‘We need to search the bins,’ he said.
Cooper checked among the plants and lamps on all the surfaces, opened the drawers of a dresser, pulled out the volumes on a bookshelf, inspected a desk with a laptop computer and printer. Nothing.
‘How was Liam Sharpe, Carol?’ he said. ‘Did you get anything useful from him?’
‘No. He was too taken up with himself. Rather overplaying the injured victim, if you ask me. As a result, he’s pretty vague about what happened on Kinder that day, apart from his own accident. He seems to have lain there nursing his bruises oblivious to what was going on around him.’
‘He must have been aware of Faith Matthew. She stayed with him when the others went off to find help.’
‘Yes, he remembers that. And he knows she left him alone at some point. He didn’t see anyone else until the search dog found him. That was quite a long while, you know. I got the impression he was starting to panic by then.’
‘But thinking only about his own situation.’
‘He wasn’t concerning himself about what had happened to Faith, anyway.’
‘I suppose it’s understandable.’
Upstairs, Cooper found the smallest bedroom of Faith’s house had been used as a large walk-in wardrobe, with clothes hung from the picture rails and piled on the bed. In the other, a dresser top was scattered with hairbrushes and cosmetics, while a dozen teddy bears and other soft toys were arranged on a chair in the corner. Faith would probably have liked one of those stuffed otters from the Chestnut Centre for her collection.
The bathroom gleamed with white tiles, so that a pink back scrub hanging over the showerhead stood out like a splash of blood.
Villiers had gone straight to the kitchen. It wasn’t a big room, with half a dozen oak-fronted units round a built-in oven and a framed Bovril poster on the wall. With a gloved hand, she pulled something out of a stack of bills and bank statements shoved behind a bread bin.
‘I think this is it,’ she said.
Cooper hurried into the kitchen.
‘What does it say?’
‘Not much. Take a look.’
She was right. The note was short and to the point, and written in block capitals. It simply read,
FALL DOWN DEAD.
18
Diane Fry stared across the table at her interviewer. The smile had gone from his face now. His eyes were sharp as he waited for her answer. He thought he’d caught her off guard.
‘I don’t know what you mean by my “relationship”,’ said Fry. ‘Angie is my sister. That seems a pretty straightforward relationship to me.’
Martin Jackson remained impassive, leaning forward with his elbows on the table.
‘DS Fry, you do know the rules about the business activities of a police officer’s immediate family members?’ he said.
‘Of course.’
‘And you must surely be aware of what “business” your sister has been involved in for a number of years now?’
Fry swallowed. Martin Jackson was an expert in the use of verbal quotation marks. ‘Relationship’ and now ‘business’. His change of tone when he said those words made them sound like accusations of depravity.
‘No, I know nothing about that,’ she said.
Jackson raised an eyebrow. ‘Really? I find that hard to believe. This is your sister we’re talking about.’
‘We lost touch for a long time,’ said Fry.
‘Ah yes.’ Jackson shuffled papers in his file. ‘That would be when you were both living with foster parents in... Where was it?’
‘Warley, in the West Midlands.’
‘But you were only teenagers then.’
‘Angie ran away from our foster home. It was years before we met again.’
‘Would you like to tell us how that came about?’
She frowned at Jackson. ‘It involved another police officer,’ she said. ‘But I suppose you know that already.’
‘Detective Inspector Cooper.’
‘Ben was only a DC then,’ said Fry.
Jackson was alert again, and she realised she’d given something away in her tone.
‘It sounds as though it might be a difficult memory,’ he said.
‘It was a surprise.’
‘And not a pleasant one?’
‘It was hard, as it turned out. We were very close when we were kids. As I’m sure you know, we were both taken into care as children. I was nine, and Angie was eleven.’
‘For your own protection?’
‘Social Services said my parents had been abusing my sister. They said it was both of them.’
‘So your childhood was spent in foster homes?’
‘Yes.’
At first, they’d kept moving on to different places. So many different places that Fry couldn’t remember them. It was a few years before she realised that they didn’t stay anywhere long because of her sister. Angie was trouble wherever they went. Even the most well-intentioned foster families couldn’t cope with her. But Diane had worshipped her sister and refused to be split up from her.
‘But you were separated from your sister at some point?’
‘When she was sixteen, Angie disappeared from our foster home and never came back.’
The small details were impressed on Fry’s mind. The last memory that she had of her sister, Angie unusually excited as she pulled on her jeans to go out that night. There was a boy who was picking her up. She was off to a rave somewhere. Diane had wanted to know where, but Angie had laughed and said it was a secret. Raves were always held in secret locations, otherwise the police would be there first and stop them. But they were doing no harm, just having fun. And Angie had gone out that night, with their foster parents making only a token attempt to find out where she was going. Angie had already been big trouble for them by then and was getting out of hand.
Looking back, Fry knew she had been unable to believe anything bad of Angie then. Every time they’d been moved from one foster home to another, it had been their foster parents’ fault, not Angie’s.
And when Angie had finally disappeared from her life, the young Diane had been left clutching an idealised image of her, like a final, faded photograph. The memory still brought the same feelings of anger and unresolved pain. Feelings that revolved around Angie.
‘But it all fell apart,’ said Diane, ‘when—’ She stopped, wondering exactly how much Jackson knew. He was giving very little back so far. Would he complete her sentence?
‘When your sister started using heroin?’ he said.
‘I was going to say when she ran away from our foster home.’
But that was what Fry had been wondering. Jackson knew about the drugs. It suggested he probably knew an awful lot more too.
When he got back to West Street, Ben Cooper smiled with satisfaction to find the outlines on his desk. Carol could always be relied on to get the job done. Not for the first time, he wished that she was his DS. Maybe one day.
He looked at the pile in front of him, wondering who to start with. Which member of the New Trespassers Walking Club might have had a reason to send Faith Matthew that note telling her to ‘fall down dead’ — and perhaps even a motive to push her to her death on Kinder Scout?
The note itself had been bagged and sent for analysis, but developing fingerprints from a porous surface like paper required processing with chemicals in the lab. They used ninhydrin to react with the amino acids and inorganic salts left in print residue. It would take days to get a result back. In the meantime, he could ask for handwriting samples from all the members of the group for comparison. But that would take time too.