Dying to Sin

‘No, you’re wrong.’

‘Oh dear. It doesn’t fit the image, does it? Had you built up some nice, rosy picture of Angie and Di settling down together, sharing girly chats about boyfriends and babies? Holding each other’s hands when we need a good cry, giggling in bed together over a couple of good books? It ain’t going to happen, Sis. So it’s about time you faced up to the real world.’

‘Look, I know you’ve changed. God knows, I’ve made allowances for that. All those years we were apart, we were bound to go our different ways –’

‘Changed? You’re damn right. Yes, I’m the one who’s grown up. I grew up a long time ago.’

‘Oh, yes? Using heroin isn’t a sign of being grown up, you know.’

‘Fuck off.’

Diane took a step forward. She saw Angie begin to edge towards the door, and realized that her sister was actually scared of her. The physical outburst a few minutes ago had taken Angie by surprise and frightened her a little. She, too, had things to discover about her kid sister that she might not like very much.

‘Come on, we can make this work, Angie. We just have to be honest with each other.’

‘Oh, and you want me to go first, right? Confession time, is it? “Come on, dear, tell the nice police officer everything you know. How about the names and addresses of all your friends for a start?” Di, you’re just not getting it, are you?’

Diane didn’t answer. Second by second, she was watching their relationship turn round, seeing her big sister become more and more uneasy in her presence, like a guilty child. For the first time in her life, Diane felt as though she was the one with the power. In some way, she had the ability to affect Angie’s life, instead of the other way about. She knew this, but she didn’t understand why. And the knowledge didn’t make her feel any better.

Angie looked at her uncertainly, pulling on her jacket. ‘I’m off to work, then.’

‘You can’t escape for ever. We’ll have to sort things out between us some time soon.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Whatever you say.’

As she watched Angie sneak towards the door, Diane found herself torn by conflicting impulses – a desire to bring her sister closer, but the urge to hurt her at the same time.

‘There’s one thing you’re just not getting either, Angie,’ she said.

‘Tell me about it some other time.’

Then her sister had slipped out of the room, and her feet were clattering on the stairs as she ran towards the front door.

Diane stood at the top of the stairs, unable to control something inside her that refused to let go of the argument.

‘And why did you go to Ben Cooper?’ she shouted. ‘Right at the beginning, why did you go to him?’

Angie stopped, but only to shout back. ‘Because he cares about people.’

‘Oh, yes? Well, I care about people, too. I just don’t care about you.’

As soon as the front door slammed, Diane had begun to regret her last words. But it was too late by then.

She glared at one of the students from the next flat, who’d stuck her head round the corner to see what was going on. As the student disappeared, Diane wondered whether she might ever get another chance to tell Angie what it was that she just wasn’t getting.

Diane went back into the flat and began to pick up the cushions that had been knocked on the floor. She was surprised by how much mess there was, almost as if the place had been broken into and ransacked. If it had been a crime scene she was visiting, she would have said there was evidence of a violent altercation.

Was the heroin still the problem with Angie? She didn’t think so, but addicts did need large amounts of money on a regular basis. Many women were out there on the streets to feed their habit, and for no other reason. Heroin or crack cocaine, or both. OK, drugs might not have put them on the street in the first place, but it was heroin that kept them there.

Diane knew that drug dealers from the big cities had moved into smaller towns like Edendale years ago. You could find drugs everywhere, pretty much anything you wanted. They were cheap, too. Perhaps it was some kind of marketing ploy to expand the customer base, but intelligence showed that Edendale was one of the least expensive towns in the country for buying drugs. Last she heard, heroin was going for about twenty pounds a bag.

It had just gradually crept in, that link between heroin and prostitution. Now it was unbreakable. The vicious circle was in play.

Diane was surprised by a sudden taste in her mouth. Dark, bitter, comforting. It was a very familiar taste, so full of memories that it seemed to sum up the whole of her life, all the low points and loneliest moments encapsulated in one brief tingle of the taste buds.

It was the return of her old craving for chocolate, and the familiarity was so intense it was almost shocking. She hadn’t thought about the craving for months, not really. But some residual instinct had leaked into the nerve endings of her mouth, triggered by a moment of stress.

It wasn’t so easy to get rid of an addiction. It could still creep up and surprise you long after you thought you’d beaten it. It lurked in your body and waited for a moment of weakness. But Diane Fry knew she wasn’t weak, not any more.

Addictions were for everyone else, but not for her.

7 (#uf6d6d0cd-8496-5b2a-9e54-a1361606c8cd)

Friday

Jamie Ward woke up late next day. For a while, he lay in bed listening for noises in the house, or in the street outside, not sure what he was expecting to hear. His parents’ semi-detached was in a comfortable suburb of Edendale, close to the best secondary school and the nicest church. There was rarely anything interesting to hear. The sirens were always across town, on the housing estates.

At first, Jamie’s mind shied away from remembering the day before, but gradually the memories crept back. All the details were still there, fresh and vivid. The mud, the police, the argument. The hand.

And then he had a sudden conviction that this couldn’t just be a normal day, not after what had happened at Pity Wood Farm. It was inconceivable that life would go on in its ordinary, routine way. Getting up, having breakfast, going for a jog, phoning his mates for a chat. It just wouldn’t feel right.

Jamie went into the bathroom and found his muddy jeans on top of the laundry basket. The first day he’d turned up for work at the building site, he’d been wearing his trainers. His second best pair, not the cool ones he went out with his friends in. And Nikolai had laughed at him. So had all the other blokes, though not quite so obviously.

‘Little Jamie, do you want to lose your toes?’ Nikolai had said, lighting up a Benson and Hedges and blowing the smoke towards his feet. ‘Boy, you won’t last a day on my site. We’ll find you some proper boots, OK?’

‘OK, Nikolai.’

‘Call me Nik.’

Most of what had gone on at the site was a mystery to Jamie. The brickies and carpenters and plasterers were skilled men who worked quickly and often silently, wielding specialist tools he didn’t even know the names for.

Some of it was obvious – the trenches dug for the new drains, the gravel laid for site access. But a few things had been odd. If he’d felt more comfortable with the other men, he would have asked them the reasons for things they did. Jamie knew that you should ask if you didn’t understand something, and not worry about looking stupid. If you didn’t ask questions, you’d never know the answers, and that was more stupid, wasn’t it?

The only good thing about the way he’d been treated on the site was that Nikolai and the men hadn’t always worried about whether he was hanging around with them, or how hard he was working.

Jamie showered and hunted out some clean clothes. Then he went to find his mother, to see if he could borrow her car to drive over to Rakedale.

Cooper arrived at work that morning to find forty-three new emails in his inbox. No spam, no jokes, no personal emails – in accordance with force policy, the IT department had blocked all those. No, these forty-three were all work-related. Not necessarily related to his own work, of course. Unfortunately, he had to open every one of them and read it all the way through before he could be sure it wasn’t relevant to him.

Today, he’d received a fairly typical batch. There were the usual requests from the Criminal Justice Unit for completed statements and copies of notebook entries. There was a series of directives and advisory notices from the senior management team, many of them related to key performance indicators. He had a couple of emails from the Police Federation, and there were notifications of five entirely new policies and procedures, all with start dates in the next month.

Each new policy had accompanying documents, which he was supposed to study and learn, then apply. He didn’t know where to begin. But some desk jockey would be appointed as a compliance officer to monitor the new policies, so he’d have to get up to speed.

Now and then, Cooper kept some congratulatory emails about the force’s Investors in People and Work Life Balance Awards. Just in case he needed cheering up some time.

‘Happiness is an empty inbox,’ said Murfin.

‘Emails?’