Lost River (20 page)

And getting girls off the streets of Birmingham only moved the problem from one place to another – in this case, the Black Country. Some said that Walsall had become the sex capital of the West Midlands.

‘How do we go about being unobtrusive in that area?’ said Diane. ‘Especially at this time of night. I’m not going to walk up and down Hagley Road like a prostitute. I couldn’t do it.’

Angie looked at her oddly. ‘I could.’

Diane studied her sister. A denial was on the tip of her tongue, but something made her stay silent. She was seeing Angie from a different perspective, picturing her standing on a street corner, looking available, trying to catch the eye of a passing motorist. Yes, she was right. Angie could do it, and wouldn’t look too out of place. Given the right clothes, anyway.

‘I know just what I’d need,’ said Angie.

‘Not for the first time, Diane wished her sister would stop reading her mind.

‘Forget it’, she said. ‘I’m going on my own anyway.’

At Five Ways, the road that had been Broad Street crossed the Middleway and became Hagley Road. This was the very northern end of Edgbaston, bordering on the reservoir – a long way from the cricket ground and the Priory Hospital.

J.R.R. Tolkien had lived around here somewhere. They said that the Two Towers were inspired by Perrott’s Folly and the nearby waterworks. There was a Tolkien Trail,
Lord of the Rings
postcards, and a Middle Earth weekend every May. Fry was glad she hadn’t arrived during that event. Imagine being surrounded by crowds of orcs and hobbits with bad breath and Birmingham accents. Wasn’t that one of Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell? Somewhere between Violence and Heresy.

As a rule, enthusiasms didn’t come naturally to Brummies. They were usually careful to avoid emotional extremes, an attitude reflected in their accent. Other urban voices sounded strident, but the natural Brummie tone hovered somewhere between bewilderment and despair. And that was an understandable way of looking at the world, when you thought about it.

Fry could see a couple of tom carders working the phone boxes, sticking up adverts for massages and personal services. There were plenty of people glad to earn a few quid for work
like that. So as quick as the council took them down, the cards were replaced. It was all the old stuff.

Andy Kewley called her back while she was standing outside a little Asian-run supermarket called Safebury’s.

‘I’ll talk,’ he said. ‘But not on the phone, obviously. I want to tell you about William Leeson.’

‘What is it about this Leeson?’

‘He’s the man who’s up to his neck in everything. It’s amazing that he’s survived this long, to be honest. I’d like to see you bring him down, Diane. You could be the person to do it.’

‘Okay. When do you want to meet?’

‘Tonight. Late, while there’s no one about.’

‘Andy, you’re getting really paranoid.’

‘You understand, Diane,’ said Kewley. ‘You know the score.’

‘No, I don’t think I do. Explain it to me.’

‘Well, you know what they say about things you don’t like being generally best swept under the carpet?’

‘I don’t have carpets in my house, Andy. I like nice, clean tiles.’

‘Diane, I want to help, I really do. But there are complications. Just take what I can give you and accept it as it’s intended. Don’t ask me too many questions. Trust me, it’s for the best.’

Fry grimaced. There was that word again. Trust. She had a negative reaction every time she heard it.

She sighed. ‘It’s the cemetery again, I suppose?’

‘Unless you’ve got a better idea.’

‘Oh, no. It’s becoming my favourite place.’

Tanya Spiers had an address in a City Estates flat near Perrott’s Folly. As Fry passed the Church of the Redeemer, a black youth stopped her to ask for twenty pence to buy a bag of rice at Safebury’s. For once, she forked out. It was a novel excuse, and twenty pence was hardly enough reward for his imagination. There was always a chance that he was telling the truth, too.

A powerful smell of blossom reached her from the gardens around Perrott’s Folly, reminding her of the cemetery at Warstone Lane.

At least these weren’t tower blocks. These flats were built on a more human scale. But Tanya Spiers wasn’t home – or at least wasn’t answering her door. Maybe she took a pill and slept through the day.

Fry pulled out one of her cards and scribbled a message on the back before pushing it through the letter box. The steel flap was on a powerful spring. The slam as it closed echoed mockingly down the hall.

Outside the flats, a familiar silver grey Hyundai was parked at the kerb under a streetlight. Detective Sergeant Gorpal Sandhu leaned against the bonnet, his arms folded, a smile on his face. DI Gareth Blake was in the passenger seat, his mobile phone to his ear.

Coming face to face with Sandhu reminded Fry guiltily of what Andy Kewley had said in Warstone Lane cemetery about some of the Asian officers here in the West Midlands. Had he been hinting something about DS Sandhu in particular? Or was it just part of the smokescreen created by his obsessions?

‘We want a word,’ said Sandhu. ‘Please get in the car.’

Blake’s face was creased with concern, his eyes steady and sincere. Fry recognized that expression. This was the face of the caring, sharing, modern police service. A face that couldn’t always be believed.

‘Diane, you know the department really wants to be supportive. Especially in the circumstances…’

‘Thanks. Although I think I hear a “but” coming.’

‘Well, we were wondering…I mean, to put it bluntly, why are you still here? We thought you would have headed back to Derbyshire by now. Isn’t your BCU missing you? I imagine they’re always short-staffed up there in the sticks.’

‘Oh, they’re coping,’ said Fry. ‘In fact, I’m sure some of them will be quite happy to have me out of the way for a while.’

Blake smiled. ‘Oh, is someone stepping up in your place? I should watch your back, if I were you, Diane. That’s always good advice.’

Fry looked away. Gareth Blake was no fool. She’d almost forgotten that. Like all the best detectives, he could read between the lines. And he could listen between the words, too. Damn it, she’d have to be more careful.

‘I don’t get back here very often,’ she said. ‘I’ve just been catching up with a few people. West Midlands Police don’t have any objections to that, do they?’

‘No, of course not. In fact, it might help you, Diane. Help to put things behind you, I mean.’

Was it her imagination, or did he put a little more emphasis on the phrase ‘behind you’ than was strictly necessary, or natural? Fry felt she was being given a hint. A gentle hint for now, but it might turn into a warning very quickly.

‘You know what it’s like with people from your past. When you meet them again, you remember why you didn’t keep in touch with them. You realize you have nothing in common.’

‘That’s right. You’ve moved on, Diane. That’s good. A nice, clean break is probably best for all concerned.’

Fry opened the door and stood on the pavement. She watched them drive away before she went back to her own car. Best for all concerned? Was it? She was sure there were some people who’d be very happy if she just gave up and walked away. DI Gareth Blake might be among them. So why was he warning her off, yet helping her covertly at the same time?

And how could Blake have known that she would be in Edgbaston? Surely he wasn’t having her followed? She would have noticed – her guard wasn’t down that much. And besides, he would never have got surveillance approved. She knew
how these things worked. There was no justification for such an operation, let alone enough spare cash in the budget. Unless Blake had been following her himself on some lone crusade, it was impossible. And he wasn’t the loner type.

So who was he in contact with who might have been giving him information?

Well, there was only one person. And if she couldn’t trust her own sister, who could she trust?

The frustration that was growing inside her made Fry feel reckless. If she wasn’t very careful, she would do something stupid. There was no one here to restrain her, to offer the quiet word of advice, or make the sensible suggestion.

In Derbyshire, a Traffic unit had taken a shout on the Ml. Several calls had come in that night reporting an obstruction on the northbound carriageway, midway between junctions 28 and 29.

Ben Cooper heard the news on his radio as he was leaving West Street. He’d been working late into the evening, trying to catch up with all the jobs he hadn’t done, and perhaps not wanting to go home. He’d phoned Mrs Shelley and asked her to go round and feed the cat. At least that was one thing he wouldn’t have to feel too guilty about.

But the message about the motorway incident caught his attention. Last time an obstruction was reported on the Ml, it turned out to be a human body. Admittedly, it would have been almost unrecognizable by the time the later callers saw it. The log had showed eight minutes thirty seconds between the initial call and the final one, when the first response car was already on the scene.

Cooper had still been in uniform then, just on the point of transferring to CID. He and his partner had been diverted to the scene to help out. It had been evening rush hour, he remembered. From the squashed and bloodied look of the body, it seemed that every vehicle in the middle lane had hit it before
Traffic officers managed to close the carriageway. By then, it was just another bit of roadkill stirring gently in the slipstream of a lorry.

‘A drunk,’ one of the Traffic officers had said. ‘Drunks and motorways are a bad mix.’

Then Cooper found himself being called up on the radio by the control room.

‘Traffic have an incident on the motorway, between junctions 29 and 30.’

‘I heard,’ said Cooper. ‘But that’s C Division. What has it got to do with me?’

‘Your attendance has been specifically requested, DS Cooper.’

‘I’m on my way.’

Cooper jumped into his car and headed out of Edendale. Frowning, he contacted the Traffic officer whose name he’d been given by Control, the officer in charge at the scene. It was a man he knew, a long-serving member of the Roads Policing Unit who had probably been present at similar incidents, possibly even the one that Cooper remembered.

‘Another one?’ he said. ‘A jumper? Between 28 and 29?’

‘It’s that bridge on the B road near Tibshelf Services. Do you know where I mean?’

‘Newton Wood Lane?’ said Cooper.

‘That’s the one. It’s the quietest spot you can pick, if you’re really going to do it. The bridge on the A3 8 is bigger, but it’s much too busy. You’re likely to get some Good Samaritan stopping and interfering.’

‘It still has nothing to do with me,’ said Cooper, but less certainly.

‘We were lucky. We got an ID straight away.’

‘An ID on the body?’

‘No, he hasn’t actually jumped yet. You know what it’s like, Ben – we got a load of contradictory reports and it came out all garbled. We arrived expecting a dead one, and he’s very much alive.’

‘And now…?’

‘And now he’s on the bridge, and he’s threatening to jump any minute. He says his name is Sean Deacon.’

‘Oh,’ said Cooper. ‘So it
is
to do with me, after all.’

Sean Deacon had resisted all attempts to talk him down from the parapet of the bridge. He was precariously balanced, and everyone could see that a move too close would send him over. Bizarrely, Deacon had a briefcase clutched in one hand, the other braced against the top of the parapet, which was barely wide enough to stand on.

‘We’ve closed the outside lane underneath him,’ said an officer in a yellow high-vis jacket. ‘But it won’t do him much good if he goes over.’

A few yards away, paramedics were waiting, and a crew in a fire-and-rescue appliance. It was clear that Deacon had been waiting for Cooper to arrive. He smiled briefly when he saw Cooper approaching the bridge, walking into the headlights of a police car.

And then Deacon jumped to his feet, ran ten yards towards the opposite carriageway, balancing like a tightrope walker, before leaping out into the air over the motorway. He seemed to glide through the air, his silhouette caught in the flickering lights of the oncoming traffic, his jacket opening out around him like wings. For that one moment, he was a bird soaring.

Cooper began to run across the bridge, footsteps pounding after him. He saw Deacon’s briefcase falling into the traffic, picked out by the headlights of a lorry, bouncing and cart-wheeling, forcing cars to swerve in a terrible cacophony of horns and screeching tyres.

Deacon had taken them all by surprise. He’d run so far along the parapet and jumped so hard that he’d landed on the grass banking just beyond the hard shoulder. For a moment, Cooper glimpsed him, crumpled against the base of a tree. Incredibly, he still seemed to be alive. Perhaps the undergrowth
had softened his landing. Cooper saw him beginning to move, to sit up against the trunk, a hand pushing himself off the ground, his white face staring into a blinding light.

Then something hit the tree with a shocking impact. Cooper could tell from the noise that it was more than just metal hitting solid wood. It was more like the crunch of a boot crushing a snail. Splintered shell and ruptured flesh. The sound turned his stomach.

When they scrambled down the banking, the emergency services found Sean Deacon pinned to the tree by the grille of a Transit van that had swerved off the carriageway. A paramedic went to him, shook her head at Cooper, opened her kit, and injected Deacon with painkiller.

‘Why did you do this, Sean?’ asked Cooper.

‘I just came to the end of the line,’ he said. ‘There’s no point in going on. It’s better this way.’

Cooper didn’t know what to say. Deacon gripped his arm.

‘Can I tell you something?’ he said.

‘Of course. Anything.’

‘I never intended to do any harm.’

And somehow, Cooper knew that he meant it.

He held Deacon’s hand so tightly that it would have been painful, if it hadn’t been for the diamorphine flooding through the man’s collapsing veins.

‘Let it go, Sean,’ he said. ‘Let it go. It’ll be all right.’

Finally, he felt the grip relax. Deacon released a long, rattling breath that came from deep inside his body somewhere. It was more than just carbon dioxide escaping from the lungs, more than just a simple exhalation. It was the dying breath.

‘Let it go. Don’t struggle, just let it go.’

Cooper looked up at the paramedic and stood aside for her. His mind numb, he began to walk away, with no idea where he was heading, just walking away from the scene. Don’t look back, he thought. There’s no need to look back.

Behind him, he heard the fire and rescue service start up
their cutters. It was too late for Sean now, but it had to be done. All these things had to be done.

At the top of the banking, he reached a fence, and stopped. The Derbyshire landscape stretched out in front of him – the village of Tibshelf, Woolley Moor, and the higher hills around Matlock in the distance. Roads glittered like strings of jewels as they snaked across the moors. Villages lay sleeping in the darkness all across the Peak District.