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

by Stephen Booth

  DNA and trace evidence had gone to the lab. Normally, results would take a week, but the extra expense had been approved to make them a rush job, so they might expect something within forty-eight hours or so.

  Fingerprints ought to be back tomorrow, even with a complete search of the national database. It was good to have a shortlist of suspects to compare prints against, but there was no list in this case, not even a shortlist of one.

  ‘It’ll be the husband,’ said Murfin as the briefing came to an end. ‘You’ll see, it’s always the husband.’

  ‘The husband is in hospital with serious head injuries,’ pointed out Cooper.

  ‘That’s a minor quibble.’

  ‘You don’t believe in the Savages, then?’

  Murfin snorted. ‘There are plenty of savages out there. Some of them work in this building. Have you seen that custody sergeant?’

  ‘Are you with us on this, Gavin? Because it has to be everyone pulling together.’

  Murfin looked startled. ‘Of course. I was only kidding.’

  ‘Yeah, okay.’

  Murfin was still regarding him curiously.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve never noticed before,’ said Murfin.

  ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘Since you got to be DS, I’ve never noticed how much you’re starting to sound like Diane Fry.’

  The divisional CID teams would get the legwork, of course. As expected, Cooper was put in charge of house-to-house in Riddings. The SIO wanted a detailed map of the village showing all the properties near the Barrons, every lane, every footpath and every rabbit track. The attackers must have approached and left by some route, however obscure. And with a bit of luck, someone might have seen them.

  ‘If they knew the area, they must have been in the village before,’ said Cooper, as Irvine came over to join them. ‘An earlier visit to get an idea of the layout, the routes in and out. Make sure you ask about the last few weeks. Any strangers acting in a suspicious manner, or asking questions. They might have posed as inquisitive hikers, or as potential house buyers looking to move into the village. You know the sort of thing, some trick to get information out of the residents.’

  ‘The thing is,’ said Irvine, ‘you can get a lot of what you need online these days. All they had to do was log in to Google Street View. And there are plenty of aerial maps on the internet.’

  An aerial view was of limited use, though. It might show you the layout of buildings and where driveways ran. But it didn’t tell you anything about the lie of the land, whether you would be hidden from view by those trees, what windows were on this side of the house, whether there was a dip in the terrain to conceal your approach, or would you be marching downhill in full view of the whole world?

  So what about Street View? But that only showed the public roads. And in Riddings, the view of many of the properties was hidden from the Google camera van. If Cooper was a burglar, he thought, he wasn’t sure he would get what he needed from it.

  ‘If we can pin down where everyone was and what they saw,’ he said, ‘we might get an angle on the route the attackers took. In and out. We’ve got the approximate times.’

  ‘They must have used a vehicle, surely,’ said Irvine.

  ‘If they did, it wasn’t on the Barrons’ property. The gates were closed, and they can only be opened from inside. There’s a lane running along the back here, though. It borders on part of the Barrons’ property. It’s only a track really, but it would be possible to get a vehicle up there.’

  ‘Who else in the village knew the Barrons?’ asked Irvine.

  ‘Uniforms are doing a trawl right now,’ said Murfin. ‘But my guess is that it’ll be a short list.’

  ‘What about this Barry Gamble? First on the scene, and all that. He has to come into the frame. Did he have a justification for being at Valley View?’

  ‘We’ll be talking to him again today, Luke,’ said Cooper.

  Zoe Barron’s sister was on TV, being interviewed on behalf of the family. It was a routine that seemed to be demanded by the media after any personal tragedy.

  ‘She was a good mother, and a good wife. A very bright, loving woman. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. If she hadn’t disturbed those intruders, she would still be alive and with us today.’

  ‘Did she disturb them?’ said Cooper afterwards. ‘Is that the way it went?’

  Murfin shrugged. ‘They came in across the decking and through the back door into the utility room.’

  ‘Yes, they came into the kitchen, where Zoe was already standing. They came to her, not the other way round. Something about that doesn’t feel right. And, as I asked before, what’s missing?’

  ‘A motive,’ said Murfin. ‘That’s what’s missing.’

  ‘Not to mention a clear idea of how they got in and out,’ added Irvine.

  ‘Right. All we have on that are the views of the loony tendency.’

  There were certainly plenty of theories being floated around, if you followed the news sites on the internet, or simply did a Google search. After the attack on Valley View, some members of the public suggested the attackers must have abseiled down the rock face like the SAS. Others claimed they flew in by hang-glider launched from the edge. They didn’t bother to explain what had happened to the glider after it had landed in the Barrons’ garden.

  The thought of Google made Cooper remember the biblical reference carved into the stone below Curbar Gap. He didn’t need to find someone with a Bible, of course. Google could come up with it for him in an instant.

  He typed in Isaiah 1:18, and the quotation appeared:

  Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD:

  though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow;

  though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.

  Wool? He was puzzling over the simile when DI Hitchens appeared by his desk.

  ‘Ben, you’ve got a new addition to your team,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘She’s just on her way up from reception.’

  Cooper had been waiting for a new recruit ever since he’d become DS. He’d been starting to think that it would be a long wait. Cost-cutting meant that staff wouldn’t be replaced. ‘Natural wastage’ it was called. Nobody had said anything, but he knew how these things were done. Now it seemed that he’d been wrong.

  Murfin grinned at him and tapped the side of his nose.

  ‘Gavin, do you know something?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘My lips are sealed.’

  ‘Mr Hitchens said she. Tell me it’s not Diane Fry come back to join us.’

  Murfin’s laugh was more of a hysterical bark, too high-pitched and nervous for genuine amusement.

  ‘Oh God. Shoot me now if it is.’

  Hitchens came back into the room.

  ‘Ben, this is your new colleague, DC Villiers.’

  Cooper stood up, ready to hold out a hand in greeting. But he froze when he saw who was with Hitchens, walking calmly into the CID room with a smile. She was a bit older, leaner, more tanned than when he’d last seen her. And there was something else different, an air of confidence, a firm angle to her jaw and a self-assurance in the way she held her head. Her pale hair was pulled back from her face now. But he recognised her immediately.

  ‘Carol,’ he said.

  ‘Hello, Ben. It’s been a long time.’

  9

  Riddings had originally consisted of a dozen estate workers’ cottages, built by a local landowning duke. Not the Duke of Devonshire, for once, but some rival aristocrat. The Duke of Rutland, perhaps. One of those people.

  He had also built a tiny Wesleyan Reform chapel in the village, but there was no parish church. Several villages in this area were served by All Saints down the hill at Curbar, with its four-hundred-year-old poor box and Jacobean pulpit of black bog oak.

  ‘It seems strange,’ said Cooper. ‘Strange that we’re colleagues now. Last time we spoke,
you were in the RAF Police.’

  He’d taken Carol Villiers with him from Edendale to ease her into the inquiry, and they were parked up in the centre of the village on The Green, near the horse trough. It felt odd having her sitting next to him in the car. They had gone to school together, studied for their A levels at High Peak College at the same time, got a bit drunk with a group of mates in a local pub when they received their results. She had been a good friend, to whom he’d been sorry to say goodbye. Her parents lived in Tideswell, so it was a bit of a surprise that he hadn’t heard she was back in the area.

  Seeing her earlier, Cooper’s mind had been thrown back several years, to the time when he’d seen another new DC coming towards him from the far end of the CID room. She had moved with a cool deliberateness, not meeting his eye, but glancing from side to side as she walked past the desks. He remembered thinking she was far too slim – slimmer than he’d grown up expecting women to be. His mother would have said she was sickening for something. Yet she had possessed a wiry look that suggested she was no weakling, no wilting violet. And so she had proved. That had been Diane Fry.

  Carol Villiers was completely different. Isabel Cooper would have approved of her, for a start. She looked strong and fit, a woman who worked out in the gym regularly two or three times a week, and never found an excuse to miss. She had an outdoor colour too, not the deathly pallor he remembered when Fry first came. And her attitude was confident, but not belligerent. He felt no hostile vibes. He knew immediately that she didn’t need to be aggressive in her style. Her self-confidence went deeper.

  ‘Yes, I was an RAFP corporal,’ said Villiers. ‘Here. This is me as a Snowdrop.’

  She showed him a photograph of her in her uniform, with black and red flashes, her corporal’s stripes on her sleeve, an MP badge, and a white top to her military cap. The cap was what gave the RAFP their nickname.

  Cooper remembered her back in their school days as a lively, sports-obsessed girl who was also surprisingly ready to let her hair down. She had been into swimming and running half-marathons, had talked a lot about some female role models who had been prominent in athletics at the time, but whose names he had now forgotten.

  And she hadn’t been called Villiers in those days either. She had been Carol Parry, the daughter of Stan and Vera Parry, who ran a bed and breakfast in Tideswell High Street.

  ‘I knew you were planning to join the police when you left the forces,’ said Cooper. ‘But I didn’t recognise the surname. Villiers? What happened?’

  ‘I got married,’ she said simply.

  ‘Oh.’

  For a few moments they sat in silence, watching Riddings quietly coming to life. Opposite The Green there were still some of the original cottages standing near the chapel. But over the years, the older part of the village had been swamped by all those expensive detached houses, their paddocks and gardens carving out the lower slopes below Riddings Edge.

  Cooper looked around him at the narrow lanes, no more than a car’s width, the stones embedded in the grass verges, the women walking their dogs, the high banks of trees screening every house. It wasn’t the best place for surveillance. A stranger sitting in a car stood out like a sore thumb. Indeed, there was hardly anywhere to park without blocking up the whole village. And all those trees hiding the big houses meant you couldn’t see a thing anyway.

  A visible police presence? You could drive a marked response vehicle up and down these lanes all day with its beacons flashing like Blackpool Illuminations, and no one would even see it from behind those hedges and walls.

  ‘I never heard about the marriage, Carol. You kept it pretty quiet. Who is he? Someone you met in the RAF?’

  ‘Yes, he was a colleague.’

  Cooper hesitated. He caught the word ‘was’ and the tone of voice that went with it. He’d heard them often enough from the families of victims.

  ‘Here.’

  Another photograph. Carol again. But next to her was a tall, well-built man in a similar uniform. He had taken off a pair of sunglasses, which dangled from one hand, and was staring into the camera lens with eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun. Behind them, Cooper could see the background of a military compound – vehicles, stores, a high boundary wall. The ground was dry and dusty, baked by heat. He could almost feel the grittiness of the sand on his skin.

  ‘That’s Glen.’

  ‘Your husband?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Cooper hadn’t really needed to ask. His eyes had been drawn directly to the name badge stitched on the man’s uniform. Villiers, it said. Carol’s badge was marked Parry.

  ‘Before you were married, though.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You look happy.’

  ‘We were. Very happy.’

  She had certainly changed a lot, but Cooper realised he’d noticed it happening a while ago. On the few occasions he’d seen her or spoken to her in the intervening years, the old Carol Parry had developed a brisk professional air, a confidence that few of his old school friends possessed. He supposed that was what the services did for you, instilled discipline and self-confidence. Especially if you had a team looking to you for decisions, men and women you were responsible for.

  But now there was an extra dimension – a shadow in her eyes, a darkness behind the professional façade. He’d noticed it straight away when DI Hitchens had brought her into the CID room in Edendale this morning. He’d looked into her eyes and seen a different Carol Parry. Part of that darkness might be explained by the loss of her husband. And perhaps there were other experiences, too, that she would be unwilling to talk about.

  Cooper wondered if she was still the ‘work hard, play hard’ type. It seemed to go with the territory, when he thought of the squaddies in garrison towns getting drunk and picking fights with the locals. They came back from a conflict zone and needed to let off steam.

  But Carol had served as an MP. It had been part of her job to control those drunken squaddies, surely? Or whatever their equivalent was in the RAF. That had to be good practice for dealing with some of the customers they scooped up for a spell in the custody suite.

  ‘I was aiming to come to E Division anyway, if I could,’ said Villiers. ‘But they moved my posting forward a bit, in view of the major inquiry you’ve got on here. I guess I was lucky to get in just before recruitment was frozen.’

  ‘We’re glad to have you,’ said Cooper. ‘Very glad. Especially right now.’

  ‘A detective sergeant, then? I always knew you’d get on. Nice to have you as my boss, Ben.’

  ‘Are you up to speed? Do you know what’s going on here?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve read the bulletins. Not to mention the news papers. It’s causing a lot of media attention, isn’t it?’

  ‘All these stories being put around are just frightening the public,’ said Cooper, shaking his head. ‘It’s making everyone unnecessarily paranoid. We ought to be calming the mood down, not allowing it to be whipped up.’

  ‘You can’t do anything about stories on the internet,’ said Villiers. ‘It’s unpoliceable. Like gossip over the garden wall, there’s no way of stopping it. Facebook and Twitter just make the stories spread all the faster.’

  ‘I know. But when people get as jumpy as this, something bad is likely to happen.’

  ‘Really?’

  Cooper started the car and drew away from kerb.

  ‘You’ll see,’ he said. ‘There’ll be some idiot who decides to take the law into his own hands, and a random passer-by will get hurt. It’s inevitable, the way things are going.’

  At Valley View, E Division’s Crime Scene Manager Wayne Abbott had just completed a full review of the Barrons’ security systems.

  Cooper introduced Abbott to Villiers, and asked him whether the Barrons had a monitored alarm system. False alarms had become so common that most police forces no longer attended call-outs from non-monitored systems, unless they also had first-hand indication of a crime in progress, either from the owne
r of the property or a member of the public. An alarm signal routed via a monitoring centre was a different matter.

  ‘Yes,’ said Abbott. ‘They have a monitored twenty-four-seven response system. There’s an external system panel, and a decoy siren box. A door entry system on the gate. Intruder alarms, passive infrared motion sensors, CCTV. They did pretty much everything they could.’

  ‘I thought most burglars avoided properties with an alarm system,’ said Villiers.

  ‘That’s because they don’t understand them, or don’t know how to do deal with them.’

  ‘So these were professionals? They knew how to disable the alarms?’

  ‘No,’ said Abbott. ‘They didn’t bother with that. They chose the other option. The one that’s only available if you’re completely ruthless and foolhardy.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘They came into the property before the alarms had been set. Simple when you think about it.’

  Villiers looked at Cooper. ‘But that could only have been when the occupants were at home, and before they’d gone to bed, too. They must have known people would be around.’

  ‘Exactly, Carol,’ said Cooper. ‘They didn’t care if they were seen by the family. They came in fully prepared to use violence. Probably planned it that way.’

  Abbott called back as he walked away: ‘Like I said, ruthless and foolhardy.’

  ‘You get an idea of what we’re up against now,’ said Cooper.

  Villiers looked grim. But she wasn’t shocked, didn’t start talking about how horrible it must have been for the family. Cooper wondered what she might have seen elsewhere that made the incident at Valley View seem unshocking.

  He took her inside the house, walking carefully on the stepping plates left by the scenes-of-crime team. Now that many of the crowd had left, it seemed very quiet inside Valley View. The windows were closed, and no sound penetrated from the garden. There was no birdsong, no sigh of the wind through the trees, no clang of karabiners from the climbers on the edge. It was good double-glazing, maybe even triple. The outside world was just that – sealed out.