No choice here. If Fry denied it, she would be forced to quote examples to support her argument. And right now, nothing came to mind.

‘I suppose so, ma’am.’

Branagh nodded. ‘I’m glad you agree. It’s a shame, because your early reports suggest that you were once considered a potential high-flier.’

Fry’s heart gave a lurch of shock. That was a real punch below the belt. All this time, she’d been considering herself a high-flier, on the surface at least. Deep down, she must have known that she wasn’t, not any more. Still a Detective Sergeant at the age of thirty? For heaven’s sake. It must have been obvious to everyone around her that she’d lost ground. She had been too busy with other concerns, taken up by so many distractions that she hadn’t been focusing on the job. Not the way she should have done.

When had it all started to go wrong? Not when she first transferred to Derbyshire. Well, not immediately, anyway. She’d been given the promotion almost straight away. But maybe that had been on the strength of her previous record. Somewhere, somehow, she had then taken her eye off the ball, had let her career get stagnant. She’d been drifting with the current, when she ought to have been swimming for land.

Damn it, Branagh was right. DS Diane Fry’s career had been ruined. In this stinking backwater, she had become soft and lazy. She’d gone native. Jesus, if she wasn’t careful, she could even end up like Ben Cooper.

Detective Superintendent Branagh was still talking, listing entries from her Personal Development Reviews. Targets and assessments, the occasions when guidance had been given, one instance when words of advice had been issued following a complaint of rudeness from a member of the public.

But Fry wasn’t really listening. She was recalling her first week on the job in Derbyshire, meeting her DI, and Hitchens asking her what she was aiming to achieve. ‘I’m good at my job,’ she’d said. ‘I’ll be looking for promotion. That’s what’s important to me.’

And, of course, she’d soon become aware of the talk around the station. Everyone said the force was short of female officers in supervisory ranks, especially in CID. Provided she kept her nose clean and smiled nicely at the top brass, she would shoot up the promotion ladder without trying. And there had been a quick promotion, too – the step up to Detective Sergeant, which hadn’t been popular with everyone.

But what had she done since then? Her brain searched for an answer that she could give Superintendent Branagh, some wonderful achievement that she could point to. But her mind was still coming up blank. That was the effect of shock tactics.

By a stroke of luck, the superintendent took her silence for absorption in some other subject than the one at hand.

‘We can resume this conversation at another time,’ she said. ‘I appreciate that you’re busy with the suspicious death case.’