffing the musky smell of foxes and catching the high-pitched yowl of a wildcat, until he reached the otter pools.
And there she was. He saw Elsa Roth waiting for him by a pen full of European otters, a splash of glistening bodies and inquisitive whiskery faces behind the glass as he approached. Elsa looked as out of place as he’d imagined in her Gucci windbreaker, like a model from a mail-order catalogue.
When she saw him, she pointed away from the otters towards a large cage across the pathway.
‘Look, a Eurasian eagle owl,’ she said. ‘Bubo bubo.’
‘I know.’
Cooper recalled his first sight of an eagle owl. He’d been a child, visiting an agricultural show with his family somewhere — probably Bakewell. He wasn’t sure how old he would have been at the time, but the owl had stood as tall as him on its perch, and was so striking with its barred wings and ear tufts. Its amazing orange eyes had been staring directly into his, totally unblinking. The young Ben had been mesmerised by the bird, and eventually he had to be dragged away by his mother to look at the exhibits in the produce tent. The way this one gazed back at him so knowingly, it could almost be the same one.