Cooper looked around the conservatory. At the far end, there were so many cobwebs that the spiders would soon be complaining about overcrowding. He needed to make time for a spring clean. He needed to find time for Liz, too, or she’d be complaining he neglected her. He was supposed to have made time for a holiday.
But time was always a problem. For him, and for Randy, there was never enough of it.
Strange how complications seemed to mount up in your life as you got older. In his twenties, everything had seemed very simple. Now, within a few years, he felt as though the world was on his shoulders some days. Was it the creeping infection of responsibility? He had a steady relationship now. He’d been going out with Liz Petty, a civilian crime-scene examiner at E Division, for several months. He ought to be getting to know her fairly well by this time.
And then there was that old, vexed question of promotion. It had come up in conversation with Liz the other night. Over a glass of white wine and a Bondi Chicken in the Australian Bar at Bakewell, she’d gently quizzed him about his future. Cooper never found it difficult to listen to Liz. She didn’t take herself too seriously, and might burst out laughing at him at any moment. He treasured those moments, as a rule. But that evening, she’d been more serious.
And she had been right, he supposed. It was now or never, if he was ever going to go for promotion. Even if it meant some kind of horizontal development, a move to a different speciality – whatever it took to get noticed. You couldn’t stand still, or you moved backwards in this world. If he was going to settle down one day and have a family… Well that, after all, was what he would do, wasn’t it? If he was going to settle down, he couldn’t spend his life on a DC’s salary, growing cynical and grumpy, like Gavin Murfin. Putting on weight in all the wrong places, too, probably. Oh, damn.
His mother had always talked so much about her grandchildren – not only those who already existed, but those that were in the future, yet unborn. They had been the most important thing in her mind in those final years, even when the illness had taken most of her memories. Matt had done that for her, the older brother fulfilling the hopes and dreams. But Ben knew he had failed her. Maybe there was still time to make up for it, though. Still time to tell her that he had settled down, got the promotion, produced those grandchildren she’d talked about. He felt sure she would know, even now, wherever she was. If it mattered enough, you could make it happen.
8
Fry woke with a fuzzy head, and looked around her in confusion. She’d only lain down on her bed for a few minutes to rest, but she must have dropped off to sleep almost straight away. It had been a busy day, but not that bad. There had been many days when she’d put in much longer hours, when the time to go home never seemed to arrive. There could be a few of those days to come, depending on the course of this new enquiry. But not today. Today had been… well, average. There was no reason she should feel so tired and groggy, unless she was coming down with something. And that was the last thing she needed.
She sniffed. The smell of soy sauce was drifting up from the flat downstairs. It was one of those smells that seemed to be able to penetrate floors and carpets with surprising ease, as if its spicy aroma could wind its way through the cracks of the floorboards like wisps of smoke.
One day, it had dawned on her that she had plenty of money in her savings account. A police sergeant’s salary was perfectly adequate, and there were hardly any major expenses in her life, except for her car and the rent on this flat. Not exactly a lavish lifestyle, was it? Fat chance of that. She ought to be able to think of something she could do with her savings.
Fry made her way into the kitchen and looked at the washing up. There wasn’t much of it, not now that she was on her own again, her sister Angie having headed back to Birmingham and whatever sort of lifestyle she led there. So those few plates and pans shouldn’t look quite so daunting, sitting there in the sink in that squalid, disapproving way.
What to do with a few thousand pounds? She supposed she could put a deposit down on a house and take out a mortgage. It was the sort of thing that everyone else seemed to do. They’d all tied themselves up in property and debts by the time they got to her age.
Fry hissed between her teeth. A mortgage? She’d rather be chained in purgatory, with eagles pecking at her liver.
She showered, changed her clothes, then pulled on her coat and went out for a walk to wake herself up. The clouds had cleared now, and a crescent moon was shining on the wet street. Music played behind curtained windows as she passed. Tunes that were vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t quite hear enough of to name.
She felt like the only person out in the streets tonight. The rest of Edendale was shut up behind its doors and windows, people enclosed in their own little worlds. Sometimes she wished she had a world of her own that she could enter that way, instead of always standing out in the cold, feeling so small and vulnerable under a vast, moonlit sky. At times like this, she craved the crowded intimacy of the city.
After a few months, Fry had finally brought herself to make an effort at getting acquainted with the students. So what if they had nothing in common? She wasn’t going to spend the rest of her life with them. But then they had all left. They’d moved away to live in student halls, or had finished their courses and got on with their lives. It was strange how everyone she moved towards always seemed to move away from her. It was as if she was caught up in some old-fashioned dance where no one was supposed to get too close, everyone spinning constantly round the ballroom floor, touching briefly before whirling away to a distant corner where she never saw them again.
She thought of Ben Cooper. The one person, perhaps, who had never entirely drawn away. She wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing, or not. It had been so typical of him to turn up at the crime scene on Longstone Moor today. She remembered the moment she’d spotted Cooper approaching the outer cordon – an unmistakable figure striding effortlessly up the slope towards her, shrugging off the wind and rain as if he was a natural part of the landscape, a creature totally at home in its own environment. He always looked vaguely windswept, even in the office, with that infuriating lock of hair that fell across his forehead. Yet he also radiated a kind of intensity that Fry rarely saw in anyone, let alone the police officers and other professionals she worked with day in and day out, people trained to say exactly the right thing in all circumstances. You could rely on Ben Cooper not to do that, at least.
Fry sighed. Of course, Cooper had been right about her antipathy to hunting. She didn’t think it was just some kind of class thing, though. At least, she hoped it wasn’t. Though hunting was often associated with class privilege and social hierarchy, there had always been a lurking violence at the heart of the sport that turned it into a kind of blood ritual.
When she was a studying at UCE, there had been fellow students who had been deeply involved in animal rights protests, including the campaign against fox hunting. Some of them were the sort of people whose instinct was to be anti everything, but the propaganda had been pervasive, the leaflets handed out, the posters of mutilated animals pinned to the notice boards in the Students’ Union.
To Fry, it had been obvious that the demand for a ban on fox hunting in Britain had as much to do with class politics as a love of animals. As any eighteenth-century farm labourer transported for killing a hare could have told you, the hunt was always about the relative status of human beings.