Secrets of Death

by Stephen Booth

  The Lion Inn was just up the tram tracks off Shipstone Street and almost overshadowed by the bulk of the old Shipstone’s brewery. They could have gone to the Clock on Craven Road, which was nearer. There, though, the attractions were soul and curry nights or evenings of spiritual mediumship, rather than lunchtime jazz sessions. Worse, they would probably have been questioned by the regulars about who they were.

  When Fry entered the Lion, she found that Mackenzie had already laid claim to a corner of the pub. It had bare brick walls, but comfortable stripy chairs arranged round a low table near an upright piano.

  Jamie Callaghan was at the bar buying the drinks. Oddly, Callaghan reminded her of a Bulgarian police officer she’d known briefly when he visited Derbyshire to liaise on an inquiry a few years ago. Not that Callaghan was Eastern European. There was nothing Slavic about him. It was more the way he moved, the confident swagger, a swing of the shoulders.

  He was definitely the kind of man she shouldn’t be attracted to, especially as he was recently divorced, escaped from a marriage that had only lasted a year or two according to the gossip at St Ann’s. They said his wife had been caught having an affair with a Nottinghamshire dog-handler. That detail might have been invented for the sake of the cruel jokes it provided the opportunity for. Who knew whether it was true or not?

  But then, who knew why any marriage ended? There were always two sides to any story. She had a strong suspicion that Jamie Callaghan would be telling her his side before too long.

  ‘Have we lost him, sir?’ asked Callaghan, setting a round of drinks down on the table. He hadn’t asked Fry what she wanted, but he didn’t have to. Vodka when she needed it. A J2O apple and mango flavour when she was driving.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Mackenzie, accepting a bottle of Spitfire.

  ‘Has Farrell skipped? Left the area?’

  Mackenzie clutched his beer bottle tightly as his face twisted into a grimace of frustration. ‘Someone must have tipped him off, if he has.’

  ‘I suppose it might just be a coincidence. He could have headed out for an evening with friends just when we decided to come for him.’

  ‘We didn’t identify any friends,’ pointed out Fry as she took a chair at the table.

  ‘That’s true. But it doesn’t mean he hasn’t got any.’

  ‘A man like Farrell doesn’t have friends,’ she said.

  Callaghan grinned, looked as if he was about to say something, then stopped. Fry wondered if he’d been going to make some joke about her not having any friends either. It was the kind of sly dig she’d heard often from colleagues during her career. Everyone thought twice now. It was hard to tell when banter crossed the line.

  Instead, Callaghan chose something worse.

  ‘He might have picked someone up in the past few days,’ he said.

  Fry shuddered. ‘No, don’t say that.’

  ‘Well, it’s a possibility.’

  He was right. But it was a possibility that didn’t bear thinking about as far as Diane Fry was concerned. That was what they’d worked so hard to prevent, after all.

  Mackenzie shrugged and took a drink of his beer.

  ‘Well, we’ll just have to find a way of tracking down Mr Farrell,’ he said. ‘He can’t hide from us for very long.’

  Fry’s phone buzzed again. And of course it was Angie. She had waited for her sister to get home, but she was still sitting in the pub. Fry saw that she’d been sent a photo. As soon as she clicked to open it, she knew perfectly well what it would be. The squashed-up Winston Churchill features of a hairless, goggle-eyed baby stared out at her from the screen. Fry flinched. She was finding it really difficult getting used to being an auntie.

  ‘What is it, Diane?’

  She put the phone away hastily before Callaghan saw the picture. ‘Nothing important. Just my sister.’

  ‘Oh, okay. I thought it looked like bad news.’

  Fry squinted at him nervously. He wasn’t supposed to be so observant. That would never do.

  ‘Do you think Roger Farrell has done a bunk, Diane?’ asked Callaghan as they left the pub.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said Fry. ‘He just isn’t the kind. He’s the sort of man who’ll try to brazen things out to the end. He’ll turn up somewhere. I’m certain of it.’

  3

  Day 2

  Well, that was really odd. Not the ideal start to the day. Marnie Letts sighed irritably as she pulled on the handbrake. And it wasn’t even Monday. Those were the worst days of the week. She always felt ill when she woke up on a Monday. Nothing was actually wrong with her. It was just knowing that the rest of the week stretched ahead.

  Marnie had been the first to arrive at work that morning, which was unusual in itself. On every other day Shirley was already at the visitor centre before her, with the lights on and the kettle boiling in the kitchen.

  Six months ago, Shirley had been appointed manager at Heeley Bank Information Centre, and opening up was part of her job. She unlocked the doors in the morning and locked up again at night. If the burglar alarm went off in the early hours of the morning, Shirley got the call-out. That was why she was paid more. Marnie didn’t even have a set of keys. And that was the way she liked it. She wouldn’t have wanted the responsibility – not for just a few pounds extra every month. She certainly wouldn’t want to get called out in the middle of the night. She had better things to do with her time. If that was what promotion meant, the likes of Shirley Gooding were welcome to it.

  So Marnie sat in her little Nissan in the staff parking area and listened to the news as it came on the radio. She was tuned into Peak FM and they didn’t waste much time on the headlines. Their listeners were more concerned about traffic alerts – the latest closure on the motorway, the length of delays on the A61, a reminder of the temporary lights in Baslow, where visitors were already queuing to get into Chatsworth.

  Marnie tapped her fingers on the steering wheel as she listened. None of it was relevant to her on her drive out of Edendale to the visitor centre. She lived on the Woodlands Estate, close to the northern outskirts of the town, and she always took the back roads to reach Heeley Bank. They were narrow and winding, but always quiet. Just a few farmers on tractors, a herd of cows on the way back to the fields from milking. Who wouldn’t prefer a commute like that?

  She frowned when she noticed the car. She recognised it as a BMW. One of her neighbours on Sycamore Crescent had one. It was always left out on the street in everyone else’s way, and she’d often had bad things to say about BMW drivers. One night, someone on the street had keyed the paintwork, so she obviously wasn’t alone.

  This one was neatly parked and undamaged, though – unlike the condition of a stolen car that Marnie had seen abandoned here a few months ago. The BMW sat in the car park under the shade of the trees on the banking above the river. There had been a bit of mist overnight and the car was covered in condensation. In a few minutes’ time, the sun would reach it and the moisture would begin to clear.

  Marnie hesitated, looking round at the entrance but seeing no sign of Shirley. That was typical of her. When there might be a problem, she wasn’t there. It could wait until she arrived, couldn’t it? Shirley was the manager, after all.

  But something made Marnie open her car door and walk across the gravel towards the BMW. The car was sitting there silently, mysteriously. It seemed to be drawing her towards it. She believed very strongly in fate, always read her horoscope in the newspaper every morning. She was a water sign, Scorpio, and was led by her instincts.

  Her footsteps sounded unnaturally loud in the early morning air. She moved confidently at first but found her feet gradually slowing of their own accord as she approached the car. She could see nothing through the windscreen because of the condensation. Had someone slept in their car overnight? Perhaps two people? She had heard of all kinds of things going on.

  If you were doing that, you’d leave the windows slightly open to let in some air, wouldn’t you? These were all r
olled firmly shut. So the BMW was just abandoned, then? That must be it.

  Marnie rapped on the driver’s side window. There was no response, no sudden movement rocking the car, no startled noises. Relieved now, she ran her sleeve across the glass and stuck her face close to it, shading her eyes against the glare of the sun as it broke over the trees.

  At first, she couldn’t understand what she was seeing. It didn’t seem human, or animal either. Her brain whirled, trying to make sense of it. A shop window dummy, a practical joke of some kind?

  She tried the handle and found the door unlocked. As she pulled it open, the realisation hit her. She knew it was no practical joke. A man sat in the driving seat. A real man, flesh and blood. But there was something wrong with his head. Something very wrong.

  By the time Shirley Gooding arrived, running late from dealing with a child too sick to go to school, she was amazed to find Marnie Letts standing in the middle of the car park screaming.

  Every morning, Detective Inspector Ben Cooper set off to work with his car full of sound. He needed it to insulate him from the world outside. The traffic passing in the street, the people on the pavements, the market stalls setting up in the square – all the bustle and activity of Edendale on a fine summer’s day. Sometimes, it could be too much.

  For the past few weeks, he’d been listening to Bruce Springsteen. ‘Dancing in the Dark’. It was always the first track that started up when he switched on the ignition. Always the same CD in the player, always the same opening chords. He hadn’t bothered changing it. One day, he supposed he’d get tired of it. For now, it suited him fine. It was like a switch that turned him on for the day, clicked him into professional mode and prepared him for the hours ahead, when anything could happen.

  He halted in traffic at the Hollowgate lights, reflecting on how his feelings were mirrored by the outside world. During those few minutes of his drive to West Street, Cooper always passed from dark into light. Everywhere he looked, he caught his town in the process of changing its character. He could see it taking off one face and putting on another. During the past few hours, Edendale had hidden away its night-time turnover of drunks and clubbers staggering between takeaway and taxi rank in noisy clumps, shadowed by weary police officers with their high-vis jackets and riot vans. They had to be ushered indoors with the coming of daylight, like vampires retreating from the sun.

  The morning brought an influx of visitors to the town. The roads got busier, the car parks filled up, the coaches crawled through the narrow streets, and the pavements became hazardous with boots and hiking poles. All the gift shops and visitor centres propped open their doors; the newsagents put out their ice cream signs.

  Edendale looked so different in the sun. And it felt different too. The atmosphere was much more relaxed, the flow of movement slower. Walking groups met at their rendezvous points, chatting and adjusting their equipment for so long that you’d think they weren’t planning to do any walking at all. The pavements were full of strolling retired couples who’d decided to have a day out in the Peak District, with a nice lunch in a pub garden and a doze on a bench by the river. Japanese tourists stood gazing into the windows of the Bakewell pudding shops or took selfies on the old bridge over the Eden, forcing passers-by into the road.

  Unlike the visitors, Cooper could see through the façade. That darkness was never dispelled completely. He could sense it lurking in the background. He’d seen enough of it to know it was always there.

  Cooper waited for the barrier to open and drove into the staff car park off West Street. Very little money had been spent on Derbyshire Constabulary’s E Division headquarters recently. As a result, the 1950s stone building was looking a bit the worse for wear. The guttering had come loose on the custody suite, creating an outdoor shower in the winter months. The tarmac of the car park was cracked in the north corner, where the riot vans were parked. Everybody expected one of them to disappear into a sink hole some day, probably in the not too distant future. On the first floor of the headquarters building, some of the offices were permanently empty and locked up. No one could remember who’d worked there now.

  Across the road, Edendale Football Club had been doing well lately. Their ground was on West Street, and the windows on this side of the building looked out over Gate C and the back of the East Stand. These days, when the club had an important home match, the streets were filled with cars, which hadn’t been a problem when Edendale FC were struggling in the lower leagues. If they became any more successful, access might become a problem on match days: a response officer trying to get to an emergency call would get blocked in and there would be trouble.

  Cooper hadn’t quite reached his own office next to the CID room when he heard his phone ringing. He broke into a jog, though he knew it was against health and safety regulations to run in the corridors.

  But the phone stopped before he could reach it and his mobile began ringing. It was Carol Villiers, this morning’s duty DC, somewhere outside Edendale at the scene of a sudden death.

  ‘What kind of sudden death?’ he said.

  Villiers was always cautious, reluctant to commit herself. He didn’t remember her being like this when they were youngsters growing up together. She must have learned it in the services. Make a risk assessment, analyse the intelligence, don’t go into anything until you’re absolutely certain of the situation. It helped a lot in this job. More police officers got themselves into trouble by reacting too quickly than by standing back and doing nothing.

  ‘Heeley Bank,’ said Villiers. ‘Do you know where it is?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘There’s a body,’ she said. And then she added the crucial words: ‘A body in a car.’

  ‘I’m on my way,’ said Cooper.

  Diane Fry had a couple of rest days after last night’s abortive operation. Today, DCI Mackenzie would be exploring the possibility of getting a search warrant on Roger Farrell’s address. It wouldn’t have been needed if they’d made an arrest. The search would be going on right now, while Farrell was being questioned in custody. But things hadn’t gone the way they had planned.

  Fry was renting a double-bedroomed top-floor apartment with its own parking space in a modern executive development in the suburb of Wilford. One of the roads on the development was called Halfpenny Walk – but her rent had cost her an awful lot more than that.

  The properties were surrounded by neat grass verges and little access roads. There was barely a sign of human occupation but for lights behind curtained windows and a car parked in front of a garage door. She always had to remember to clear the burglar alarm when she let herself in. She didn’t have anything worth stealing – she’d never felt the urge to surround herself with material possessions – but it seemed like an obligation here, like being careful where you put your wheelie bin so that you didn’t make the development look untidy.

  She hadn’t met any of her neighbours in the apartment block to speak to, and she probably never would. She’d nodded to one or two people as she passed them in the hallway or while getting into her car. She didn’t know who they were and had never stopped to chat, though sometimes they showed indications of wanting to introduce themselves before she could escape.

  One couple downstairs had put a card through her door inviting her to a drinks party when they moved into their apartment. She hadn’t gone, of course. For a few hours she’d listened to the faint sound of cheesy nineties pop music and hollow laughter drifting up the stairs, and told herself how glad she was she hadn’t accepted the invitation.

  The rooms of the apartment had sounded very empty and strange when she first moved in. She hadn’t realised how accustomed she’d become to living in a shared house with students and migrant workers coming and going at all hours. The place in Grosvenor Road had never been quiet.

  Here in the suburbs, she was only twenty minutes from the city centre with its pubs and shops and theatres. There was even a tram line now, cutting the journey time yet more. And the
location suited her just fine. She liked the comforting roar of traffic on the Clifton Bridge, which carried the A52 over the River Trent.

  That morning, Fry looked out of the window of her apartment as a car turned in from the direction of Clifton Lane and drew up in front of her building. It was a silver-grey Renault hatchback. Nothing unusual about that at all. But something about the occupants caught her eye, and she watched curiously as the engine was turned off and the door swung open.

  Her heart sank when she saw a figure get out and open the tailgate.

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ she said.

  A pushchair came out first, then a bag full of goodness knew what – bottles, teats, steriliser, wet wipes, extra clothes. And packs of nappies. Nappies. God help her.

  She looked around the apartment, anxiously scanning for anything left out that she didn’t want seen. She wasn’t big on tidying up and dusting, because she never expected visitors. It was too late to do anything about it. That empty vodka bottle should go in the bin, and the box from last night’s pizza delivery. Oh, and the one from the night before.

  Cursing, she burst into activity to make the sitting room at least look presentable. She was sweating from stress and effort by the time the door buzzed and she had to let her visitors in.

  ‘Sis! What a surprise.’

  Angie stood there on the threshold of her apartment. Her sister. Barely recognisable now because of the weight she’d put on, which concealed her usually thin, angular frame. And because of the object clutched to her chest in a sling, something wearing a white floppy sun hat with pictures of animals on it.

  ‘Hello, Di,’ said Angie. ‘We thought we’d call in and see you.’

  Diane heard a car engine and quickly stepped to a window in the entrance hall to gaze down at the departing Renault.

  ‘Who was that?’ she said.

  ‘A friend.’

  ‘A male friend?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The male friend?’