Free Kill Call by Stephen Booth Page B

him at any moment. He treasured those moments, as a rule. But that evening, she’d been more serious.
    And she had been right, he supposed. It was now or never, if he was ever going to go for promotion. Even if it meant some kind of horizontal development, a move to a different speciality – whatever it took to get noticed. You couldn’t stand still, or you moved backwards in this world. If he was going to settle down one day and have a family … Well that, after all, was what he would do, wasn’t it? If he was going to settle down, he couldn’t spend his life on a DC’s salary, growing cynical and grumpy, like Gavin Murfin. Putting on weight in all the wrong places, too, probably. Oh, damn.
    His mother had always talked so much about her grandchildren – not only those who already existed, but those that were in the future, yet unborn. They had been the most important thing in her mind in those final years, even when the illness had taken most of her memories. Matt had done that for her, the older brother fulfilling the hopes and dreams. But Ben knew he had failed her. Maybe there was still time to make up for it, though. Still time to tell her that he had settled down, got the promotion, produced those grandchildren she’d talked about. He felt sure she would know, even now, wherever she was. If it mattered enough, you could make it happen.
    8
    Fry woke with a fuzzy head, and looked around her in confusion. She’d only lain down on her bed for a few minutes to rest, but she must have dropped off to sleep almost straight away. It had been a busy day, but not that bad. There had been many days when she’d put in much longer hours, when the time to go home never seemed to arrive. There could be a few of those days to come, depending on the course of this new enquiry. But not today. Today had been … well, average. There was no reason she should feel so tired and groggy, unless she was coming down with something. And that was the last thing she needed.
    She sniffed. The smell of soy sauce was drifting up from the flat downstairs. It was one of those smells that seemed to be able to penetrate floors and carpets with surprising ease, as if its spicy aroma could wind its way through the cracks of the floorboards like wisps of smoke.
    One day, it had dawned on her that she had plenty of money in her savings account. A police sergeant’s salary was perfectly adequate, and there were hardly any major expenses in her life, except for her car and the rent on this flat. Not exactly a lavish lifestyle, was it? Fat chance of that. She ought to be able to think of something she could do with her savings.
    Fry made her way into the kitchen and looked at the washing up. There wasn’t much of it, not now that she was on her own again, her sister Angie having headed back to Birmingham and whatever sort of lifestyle she led there. So those few plates and pans shouldn’t look quite so daunting, sitting there in the sink in that squalid, disapproving way.
    What to do with a few thousand pounds? She supposed she could put a deposit down on a house and take out a mortgage. It was the sort of thing that everyone else seemed to do. They’d all tied themselves up in property and debts by the time they got to her age.
    Fry hissed between her teeth. A mortgage? She’d rather be chained in purgatory, with eagles pecking at her liver.
    She showered, changed her clothes, then pulled on her coat and went out for a walk to wake herself up. The clouds had cleared now, and a crescent moon was shining on the wet street. Music played behind curtained windows as she passed. Tunes that were vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t quite hear enough of to name.
    She felt like the only person out in the streets tonight. The rest of Edendale was shut up behind its doors and windows, people enclosed in their own little worlds. Sometimes she wished she had a world of her own that she could enter that way, instead of always standing out in the cold, feeling