Secrets of Death

by Stephen Booth

  ‘It could do. In fact, it might have done already. We don’t really know.’

  ‘And you said all of your suicides have been males.’

  ‘That was the case when I spoke to you yesterday.’

  ‘You’ve had another one? A woman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Cooper gave her a brief outline, glancing round to see that no one could overhear the details.

  ‘That’s interesting,’ said Dr Young. ‘It doesn’t fit the pattern.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  ‘With male suicides, there’s a well-established process. The trouble is, men never have anyone to talk to. Not just the loners, but the ones who’ve been married for a while. They lose all their male friends and their chance of any meaningful conversation vanishes for ever. Unless they have enough sense to get professional help, which too few of them do.’

  ‘Not around here. It would be considered a sign of weakness.’

  She nodded. ‘And that’s often the way it is, until it’s too late.’

  Cooper remembered attending a seminar once, when the subject of the increasing rate of male suicides was raised. An experienced police officer had voiced the common belief that men achieved a successful suicide, whereas women only attempted it as ‘a cry for help’. So when a woman did manage to kill herself with an overdose or a self-inflicted wound, it was an accident, a simple misjudgement. Men planned to die, and most of them did it competently.

  ‘Yet some people live to a grand old age without any friends or family around them,’ said Cooper. ‘You hear about them all the time. Some ninety-nine-year-old Second World War veteran who’s seen off all his contemporaries and spends his last days in a nursing home among total strangers. You see appeals in the papers for people to go to their funerals so the church isn’t empty.’

  Chloe Young threw out her hands helplessly. ‘I can’t explain that for you. No doubt there are lots of other factors involved. But the suicide rate among men is substantially under-reported. Coroners bend over backwards not to upset the family with a suicide verdict. And of course there’s the question of life insurance. Suicide makes a policy invalid. So the family may try to conceal any direct evidence, such as a farewell note, and hope the death will be recorded as an accident. The trouble is, under-reporting means the seriousness of the problem isn’t appreciated and there’s no pressure on the authorities to do anything about it.’

  ‘Suicide is still disapproved of, though.’

  ‘In a way.’

  Cooper nodded. ‘In a way’ was right. The righteous denunciation of more religious times had gone. What had once been considered a mortal sin was now something more private and shameful, an act to be swept under the carpet rather than denounced from the pulpit. A form of self-abuse, rather than an insult to God.

  Although suicide was still shocking, it seemed to Cooper that it had become respectable in a strange sort of way. An acknowledged problem for society, a suitable subject for study by sociologists and medical professionals. The image was no longer of Romeo and Juliet, romantic and youthful, but more like King Lear, ageing and desperate.

  ‘Statistically, the number of successful suicides increases with age,’ said Dr Young. ‘You are more likely to kill yourself between the ages of fifty-five and sixty-five. The young attempt it, but don’t succeed as often. They act impetuously, on a wave of emotion, a statement of despair. Older suicides are more careful and more determined.’

  ‘And more usually men.’

  She nodded. ‘In many cultures, suicide has often been regarded as a logical act by a man. It’s the choosing of death before dishonour.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  Cooper had heard of it even in his own culture. If you believed what you read in classic detective fiction, it had even been offered as an alternative to arrest and trial. There were countless stories by the likes of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle in which the perpetrator had been left alone in their study with a loaded revolver and expected to take the ‘honourable’ way out.

  And there seemed to be some truth in it, as far as men were concerned. Many suicides were the result of disastrous decisions in life, men caught out doing something shameful or experiencing the disgrace of bankruptcy or unemployment, or divorce. Not long ago, a serving police officer in a neighbouring county had jumped from a bridge to avoid prosecution for sexual offences committed while he was on duty. He hadn’t been able to face that prospect. He’d taken the honourable way out. Or that was what people said.

  ‘It’s odd how some suicides are given a sort of legitimacy,’ Cooper said. ‘They seem to be regarded as an understandable response to circumstances.’

  ‘Yes, there’s a whole list of causes that are used to justify the act. But then there are others who are judged to have no legitimate reason for taking their own life, who were regarded as disturbed or irresponsible, or even cowardly. Those are the ones we condemn.’

  Cooper looked at Dr Young and realised there was something she wasn’t saying or was only suggesting between the lines.

  ‘The ones we condemn,’ he said. ‘They’re usually women, aren’t they? They’re not considered to have legitimate reasons, no option to take the honourable way out.’

  She smiled. He’d said the right thing, had understood what she’d meant without her having to spell it out in words of one syllable.

  ‘Your latest case, the woman from Cheshire,’ she said. ‘She will be the one the newspapers talk about. Even though she was terminally ill, her suicide will be disapproved of.’

  ‘I think her choice of method will disturb people too,’ said Cooper. ‘Cutting your wrists is a violent act. Messy. A clean death isn’t so bad.’

  ‘I agree. You know, a couple of decades ago, the drug of choice would have been paracetamol. It was readily available and people took them like sweets. There were so many deaths from paracetamol overdoses that the media were asked not to report the amount a victim took in a suicide case. It was believed that printing the details encouraged more suicides.’

  ‘The copycats.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Despite the nature of their conversation, Cooper found he was enjoying the company of Chloe Young too much. Was it possible to enjoy being with someone too much? Well, it was if you were still nervous of forming a new relationship. The memory of Liz was still too fresh in his mind, the experience of her death too painful.

  He would never have made the first move with someone he’d just met anywhere, let alone over a dead body in a mortuary under the beady eye of Juliana van Doon. But Chloe Young had taken the trouble to phone him to arrange this meeting, hadn’t she? It would have been much too rude to refuse.

  It was hard to know how he could move the conversation on. Their relationship so far revolved entirely around the subject of suicide. It wasn’t the most promising of starts. Yet it was all he had right now.

  ‘Dr Young …?’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Most people who commit suicide do it because they lose hope. They suffer some tragic loss, they’re grieving or in pain and they end their lives out of despair. Isn’t that usually the case?’

  ‘Yes, generally speaking.’

  ‘Why else would you kill yourself?’ asked Cooper. ‘What other motive might you have, other than to put an end to your own suffering?’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ She thought about his question. ‘To save someone else? Someone whose life means more to you than your own.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Cooper. He gazed at his empty glass and the remains of his jacket potato. ‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right.’

  There were so many campaigns to make people aware of the suicide problem. World Suicide Prevention Day took place in September every year, when members of the public were encouraged simply to go up to someone in distress and ask ‘Are you okay?’ Police officers were issued with guidance on dealing with potential suicides too.

  It was a frustrating issue to tackle. The problems s
uicidal individuals faced were often short-lived. By the time they’d talked their problem through with someone, it was all over and done with. But only if they got the right help, the appropriate response.

  During the critical phase, everything could get completely out of proportion or out of perspective, and people became desperate. That was when they were open to the wrong influence, to the dangers of manipulation.

  The person who preyed on vulnerable individuals like these had to be a kind of psychopath, an emotionless monster lacking in empathy or compassion. They were as bad as any serial killer, weren’t they?

  It was still only nine o’clock when they left the Barrel and the sun wouldn’t set for another half-hour or so. It was a fine evening, but with a slight chill in the breeze up here, which reminded Cooper that it was still early in the summer. The weather could change dramatically and without warning in the Peak District.

  Not many miles to the west was Buxton, where a cricket match had famously been snowed off one June.

  Instead of heading to her car, Chloe Young began to walk slowly towards the corner of the pub, where a lane ran up the hill.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘I remember an interesting spot at the back here. I thought I might go for a walk while it’s still light.’

  ‘Yes, Bretton Clough.’

  ‘That’s it.’ She turned and looked at him. ‘Are you coming? You can’t have any more dead bodies to look at tonight?’

  Cooper hesitated only briefly. ‘Okay.’

  They walked up the lane through a copse of trees, along verges full of wild flowers and past a sagging dry-stone wall holding back a hillside yellow with gorse. Within a few minutes they reached a footpath that cut across the fields to the clough itself. A few yards ahead was the Duric Well, a spring, the water of which was said to make women fertile. It was hard to find, though, since it was a small stone chamber set into the hillside, barely two feet wide.

  Bretton Clough was one of those peculiar landscapes he had only ever stumbled across in the Peak District, the sort of place that made him feel he’d just stepped into a different universe, as though he’d fallen down a rabbit hole or walked through the back of a wardrobe. The bottom of the clough was unnaturally undulating and broke out into a series of odd grassed-over humps, with one of the biggest rising steeply to a peak like a tiny extinct volcano. Cooper had always thought that if he looked hard enough among the bracken there he might find a hidden door.

  ‘It makes me think of hobbit houses in the Shire,’ said Dr Young.

  ‘Yes, me too.’

  ‘Lead mining?’ she said doubtfully.

  ‘Actually, no.’

  In many parts of the Peak District, a landscape like this would have indicated the remains of old mine workings, the spoil heaps and deep hollows left by generations of lead miners. Not here at Bretton Clough, though.

  ‘Back in the nineteenth century, the lord of the manor created a rabbit warren here,’ he said. ‘They used to produce rabbit fur for London furriers and tie makers. It wasn’t a financial success, but the rabbits thrived. They burrowed so far into the sides of the clough that they damaged the land. They made the slopes of shale so unstable that they created landslips. These mounds are the result. So this landscape was created by rabbits.’

  ‘So it’s more Watership Down than The Hobbit, then.’

  ‘Well, the rabbits are gone. But we can still imagine Bag End.’

  Cooper watched her walking among the humps. The ruins of five deserted homesteads stood in Bretton Clough, which had once been a thriving community. Nearly three hundred years ago, one of the farms had been the scene of a notorious and bloody murder. A man known locally as Blinker Bland had come here one night intending to rob the farmer of his savings. He had hit the farmer over the head with a milking stool and fatally wounded him. Milking stools weren’t much used as murder weapons these days. So Bretton Clough had earned its place in the criminal history of Derbyshire.

  Cooper looked at Chloe Young as she set off to climb back up the track. It was perhaps best not to tell her that story. Murder might always be in his own mind, or not far away, but he was happier to let her go away thinking of rabbits and Bilbo Baggins.

  18

  A few minutes after he left the Barrel Inn, Ben Cooper turned his Toyota into the car park at Heeley Bank. He turned off the engine and wound down the windows.

  The sun was setting in the west over Bamford Moor, turning the sky a spectacular orange as banks of cloud built up overhead. It was twilight now, that eerie stage between day and night when the fading light made everything seem wrong.

  The rolling farmland and tree-covered slopes to the south looked welcoming and approachable when lit by the sun. Dry-stone walls broke up the scenery into an intricate patchwork, forming geometric shapes that caught the eye from every angle. But the White Peak was full of hidden depths. Here and there, steep limestone cliffs and the pockmarks of abandoned mine workings were waiting to surprise the visitor. It was a human landscape, shaped by people, but a place where thousands of years of history might lie close to the surface, if you cared to look.

  To the north, the moors of the Dark Peak looked completely different. Forbidding and dangerous. The bare surfaces of its gritstone outcrops absorbed the sun instead of reflecting it as the limestone did. Bad weather seemed to hover around the dark slopes, catching out many ill-prepared hikers, even in the summer.

  A large flock of sheep slowly edged their way across the slopes, moving east to west with the sun. In winter those sheep would cluster on the roadside for warmth at night, creating an extra hazard for drivers.

  There were still a few cars left in the car park when he arrived. He saw a French car, one with German plates and a dark blue Mazda with a National Trust membership sticker in the windscreen. A party of walkers stood around a pile of hiking poles near the picnic tables. A row of fresh molehills had erupted in the grass behind the toilets and banks of nettles grew along the paths.

  He noticed a sign saying: ‘CCTV may operate in this car park’.

  ‘Not this one,’ he said to himself.

  When the last car had gone, he sat with his windows down and listened. A stream gurgled a few steps away, the canopy of leaves stirred gently in the breeze, a rook cawed in the woods. A lone sheep complained, bleating plaintively as dusk fell and the air began to cool.

  It felt so peaceful, he could imagine why a place like this drew people who were planning to end their lives. It was a perfect spot to say goodbye to the world, if that was your firm intention.

  It made him wonder, though. Did they begin to think differently as the evening grew late and night gradually fell? When it was dark on the outside, but even darker inside? An uncontrollable drift into the final blackness.

  Cooper shuddered. He was finding it too easy to imagine. He would have to stop thinking about it. Focus on something else. But what?

  He saw from his phone that Matt had rung earlier on. He ought to call back and see how his brother and his family were getting on after the incident that day.

  Ben got out of the car and walked into the dusk. He always felt there was something unnatural in this period between light and dark. Sometimes, its grey malevolence made him shiver.

  Matt sounded okay when he answered at Bridge End Farm. Well, as okay as he ever did. He was never absolute sweetness and light when he picked up the phone. If he ever did give up farming, a job as a receptionist or in a call centre would not be top of his list.

  ‘The girls are a bit quiet,’ he said. ‘Otherwise we’re fine. Another family of caravanners left, but we expected that. They were perfectly nice about it, but I suppose we’ll be getting negative reviews on TripAdvisor.’

  ‘It was hardly your fault,’ said Ben. ‘It’s not as if it was some failure in the advertised facilities on the caravan site. It could have happened anywhere.’

  ‘Well, it didn’t.’

  Ben sighed. ‘No. And I can’t tell you why
, Matt. You’ve given your statement, haven’t you? So that’s all done with.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve done that. I suppose I’ll start getting all those leaflets now.’

  ‘There’s no avoiding it, I’m afraid.’

  In Derbyshire, anyone who reported or witnessed a crime became subject to the ‘Justice Information Guide Supporting and Advising Witnesses’, a clumsy-sounding phrase designed to produce the acronym JIGSAW. It was all about the way the ‘jigsaw’ of the criminal justice system was pieced together. Sometimes, it wasn’t very clear where the victims of crime fitted into it, let alone the witnesses.

  Ben knew he must have mentioned it at some time during a spell of grumbling about the bureaucracy and paperwork he was beset by now. Matt always seemed to appreciate those conversations, especially as he’d spent years boring everyone about the bureaucratic nightmare farmers had to cope with. The idea that his younger brother had the same issues seemed to give him a peculiar satisfaction.

  ‘Where are you, by the way?’ asked Matt. ‘You’re not at the new house.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘I can hear water, a stream. There’s a pheasant out there somewhere. And sheep. I know sheep when I hear them.’

  ‘Can you hear all that from Bridge End?’

  ‘Clear enough.’

  ‘I’m out at Heeley Bank, in the car park.’

  ‘At night?’ said Matt. ‘I didn’t know you were into dogging.’

  ‘What?’

  Then Ben realised his brother was making a joke. He did it so drily, in such a matter-of-fact tone, that it wasn’t always easy to tell. Now Ben felt genuinely reassured that Matt was okay.

  Ben turned at the sound of a loud rattling coming towards him in a wave across the adjacent field. He could see nothing at first and it took him a few seconds to work out what was happening. It was only when the first series of impacts hit the edge of the tarmac that he realised what was coming.

  He dashed for his car as a scatter of hailstones began to land on his head and shoulders. He slammed the door and sat in the driving seat listening to the drumming on the roof and watching the crystals build up on his windscreen. Within a couple of minutes, the surface of the road had turned white, as if there had been a sudden snowfall.