Secrets of Death

by Stephen Booth

  ‘What’s happening?’ Matt was saying. ‘Ben, are you there?’

  Ben shook hailstones off his jacket and out of his hair.

  ‘It was hailstones, that’s all.’

  ‘For a moment, I thought something had happened to you.’

  ‘It was just a shower. It’s gone now. I guess it will be heading your way.’

  ‘We’re all inside for the night,’ said Matt.

  ‘Sounds great.’

  Ben ended the call and sat listening for a little while longer after the hailstone shower had stopped. Eventually, as night came on, the noises receded. They left just the lonely call of a bird on the moor and the sound of his own heart beating in his ears.

  Cooper was only half paying attention to the road on his way back from Heeley Bank. It was dark now, properly dark in the way it only ever was in the countryside where there were no street lights. The sky had clouded over as night fell and there were no stars or moon visible. There were just his headlights picking out the shapes of the trees and gateways, and the flicker of a sheep’s eyes in the darkness.

  At first he didn’t notice the lights behind him. Though there was little traffic on this road at night, it wasn’t so rare as to draw attention. It was only when the headlights steadily came closer and closer that he became conscious of the glare in his rearview mirror.

  ‘What on earth are you trying to do?’ he muttered.

  Some drivers were far too impatient and took ludicrous risks to overtake in dangerous situations. On this road there was barely room for one car, let alone a safe overtaking manoeuvre. The bends and the stone walls prevented you from seeing what was coming in the other direction, even in daylight. At night, it was only the last-minute glimpse of an approaching headlight that warned you to slow down and swing over on to the verge as you passed. Everyone knew that who was used to driving on these narrow back roads. This must be some tourist, perhaps heading home from an evening at a country pub after too much to drink and deciding to take the scenic route.

  Cooper peered ahead, trying to spot a place to pull in so he could let the other driver past. But there were only walls close on either side, a stretch of rocky banking and a gnarled hawthorn tree poking its branches into the road.

  The headlights came closer still, until the interior of the Toyota was flooded with light. Cooper found he was clutching the steering wheel tighter.

  ‘Idiot,’ he said.

  He sounded his horn, a couple of sharp beeps to warn the other driver. The car kept coming, closer and closer. Had the driver taken him for a tourist and decided to have some fun by pressuring him to drive faster and faster on the narrow road? If so, he’d chosen the wrong person.

  Cooper switched his hazards on, opened his driver’s side window and waved a hand to indicate to the driver to slow down. He couldn’t brake, because the other car was too close and the road was slippery after the shower of hailstones: there would certainly be a collision. The Toyota was his own vehicle, not police property, so any damage to his rear end and the subsequent insurance claim would be a nightmare, just like Gareth Cook’s experience.

  Then Cooper felt a jolt and was thrown forward into his seat belt.

  ‘What the hell—’

  He realised the car behind had deliberately hit him. He gazed in surprise into his mirror and was just in time to see the car lurch forward again and collide with his bumper. Cooper put his foot on the accelerator, but had to swing the wheel sharply to the right as he went into a bend.

  The other vehicle accelerated too. He could hear the roar of the engine and the squeal of the rubber from the tyres a second before he felt the impact, harder this time, a shunt that spun his Toyota out of control. Though he frantically twisted the wheel, he found himself sliding off the road and bouncing over a grass verge in a hail of scratching branches and stones scraping the underside of the car.

  The brakes were useless on this surface as he skidded into a slope. His front wing bounced off something and his view through the windscreen was suddenly obscured by a mass of leaves and twigs from a dense shrub.

  By the time Cooper undid his seat belt and pulled himself out of the Toyota, the other car was a hundred yards away, round the bend and out of sight.

  Cautiously, Diane Fry unlocked the door of her apartment, pushed it open an inch or two and sniffed.

  A pungent odour reached her nostrils. Several pungent odours. They mingled like a fatal disaster in a perfume factory. That meant her sister and the baby were still in residence. Life wasn’t yet back to normal.

  ‘It’s only me,’ she called as she entered the hall.

  There was no reply. Perhaps they were asleep. She pictured Angie sprawled out on the bed in the spare room. And the baby? Where would the baby be? You weren’t supposed to leave them unsupervised, were you? They could lie in the wrong position and their faces would go flat. She was sure she’d read something like that.

  She had to admit that the baby terrified her. It seemed to keep staring at her and demanding things. No, he. She was supposed to say he, not it. His name was Zack. She’d even managed to say it out loud once or twice and she was quite proud of her achievement.

  Diane found Angie dozing on the settee in front of the TV, with the baby on her lap and a reality show unwatched on the screen. At least there was no sign of the mysterious boyfriend.

  Against her better instincts, Diane felt a rush of affection for her sister. Lying there with eyes closed, mouth open and a pool of baby dribble on her T-shirt, she looked peculiarly vulnerable in a way that Diane hadn’t seen her for a long time. It took her all the way back to their teens when they were growing up in foster homes together and were as close as sisters could possibly be. What had happened between them since then to drive them apart?

  The baby stirred, kicked its legs, gurgled and woke up. In a moment, it would begin to cry and wouldn’t stop for hours.

  Well, that was one thing that had come between them. This child had driven a wedge in their relationship. It stirred up so many mixed emotions in her that she could hardly bear to have it in the house a minute longer.

  Diane headed to the bathroom for the shower, thinking, Not it, he. She supposed she would get used to the idea one day, when baby Zack had grown up, left school and was earning a living for himself. Then she turned the shower up full blast, so that she couldn’t hear the baby crying.

  19

  Day 5

  Carol Villiers did a double-take and stared across the staff parking area behind E Division headquarters. She walked over, then stopped and shook her head in disapproval.

  ‘So what happened?’ she said.

  ‘Some idiot,’ said Cooper, climbing out of the driver’s door and gazing at the scratches in the car’s paintwork.

  ‘Some idiot what? Some idiot was driving his red Toyota RAV back from the pub and hit a stone wall?’

  ‘Well … no, it wasn’t like you’re thinking.’

  ‘You’ll need a new wing anyway,’ said Villiers. ‘And a respray. Have you made an insurance claim?’

  ‘I might have difficulty with the insurance company.’

  ‘Why? Where had you been?’ She looked at the expression on his face. ‘Oh, you were at the pub. Seriously, Ben?’

  ‘I was drinking fruit juice,’ he said. ‘You know me better than that.’

  ‘So what did happen?’

  ‘Someone ran me off the road.’

  ‘Deliberately?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t be sure.’

  ‘You didn’t get the registration?’

  Cooper sighed. ‘Not even the first letter of it.’

  He could have kicked himself for that. It was one of the first questions you asked people who were involved in a hit-and-run or a road traffic collision where one of the parties left the scene. Didn’t you get the registration number? And so few people did.

  ‘But you’re okay, are you?’ said Villiers as they entered the building.

  At last, she was expressing co
ncern for his welfare rather than only about the damage to his car and his blood alcohol level.

  ‘I’m fine, thanks,’ he said. ‘Just a bruise or two. I’ll let you know if I suddenly develop whiplash. I could be wrong,’ he went on. ‘It may have been some fool who’d had too many drinks and wasn’t used to the road.’

  ‘They didn’t stop, though,’ said Villiers. ‘That’s a serious offence right there. They were probably trying to avoid getting breathalysed and banned. You’re sure it wasn’t deliberate?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Cooper. ‘I really don’t know.’

  He followed Villiers up to the first floor and headed for his office. No, he didn’t know for sure what had happened last night. All he could feel certain of was the tangled undergrowth he’d had to clear from the front of his car, the branch he had to wrench out of his wheel arch, the mud covering his headlight.

  He also didn’t know whether his brief glimpse of the other car had been accurate. He couldn’t be sure that it really had been a Land Rover.

  ‘So what’s going on this morning?’ he asked when they reached the first floor.

  ‘The body in Ladybower last night,’ said Villiers. ‘His name was Christopher Yates. You know Luke Irvine was right on the spot?’

  ‘Yes, I heard.’

  ‘Mr Yates was only a young man. Twenty-three. He has an address in Dronfield. We don’t have anything else on him yet. Becky Hurst is out taking some statements.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Cooper sat at his desk and turned over some paperwork without reading it. He realised Carol Villiers was still standing there watching him. He wondered what she was thinking, what she might see in him that was different this morning. Apart from the dents on his car, that was.

  ‘Carol, what do you think of assisted suicide?’ he said.

  ‘Assisted suicide? It’s illegal, isn’t it?’

  ‘Both active euthanasia and assisted suicide are illegal under English law,’ said Cooper. ‘Depending on the circumstances, euthanasia is treated either as manslaughter or murder. The maximum penalty is life imprisonment. Assisting suicide is also an offence under the terms of the 1961 Suicide Act. It’s punishable by a maximum of fourteen years in prison.’

  ‘You’ve been looking it up,’ said Villiers.

  ‘I don’t carry a law book in my head.’

  ‘It’s legal in some countries, though.’

  ‘Yes, a handful. Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg. Under their laws, a person’s life can be deliberately ended, but only by their doctor or a healthcare professional. Generally they use an overdose of muscle relaxants or sedatives, which causes coma and then death. But it is only legal if the individual makes a voluntary request to end their own life and has the mental capacity to make an informed decision. Oh, and they must be suffering unbearably and have no prospect for an improvement in their condition. The conditions are pretty tight.’

  ‘So what’s your point?’

  ‘Well, do you think assisted suicide is wrong?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘You just said yourself – in this country, assisted suicide is a crime.’

  ‘Yes. But is it wrong?’

  Villiers hesitated. It was a question police officers weren’t used to being asked. In their world, things were either legal or not. An activity was either an offence or it wasn’t. The law was the only rule they could act by, an Act of Parliament their point of reference. If something was defined as a crime on the statute books, how could it not be wrong?

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Villiers. ‘I can’t judge.’

  ‘No, nor me.’

  Well, how could anyone understand or judge those individuals who chose to go down that route, to take a trip abroad to end their lives? Otherwise, their future rested on a decision between enduring the hell of their own suffering or attempting a high-risk suicide. Yet it was said that 80 per cent of those who got the green light for an assisted suicide didn’t go through with it in the end.

  From the outside, the thought processes were impossible to understand. As Anson Tate had said: ‘Don’t judge anyone’s choice. Not until you know what options they had to choose from.’

  ‘And attempting to kill yourself isn’t a criminal act in itself,’ said Villiers. ‘It’s not like attempted murder.’

  ‘The motive for suicide is the same,’ said Cooper.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s the same reason some people end up committing murder. They reach a point in their lives when they start to get everything out of perspective or out of proportion, and they can’t see any other way out.’

  ‘Yes, I think you’re right.’

  Cooper had always been fascinated by what led people to commit murder, the ordinary individuals who found themselves in circumstances where they could see no other way except the taking of someone else’s life. They were rarely evil. Everyone had the potential for good and bad, to be perpetrator or victim. There was often a very complicated prior relationship between the two in a murder inquiry. And, in a way, suicide was the ultimate example. In suicide, the killer and victim were the same person.

  He recalled what Chloe Young had said. Men never had anyone to talk to. Not just the loners, but the married ones. Their chance of any meaningful conversation vanished. And that’s the way it is, until it’s too late.

  Cooper looked up from his paperwork. What if these men actually had found someone to talk to? Perhaps the only person they could ever talk to about the way they were feeling and explain their suicidal thoughts. And that person hadn’t steered them away from taking their own lives. Instead, they’d been guided towards death. But why?

  He saw that Luke Irvine had come into the CID room and he went out to speak to him.

  ‘Well done, Luke. That must have been difficult.’

  ‘I couldn’t do anything to help him,’ said Irvine.

  Gently, Cooper put a hand on his shoulder. ‘I know. It’s bad, isn’t it? You want to feel you can do something to help. Sometimes, it just isn’t possible. And you have to remember, it’s not your fault.’

  Irvine nodded. ‘I know you’re right.’

  ‘Take some time, if you want,’ said Cooper.

  ‘No, I’m okay.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘You know what made it worse?’ said Irvine, ‘The fact that he was so young. Younger than me.’ He shook his head in bafflement. ‘Why would you do that?’

  Cooper became aware that DC Becky Hurst was standing in the doorway. She was clutching her notebook and he would normally have expected her to bear that eager expression when she had useful information. But not this time. She stood quietly, hesitating as she listened to what Luke Irvine was saying. Hurst almost looked as though she was about to back out again. Cooper waved her forward.

  ‘What have you got, Becky?’

  She stepped forward tentatively, glancing from him to Irvine and back again.

  ‘Well, I don’t know if this is good news or not,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She gazed at a page of her notebook, but only to avoid meeting anyone else’s eye. She would know what it said by heart.

  ‘The deceased,’ she said. ‘Mr Christopher Yates. The man who drowned in Ladybower Reservoir.’

  ‘Yes?’

  Irvine had turned to look at Hurst, and Cooper could see that he’d tensed up again.

  ‘The fact is,’ said Hurst, ‘he wasn’t a suicide. He decided to go for a dip because it was warm and got sucked to the bottom by the current. He died because his heart failed in the cold temperature.’

  ‘So that was an accident.’

  ‘Or misadventure. On the other hand …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, it looks as though we might have missed one.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘A Nissan X-Trail has been at Surprise View for two days now. We ran the number-plate and it hasn’t been reported stolen. The owner is a lecturer at Eden Valley College by the name of Gordon Burgess.’ />
  ‘Local?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Yes, local.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘He lives in Edendale. Why?’

  ‘He doesn’t fit the pattern, that’s all. He’s not a tourist.’

  ‘Well, pattern or not, he hasn’t turned up for work today. And no one knows where he is.’

  Cooper looked down at the map. ‘It had to happen,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That one of them wouldn’t stay with their car. We’ll find him on the Longshaw Estate or up on one of the hills. If we’re very unlucky, he’ll be somewhere on the moors. There’s no chance of finding a body out there at this time of year. Not on the ground anyway. The heather and bracken are too deep; there are too many dips and hollows.’

  ‘I’ll request the air support unit, shall I?’

  Cooper nodded. ‘And mountain rescue. They’re the best resource on the ground in these circumstances.’

  ‘They’re all volunteers, though, aren’t they?’

  ‘They’ll come nevertheless,’ said Cooper. ‘They always do.’

  From Surprise View, the panoramic vistas were dramatic, some of the most spectacular scenery in the whole of Derbyshire. To the north, a series of steep edges linked together to form a gritstone barrier dividing the higher moorland from the lower limestone dales.

  When Cooper arrived, he could see several liveried police vehicles and a silver-grey four-wheel-drive ambulance from the Buxton Mountain Rescue team halfway up the track towards Carl Wark.

  ‘Yes, we’ve located the gentleman,’ said a uniformed officer in a high-vis jacket. ‘Or at least the mountain rescue team did. And do you want the other good news?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘He’s still alive. But only just. He seems to be in a coma. We’ve got a problem, though.’

  ‘A problem? Why isn’t he in hospital?’

  ‘He hasn’t even been examined yet. We can’t get near.’

  ‘What do you mean? Are you afraid of getting your feet wet?’