Secrets of Death

by Stephen Booth

  ‘It’s not that. You’d better see for yourself.’

  Cooper finished pulling on his boots and followed the officer up the rocky path until they crested a rise and looked out over the moor.

  The stone ramparts of Carl Wark rose above him, guarding the boundary of the Dark Peak. Yards of tumbled rocks lay below the summit of the hill fort, boulders of weathered gritstone that might have been tossed there by an angry giant. This site had played a huge part in his imagination when he was growing up. Who knew what had lived out here among the bleak expanses of peat moor and the twisted rocky outcrops?

  And Cooper could see the body straight away. It lay in a clear patch of grass between clumps of bracken, the start of a track that led across the moor, snaking between the boggiest parts. Gordon Burgess was wearing a bright blue cagoule and denim jeans. The legs of the jeans were turning black where the dampness from the ground was soaking through.

  Yet the man looked perfectly comfortable, lying flat on his back with his arms folded across his chest like the effigy of a dying saint. His face wasn’t visible, but the position of his head suggested he had simply lain down to gaze at the sky.

  The reason the officers were standing cautiously back from the body was equally obvious. Two long-haired German Shepherds lay on either side of the body, pressed close to their owner as if trying to keep him warm. Their leads lay on the ground where they’d fallen from his hands as he died. When Cooper took a step closer, the two dogs bared their teeth and snarled.

  ‘That’s as far as they’ll let us get,’ said the officer. ‘They’re protecting him.’

  ‘So I see.’

  ‘We’ve asked for a marksman. We’re going to have to shoot them.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We can’t get near. They’re too vicious.’

  ‘I don’t think they’re vicious,’ said Cooper. ‘They’re just protecting their owner. They’re doing their job.’

  ‘Even so—’

  ‘What would you do if that was a human being shouting at everyone and threatening you when you came close?’

  ‘We’d use a Taser,’ said the officer.

  ‘So why treat an animal differently?’

  The dogs began to bark as an officer came too close for their liking. The noise gathered resonance from the gritstone slabs around them and echoed across the site of the hill fort.

  Diane Fry was sitting in a meeting with Detective Chief Inspector Alistair Mackenzie and other members of the Major Crime Unit at St Ann’s.

  ‘What about the other two?’ she said. ‘Simon Hull and Anwar Sharif.’

  Mackenzie ran his fingers over his smooth, bald head to a fringe of hair at the back.

  ‘We can’t get to them without Farrell,’ he said.

  ‘Is there no way?’

  ‘Have you got any suggestions, Diane?’

  Fry looked up at the board on the wall. Three faces stared back at her. One of them was Roger Farrell. The other two were men who had been seen at the same time in the same vicinity as Farrell, either following him or watching him, and just once in an altercation with him on the street in Mapperley. The relationship between them was unclear. Associates, accomplices?

  That didn’t seem to be the case from the facts they’d gathered during the inquiry. Their presence had been more of a warning or a threat. Farrell had made deliberate efforts to keep away from them when they appeared.

  ‘We do know where to pick them up,’ said Fry. ‘We have home addresses for both of them. Anwar Sharif works on a business park near the motorway. And Simon Hull has the garage in Radford. We’ve always considered the possibility that the garage provides a connection with Farrell, haven’t we?’

  ‘But we have no evidence against either of them,’ said Mackenzie. ‘At this stage, they’re potential witnesses, not suspects.’

  ‘Unless they were responsible for Farrell’s death,’ said Fry.

  ‘How could they be? He killed himself, didn’t he?’

  ‘Are we sure of that?’

  ‘Divisional CID in Derbyshire seem pretty sure.’

  Fry shook her head. ‘I don’t think that’s enough.’

  To her surprise, DC Jamie Callaghan backed her up.

  ‘DS Fry is right, boss,’ he said. ‘We could pick them up and get them in an interview room. One at a time, of course. Then see if we can get anything out of them. It will put them under a bit of pressure and we won’t have lost anything.’

  Callaghan glanced at Fry and smiled. She wasn’t used to that kind of support. It was usually more grudging.

  Finally, DCI Mackenzie nodded.

  ‘Let’s do it, then,’ he said. ‘You two can check out the lie of the land today, make sure Hull and Sharif haven’t skipped, and we’ll put an operation together tomorrow. How does that sound?’

  ‘Great,’ said Fry and Callaghan in unison.

  Mackenzie smiled. ‘Meanwhile, we should make sure divisional CID in Derbyshire aren’t queering our pitch with their enquiries into Roger Farrell.’

  No major roads ran through Forest Fields, so it was a place most people never visited. To Diane Fry, it seemed to be shut away from the rest of the city. Only since the arrival of the tram route had Forest Fields become visible, as commuters travelled up and down Noel Street between the northern suburbs and the city centre. Yet it still carried an air of neglect.

  Forest Fields, Hyson Green and Radford comprised the NG7 area of Nottingham. This district had some of the cheapest housing in the city, so it attracted people on low incomes or benefits. It was mostly street after street of small two-up, two-down terraced houses familiar from Coronation Street. Decades ago, the streets would have been cobbled and the toilets would have been outside in the backyard. There were some larger houses near the Forest recreation ground, originally built for the management classes but now divided into flats.

  In the 1950s, immigration into Nottingham had been mainly from the Caribbean. But the 1960s had seen a new wave of immigrants, largely from Pakistan. Like other towns and cities, Nottingham had tended to divide itself along ethnic lines. Black Afro-Caribbeans lived in Radford, St Ann’s and the Meadows; Pakistani communities settled in Sneinton, Hyson Green and Forest Fields.

  Gun crime had been a major problem in this city at one time, earning it the nickname of ‘Shottingham’. Fifteen years ago, when Fry was working for West Midlands Police in Birmingham, Nottingham had become the first city in the UK to have armed police officers on regular patrol, carrying Walther P990 pistols on their service belts, with Heckler and Koch semi-automatic carbines in their cars for back-up.

  Things were better now. The drug and gun culture that existed on some of the estates had been suppressed, though she was sure it still lingered here and there.

  Jamie Callaghan sat alongside her in her black Audi as Fry drove through Forest Fields. As usual, he wanted to chat. Callaghan always seemed to be asking questions about her, as if it was important to find out as much about her as he could.

  ‘Are you hoping to stay with EMSOU long-term, Diane?’ he asked. ‘Derbyshire Constabulary could still call you back, couldn’t they?’

  ‘They could,’ said Fry, ‘I suppose.’

  Yes, it was true, but the thought made her blood run cold. Well, a transfer to D Division in the city of Derby might not be too bad. But a recall to E Division CID? That was her worst-case scenario. If that happened, she would have to resign. No question about it.

  ‘I was already working here in Nottingham,’ said Callaghan. ‘This is home for me.’

  ‘What – this?’

  ‘Well, not this,’ he said, gesturing out of the window. ‘I mean Beeston. My father was a civilian contractor at the Chetwynd Barracks in Chilwell.’

  Simon Hull’s car repair business was located in a unit on an industrial estate, reached from the other side of the old Shipstone’s brewery. Doors stood open into a couple of bays with ramps waiting for customers’ vehicles. The windows on the ground floor were plastered over with
signs, the blue triangles for an MoT testing centre surrounded by warnings of CCTV cameras and guard dogs. Hull’s black Jeep Grand Cherokee was backed up to a padlocked gate. The yard beyond it was protected by security fencing topped by steel spikes. Blinds were pulled down on the first-floor windows of the building, where there must surely be far too much office space for a business this size.

  ‘There doesn’t seem to be much happening,’ said Callaghan, showing an ability to state the obvious.

  ‘Isn’t that always the case?’

  ‘They don’t seem to have any customers. There are no cars on the ramps. Perhaps we’ve come on a quiet day.’

  ‘Or they’ve got some other work on.’

  A shadow moved on the blinds at one of the upstairs windows. A hand appeared, separating the slats, as if someone was peering out. Fry didn’t think they were visible here. There were plenty of vehicles on either side of the street and vans coming and going to the other units.

  ‘We’ve got a bit of movement,’ said Callaghan.

  A mechanic in blue overalls emerged from the shadows of the workshop and stood outside in the sunlight to smoke a cigarette, leaning on a trade waste skip and knocking his stub out in a wall-mounted cigarette bin. A moment later, he was joined by a second man, who was talking on a mobile phone.

  ‘That’s Hull,’ said Fry.

  ‘He’s at work anyway. Everything looks normal.’

  A recovery truck passed Fry’s car carrying a white Citroën with a badly crumpled wing and a missing bumper. It drew on to the forecourt of the garage and the driver unloaded the Citroën from the bed of the truck with a winch. Hull and his mechanic gathered round to examine the damage and began to manoeuvre the car into the workshop.

  ‘Well, that should keep them busy for a while,’ said Callaghan.

  Fry looked up at the first-floor windows, wondering what the rooms were used for. They might just be storage space, with shelves full of air filters and boxes of spark plugs. On the other hand, you could keep anything, or anyone, hidden up there. She itched to get a search warrant and give the place a going-over. But that wasn’t going to happen just yet. Procedures had to be followed.

  ‘Check with the team assigned to Sharif,’ said Fry.

  Callaghan called using a direct channel on his personal radio and listened for a moment.

  ‘Same at their end,’ he said. ‘Anwar Sharif is at work as usual.’

  ‘So both Hull and Sharif are keeping themselves busy during the day.’

  ‘It seems they’re a couple of law-abiding, hard-working citizens. Nothing to raise a red flag.’

  ‘During the day, yes,’ said Fry. ‘It’s what they might have been getting up to in the evenings that I’m interested in.’

  Callaghan shook his head, baffled. ‘But what did Roger Farrell mean to them, Diane?’

  Fry took one last look at the garage, now busy with work going on around the damaged Citroën.

  ‘That’s what we need to find out,’ she said.

  20

  Jessica Burgess had spent the morning picking fleas off her cats and popping them one by one between her fingers. There was something very satisfying about the way the insects burst under her fingernail with a tiny spit of blood.

  When the police came to the door, she was baffled and couldn’t understand what they were trying to tell her about Gordon.

  ‘No, he’s at work,’ she kept saying.

  She could hear herself saying it and knew from the expressions on the faces of the two police officers that it wasn’t true. She said it again anyway, though it didn’t satisfy them. It was all she could think of to say.

  ‘No, he’s at work. He’s teaching today. He’s taking extra classes, because they’re short-staffed.’

  ‘We’re very sorry, Mrs Burgess,’ said the female officer, ‘but we need someone to identify him. Perhaps there’s a relative …?’

  She bridled at that. Were they suggesting she wasn’t capable of recognising her own son without help?

  ‘Where do you want me to go?’ she said.

  ‘To the hospital.’

  She nodded. Obviously, Gordon was just hurt. They’d got it wrong or she’d misheard.

  Without hesitation, she picked up her packet of cigarettes and lighter from the table. ‘Are we going in your car?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Burgess.’

  She climbed into the back of the police car and smiled to herself as they drove her to the mortuary.

  Ben Cooper got the news soon afterwards. ‘Gordon Burgess is dead,’ said Carol Villiers. ‘He never came out of the coma. He was declared DOA when they got him to the hospital.’

  Mr Burgess had died from a gunshot wound. He was found clutching a 1930s Enfield No. 2 revolver, a standard sidearm issued to British Army officers during the Second World War and for many years afterwards in conflicts from Korea to Aden. Burgess’s were the only prints on the gun. But where had he obtained it?

  ‘Next of kin?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘His mother, Jessica. She’s a bit elderly, Ben.’

  ‘I understand.’

  The Burgesses lived in the Underbank area of Edendale. Steep streets, old houses. Very different from the sprawling modern estates to the north of the town. It felt more intimate, more friendly. More like a proper community.

  The sitting room of the house was crowded. Cooper picked out the elderly Mrs Burgess, but he had no idea who all the other people were. Family members, friends, neighbours? Half the street seemed to be in Mrs Burgess’s house.

  ‘Please. Have a seat,’ said someone.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Cooper hesitated. An armchair had been left conspicuously vacant. The moment he took a step towards it, he knew whose chair it was. He could sense the tension in the room, hear the sharp intake of breath from one of the family. He could feel their eyes watching him – the hopeless, agonised stares of people who could see a bus about to run them over but were too scared to move or protest. They were all too polite to ask him not to sit in the armchair. But he knew it would be a mistake and might stifle the conversation completely. Throughout his visit, they would be looking at him, but seeing someone else in his place. Seeing a ghost.

  He turned and looked at Mrs Burgess. He followed her eyes to a dining chair that looked as though it had been brought into the sitting room to cope with an influx of visitors.

  Cooper sat down. First, he expressed his condolences, which produced a series of nods and a few tears on faces already stained by too much crying.

  He tried to assess the group. There was a large middle-aged woman in a baggy denim trouser suit and a man wearing a black quilted body warmer, with oversized lips and a piercing through his eyebrow. A very frail-looking younger woman sat bundled up in a coat. Where her hands protruded from her sleeves, they seemed unnaturally long and fragile.

  A young man of about seventeen kept moving restlessly from room to room. His hair was cut very short and his feet were in huge, bright blue trainers. He was talking on his mobile phone, but all Cooper heard him say was, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look.’

  Like a lot of teenagers, he seemed to take up more space in the room than was physically necessary. With every movement, he came within inches of bumping into a wall or knocking over an ornament. Cooper was reminded of a large, clumsy dog whose limbs weren’t quite as co-ordinated as they ought to be.

  This could be family. But his instinct was telling him they were neighbours, crowding in on the pretext of proving support for the old lady while picking up any information they could glean. A prurient interest was natural, he supposed.

  He marshalled his first questions in his mind, but found he didn’t need to ask anything. Mrs Burgess began to talk, with her visitors chipping in comments occasionally. They barely even gave him chance to figure out who was who in the room.

  The information came in no logical order. It was just brought out randomly as it occurred to someone. He gathered that Gordon Burgess was a volunteer with the Derbyshire Wildlife
Trust and had recently been working on a badger vaccination programme in the Hope Valley, which was a designated ‘edge area’ where bovine TB hadn’t yet taken hold. His mother seemed particularly pleased with this detail, as she repeated it a few minutes later.

  Gordon was a native Derbyshire man, born and raised in the area. At one time, the idea of such a man committing suicide would have been almost inconceivable. Derbyshire hill people were bred to be stoical. The ability to cope and be imperturbable in the face of a crisis was second nature. And Gordon Burgess had always seemed that way, according to his family. His decision to take his own life was a total shock to them. At some point, Gordon had found it much too difficult to maintain the façade.

  ‘Yes, his father served in the army during the early fifties,’ said Mrs Burgess when Cooper got round to asking about the gun. ‘When he died, he left a box full of mementos. I never asked what was in it. It was a personal thing between them. I just thought they were medals and such.’

  ‘Do you know where the box is?’

  ‘It’s in Gordon’s room. At the bottom of the wardrobe.’

  Cooper found the box easily. It was a solid metal construction, a bit bigger than a shoe box. A key was in the lock. Inside, there were indeed some service medals, badges, postcards from the Middle East, a shoulder epaulette. And a small, greasy cardboard carton with indecipherable printing, which rattled when he picked it up. Inside were half a dozen bullets.

  And there was one other item. A black business card with a string of numbers and letters. Secrets of Death.

  He closed the box up and locked it before he went back downstairs. Everybody turned and looked at him as he entered the sitting room. They seemed surprised that he was still there or had forgotten who he was. He had never felt more like an unwelcome intruder, like the title character in An Inspector Calls.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to take this away with me, Mrs Burgess,’ he said.

  She nodded. ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’ll make sure you get everything else back.’

  She nodded again. He wasn’t sure she understood what he was saying. Perhaps someone would explain it to her later.