‘Right.’
She laughed. ‘You’re all the same.’
‘Who?’
‘The police. You look down so much on the media. Until you want our help with something. An appeal to the public, an e-fit of a wanted man. Oh, then we’re all supposed to be on the same side. But when we want information from you, the barriers go up. Then you pull that disapproving face and say we’re not helping the situation. You say we’re sensationalising.’
‘I don’t have a disapproving face,’ said Cooper. ‘Do I?’
She took a drink to hide her expression behind the glass. ‘Well, perhaps not as much as some I could mention. I’ve met Superintendent Hazel Branagh.’
Cooper stifled a smile. ‘Oh, have you?’
‘It was at some civic do. She was being all smiling and matey with the dignitaries, but when she found out who I was, she looked as though she’d just sucked on a lemon.’
‘We’re not all like that. But some police officers have had a bad experience with the press during the course of their careers. We learn to be cautious. We definitely learn not to say too much.’
‘Or not to say anything at all,’ said Byrne.
‘Not quite, surely?’
She put down her glass and positioned it carefully on a coaster, wiping off a mist of condensation.
‘My dad was a local newspaper journalist too. Old school. He ended up as a subeditor on the Sheffield Star. He once told me that when he was a trainee reporter, if he had the police stories to cover, he actually went round to the police station every morning and spoke to the desk sergeant. That was when there were such things as desk sergeants, of course. The sergeant would look in the incident book and tell him what had happened overnight. And because they spoke every morning, they got to know each other. So if the sergeant was busy, he just gave Dad the incident book to read for himself. It’s a question of trust, you see.’
‘That was, what? The seventies?’
‘I suppose so. Dixon of Dock Green might still have been on the telly.’
‘It wouldn’t happen now.’
‘Too true. The reporters on police calls now never see a police officer, let alone get to know one. They never go inside a police station, either. All they do is make a phone call and get a recorded message. There’s absolutely no personal contact, and no trust. My dad pulls his hair out when I tell him what it’s like now.’
‘My dad would, too,’ said Cooper.
She opened her mouth as if to ask him about his father. But perhaps she read something in his face, because she kept the question to herself. That required quite a lot of self-control for a journalist.
‘Anyway, enough of that,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you don’t want to listen to me moaning. This is what you wanted to see.’
She handed Cooper a clear plastic wallet containing a single sheet of paper and an envelope. The note itself was crudely written. He might actually have said drawn rather than written. It looked as if it had been scrawled in felt-tip pen by a clumsy child. Just one sentence.
‘Sheffeild Rode,’ he said thoughtfully.
‘I know it’s crude,’ said Byrne. ‘And illiterate, too.’
‘Sheffield isn’t all that difficult a word to spell, surely.’
‘It could be written by someone whose first language isn’t English?’
‘Maybe. And what’s this symbol?’
The note was accompanied by a rudimentary sketch – a short horizontal line with an arrow beneath it, pointing to the centre of the line. If it was supposed to represent a road, with a particular house indicated on it, the sketch was worse than useless. But perhaps it wasn’t that at all. It looked more symbolic than representational.
‘I don’t know,’ said Byrne. ‘No one in the office could identify it.’
‘And you didn’t look it up?’
‘We’d normally do a Google search, of course. But there’s no way of entering a picture as a search term. No way that I know of, anyway.’
‘No, that’s right.’
‘So without a clue what to look for, we were a bit stumped. That’s why my editor agreed we should pass it to you. On the understanding that we, you know…’
‘Get some information in return?’
‘Yes. Or at least a bit of a head-start on the nationals when there’s a breakthrough.’
Cooper nodded. ‘I understand.’
‘So, what are you going to do? Raid all the houses on Sheffield Road?’
He laughed. ‘I would have difficulty justifying that on the grounds of an anonymous message.’
‘Yes, I see the problem.’
‘But we can get it forensically examined. Something might emerge.’
‘I’ll leave it with you, then.’
Cooper looked at her as she got ready to leave.
‘You’re not covering the show this afternoon?’ he said.
‘Oh, Riddings Show? That’s today, is it? No, we don’t have time to cover things like that. We pay a village correspondent a few pennies to write down the names of all the winners. Names still sell papers, they say. If necessary, we give them a little digital camera so they can take their own photos, too. Much cheaper than sending a photographer out from Chesterfield. We don’t have our own snappers in Edendale any more.’
‘It’s the way everything’s going.’
‘Oh, I know. We get policing on the cheap too now.’
‘I won’t argue with that.’
‘Well, I’m sure there must be lots of things you should be doing. I bet some of the residents around here would be furious if they saw you sitting in the garden of the Bridge Inn having a drink with a journalist. They’d be writing to the chief constable in their scores.’
Cooper thought that was probably true. But right at this moment, he didn’t care.
Byrne got up to leave. ‘Will you report our conversation to your boss?’
Cooper hesitated. He couldn’t mention his contact with the press to Superintendent Branagh. He’d heard her berate other officers for the slightest communication with the media, or for taking their claims seriously. He would risk being tainted by the meeting.
‘I ought to.’
Byrne smiled. ‘There are a lot of things we ought to do, Detective Sergeant Cooper. Sometimes it’s much more fun doing the things we shouldn’t.’
When she’d gone, Cooper checked his phone for messages, then decided to stay for a few minutes to finish his drink.
He opened the copy of the Eden Valley Times and flicked through the pages, glancing at the photographs. He wasn’t interested in the lead story about the Savages. It wouldn’t tell him anything he didn’t know, and might well fill his head with misconceptions and half-truths.
Halfway through the paper, just before the property section, were the pages of community news. What was going on in the villages, in other words. As usual, that seemed to be mostly WI meetings and summer fetes, tractor rallies and fund-raising garden parties. But there they were, underneath next week’s church services – a party of balsam bashers pictured by the side of Calver Weir. With their boots and waterproofs, packed lunches and water bottles, they looked ready for a happy day of non-native-plant destruction.
He peered more closely. The photograph was in colour, which ought to help identification. But this was the Eden Valley Times, and the colour register had been slightly off alignment when the page was printed. So everyone in the picture seemed to have a faint magenta shadow blurring the left side of their face. It was an odd effect, like looking at a 3D image without the proper glasses on. But Cooper recognised Martin and Sarah Holland, standing just to one side. Barry Gamble was over to the right, lurking close to a couple of Peak District National Park rangers who had posed in the foreground wearing red rubber gloves and clutching tall plants with pink flowers.
It was the expression on Gamble’s face that grabbed Cooper’s attention. Despite the off-register printing, it was clear that he wasn’t smiling for the camera like everyone else. He wasn’t looking towards the photographer at all. In fact, he had been caught in an unguarded moment as he waited for the click of the shutter.