Secrets of Death

by Stephen Booth

  ‘Dr Young, from the mortuary. We met over a dead body.’

  He heard the laugh in her voice and recognised her then.

  ‘Oh, Dr Young. Of course. What can I do for you?’

  ‘Juliana van Doon found your number for me. I was wondering whether you had more time yet.’

  ‘For …?’

  ‘Well, to talk about my suicide study,’ she said. ‘Informally, you know. Since you said you were interested. I thought it might be good to get another perspective on the subject from an experienced police officer.’

  ‘Oh, I see. When were you thinking of?’

  ‘Tonight?’

  Cooper was surprised by his own inner response – that sudden warm rush, the upsurge of hope. It was a feeling he hadn’t experienced for a long time, not since Liz’s death. But he recognised in himself a growing need for something, for someone new. Perhaps it was time to stop mourning.

  ‘I’ll be free in an hour or two,’ he said.

  ‘Excellent. Do you know where the Barrel Inn is?’

  ‘The one at Bretton? Certainly. It isn’t far from where I live.’

  ‘Seven-thirty or so?’

  ‘Fine. I’ll see you there.’

  Cooper ended the call. He wasn’t quite sure what had just happened. Perhaps he would find out tonight.

  In the CID room at West Street, Cooper went first to speak to Luke Irvine, who sometimes needed nudging to get results from the jobs he’d been given. In particular, some hint of a connection to the card in Roger Farrell’s car was a priority. Secrets of Death was starting to bother him.

  ‘Ben, we’ve got a result from our appeals in the media,’ said Carol Villiers.

  Cooper looked round. ‘What appeals?’

  ‘For potential witnesses who were parked at Heeley Bank the night Roger Farrell killed himself.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Cooper had put the appeals to the back of his mind. They had just been a gesture really. He hadn’t expected anything to come of them. So this was a stroke of luck.

  ‘Anyone credible?’ he said.

  ‘A couple from Chesterfield got in touch. We got lucky with them – they weren’t too far away and saw the piece in the local news.’

  ‘Are they coming in to see us?’

  ‘They’re on their way now. In fact, they’ll be here soon.’

  ‘Great.’

  Barely half an hour later, Villiers escorted a couple of visitors to the first floor and knocked on Cooper’s office door.

  ‘This is Mr and Mrs Cook,’ she said.

  ‘Gareth and Barbara,’ said the man who stepped forward to shake his hand.

  ‘Thank you very much for coming in.’

  ‘It’s no problem,’ said Mrs Cook. ‘We’ll be happy if we can help at all. It was a terrible thing to happen.’

  The couple sat down in his little office, which was hardly big enough for three people. They pulled their chairs as close together as possible and Barbara Cook took her husband’s hand, as if for reassurance.

  Cooper could see from the start that they were the sort of people who had never been in a police station before, not for any reason. Possibly they were among those lucky members of the public who had never even encountered a police officer and didn’t know quite what to expect. It might depend what TV crime dramas they were used to watching. Their expectations might have been shaped by anything between Midsomer Murders and The Wire.

  So Cooper smiled and offered them tea, which they declined. He eased them into the session by asking them about themselves and how often they visited the Peak District. He learned that they’d met each other as members of a group of conservation volunteers on a tree-planting project near Grindleford, that they’d only been married two years and had no children yet. He told them he’d volunteered himself once and had been allocated to a footpath construction and repair team on the edge of Bleaklow.

  ‘It was January,’ he said. ‘We were soaked and freezing cold. I admire the people who keep going back time after time.’

  He watched them relax and they began to tell him about their visit to Heeley Bank. They’d been there for a walk in the woods and down to the river. They’d also bought some flapjacks in the information centre and eaten them in their car with a flask of coffee. Cooper gathered that the Cooks were keen people-watchers. They noticed things.

  He slid across the photograph of Roger Farrell.

  ‘And you recognised this man?’ he said.

  Barbara Cook grimaced. ‘Yes, we’re quite sure it was him we saw. Aren’t we, Gareth?’

  Her husband nodded. And then he described seeing Farrell leave his BMW and go into the information centre. That was news to Cooper. Marnie Letts hadn’t mentioned it.

  ‘What time would that be?’

  ‘Oh, perhaps about four o’clock. Not long before we left.’

  ‘He wasn’t in the centre for long,’ said Barbara. ‘He came out again. And then he spoke to someone.’

  ‘He did? Who?’

  ‘We don’t know. Sorry. It was just a man, standing over by the toilet block. They only spoke for a minute or two.’

  ‘We couldn’t really see them very well because of the sun,’ said Gareth. ‘It was shining from that direction and they were in the shadows. You know what I mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Cooper questioned them gently for a few minutes to see if they could remember any other details, but they seemed to have exhausted their information. They were trying very hard, too, he could see that.

  Finally, he ran out of questions and sat back to look at them. The Cooks stirred in the chairs, as if about to leave. Then Gareth Cook reached into his pocket.

  ‘Oh, and there’s this,’ he said.

  ‘What is it?’

  He handed Cooper a small blue case containing a memory card.

  ‘We have a dashcam,’ said his wife. ‘Gareth bought it after he had a collision in the car last year and the other driver wouldn’t accept liability.’

  ‘It was a total nightmare,’ said Gareth. ‘I was going backwards and forwards with insurance companies for months and the worst thing was they didn’t seem to believe me. I lost my excess in the end. Three hundred pounds. So now I’ve got proof, if it happens again.’

  ‘Unless someone hits you from behind,’ said Barbara.

  ‘Well, I’d have to install another camera on the back shelf to cover that, wouldn’t I?’

  Cooper held up the case. ‘You’re telling me you had your dashboard camera operating during the time you were parked at Heeley Bank that day?’

  ‘Only while the engine was running, obviously. But there should be some footage to look at. It’s a sixteen-gigabyte micro SD card and we get nearly three hours of recording from the camera before it starts to overwrite the earliest files.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Cook,’ said Cooper, feeling genuinely grateful for something for the first time all week.

  ‘You’re welcome. We hope it helps, we really do.’

  ‘It was a terrible thing,’ said Barbara.

  When the Cooks had left West Street, Cooper took the memory card to Luke Irvine.

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Irvine.

  ‘It’s footage from a dashboard camera.’

  ‘Do you want to view it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘No problem. This PC has a card reader.’

  When the video started, the quality on screen was surprisingly good. Unfortunately, the first half-hour had recorded the Cooks’ journey all the way from the drive of their home in Chesterfield. There were glimpses of a Tesco Extra, the Proact Stadium where Chesterfield FC played, then a scenic drive out past the Old Pump in Barlow before they even reached the boundary of the national park near Unthank.

  Cooper straightened up. ‘I’m going back to my desk. Let me know when they reach Heeley Bank,’ he said.

  It seemed a long time before Irvine came to fetch him again.

  ‘They got to Owler Bar and stopped for lunch,’
he said apologetically. ‘And they seem to have taken the scenic route to Heeley Bank.’

  Irvine restarted the video. Cooper saw the familiar view of the hill on the approach to Heeley Bank and watched as the Cooks’ car slowed and turned into the car park. The place was full when they arrived and it was hard to make out any individual vehicles, except a green VW camper van they parked opposite, which was captured in beautiful detail for a few moments before the dashcam stopped when the engine went off.

  ‘I think they left the car here,’ said Irvine.

  ‘They went for a walk in the woods.’

  ‘Right. But here they come back again.’

  A different vehicle was facing the Cooks’ car when the dashcam came back on. A small blue car, a Vauxhall from the look of the badge on the radiator grille. The car park was beginning to empty. Two vehicles passed in front of the camera on their way out. And then Cooper realised there was now a view up the car park towards the information centre. He couldn’t see the door of the centre, but he could see the toilet block clearly. A couple of figures stood talking nearby, but he couldn’t make out any details. There was no way he would be able to recognise anyone, let alone Roger Farrell, whom he had never seen alive.

  ‘Well, that’s a washout,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Not your fault, Luke.’

  Then Cooper looked more closely at the last bit of footage from the dashboard camera. There was a vehicle parked close to the corner of the building. He could catch just a glimpse of a wing, dark and half obscured. But there was something distinctive about the shape of it. Surely there was only one type of vehicle that still had that shape of wing?

  It was the familiar boxy outline of a Land Rover.

  Marnie Letts had an address on the Woodlands Estate. It was way up in the north of Edendale, an area that was hardly part of the town itself, as far as Cooper was concerned. Their natures were certainly very different.

  Victoria Park was the point where the character of Edendale changed. On one side of the park stood the Royal Theatre, just off Hulley Road, with the new courthouse development across Park Street. To the north of Victoria Park, Edendale’s largest housing estates began. They’d spread way out of town that way now. Passing the park gates, he could see the Devonshire and Cavendish Estates, but he knew there was much more housing creeping up the hillsides behind them.

  Cooper had patrolled the beat on the Devonshire Estate when he was a young bobby, watching out for stolen cars being raced round the streets or gathering information on local drug dealers who operated from the sprawl of prefabricated concrete houses slung up in the 1960s.

  The estate occupied low-lying land in the valley floor that had once been water meadows until they were drained for the housing scheme. For decades the damp had been creeping back into the foundations of the houses, staining the walls with mould and rotting the doors and windows. When some of the houses became virtually uninhabitable, with fungus growing through the floorboards and water pouring through the roofs, the council decided to act and had carried out a major remedial scheme on the entire estate, redecorating, replastering and re-roofing. They’d spent millions of pounds on the project and it had taken three years. But it hadn’t stopped the damp creeping back in.

  The Woodlands Estate was more modern and bigger, stretching all the way across to the Manchester Road. Addresses on the estate were instantly recognisable: Elm Street, Sycamore Crescent, Chestnut Avenue, Lime Tree Close. It seemed as though the house-building had only stopped when the developers ran out of tree names.

  He recalled Gavin Murfin talking about working on the Woodlands Estate. He had some sympathy with Murfin. Residents were known universally as Woodies. The name had taken on connotations that summed up all kinds of prejudices and preconceptions.

  Cooper drove up into the estate with his windows open. He passed a shopping parade in the middle of it. Most of the shops had steel shutters pulled down over their windows and doors, as if preparing for a riot.

  The local supermarket was about to close for the evening and teenagers had begun to gather in the car park. They clustered round a yellow hatchback with its doors and windows open and loud grime music banging out into the summer air. Cooper didn’t need to get any nearer to guess what the kids were smoking. He could smell it from here, its distinctive odour mixing with the tang of lager.

  At her address on Sycamore Crescent, Marnie Letts looked as though she had been doing some baking. She was wearing an apron and there was a smudge of white flour on her face. She looked uneasy at getting a visit. Cooper remembered her at Heeley Bank. She’d been calm and composed after the initial shock and once she knew what was happening.

  ‘I’m taking the chance to catch up on some jobs,’ she said. ‘Pete is working and it’s much easier when he’s out of the house.’

  ‘Your husband?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Yes, he’s a tree surgeon.’

  ‘We’ve had a couple of witnesses who responded to our appeals,’ said Cooper when she let him into the house. ‘They say they remember the man in the BMW – Mr Farrell. They saw him come into the information centre that afternoon. It would have been about four p.m.’

  ‘I don’t recall him,’ said Marnie. ‘But then – what did he actually look like?’

  Cooper realised that Marnie Letts would not have seen Roger Farrell’s face, except when it was obscured by the exit bag after his death.

  ‘Haven’t you seen the story in the papers?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I didn’t want to read about it. Not after that morning …’

  ‘I see. Well, here. This is Mr Farrell.’

  Cooper showed her the photograph of Roger Farrell they’d been using. She ought to have been shown it earlier, if he’d thought about it. Too much else had been happening.

  Marnie looked at the photo, squinting her eyes as if seeing Farrell against a burst of sunlight, then shook her head.

  ‘No. I still don’t remember him,’ she said. ‘That’s not to say he didn’t come in. We were quite busy that day. I don’t remember people very well, to be honest. Some of them don’t actually buy anything, you know. They just browse the books and postcards, then pick up a few free leaflets before they go out again. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Thank you anyway.’ Cooper took the photo back. ‘According to our witnesses, when Mr Farrell came out of the information centre he spoke to someone near the toilet block.’

  ‘I definitely can’t help you there,’ she said. ‘I can’t see in that direction, not when I’m working behind the counter. If I happen to be standing near the door, I can. But, like I say, we were busy. So I was probably serving a customer at the counter.’

  ‘I understand. It might not be important, but we have to check these details. The evidence from our witnesses does confirm the presence of a dark-coloured Land Rover, by the way.’

  ‘If that’s what it was,’ said Marnie.

  ‘Yes.’

  She could see that Cooper was disappointed.

  ‘I’m really sorry I can’t be more help,’ she said.

  Cooper smiled. ‘Everyone says that.’

  As he was leaving the Woodlands Estate, Cooper noticed a crowd of Woodies gathered at the corner of Sycamore Crescent. They were probably building up to a fight between the Sycos and the Elmers. It was the normal evening entertainment around here.

  16

  Luke Irvine had left the office promptly at the end of his shift that day. There was no overtime on this inquiry. In fact, it was as rare as hen’s teeth these days, unfortunately.

  Irvine had been living in Bamford for a couple of years now. It suited him nicely – a village location that reminded him of his family home back in West Yorkshire, a good community atmosphere and a fantastic pub. What more could he ask? It even had a little railway station on the Hope Valley line, so he could get to Manchester or Sheffield without driving – though the nature of the Peak District landscape meant he couldn’t get to Edendale, which lay over the hill
in a different valley.

  Since he’d arrived in Bamford, Irvine had been sharing a house on Old Post Office Row with two web designers. He had a room overlooking the fields between The Hollow and South View. When he opened his window in the morning he smelled fresh horse manure.

  When he got home that evening, he parked his Kia half on the pavement. He wasn’t stopping long and parking was a problem, of course. These villages were built before people had cars. The older properties had no off-street parking and the roads were narrow, so there was always a bit of competition for spaces. That was one of the compromises you had to accept.

  Irvine let himself into the house, went up to his room and changed into a T-shirt, jogging bottoms and trainers, then went straight out again. On the pavement, he paused and looked around the village.

  The house was positioned halfway up the long hill that Bamford had been built on. One Sunday morning at about half-past ten, not long after he’d moved in, Irvine had walked down the hill and into the village church, St John the Baptist, attracted by the smell of fresh coffee. He’d spent the previous evening in the Angler’s Rest and wasn’t quite awake. He discovered that the service on the first Sunday of the month began with coffee and cake.

  Irvine hadn’t been to church much since he’d left Denby Dale, where he grew up. His mother had been a church warden and was very serious about the role, which had probably made him react against anything with a whiff of C of E ever since. St John’s had a curiously tall, thin tower with bells that he heard being rung for practice every Wednesday evening when he was at home. He’d been told that bodies exhumed from the village of Derwent had been brought here for reburial after it was submerged during the construction of Ladybower Reservoir.

  And, while he was drinking coffee and eating cake there, he’d met the female vicar for Bamford, who covered three parishes and lived down the line in Hathersage. And somehow, he’d found himself being roped in to help with the village carnival, climbing ladders to put up bunting and acting as a marshal for the parade. He found it oddly satisfying. He was starting to be absorbed into the community.

  But today when Irvine got back in the Kia he headed uphill. Not far above Bamford, he hit the lower end of Ladybower Reservoir, where the dam held back twenty-eight million gallons of water from flooding Bamford and the famous eighty-foot-wide plugholes created swirling vortexes on the surface of the water, as if Ladybower was draining away into another dimension. Most of the water flowed southwards from here along the Derwent Aqueduct to be distributed to the populations of Derby and Leicester.