Ben Cooper and Diane Fry 11 - The Devil’s Edge

by Stephen Booth

  Cooper was waiting for his team to rendezvous and compare notes. They had arranged to meet in the centre of the village, where an ancient stone horse trough provided the central feature on a few square yards of cobbles. From here, he could see Union Jacks flying over several properties.

  For some reason, many of the house names in Riddings included the word ‘croft’. There was South Croft, Hill Croft, Nether Croft. It made them sound more like remote homesteads in the Scottish Highlands than homes in an affluent middle-class Derbyshire village.

  Every few yards, steel posts were sunk into the verges to prevent cars parking on the grass. In one place, someone had exercised a bit of artistic interpretation and used giant imitation toadstools instead. All the mail boxes he’d passed seemed to be decorated with illustrations of post horns or stage coaches. He couldn’t imagine that little touch on the Devonshire Estate.

  Throughout the village, rose hips hung over the road, and long banks of unpicked blackberries were ripening at the wayside. What a waste.

  Just beyond a sign warning of horse riders, Cooper saw a gate with a cattle grid to keep the sheep out. There might have been sheep in Riddings once, but there wasn’t much sign of them now. Apart from horses, the nearest livestock would be the Highland cattle roaming the flats above Baslow Edge, so often photographed by tourists against a backdrop of the Eagle Stone or Wellington’s Monument.

  Nearby, a woman in a pink sleeveless top was kneeling on the grass weeding a flower bed, watched by a West Highland terrier. In a small orchard, speckled hens pecked among windfall apples. Life seemed to be going on as normal in Riddings.

  ‘The Barrons have been here for three years,’ said Gavin Murfin, sweating his way to the meeting point and peering at the scum-covered water in the horse trough. ‘One of the neighbours told me that Valley View was on the market for nearly two and a half million. I guess prices have fallen a bit since then, though.’

  ‘Not in this village.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘So where did the Barrons get the money to move into Riddings, I wonder?’

  ‘I know what you mean. Not forty years old yet, and three kids to bring up. You’d think they’d be on the breadline like the rest of us poor saps who have families draining every penny from our pockets. But Jake Barron is in line to take over the family business. The Barrons have a chain of carpet warehouses across South Yorkshire – Sheffield, Rotherham, Doncaster, all those places. His dad is still company chairman, but Jake is chief executive. I guess he’s taking a fair whack out of the company.’

  ‘Hasn’t the carpet trade suffered from the recession?’

  ‘No, the opposite. People have been spending their money on home improvements instead of moving house. New furniture, new carpets, that sort of thing. There’s no recession so bad that somebody doesn’t benefit from it. They say the pound stores are booming.’

  Detective Constables Becky Hurst and Luke Irvine arrived together, and shared the results of their interviews with neighbours. No one had seen or heard anything, it seemed. As far as the residents of Riddings were concerned, the Barrons’ assailants had come and gone like ghosts.

  ‘Who has details of the Barrons’ children?’ asked Cooper.

  Hurst held up a hand. ‘I can tell you that. There are three of them. Their names are, let’s see …’ She consulted a notebook. ‘Melissa, Joshua and—’

  ‘Fay,’ said Murfin. ‘Melissa, Joshua and Fay.’

  He couldn’t resist a note of satire in his voice as he read out the names. His own kids were called Sean and Wendy.

  ‘But I don’t suppose they were in a position to see or hear anything. I bet none of them even went near a window to look outside.’

  ‘We need to keep knocking on doors, then,’ said Cooper.

  Murfin wiped a hand across his brow and fumbled in his pockets for sustenance. ‘We need more manpower to do all this door-to-door.’

  ‘I’ve been promised there’s more coming.’

  ‘Some people have got out from under anyway,’ said Murfin grumpily.

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘Diane Fry, that’s who. The Wicked Witch of the West Midlands. Let’s face it, she’s just phoning it in these days. Secondment to a working group, I ask you. It should be me phoning it in. I’m the one who’s done his thirty. I’m the one who’s so close to retirement it’s practically singeing my arse. But look at me – still pounding the streets, knocking on doors. It’s cruelty to dumb animals.’

  ‘Gavin, I really don’t think you’d want to be on a working group. Implementing Strategic Change? Think about it.’

  Murfin chewed his lip ruminatively. ‘Okay, I thought about it. And I fell asleep.’

  Cooper thought of the Barrons’ house again. They were getting nothing from the neighbours, so the answers must lie at Valley View. Everything would depend on forensics from the scene, and he was missing out on that.

  ‘Better keep knocking on doors, Gavin.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  Murfin looked at the main street that ran through the village.

  ‘I’m not walking up that hill, though. Someone will have to drive me to the top, and I’ll work my way down.’

  It was true that Murfin had never been cut out for country treks. No matter how many memos were sent out by management about the fitness of officers, he had been unable to lose any weight. From time to time he’d compromised by taking his belt in a notch, which had only succeeded in producing an unsightly roll of spare flesh that hung over his waistband.

  His wife Jean had been putting him on diets for years, but they never worked. Now he was so near to completing his thirty years’ service and earning a full pension that he didn’t really care any more, didn’t feel the necessity to meet the fitness requirements or respond to emails on the subject. It was odd, then, that the prospect of approaching retirement hadn’t made him more cheerful. Instead, he was becoming more and more lugubrious, like an overweight Eeyore or Marvin the Paranoid Android.

  A woman came past walking a terrier. Surely the same woman Cooper had seen gardening only a short time earlier.

  ‘How’re you doing, duck?’ said Murfin with forced brightness.

  The woman glared at him coldly.

  ‘What are you selling?’ she said. ‘Whatever it is, we don’t want any.’

  Murfin sniggered as if she’d told a dirty joke and sidled up to her to show his warrant card.

  ‘Police,’ he said. ‘Oh, I know – I can’t believe it either. They take anybody these days. Can you spare a minute, duck?’

  ‘Okay,’ said Cooper. ‘While Gavin is out ingratiating himself with the locals, let’s get some real work done.’

  ‘Ten to one he’ll end up being offered a cup of tea,’ said Hurst, watching Murfin with a hint of admiration.

  ‘Fresh coffee,’ said Cooper. ‘But if I know Gavin, it’ll be the biscuits he’s interested in.’

  A car pulled alongside, a metallic blue Jaguar XF with the number plate RSE1. The passenger window hummed down, and man leaned towards it from the driving seat. Iron-grey hair swept back, a sardonic eyebrow, a loud and commanding tone of voice.

  ‘Police?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Cooper.

  ‘You know what’s going on around here, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes. We’re aware of it.’

  ‘So what are you doing about it? Anything? Or nothing?’

  He didn’t wait for an answer, but put his car back in gear and accelerated off down the hill.

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Nice to know we have the support of the public,’ said Hurst as she watched him drive away.

  ‘When people get upset and frightened, they need someone to blame.’

  ‘Surely they should be blaming the thugs responsible for the crimes?’

  ‘But no one knows who they are, do they? So we’re the nearest target. That’s the way it works, Becky.’

  ‘That’s so unfair.’

  ‘It happens.’ Cooper glanc
ed at her. ‘You’re going to have to get used to our relationship with the law-abiding public.’

  While Fry waited in the garden of the Seven Mile Inn, she checked her phone and saw she’d missed a call from Angie. There was a voicemail message.

  Hi, sis. We haven’t talked. We need to talk, you know? Call me.

  She saw Mick or Rick coming back towards her with their drinks.

  He smiled as he handed her a glass. ‘A boyfriend?’

  ‘No, my sister.’

  ‘Right.’

  His smile became a smirk, as if he’d just been given some kind of signal. Fry gritted her teeth. Just because the call wasn’t from her boyfriend didn’t mean she hadn’t got one. But that was the way some men’s minds worked. They read an invitation in the slightest thing. She supposed it must be some instinct from their primitive past, sniffing the air to detect the presence of a rival, then mating with anything that stood still long enough.

  He sat opposite her, gazing into her eyes, his mind evidently searching for the right conversational gambit. Best to stick an oar in straight away.

  ‘So, what do your people down in Leicestershire think about the plan for elected police commissioners?’

  She lifted an eyebrow at him over her glass. For a moment, he looked pained, as if she’d just kicked him under the table. But he recovered well.

  ‘The scrapping of performance targets and minimum standards is okay. But locally elected police commissioners? That’s not so welcome. Everyone thinks that, don’t they?’

  Fry supposed that was true. As with all kinds of amateur interference, the role of elected politicians tended to be viewed with suspicion. Most officers preferred the idea of power resting in the hands of the chief constable. After all, he or she was a police officer, a colleague who had come up through the ranks.

  That said it all really. It was ‘us and them’ again. The police and the public. The constant blurring of the lines was viewed as a threat. Even creeping civilianisation was regarded as an insidious disease.

  ‘Politics has no place in the police service. The idea of an elected commissioner with the power to sack the chief constable makes my blood run cold. Are police numbers sustainable in the face of budget cuts? Who knows? Who wants to wait around to find out?’

  With eighty-three per cent of the policing budget being spent on staffing, it seemed likely that numbers would be reduced in the coming months. More than likely. If Fry had been a gambler, she would have called it a racing certainty.

  So the big idea was to save cash through structural reforms, exploring the possible mergers of specialist units and back-office functions, sharing the purchase of expensive equipment and IT systems, forensic and legal services. Any merging of functions would have to be low profile, though, and needed spinning in the right way when it was announced.

  An overtime and deployment review had been under way for some time. The police authority’s audit and resources committee was already looking at ways of providing value for money in policing. The addition of government budget cuts meant an ideal opportunity to look at streamlining costs. At least that was what the management team had called it in their emails – ‘an opportunity’.

  It was all spelled out in the document currently sitting on Fry’s desk back in Edendale: ‘Policing in the Twenty-first Century: Reconnecting police and the people’. Her head resounded with phrases about mobilising neighbourhood activists, implementing radical reform strategies, stripping away bureaucracy in the partnership landscape …

  The partnership landscape. Well, it was certainly a different kind of scenery from the one Ben Cooper harped on about endlessly. These days, her hills were mountains of paperwork, her valleys contained rivers of jargon, endlessly flowing. The only thing her landscape had in common with the Peak District was the number of sheep involved, and the amount of shit they left behind.

  She was hearing more and more buzzwords as each day passed. Sacrifices, restraint, institutionalised overtime.

  Fry looked at her companion. She really ought to get his name right, but he’d taken off his badge when they left Sherwood Lodge.

  ‘You know, when you’ve been in the job for a few years, everything seems to come full circle,’ he said. ‘It’s funny to watch the pendulum swinging. Take the question of force mergers …’

  Force mergers. If she ever heard that phrase again, she would probably scream. Back in 2005, HM Inspector of Constabulary had pointed out that poor information-sharing between police forces had led to serious crime that crossed regional boundaries slipping through a gap. HMIC said that the forty-three-force structure was no longer fit for purpose, and proposed the creation of ‘strategic forces’. The result had been the government’s ‘superforce‘ merger plan, which had soon been abandoned in the face of local opposition and the cost of restructuring.

  Full-scale force mergers were seriously unpopular with voters. The suggestion for a huge East Midlands Constabulary covering Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire and Bedfordshire had been dropped like a hot potato. No one wanted to see their local force disappearing into an unaccountable monolith.

  Now they were discussing another report, which had also declared the structure of forty-three forces obsolete. But the answer to the problem was different. They pointed to figures showing that small police forces caught more criminals than larger ones. They suggested that the current forty-three forces should be split into around ninety-five, more than twice the present number, so that police forces could properly reflect their local communities. No mention of restructuring costs there. But Fry was willing to bet the budget cuts would count that one out too.

  ‘What’s your task after the working-group sessions?’

  ‘Demand management reports on control room processes for all five forces.’

  He shrugged. ‘Good luck. Control rooms will probably be contracted out, like payrolls.’

  ‘You think so?’

  Fry knew that payrolls had been contracted out to a business services company with a brick and glass office block on the waterside in Lincoln. Sorry – not an office block; a human capital management facility.

  ‘And, of course, we wait to hear the good news about front-line services. How many sworn officers will your force lose?’

  It struck Fry that this was the only reason he’d wanted to go for a drink with her, the chance to talk to someone from another force about all his worries. A soulmate, in a way. But she’d hoped for a different kind of conversation.

  She took a drink. ‘I’m leaving Derbyshire anyway,’ she said.

  ‘Oh? Where to?’

  ‘I thought I might try for EMSOU.’

  The East Midlands Special Operations Unit had been set up nearly ten years ago to provide operational support for the Regional Intelligence Unit, helping to tackle serious and organised crime. It had initially covered only Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire. But the chief constables of the region had got together and agreed to expand it from two forces to five. The unit now employed officers and staff from all five areas, but there might be vacancies.

  Then Fry remembered that the Home Office funding package for EMSOU and the Regional Intelligence Unit had come to an end this year, leaving Derbyshire and the four other forces responsible for all future funding. Probably not many vacancies then.

  And then there were the effects of the recession. According to Human Resources, attrition rates had shown a sharp dip. That meant fewer officers leaving the job, and fewer openings to replace them. Candidates for recruitment to the police service were being told there were no vacancies at the moment due to the ‘economic conditions’.

  Normally, candidates who successfully completed a two-day recruitment process and achieved a mark of at least sixty per cent in the National Recruiting Standards test were given a start date to attend their first day of training. But for some time now, such candidates had been told that their applications were going to be rescinded, and there would be no start dates for at least two
years.

  So a move back to the West Midlands, which had looked so easy a couple of months ago, was becoming a distant hope.

  How many years had she been in Derbyshire now? Well, it was too many, anyway. Far too long since that transfer from Birmingham had brought her here, and a return to her old patch was way overdue.

  Trouble was, while she waited, she was afraid she was losing her edge. After a while, you began to find yourself accepting second best.

  Fry looked at her companion as he drained his drink.

  ‘Better get back, I suppose.’

  5

  There were older properties in Riddings, though they only dated from the first decade of the nineteenth century. Not old at all in Derbyshire terms. The Iron Age settlements on the moor above the edge made these cottages on The Green look almost futuristic.

  To reach number four Chapel Close, Cooper had to park on The Green, leaving the Toyota angled awkwardly on the verge, right up against the steel posts that prevented him getting any further off the road. He supposed there would be complaints, but in Riddings it couldn’t be helped.

  At least Barry Gamble was home now. He looked innocently surprised when he was asked where he’d been, as if he had no idea that anyone would want to speak to him again. He’d done his bit, and that was it. Cooper was amazed how often he had to disillusion people in these circumstances. Surely everyone must know by now that it wasn’t so simple?

  ‘I’m afraid not, Mr Gamble. There will probably be a lot more questions.’

  ‘Well, I suppose I’m an important witness.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  Gamble had bushy eyebrows that made him look as though he was permanently peering through a hedge. He wore a cowboy hat pulled too low, making his ears stick out, and he carried a stout walking stick, though Cooper could see no sign of a limp. When Gamble turned to lead him into the house, Cooper saw tufts of hair sprouting from his ears to match his eyebrows. The crown of the cowboy hat was circled by wooden beads.

  ‘The Barrons,’ said Gamble. ‘You’ll want to know everything I can tell you about the Barrons.’

  ‘Well, you and …’