Dying to Sin. Stephen Booth

from West Midlands Police. She’d been scornful of everything in those days, so prickly that he soon developed the habit of letting her comments go by unnoticed. When he’d told her about singing in the choir, she had been predictably derisive. ‘Do you sing soprano?’ she’d asked. ‘No. Tenor.’ And he hadn’t even seen the barb until much later.

      Oh, well. Fry had mellowed a bit since then, hadn’t she? Surely she had. Cooper frowned slightly. There was always the possibility that he’d just become very good at letting everything pass him by.

      When he lifted his hand off the gear stick, Liz took his fingers for a moment and held them gently.

      ‘Thanks for coming to the panto with me, Ben.’

      On the road out of town that night, taking Liz home to Bakewell, Cooper felt content. Below him, the sprawling outline of Edendale was marked by a network of lights, but most of the Peak District lay in darkness. After all that had happened in his life, things seemed to be coming right at last. He’d found someone he cared about. And, above all, he was in the only place he’d ever wanted to live in the world.

      With a surge of blind rage, Diane Fry grabbed her sister’s arm and dragged her back, pulling her off balance and throwing her on to the bed.

      ‘Hey!’ gasped Angie, shocked by the sudden violence.

      ‘Angie, what the hell are you up to?’

      Diane could hear her voice coming out in a spiteful hiss. It sounded awful, but she couldn’t have changed it. Her throat was too tightly constricted by the flood of emotions overwhelming her. Anger, bitterness, a sense of betrayal. And other emotions she’d never experienced before, too fleeting to be pinned down and named.

      ‘Me?’ Angie tried to laugh it off, sitting up on the bed and straightening her sleeve as if it were just a family game, a bit of rough and tumble between siblings. ‘Sis, you know I’m always up to something. The original problem kid, that’s me.’

      ‘I’m not joking here. I want to know what you think you’re doing.’

      ‘Come on, Di. Lighten up.’

      Diane felt herself flushing angrily. She’d told herself she wouldn’t get angry with her sister. But here it was, all that rage, bubbling just below the surface. Anything could release it, a wrong word or an unguarded expression.

      ‘Don’t try to get round me, Angie,’ she said. ‘Just don’t try it. It might have worked once, but it doesn’t work on me now. Things have changed between us. I’m not your kid sister any more.’

      ‘Oh, really?’

      ‘Yes, really. You’ve got to start understanding that, or there’s no future between us.’

      ‘But that was always true, wasn’t it?’ snapped Angie. ‘We never had any future between us.’

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘We have a past, that’s all. That’s the only thing we share, the one factor we have in common. And that’s all it is – the past. We’d never have stayed together, Di. I know you couldn’t see it at the time, but I was always going to go my own way, and it wasn’t the same as yours. We’d have split up pretty soon, and you’d have gone off to your college and your police training feeling ashamed of your big sister. You ought to thank me for what I did. It was much the best way.’

      Diane felt the anger draining from her. It was replaced by a strange chill that crept over her skin, like the first indications of approaching flu.

      ‘But we’re back together again now. We have to think about what sort of future there’s going to be,’ she said. ‘We have to sort some things out to make that future work.’

      Angie got up from the bed, and Diane backed away to put some distance between them.

      ‘You haven’t been listening, have you?’ said Angie. ‘You just hear whatever you want to. I just said we have no future. Not just back then, but now, too. We have nothing in common, Di. And we never will have. If you imagine any different, you’re fooling yourself.’

      ‘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