‘Can you recall anything that was removed, sir? Anything out of the ordinary? There must have been a few items that were present when you viewed the property, but which had gone when you took possession.’

The solicitor was silent for a moment, except for a thoughtful mumbling.

‘Nothing that seemed to be of any value,’ he said. ‘It’s not exactly the sort of place you’d expect to be stuffed with antique furniture, is it? Or, if it ever was, they sold anything of value years ago. I gathered the farm had been failing for some time.’

‘Yes, I believe so.’

‘Then there was nothing, really, Detective Constable. Nothing that I wouldn’t have wanted to get rid of, anyway.’

Then he began to laugh, and Cooper looked at the phone as if it had done something weird. ‘Would you like to share the joke, sir?’

‘Well, I’m sure this can’t be what you mean,’ said Goodwin, still chuckling. ‘But obviously, they took the severed head.’

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Nineteen

Fry took a moment to steady her breathing, shocked by the unexpected surge of panic that had turned her stomach over for a few seconds. It was a totally irrational feeling. She’d thought the same herself many times, hadn’t she? She was like a fish out of water in E Division. In Derbyshire, come to that. Her home was back in the city, away from these people she would never understand and couldn’t tolerate.

It was just hearing the sentiment put into someone else’s words that had hit her like a blow to the solar plexus. It was a statement of the obvious. Yet she loathed the idea that Detective Superintendent Branagh had sat in a meeting this morning and expressed the thought to her managers. She hated the intrusion of someone like Branagh reading her file and summing her up so easily. It was illogical, of course. But no less hurtful for that.

‘Oh, no need to be sorry, sir,’ she said quietly. ‘No need for you to be sorry at all.’

That fear of being an outsider had haunted her all her life. At school, in her various homes in the Black Country, and even when she’d studied for her Criminal Justice and Policing course at UCE. As a child, she hadn’t realized that everyone dreaded finding themselves on the outside, not a part of the gang. She thought it was her own particular weakness of character that drove her to seek acceptance from her peers.

It made her wince now to think of her teenage self, hanging around in the corridors of her comprehensive school, trying to attach herself to a group. It was only as an adult that she’d learned it was the same for most kids of her age. Some were so desperate to belong that it became a question of any gang that would have them.