LITMIR.BIZ

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enquiry team.

      The report didn’t take her long. She was a competent typist, and her note-taking was accurate and legible. She hesitated for only a moment when she reached the end of the interview, but decided to include the final comment from Harry Dickinson for the sake of completeness. As she wrote that Dickinson had told DCI Tailby to ‘bugger off’, she was surprised to find herself smiling. She quickly changed the expression to a grimace, then a frown, looking round the empty office to be sure that no one was watching her. It wasn’t her style to laugh at senior officers – she had never joined in the irreverent banter and rude jokes of the canteen, either here or at West Midlands. She couldn’t understand what there was about Harry Dickinson’s comment that could have made her smile.

      She printed out two copies of her notes and dropped one into the tray on DI Hitchens’s desk. Then she walked up to the incident room, where a DS and a computer operator were huddled together over a telephone and a screen full of data. They both ignored her as she cast around for the action file to insert the second copy of her report. She knew that, in the morning, when the regular day shift came on, the room would be buzzing with activity. From what she had seen of Tailby, she was sure he would be fully up to date and reminded of the details of the day by the time everyone arrived for briefing.

      Then, finally, there was nothing left for her to do. She shut the incident room door quietly and walked back down through the almost empty building to the car park.

      After she had deactivated the alarm on her black Peugeot, she stood for a moment, looking at the back wall of the police station. There was nothing at all to see, but for a few lighted windows, where shadowy outlines could be made out occasionally as officers went about their business. Probably some of them were resentful about being on duty when they would rather be at home with their families or out at the pub or whatever else police officers did in their free time. Fry guessed that very few of them would resent having to leave the station and go home. She started the Peugeot and drove too quickly out of the yard.

      In Edendale, as in any other small town, the evening often meant almost deserted streets for long periods, interrupted by straggling groups of young people heading for the pubs between eight and nine o’clock, and the same groups, stumbling now, returning home at half past eleven or looking for buses and taxis to take them on to night clubs or parties.

      Many of the youngsters who littered the streets at night were not only the worse for drink, but were also plainly underage. Diane Fry knew enough to turn a blind eye when she passed them. Every police officer would do so, unless some other offence was being committed – an assault, a breach of the peace, abusive language or indecent exposure. Underage drinking could only be tackled in the pubs themselves, and there were always more urgent things to do, always other priorities.

      Today was Monday, and even the young people were thin on the ground as Fry drove down Greaves Road towards the town centre. She circled the roundabout at the end of the pedestrianized shopping area and automatically looked to her right down Clappergate. There were lights on in the windows of Boots the Chemists and McDonald’s, where three youths slouched against the black cast-iron street furniture, eating Chicken McNuggets and large fries prior to adding their cartons to the debris already littering the paving stones.

      Most of the shops were shrouded in darkness, abandoning the town to the pubs and restaurants. Fry had not yet got used to the mixture of shops in Edendale. By day, there was a small baker’s shop in Clappergate with wicker baskets and an ancient delivery boy’s bicycle strung with onions and a painted milk churn, all standing outside on the pavement. A few doors down was a New Age shop rich with the smell of aromatherapy oils and scented candles and the glint of crystals. In between them lay SpecSavers and the dry cleaners and a branch of the Derbyshire Building Society.

      Further along, on Hulley Road, a couple in their thirties stood looking into the darkened window of one of the estate agents near the market square. They were probably weighing up the prices of properties in Catch Wind and Pysenny Banks, the more picturesque and desirable parts of old Edendale, where the stonewalled streets were barely wide enough for a car and the river ran past front gardens filled with lobelias and lichen-covered millstones. Diane Fry wondered why the couple had chosen to visit the estate agent’s at night. Where were they going, where had they come from? What intimate plans were they making for themselves, the two of them together?

      She had to stop at the lights at the far end of the square. On her right, running down the hill, were steep cobbled alleys with names like Nimble John’s Gate and Nick i’th Tor. Narrow pubs and tea rooms and craft shops filled the corners of these alleys like latecomers crowding round the edges of the main shopping area. Of course, they really were latecomers – attracted by the twentieth-century influx of tourists rather than by the traditional trade of a market town.

      Fry had researched her new area, and knew that a fair share of the Peak District’s twenty-two million visitors found their way to Edendale each year, in one form or another. By day, the market square was frequently impassable because of the volume of traffic passing through or seeking parking spaces on the cobbles near the public toilets and the recycling skips.

      A huge Somerfield’s lorry rolled slowly across the junction, heading for the back of the supermarket that had recently opened on Fargate, replacing a derelict cotton mill. Beyond the junction, the Castleton Road began to climb past rows of pebble-dashed semis. On either side, close-packed residential areas spiralled up the hillsides, houses lining narrow, winding roads that took sudden twists and turns to follow the humps and hollows of the underlying contours. The roads were made even narrower up there by the cars parked nose to tail at the kerb, except on the worst of the bends. The bigger houses had made room for short drives and garages, but the humbler cottages had not been built for people with cars.

      Further out, the houses became newer as they got higher, though they were built of the same white stone. On the edge of town were small council estates where the streets were called ‘Closes’ and had grass verges. Finally, there was an area where the housing petered out in a scattering of smallholdings and small-scale dairy farms. In some places, it was difficult to see where town became country, with farm buildings converted into homes and mews-style developments, lying shoulder to shoulder with muddy crewyards, fields full of black and white cows and pervasive rural smells.

      Eventually, the pressure for more housing would force up the price of the farmland, and the town would continue its spread. But for now, Edendale was constrained in its hollow by the barrier of hills.

      Turning from Castleton Road into Grosvenor Avenue, Fry finally pulled up at the kerb outside number twelve. The house had once been solid and prosperous, just one detached Victorian villa in a tree-lined street. Its front door nestled in mock porticos, and the tiny bedsitters on the top floor were reached only by hidden servants’ staircases.

      Her own flat, on the first floor, consisted of a bedroom, sitting room, bathroom with shower cubicle and a tiny kitchen area. The wallpaper was striped in a faded shade of brown, and the pattern on the carpet was a complicated swirl of washed-out blues and pinks and yellows, as if designed to hide any substance spilt on it. Judging by the background smell, there must have been many things spilt in the flat over the years that she would not have liked to name. Most of the other occupants of the house were students at the High Peak College campus on the west side of town.

      Fry made herself cheese on toast and a cup of tea and took a Müller low-fat yoghurt from a fridge that smelled suspiciously of rotting fish and onions. No amount of cleaning had removed the smell, but in any case she intended to keep only a minimum amount of food in the fridge, preferring to visit the shops as often as required, glad to take any excuse to be out of the flat. There was an Asian corner shop a quarter of a mile away where the young couple behind the counter had seemed pleasant enough. A friendly greeting over the sliced bread and gold top could be welcome at times.

      After her meal, she spent ten minutes going through some gentle exercises, winding down from the day as she would after a practice session at the dojo, flexing her muscles and stretching her joints and limbs. Then she showered and put on her old black silk kimono with the Chinese dragon on the back and the Yin and Yang symbols on the breast.

      Tomorrow, she decided, she would make a

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