The Devil's Edge Read Online Free PDF

sapped, her energy levels at zero.
    And her bum was numb, too. This was purgatory.
    Fry had spent the whole morning in Nottinghamshire Police headquarters at Sherwood Lodge. At the front of the room, someone whose name badge she couldn’t read was sticking Post-it notes on a sheet of brown paper that had been Blu-Tacked to the wall. The Post-its were all the colours of the rainbow, which apparently had some significance. A few of them had already moved position several times during the session, making determined advances or strategic retreats, like military units moving around a simulated battlefield. She supposed there was some kind of overall narrative to the present ation. It might even be explained in the handout she hadn’t read. But she’d lost track half an hour ago. Now she was losing the will to live. She could feel her eyes glazing over, a well-known clinical side effect of staring too long at yellow Post-it notes.
    When the speaker turned his back for a moment to move another Post-it, she leaned towards the officer sitting next to her.
    ‘What is this kind of presentation called again?’ she whispered. ‘A Sellotape brainstorm?’
    ‘No. A brown-paper workshop.’
    ‘Of course.’
    If she remembered rightly, her neighbour was an inspector from the Leicestershire force. Mick or Rick, something like that. They’d all had to do ten-second introductions at the start of the session. Tell us who you are and what you hope to get from today . Cue a bunch of po-faced lies.
    ‘The Sellotape comes at the end,’ said Mick or Rick with a conspiratorial smile. ‘When we fix the Post-it notes in their final position.’
    ‘I’ll be on the edge of my seat by then.’
    ‘You and me both.’
    Fry sighed. She was almost starting to miss Edendale. Unlike Derbyshire Constabulary, their neighbours in Nottinghamshire had an extra assistant chief constable, whose sole responsibility was Strategic Change. And change these days meant cooperation between forces to save money. So here she was, in this conference room in Sherwood Lodge, forty miles from Derbyshire E Division and starting to feel nostalgic for the company of DC Gavin Murfin and his colleagues. She would never have thought it possible.
    She wondered idly which she would prefer right now – a nice restful spell in the private hospital she’d seen on the other side of the trees as she came down the drive, or a visit to the pub a little way back down the road.
    She caught Mick or Rick looking at her. He pointedly checked his watch, and made a gesture with his wrist suggesting the act of drinking. A soulmate, then. Or at least close enough for now.
    ‘Seven Mile Inn,’ he said.
    ‘I saw it. Just by the lights.’
    These working-group sessions were supposed to be interactive. That meant she couldn’t entirely escape joining in. At strategic moments she had found herself blurting out phrases that sounded right. Methodical workforce modernisation . Greater interoperability . She tried to say them while other people were shouting out suggestions, so that her words were swallowed in the general verbiage. The best place to hide a tree is in the forest.
    The frustrating thing was that she knew she could do this stuff. She could do it standing on her head, write the entire report for them if that was what they wanted. You didn’t get far in the modern police service without learning those skills. It was just that her heart wasn’t in it. This wasn’t how she should be spending her days, trapped in a stuffy conference room.
    And then the facilitator said the words she’d been waiting for.
    ‘Okay, people. We’ll break for lunch. Please be back promptly at two.’
    Some of the attendees had brought their own sandwiches. Packed lunches, like schoolchildren. There was a civilian, a techy type from an IT department somewhere in the region, who was drinking Coke through a straw while he listened to an iPod and scrolled through messages on his iPhone.
    You would have