At least, that was what she told everyone afterwards.
4
Patiently Diane Fry waited until long after Ben Cooper had left the crime scene and driven out of Haddon Close. She watched from the window of the Athertons’ sitting room as Cooper’s red Toyota disappeared round the corner on its way back to the local police station in Edendale’s West Street.
Then Fry got out of the town as quickly as she could. She found it hard to believe that she’d once lived in this backwater. Yes, Edendale was changing, but very slowly. In a few decades’ time, it might reach the twenty-first century. There were still villages around the Eden Valley where you couldn’t get a mobile-phone signal, where the erratic broadband connection was slower than one megabit per second at best. There were Third World countries with better facilities than that.
Yet each year a large proportion of the Peak District’s twenty-two million visitors found their way to Edendale. Even today, in late October, the market square was choked by the volume of traffic, either passing through or looking for parking spaces. Most of them clustered by the bridge over the River Eden or strolled along steep cobbled alleys with names like Nimble John’s Gate and Nick I’th Tor. Pubs and tearooms and craft shops jostled for space in the alleys, attracted by the influx of tourists. Fry had seen enough of them during her time in Edendale.
Beyond the town centre, the road climbed steadily out of the valley. Residential streets spiralled up the hillsides, with houses lining narrow, winding lanes that twisted and turned to follow the undulating landscape.
And that was another problem. The older houses hadn’t been built for people who owned cars and as a result vehicles were parked nose to tail along the kerb, making driving on those lanes like tackling an obstacle course.
On the edge of Edendale, she passed a series of small council estates, which petered out into farmland. In some places, it was difficult to see where the town became country, with fields full of sheep lying side by side with unused farm buildings converted into designer homes. For now, Edendale was constrained in its hollow by the barrier of the surrounding hills. But eventually, the pressure for more housing would force up the price of land and the town would continue to spread. Fry hoped she wouldn’t be around to see it.
After half an hour, she left the gathering mist behind her as the hills began to level out. She was on the Flying Mile, a flat, straight stretch of the A632 between Chesterfield and Matlock, when Fry took a call from her boss at the Major Crime Unit, DCI Alistair Mackenzie.
‘DS Fry?’ he said. ‘Are you on your way back from Derbyshire?’
‘I’m en route now. I’ll be there in thirty minutes.’
He grunted, and she pictured Mackenzie checking his watch. It was an automatic reaction, something he always did when anybody mentioned an interval of time, as if he had to confirm for himself that thirty minutes was a genuine measurement on the clock. Some of the staff at EMSOU called him the Time Lord, though only ever behind his back, of course.
‘We’ll wait for you,’ he said.
‘Wait for me why?’ said Fry. ‘What’s happening, sir?’
‘We’ve got an operation on this afternoon. We’re all ready to go, but I want you to be part of it.’
Fry felt her foot press down on the accelerator instinctively.
‘I’ll be there in twenty.’
‘Great stuff.’
He didn’t even pause to look at his watch this time, just ended the call. There would probably be a room full of officers somewhere kicking their heels and waiting for him to give the word.
Feeling the catch of excitement in her chest, Fry swung the Audi out of Matlock and up the hill through Tansley towards the motorway. The Major Crime Unit had moved from its offices at St Ann’s Police Station in Nottingham, and now she had to drive to the northern outskirts of the city every morning to reach the new EMSOU base just off junction 27 of the M1.
It was actually twenty-five minutes before she drew into the car park and keyed in the security code. She could feel the buzz as soon as she entered the building. Detective Constable Jamie Callaghan greeted her as she walked into the office.
‘Just in time,’ he said. ‘I think the boss is starting to get itchy.’
‘What’s up?’
‘We’re raiding an illegal firearms dealer.’
‘A dealer? Or the customers?’
‘West Midlands are rounding up the gangs. But the dealer is on our patch.’
Callaghan led her straight to the briefing room, where a photo of a man in his fifties with a short grey beard was being projected onto a screen.
‘This is Mark Brentnall,’ DCI Mackenzie was saying. ‘He’s a registered firearms dealer with a legitimate business, but he has a much more lucrative illegitimate trade on the side. We believe Mr Brentnall is a crucial link in an underground network supplying sawn-off shotguns to organised crime groups. His particular expertise is in shortening barrels and removing serial numbers.’
He turned and nodded at Fry and Callaghan as they entered the room.
‘Today we’ll be carrying out simultaneous raids on his business premises and his home address. Our colleagues in Birmingham are targeting the individuals believed to be sourcing the weapons and distributing them to criminal associates across the West Midlands. This is the culmination of a complex investigation that we hope will lead to significant prison sentences and to illegally held guns and drugs being removed from the streets. OK, let’s get ready.’
Fry collected a bulletproof vest and joined the rest of the team as they piled into a convoy of vehicles and headed back onto the M1.
She found herself sitting with two other EMSOU officers, a DS and a DC seconded from Nottinghamshire Police. She said hello but got barely a murmur in return from either of them. The DS turned away as if he didn’t even want to acknowledge her presence. Fry frowned. That seemed rude. Perhaps he was just that sort of person, though. She looked at the DC, who was staring at her as if she were an alien visitor. She stared back until he blinked and lowered his head in embarrassment.
What was the matter with these people? They made her feel like an unwanted interloper. She wondered for a moment what had been said in the briefing before she arrived. She didn’t enjoy the feeling that people had been talking about her behind her back.
Mark Brentnall’s home was deep in the countryside south of Nottingham, verging on the border with Leicestershire near the River Soar. When they got close to the address, many of the road signs pointed towards Loughborough or Melton Mowbray.
A vanload of officers from the task force went in first, smashing open the front door with the ram. Then they crowded into the house with shouts of ‘Police!’
But Mr Brentnall wasn’t there. In the sitting room, they found a woman standing open-mouthed at the sight of the police officers in her home. For a moment, Fry and the woman stared at each other as the team moved on to clear the rest of the rooms.
‘Mrs Brentnall?’ she said.
‘Yes. What...?’
‘Where is your husband?’
‘He’s out in his car.’
‘Where is he going?’
‘I don’t know. Business.’
The woman began to reach for something hidden behind a chair. Fry lunged forward and grabbed her hand.
‘What are you doing?’ she said. ‘Let me see what you’re reaching for.’
But it was only a mobile phone. Mrs Brentnall’s instinct had been like anyone else’s — to phone her husband to tell him what was happening.
‘Please don’t do that,’ said Fry. ‘Just sit down quietly or we’ll have to arrest you.’
She left a uniformed officer to watch over the woman and joined the search. In an extension to the rear of the house, they found a workshop full of equipment used for shortening shotgun barrels and stocks. Scores of well-worn hand tools hung in racks on a breezeblock wall over a cluttered workbench fitted with a vice and a bright lamp. The air was thick with the smell of dust and metal filings. A number of freshly cut barrels lay on a table, and a locked cabinet contained several handguns and boxes of ammunition.