Fry was waiting to be called into Superintendent Branaghs office, back at E Division headquarters in West Street, Edendale. She felt like a naughty school girl sent to see the headmistress.
Michael Lowndes, said Branagh, when she was finally summoned. What went wrong?
There was no point in trying to make excuses. Branagh had eyes that could look right through you.
I took my eye off the ball, maam.
Obviously. You were supposed to follow him to the meeting, and take the main players out. You were in position, and so was your team. We only put together this operation so that Lowndes would lead us to the others.
We failed, said Fry.
We?
Fry swallowed. I failed.
Branagh sat back in her chair and studied her for a few moments. Diane, weve been patient with you for a while now, she said.
Yes, maam.
Weve given you some leeway, allowed you plenty of space. But you have a decision to make, and its time you made it. I believe its starting to affect your performance.
I wouldnt say that.
Have you some other explanation?
But Fry hadnt. She couldnt blame anyone else but herself.
DS Fry, I want you to make a decision here and now. I dont like to put pressure on you in these circumstances, but I have wider issues to consider.
Fry looked at her, wondering if she would be as terrifying herself if she ever reached the dizzy heights of such a senior rank. Not that it was likely.
The last time Fry had sat in this office was when DI Gareth Blake and the specialist rape counsellor Rachel Murchison had arrived from the West Midlands, bringing the news of a DNA hit that would enable them to re-open the enquiry in which she was the victim. A cold case rape enquiry. All they needed was her decision, whether she wanted to go ahead with a fresh enquiry, or close the book and put the whole thing behind her.
Blakes words still echoed in her mind. Shed been turning them over and over since that day.
When we get a cold case hit, we consult the CPS before we consider intruding into a victims life. We have to take a close look at how strong a case weve got, and whether we can do something to strengthen it.
With the help of the victim.
Of course. And in this case
In my case. This is personal. Dont try to pretend it isnt.
In your case, we had a very credible witness report from the victim. From you, Diane. Everything is on file for this one. We have an e-fit record in the imaging unit, and a copy of everything has been kept by the FSS. But the bottom line is, we got a DNA match.
DNA, the holy grail of trace evidence. The national DNA database had gone live in 1995 and every week now the Forensic Science Service laboratory in Birmingham matched more than a thousand profiles taken from crime scenes, solving crimes up to thirty years old. Soon, the database would hit its target of three million profiles.
It was so easy to believe that DNA evidence was foolproof. Yet the larger the database, the greater the chance of somebody being wrongly linked to a crime. For some, it was too much like the beginnings of a Big Brother society they didnt really want to be part of.
The time is now, said Branagh. Do we have a decision?
Yes, maam.
Excellent. Im granting you indefinite leave of absence.
Branagh made a note in a file on her desk.
Of course, since we dont know how long youll be away from the division, therell be an appointment to Acting DS in your place.
Leaving Branaghs office, Fry pulled out her mobile and dialled a number.
Dad? Will you be at home tomorrow? Yes. Im coming to see you.
Ben Cooper turned right and dropped the Toyota down a gear to go up the steep street. Edendale was one of only two towns that sat within the boundaries of the Peak District National Park. At Buxton and other towns, the line on the map took wide sweeps around them and back again, to exclude them from national park planning restrictions. But Edendale sat too deep within the hills to be excluded. It lay in the middle of a valley running west to east, halfway between the Hope and the Wye. The River Eden came down from the hills and meandered its way through the town before escaping to the east. Because of its position, every road in the town led upwards, out on to the moors.
Castleton Road climbed past close-packed residential areas that spiralled up the hillsides, houses lining narrow roads that took sudden twists and turns to follow the humps and hollows of the underlying landscape. Further out, the houses became newer as they got higher, though they were built of the same stone. Finally, the housing petered out in a scattering of small-holdings and small-scale dairy farms.
For the moment, Edendale was constrained in its hollow by a barrier of hills. But the pressure of housing demand might force it to expand some time either southwards into the gentle limestone hills of the White Peak, or north towards the bare gritstone moors of the Dark Peak.
By the river in the centre of town, the Buttercross area was where Edendales antique shops clustered. This was the oldest and most picturesque part of the town, including Catch Wind and Pysenny Banks, where the stone-walled streets were barely wide enough for a car and the river ran past front gardens filled with lichen-covered millstones.
In this area, his sister Claires shop stood empty now, the To Let signs up, and all its stock sold off. There wasnt much hope of a sale at the moment. It was hardly the only empty shop in town anyway. Time moved a bit more slowly here than in other parts of the country, and the recession had come along late, its ripple effects hitting the Eden Valley some months after the stone that had been dropped into the water of the UK economy.
At the height of the recession, twenty per cent of retail property had stood vacant in the city of Derby. In the north of the county, smaller market towns like Edendale had survived for a while on their tourism business thanks to all those people whod decided to spend their holidays in Britain rather than fly to the Maldives. And now, while the papers talked about the green shoots of recovery, the shutters were still up in Edendales High Street.
But Claire Cooper was ready to make a fresh start. She was a glass half-full sort of person, and saw it as an opportunity. Even Matt might be pushed and cajoled into adopting a more optimistic outlook than hed expressed for a long time.
At E Division, Gavin Murfin would be retiring in a few years time, finally able to claim a full pension at the end of his thirty years service. Gavins eldest was due to get married soon. Hed probably be a grandfather before long. But what would he do with himself in his mid-fifties, a career in Derbyshire Constabulary behind him, and too much time on his hands? It was funny how that happened in someones life. Time turned them into a person their friends didnt recognize and had no connection with. Old colleagues whod depended on each others support for years suddenly found they had nothing in common, no way even of sharing the office gossip. You couldnt talk about work to a civilian. And all of that could be a brutal wrench for some officers. Too cruel a rupture.
Cooper had a sudden vision of himself in twenty years time, overweight and middle-aged, slouching around the CID room at Edendale, checking his watch to see if it was time to go home yet, setting a bad example for the younger DCs, grumbling about always missing out on promotion. He could become another Gavin Murfin.
No, surely not.
But some things never changed. Every division was still struggling to meet all its targets. Sanctioned Detection Rate, Crime Reduction Figures, PDR Completion Rate, Public Confidence Measure. The list seemed endless and unattainable.
Number 8 Welbeck Street lay just across the river from the town centre, close enough for him to walk to work if he wanted to. It benefited from a conservatory, and long gardens between Welbeck Street and the shops on Meadow Road. Unfortunately, his landlady Mrs Shelley, who lived next door, was becoming dottier and dottier, and he wasnt sure how long he had left before her acquisitive relatives took over the two houses. No doubt they had their own plans.
He did still have a cat, though. Not the original black moggy who had come with the ground-floor flat as a sitting tenant. The poor chap had died one night in his sleep, and the flat had felt very empty without him.
Coopers new cat had chosen him one day when he visited the Fox Lane animal sanctuary. She had hooked him with her claws as he passed her cage, and refused to let go. One look into her anxious bright green eyes had left him with no option.
Now she was very much at home in Welbeck Street, enjoying the freedom of roaming the back gardens. He was gradually getting used to seeing tabby stripes instead of long black fur.
It had taken him ages to name the new cat. Naming an animal seemed such a simple thing. It wasnt like choosing a name for a child, when something that suited a gurgling baby also had to be cool enough to avoid bullying when a child reached its teens, and appropriate for a responsible adult who didnt want to sound like a porn star.
Claire had told him that a cat was the Celtic equivalent to the mythical two-headed dog Cerberus, the guardian at the entrance to the Underworld. So hed toyed with some names from Celtic mythology. Brigid, Mari, Morgan, Rhiannon. Wikipedia had come up with a whole list. But none of them had seemed right. They sounded too much like witches.
Hed decided that the name ought to represent something of the area, the landscape that meant so much to him. Living in town, he missed the countryside, particularly his old home at Bridge End Farm. It ought to be something that reminded him of good things, the name of a hill or valley. Not a bleak peat moor from the Dark Peak, but something gentler.
The answer had come to him as he sat looking at the cat, gazing into her green eyes. He had an image of the wonderful panorama from Surprise View above Hathersage. It was a view that summed up the Peak District. On one side was the edge of the Dark Peak, with its twisted gritstone tors and the ramparts of Carl Wark. On the other side lay the White Peak, densely wooded slopes, limestone dales, picturesque villages. Ahead, there was a view right up the valley to Castleton, and on the horizon the hump of Mam Tor, the shivering mountain. The Hope Valley. Perfect. Now his cat was called Hope.