Lost River (17 page)

In the middle of the kitchen, the granite-effect U-shaped preparation surface was spotless. Although it must have been in use all day, it gleamed as if it had just been polished. Cooper glanced at the appliances – an integrated Electrolux dishwasher, a Smeg gas hob with an eye-level double oven. It all looked brand new.

Part of the preparation surface formed a kind of peninsula dividing the breakfast area from the kitchen proper. Dawn stood on one side of the peninsula, gently ushering back visitors who attempted to stray towards the sink with an empty plate or glass. The message was quite clear – this was her territory, and she was the absolute ruler.

Following the flow of people towards the back door, he noticed Alex standing in the utility room. He had the internal door to the garage open, and seemed to be examining his father’s silver grey Volkswagen Passat.

Outside, the garden was screened by close-boarded timber fencing, making it as private as it could be on a modern estate. A paved terrace and gravel paths were bordered by ornamental
trees and shrubs, which stood almost regimentally erect, as if prepared for inspection.

Cooper had never liked gardens that were too neat or formal. He preferred to see nature allowed in. A garden like the Nields’ felt too sterile, too artificial. Those shrubs might as well be made of plastic.

The only sign of real life was the dog – a large golden retriever lying disconsolately on the path. This must be Buster, the dog who’d chased the stick into the River Dove, and who’d been followed into the water by Emily Nield. According to some accounts, anyway. Cooper could hardly ask for an eyewitness statement from the animal itself.

The dog looked up and wagged a shaggy tail half-heartedly when it heard his footsteps, but lowered its head again when it failed to recognize him.

Cooper heard splashing, and walked towards the corner of the house. A small water feature tinkled at the end of the sun terrace. Water poured from the mouth of a twisted stone face. A god or gargoyle, he couldn’t tell.

But, even as he watched, the flow stopped suddenly. The mouth dried up, and the trough began gradually to empty. Puzzled, Cooper looked around for the source of the water. He couldn’t see a hose pipe, so presumably the supply came straight from the house.

Shrugging, he walked back in through the back door, and saw Alex still in the utility room. He smiled at the boy.

‘You need to get away from the crowds some time, don’t you?’

‘I wish they’d all go,’ said Alex.

‘I understand. Have you got some time off school?’

‘They’ve said I can take as long as I want.’

Cooper could practically see him itching to get back to his computer, to disappear into the security of his online world. He wondered if Alex was worried about getting ejected from his tribe if he stayed offline too long. How long did you get
until you were kicked out, anyway? What was the leeway before you turned yellow? Or was Alex simply itching to destroy that stupid noob who’d just asked to join his tribe?

‘Alex, I think I saw your sister at the funeral this morning,’ said Cooper. ‘Your older sister. Lauren, isn’t it?’

The boy kept his head down. ‘Yeah, I saw her.’

‘When did she leave home?’

‘I dunno. About two years ago, I suppose.’

‘Alex, does the thirtieth of June mean anything to you?’ asked Cooper.

‘No, why?’

‘It isn’t Emily’s birthday, or anything?’

‘No, her birthday is in March.’

‘And Lauren’s?’

‘November.’

‘Thanks.’

Alex began to edge away, trying not to meet his eye.

‘Two years ago,’ said Cooper. ‘That would be while you still lived in Wetton?’

The boy nodded, then slunk off. Cooper still hadn’t got the chance to ask him more about what happened in Dovedale. But now wasn’t the time, either. He would have to find another excuse to visit the Nields. Another question, for another day.

When he was gone, Cooper noticed that the boy had been standing in front of a tap that controlled the flow to the water feature in the garden. So that explained it. Alex had been the one who turned it off.

Back in the house, the family and some friends were huddled over a collection of photographs. Not the type that Alex took, though. These were family snaps, the history of the Nields captured on glossy paper. Dawn was showing off Alex’s class photo, three rows of children lined up in their navy blazers.

She pointed out other people’s sons, surnames that seemed to mean something to her, but passed Cooper by. The more
respectable families of Ashbourne, no doubt. He did notice that all Alex’s classmates seemed to have biblical names – Joshua, Daniel, Jacob, Gabriel. At one time, a child called Alex would certainly have been Scottish. And Gabriel would have been a character in the school nativity play – a role taken by a girl, too.

Cooper recalled his brother, Matt, complaining that all his daughters’ male classmates were called Jack, and that Amy and Josie treated him as if he was stupid for not knowing which one they were referring to. Well, according to the news-papers, Jack had been the most popular choice of a boy’s name for sixteen years running. That must be causing chaos in classrooms by now. But where were the Jacks among Alex’s friends?

‘Which of those are his closest friends, Mrs Nield?’ he asked.

‘I’m not sure. He doesn’t mention any of them very often.’

‘Don’t any of his friends come to the house?’

‘They have been here, now and then. But they don’t come often enough for us to get to know them.’

‘That’s a shame.’

‘Yes, he seems to prefer those solitary games he plays on his computer.’

‘Well, they’re not really solitary,’ said Cooper.

Dawn screwed up her eyes. ‘What?’

But before he could explain, she was drawn away to speak to someone else. Cooper realized that she didn’t know the difference between a game on a PlayStation and the kind of multi-player online world that Alex inhabited. In
War Tribe
he had many friends – allies, tribemates and neighbours, from all over the world. But he also had plenty of enemies.

Cooper said his goodbyes and left the Nields’ house. He had more than enough to do. He had a phone call to make to Diane Fry in Birmingham, for a start. She would be waiting to hear from him, and he didn’t want to let her down.

As he reached the end of the drive, Cooper heard footsteps running behind him. He turned and found Alex coming round the side of the house from the garage. He looked furtive, as if he’d just sneaked through the door from the utility room without his parents knowing that he’d left his room and was away from his computer.

‘Alex?’ said Cooper.

The boy held out a sheet of paper. ‘I printed this out for you. I thought you should have it.’

‘What is it?’

‘I have to go back.’

Cooper watched the boy run back into the garage and dodge past his father’s car. He unfolded the paper, and saw a colour image. The printing was poor quality, probably done on the small photo printer he’d seen in Alex’s room. But it wasn’t the quality that mattered. It was the subject.

The image was clearly one of Alex’s series from Dovedale. But it hadn’t been part of the slideshow on his computer, and Cooper could see why. The subject was quite different – the first picture he’d seen with people in the shot. The spires of the Twelve Apostles were visible in the background, and opposite the steep scramble up to the arch in front of Reynard’s Cave, with a glimpse of glittering water where the River Dove flowed in between.

There might have been an intended pattern in the shot, the juxtaposition of the two sides of the dale. But the composition was spoiled by the accidental human subjects. On the bank of the river stood two figures, distant but recognizable. They were recognizable to Cooper, anyway.

One of them was Robert Nield, tall and slightly stooping, dressed in the blue shirt and cream slacks he’d been wearing at the hospital that day. He was talking to another man, older and less tall, one shoulder slightly raised as he turned towards Nield, an expression of appeal on his face. That other man was Sean Deacon.

When Fry awoke in her hotel room that morning, she knew from the state of the bedclothes that she’d been dreaming. Dreams always made her toss and turn restlessly, kicking out at the duvet and crumpling the bottom sheet. She had a dim recollection of being lost in a strange city. No, that wasn’t right – it wasn’t a totally strange city, it was like Birmingham in some ways, but unlike it too. She’d known where she wanted to get to, but couldn’t find the way. All the roads had changed, and none of them went where she expected them to. As a result, she’d been getting further and further away from her destination instead of nearer to it. And of course, she’d been running out of time. In every dream she ever had, she was always short of time. Forever in a hurry, and always destined to be late.

As she exercised and showered, Fry slowly began to realize that fragments of real memories had been scattered through her dream. They were elusive recollections, pebbles in the sand, which slithered away when she tried to grope after them. Like the drops of water bouncing off her body, they had pinged against her mind and whizzed away again.

Was this what Rachel Murchison had meant when she talked about hidden memories? But these were more than hidden.
These memories were playing a game with her, continually sneaking close enough to be almost within her grasp, then eluding her like slippery balls of soap.

Of course, you brought along a lot of baggage as you went through life. Some of it clung to you so persistently that it weighed you down for years. But surely there was even more baggage that you left behind, wasn’t there? Memories and experiences, and failed relationships, that you shrugged off and left at the roadside when you moved on. She pictured a mass of sagging cardboard suitcases, sealed with grubby parcel tape and bulging at the corners. A long row of them, standing at the edge of a pavement, as if awaiting collection by the binmen, but destined never quite to reach the tip. There wasn’t ever any point in going back and poking open the lids to look at what you’d left behind. The accumulated mould was likely to choke you, the dust to get in your eyes.

Now her body craved action, something to focus the pentup tension, some target to hit out at. Her old
shotokan
master in Warley had taught her to recognize that feeling and use it. Very soon, she would have to get that release, or the dark well of anger would boil over and the wrong target would be in the way.

An hour later, Fry had eaten her usual light breakfast and was standing on the walkway over the fountains, near the eye-shaped Costa Coffee outlet in Central Square. Office workers in dark suits strolled through the square, past the steps in front of the Italian-style arcade of the 3 Brindleyplace office block.

It was unseasonably warm again. More like July than early June. The weather shouldn’t be quite so humid this early in the summer, not in England. But maybe this was the climate change they’d been warning her about for years, and Birmingham was turning into the new Provence. Soon there’d
be vineyards on the slopes of the Lickeys, and olive trees growing on the banks of the Rea.

Well, not really. There’d just be more office workers sweating in their glass towers. Mosquitoes swarming on the scum of the canal. Huge, pale women showing far too much flesh in their halter tops and baggy shorts. Brum would never be Cannes, no matter how much it tried.

Tower blocks were going up again in Birmingham. But now they were high-rent, city-living apartments. The inhabitants of the Chamberlain Tower would never be able to afford to live on the top floors of the Beetham, above the Radisson SAS. She could imagine them having a good laugh when Beetham Tower residents’ cars were trapped in their underground car park for three days by a breakdown in the computerized access system.

When Angie arrived, she was carrying a black shoulder bag.

‘Not here,’ she said. ‘Can we go to your hotel room?’

‘Yes, if you like.’

They went back to the hotel, checking that the housekeeping team had finished with her room, and locked the door.

‘There’s some stuff for you,’ said Angie.

Diane looked at the folder she put on the table.

‘Stuff?’

Angie flicked it casually. ‘Oh, names and addresses, witness statements, signatures of investigating officers, PNC print-outs. Forms and more forms, I don’t know what.’

‘A copy of the case file? You’re kidding.’

‘You’ll be able to tell what it all is, I suppose. I hope it’s what you need.’

Diane opened the file, and read the cover sheet. ‘How on earth did you get hold of all this?’

‘I have my abilities. I’m always unappreciated, of course.’

Leafing through the file, Diane felt her sense of astonishment fighting with a feeling of guilt – guilt at the knowledge she was handling confidential information that should never have left Colmore Circus.

‘I suppose I shouldn’t ask,’ she said, hardly able to look her sister in the eye.

‘That’s usually the best advice.’

‘Are their Phoenix prints here?’

‘Probably. You’ll have to look, won’t you?’

Diane closed the file. She had hardly read a word of it, simply scanned the headings. Case summary, Witness Statement, Record of Interview. And on all of the pages was the familiar black bar – ‘RESTRICTED WHEN COMPLETE’.

‘I’m not sure I can take them,’ she said.

‘This stuff has all the names, doesn’t it? You’ve seen enough to tell that. Suspects, witnesses, alibis – it’s all there, I know it is.’

‘Angie, I’m sorry, but it goes against the grain even to handle something like this, when I know it’s been obtained illegitimately.’

Throwing herself back on the bed, Angie blew out one long, exasperated breath. ‘Oh, you have got to be kidding. What – you’re suddenly going to go all upright and honourable again? You don’t want to put a foot wrong, in case you upset your bosses? That’s the old Diane. Things have changed, Sis. Haven’t you noticed? We’re not playing this game by the rules any more. And that was your decision. Don’t forget that.’

Diane shook her head.

‘Okay, so what are you going to do? Shop me? Betray the only people who are trying to help you? Because it’s either that, or you become an accessory.’

Angie stood up. Finally, Diane forced herself to look at her.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

‘I’m going to leave you to think about it. There’s the file. It’s all yours. Now it’s up to you whether you read it or not.’

‘Angie –’

But her sister was on her way to the door.

‘You know how to get hold of me, if you want to talk
about it.’ Angie paused in the doorway. ‘But if you don’t want to, Diane – well, that’s fine too.’

So Angie knew someone who worked West Midlands Police headquarters in Lloyd House. She knew them pretty well, too – well enough to persuade them to break every rule in the book.

Fry supposed she ought to feel grateful that someone was on her side, and that person was willing to help her buck the system and achieve proper justice. She touched the front of the file where it lay on the table. She couldn’t quite figure out why that feeling of gratitude didn’t come.

Now she didn’t know what to do. She’d always tried to go by the book, to follow procedures and not put a foot wrong. It was the way she’d planned to advance her career, having sussed out the restrictive times the police service was going through. An insensitive or imprudent comment could damage an officer’s prospects permanently.

Yet she saw officers breaking the rules all the time. And not just back in the nineties when she first joined up. Even now there were people willing to bend the rules, play the system, or totally cross the line. Sometimes they did it for their own benefit, to fund a gambling addiction, or to help out a friend who happened to be on the wrong side of the law. Other times, though, they did it for reasons they might claim were good and honourable ones. Reasons like loyalty, justice, the righting of a wrong that the court system alone couldn’t deal with.

So which situation was this? Was there some honourable justification she could claim for implicating herself in a breach of the rules? Did it really make any difference? The outcome would be the same, if she was found out.

Besides, what was she planning to do with the information? If she’d obtained these names in any other way, what were
her intentions? Nothing that was within the rules. She acknowledged that fact to herself for the first time, accepting that a determination had been growing slowly inside her, a bloom of anger that needed an outlet, and which cared nothing for correct procedure.

From the moment she faced that fact, and accepted her own failing, she began to feel an awful lot better.

And who had done this to her? Who had been the Satan who placed temptation in front of her, the person who was so much inside her mind that she knew the exact moment when Diane wouldn’t be able to resist? Who would get their satisfaction from corrupting her principles?

Diane went to the window of her room, looked down into the central square with its fountains. She watched her sister walking away towards Broad Street, striding confidently, not glancing to either side as the bag swung on her shoulder.

After all this time, Angie Fry was no longer the figure that Diane remembered from her past, the older sister she’d worshipped. Now, she was a totally different person. Another broken angel.

Fry opened the case file. The various forms were numbered in order, from MG1, in accordance with the Manual of Guidance.

Form MG1

RESTRICTED WHEN COMPLETE

FILE FRONT SHEET

File Type: Expedited

CPS Office: Birmingham

Anticipated guilty plea? No

And then there were two sections for the defendants’ details:

Defendant’s full name: Darren Joseph Barnes

DOB: 19/07/1981

Male X

Persistent Offender? No

Occupation: Unemployed

PNC Ethnicity code: IC1

Nationality: British

No of TIC(s) (if applicable)

Previous convictions? Yes

Previous cautions/final warning/reprimands? Yes

Defendant’s full name: Marcus Shepherd

DOB: 07/03/1980

Male X

Persistent Offender? No

Occupation: Unemployed

PNC Ethnicity Code: IC3

Nationality: British

No of TIC(s) (if applicable)

Previous convictions? Yes

Previous cautions/final warning/reprimands? Yes

Fry had already committed the names to memory. Barnes and Shepherd. When she first heard them, they’d sounded so innocuous somehow. So rural, even. When she looked at their dates of birth now, she could see that they’d both been teenagers at the time of the attack.

According to their PNC ethnicity codes, one of them was white and the other black. At least, that was the opinion of an arresting officer entering their details on to the Police National Computer. She couldn’t have testified to that herself. It was a detail beyond her recollection.

MG1 concluded with a dated declaration:

I certify that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, I have not withheld any information which could assist the defence in the early preparation of their case, including the making of a bail application.

At the bottom it was signed by Gareth Blake as the ‘officer in case’, and by his supervising DCI. Fry turned to the second page, Form MG5. The Case Summary.

Regina v. Shepherd and Barnes

There are three witnesses. One independent witness Louise Jones had an unobstructed view of two males seen running from the scene of the incident. At a subsequent ID parade, Miss Jones made a positive identification of Darren Barnes as one of the males. A second witness Miss Tanya Spiers states that she encountered Shepherd and Barnes at a club later that night with a group of other males, when they boasted that they had ‘done a copper’. Shepherd and Barnes were both previously known to her. The third witness is the IP, who is unable to make an identification.

Officers arrested Darren Barnes and Marcus Shepherd. Barnes stated in his first interview that he had not been with Shepherd at all that night, but said he had heard about the incident. Shepherd stated in interview that he had been with Barnes in the general area, but they had been drinking in a local pub and had not left until around 21.30 hours, when they visited the Sub Zero club in Broad Street, Birmingham. On re-interview, Barnes stated that he had seen Shepherd at the club, but had not been with him at the pub in Digbeth.

I submit this file for review.

There was more, lots more. MG11s for the witness statements, several pages of MG15, the Record of Interview.

WITNESS STATEMENT

(Criminal Justice Act 1967, section 9)

Statement of: Louise Jones

Occupation: Editorial Assistant

This statement signed by me is true to the best of my knowledge and belief and I make it knowing that, if it is tendered in evidence, I shall be liable to prosecution if I have wilfully stated in it anything which I know to be false, or do not believe to be true.

I am the above-named person and reside at the address overleaf.

My name is Louise Susan Jones DOB 05/05/1979. At approx 12.15 a.m. I was leaving my place of employment after an evening event. As I walked to my car I looked down the street. I had a clear unobstructed view. I saw two males running away from an area of wasteland near the Connemara pub. The first male was white, skinny build, I would say probably approx five feet eight inches tall. He was wearing a dark sweatshirt and jeans. The second male I would describe as much larger in build than the first male and probably six feet tall. He was black. I could not tell what he was wearing, other than a baseball cap. I would recognize the first male if I saw him again. If required to do so I am willing to give evidence and attend court as a witness.

Signed: Louise Susan Jones

Fry was impressed with Miss Jones’ observation. She seemed to have identified the white male. That would have been Darren Barnes, the IC1.