Secrets of Death

by Stephen Booth

  ‘It would scare me, actually.’

  ‘Me too.’

  Fry smiled. ‘We’ll go back to Simon Hull. We’ll work out all the details in due course.’

  ‘I’m sure you will.’

  She looked at him quizzically. ‘Were all those other suicides arranged just to camouflage the death of Roger Farrell?’ she said.

  ‘No, no. It wasn’t as simple as that.’

  Cooper had thought about the question already. Anson Tate had surely enjoyed what he was doing. Given the opportunity, he’d found he couldn’t stop. All those potential suicides coming to his website had encouraged him to continue. They had needed him. And he’d been unable to turn them away, because he liked it too much. He liked being needed. It was difficult to imagine the feeling of power it must have given him. The power over life and death. It was the nearest you could ever get to being God.

  ‘What about the others?’ asked Fry.

  ‘I’ve had the team going through them in minute detail. We can’t find any connection.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Apart from Farrell, it seems Tate didn’t contact any of the others directly. He didn’t need to, though. David Kuzneski, Alex Denning, Gordon Burgess, Bethan Jones, and probably others – they were already in a state of mind where they’d decided to look for guidance or for information, or just for someone who understood what was going through their heads.’

  Fry nodded. ‘Not everybody would understand. They probably felt members of their families wouldn’t.’

  ‘Exactly. So they went looking elsewhere. And of course they did it online. It’s like when you feel ill, isn’t it? Everyone goes online to check what disease their symptoms might indicate, before they ever think of visiting their GP. It seems to be the same with potential suicides. They do a Google search one night when they’re feeling at rock bottom and they come across these websites.’

  ‘And some of them found Anson Tate’s site secretsofdeath.org.’

  Cooper sighed deeply. ‘Yes. So they weren’t targeted at all. They were drawn to it, like moths to a flame.’

  Ella Webster stared at the photograph of Anson Tate, then laid it carefully on the table.

  ‘Yes, I do recognise him,’ she said, as if Cooper had been pestering her with the question for days. ‘He visited my aunt when I was over there from Spain a few months ago. I didn’t like him, but Aunt Fay wouldn’t tell me what he wanted. She said he was a journalist, but not what he was writing about.’

  ‘He wasn’t writing a story about anything. He was investigating your father.’

  Ella looked away. ‘I thought it must be something like that. I just didn’t want to get involved.’

  ‘Mrs Webster, did you have any idea what your father was doing?’

  ‘No. Well, there was talk among the family. Disapproving murmurings from Aunt Fay, the odd mysterious hint from Uncle Alan, her husband. I tried to keep out of it.’

  ‘You didn’t want to know anything.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. Does that make me so bad? The father I knew had already gone. Not that he was ever a loving and affectionate dad. But he’d changed so much after Mum died that we couldn’t even talk to each other any more. He was like a stranger to me. Whatever it was, I just prayed it would end quietly, without dragging us all into some vile scandal. That would have been awful. I have two children, you know. I need to shield them from things like that.’

  Cooper studied her carefully. Like almost everyone he’d ever interviewed, she was keeping something back. Some were blatant about it, but others pretended to be open, sharing some information while holding details back. And Ella Webster had clammed up, just like a suspect in an interview room. Cooper expected her to say ‘no comment’ at any moment.

  ‘You and your family must have suspected something?’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you come to the police?’

  Her eyes flickered, but there was no other response.

  ‘You surely had some idea of what your father was doing?’ he persisted.

  ‘How could we?’ she said.

  Cooper stared at her, frustrated. How could they indeed, if they had never talked to him? The timing of the estrangement in Farrell’s family looked to be more than a coincidence. But, since none of them would talk, he had no evidence that he could use.

  He would have to leave it to their consciences. In years to come they might reflect that their own inaction, the instinct of loyalty to a family member, could have resulted in the deaths of three young women.

  ‘I think you probably knew what your aunt was talking to Mr Tate about,’ said Cooper. ‘And you didn’t object. You just closed your eyes, crossed your fingers and hoped it would work out in your favour.’

  Ella Webster pursed her lips stubbornly. ‘All I can say is that it turned out for the best in the end. No long-drawn-out court case, no prurient media coverage, no need for any of the family to get dragged in. And my children can remain oblivious. All they know is that they no longer have a grandfather whom they never met. I’m sorry, Detective Inspector, but that’s the way I like it.’

  Cooper wanted to tell her that it might all come out afterwards, when they got Anson Tate in court. A not-guilty plea would result in a long, complicated trial with many of the details about Mr Farrell brought out by the prosecution. He didn’t feel able to say that with any confidence, though. He wasn’t sure that the CPS would go ahead with a prosecution or what charges they could use. And Tate was certain to plead guilty to anything they presented. A quick hearing and a lesser sentence. He could see Tate smiling now.

  Instead, Cooper stood up. There seemed nothing more to say to Ella Webster. Chloe Young had been so right, more correct than she could know. Some men had no one to talk to, not even members of their own family.

  He couldn’t feel pity for Roger Farrell, of course. But how many others were there out there, alone and isolated through no fault of their own, easy prey to malicious outside influences and to their own inner torments?

  31

  Ben Cooper interviewed Anson Tate again. He was very glad that Tate wasn’t the ‘goldfish’ type of interviewee who responded with ‘no comment’ to every question. Tate liked to talk. He talked a lot. All he wanted was the attention. It was a bit pathetic to see really.

  But after a while Tate’s arguments about rational suicide began to grind Cooper down. Tate was trying too hard to present himself as someone with good intentions, claiming that even Roger Farrell had made his own decision to end his life. Anson Tate was just a man who was there to help.

  Sitting across the table in the interview room, Tate still looked insignificant, despite everything that Cooper now knew about him, or suspected. His narrow mouth was held in a tight line and his eyes darted around the room. The stiff wedge of hair on his forehead had sagged and lost its shape. It lay against his skull like a damp rag.

  ‘So, Mr Tate,’ said Cooper, ‘tell me this: what was the nature of your relationship with the murdered student Victoria Jenkins?’

  Tate scowled. ‘I don’t want to talk about her.’

  ‘Why not? Are you ashamed, Mr Tate? Surely not.’

  ‘Why would I be ashamed?’

  ‘A man like you, with a teenage girl …’

  That hit a nerve. Tate flushed angrily.

  ‘That’s a disgusting suggestion,’ he said.

  ‘Well, you’re a lot older than she was,’ persisted Cooper.

  Tate leaned forward. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Old enough to be her father.’

  Cooper frowned at his tone. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Don’t you get it? I was her father. Victoria was my own daughter.’

  ‘You look a bit shattered,’ said Fry later, sitting across the other side of Cooper’s desk without a hint of a knock on the door. ‘Mr Tate worn you out?’

  ‘He’s depressing me,’ admitted Cooper.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘His relationship with Victoria Jenkins,’ he said. ‘It was more than an obsessive crush on
a much younger woman. Tate believed that she was his daughter.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It seems he had a fling with her mother, way back when he was a dashing young newspaper reporter. When he was sent out on the A-level story, he realised who she was and calculated that her age was a fit.’

  ‘Did he never do anything about it? Speak to her mother, try to get a DNA test?’

  ‘No, not Mr Tate. It was an act of faith for him. He must have seen something of himself in her or convinced himself that she was his, because of her cleverness. He has quite an ego, you know.’

  ‘Doesn’t he just?’

  ‘Well, that’s his story. Believe it or not, as you like.’

  ‘So what did he do after Victoria Jenkins was killed?’ asked Fry.

  ‘He expected there to be an arrest and someone to be charged with her murder. He was hoping for justice, I suppose. And it didn’t happen.’

  ‘Well, that would be why Tate made himself busy making his own enquiries around Nottingham,’ said Fry, consulting her notebook. ‘It seems he talked to the working girls. They gave him information that they wouldn’t share with us.’

  ‘I suppose he paid them, did he?’

  ‘Yes, that tends to make a difference. So they told him their experiences. Roger Farrell had been on the scene for some time and word gets around. Even the newer girls knew all about him. They gave Anson Tate enough for him to use.’

  Cooper looked at her closely. Fry seemed a bit uncomfortable. Her head was down gazing at her notes, as if she couldn’t meet his eye. He knew there was something she deliberately wasn’t saying. She was hoping he wouldn’t ask the pertinent question. That was why she couldn’t look at him. But what was it? He considered what he’d be focusing on if she was a suspect in an interview room and he was probing for the truth.

  ‘Diane,’ he said, ‘how do you know all that, if the girls wouldn’t talk to you?’

  Her head came up suddenly.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  To Cooper, it sounded like ‘no comment’. So he asked the question again.

  ‘You’ve just said that the working girls in Nottingham wouldn’t share information with you. Anson Tate would be the only other person who knows what information they gave him and he hasn’t admitted it in my interviews with him. Not yet anyway. So how do you know what the girls told Tate?’

  ‘I …’ began Fry.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I used Devdan Sharma,’ she said. ‘He said he had some relevant experience from his assignment liaising with Immigration Enforcement. So I asked him to use his contacts. They came up with an Albanian girl who’d been working in the Forest Road area. They picked her up earlier this week and she was facing deportation. She talked.’

  ‘And that’s it?’

  ‘It seemed a good idea,’ Fry said defensively. ‘And it worked. You can’t deny it worked.’

  ‘No, I can’t.’

  They sat and looked at each other for a while. Cooper was seething inside, but with mixed emotions. Fry had interfered, but he had to admit that she’d achieved results. Dev Sharma should have told him what Fry had asked him to do. He should have referred the request to his DI straight away, since Fry had no authority here in Edendale. But Sharma hadn’t done that. He seemed to have switched loyalties very easily. But he had also got results.

  Cooper knew it would be churlish of him to object. He should be thanking Fry. But the words wouldn’t come out of his mouth. He mentally filed it away to deal with later, when he could figure out the right response. Now wasn’t the time. He could only move on.

  ‘So that’s how you know Tate paid the girls for information,’ he said finally.

  ‘Yes,’ said Fry, visibly relaxing.

  Cooper nodded. ‘I suppose Tate must have run out of money in the end. That was why he moved into that grotty flat in Edendale. He said it was because he liked it. It should have occurred to me to wonder what he’d done with his money.’

  ‘Well, he had no one to leave it to in his will,’ said Fry. ‘And I don’t suppose he was much into charitable giving. He doesn’t seem the type.’

  ‘So he figured out who killed his daughter and the other girls, or he believed he had. Why didn’t he report his suspicions? No faith in the police?’

  Fry sniffed. ‘Possibly.’

  ‘And instead he decided to take things into his own hands.’

  ‘Yes. But not the way some men would have done. Many fathers would have cornered Farrell in an alley somewhere with a few friends and beaten him to within an inch of his life. That’s the usual sort of vigilante justice we’re used to.’

  ‘Anson Tate isn’t that kind of man. He doesn’t approve of violence. He said so.’

  ‘Well, that’s ironic for a man who’s killed half a dozen people,’ said Fry.

  Cooper had begun to feel very weary now. ‘He didn’t actually kill them, Diane. He was just partly responsible for their deaths.’

  ‘Just partly responsible? What a woolly expression. I’m sure you don’t really believe that.’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘And you still don’t think he was trying to blackmail Farrell?’

  ‘For money? No. Anson Tate was cleverer and more subtle than that. He didn’t want money from Farrell. He wanted his death. That was a pretty good reason for him to sell his house in Mansfield and move into that cheap flat. He had nothing else he wanted to do with his money, except to track down Roger Farrell and end his life in some way.’

  ‘He could have hired a hit-man,’ said Fry. ‘I believe they’re easy enough to find in the city, if you’ve got the money.’

  Cooper shook his head. ‘No, that wouldn’t have satisfied Tate. He needed the feeling of power and control. He wanted to play God. In this case, a vengeful God.’

  ‘Of course, vigilantism is wrong, no matter what form it takes. Whether it’s a baseball bat in an alley or psychological pressure. The outcome is the same.’

  ‘Yes, it’s wrong. On the other hand …’

  ‘We’re not going to spend much time regretting it in Farrell’s case, are we?’

  ‘No. Just the others.’

  ‘The collateral damage.’

  ‘I’m not sure they could be described as that really. Denning, Kuzneski, Burgess. They weren’t just accidents. I think Tate got a buzz from it. He got a taste for the feeling of power. For him it was like being God.’

  A few minutes later, after Fry had left, Cooper looked up suddenly, as if he had just been jerked out of sleep. Carol Villiers was standing in the doorway and she’d brought him a coffee.

  ‘You looked as though you needed this.’

  ‘You’re right. I need it so much.’

  Villiers stood and watched attentively as he drank it, like a mother making sure her children ate their greens.

  ‘You were right in what you said the other day, Carol,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Was I? When was that momentous occasion?’

  ‘When you said that Bethan Jones was the odd one out. And not just because she was female. As far as Dev and Luke can tell from trawling through her online activity, she may have visited other suicide sites but she had no contact with Anson Tate and his Secrets of Death website. She was entirely the wrong sort of victim for him to prey on.’

  ‘She was an ordinary suicide, then?’

  ‘If there is such a thing,’ said Cooper.

  ‘She made her own decision and decided to give up the fight.’

  ‘There’s a difference between giving up trying and coming to terms with what life has thrown at you. One’s fatalistic, the other’s realistic.’

  ‘You should never give up trying,’ said Villiers vehemently. ‘Never.’

  Cooper turned over a plastic evidence bag. At least Anson Tate had left a note in his flat on Buxton Road, though it was a strange form of farewell that he’d written. What an irony. A suicide note without a suicide. Finally, Tate’s planning had gone wrong. There was an unpredictable factor he
hadn’t taken into account.

  ‘So what are we going to charge Tate with?’ asked Villiers.

  ‘We’ll have to talk to the CPS. But we’ll never get him to trial.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘There’s only one way out that Anson Tate will be planning. And you can bet it won’t be a long spell in prison, followed by old age and a gradual decline into senility. He’ll have to be on suicide watch while he’s in the cells. And I doubt even that will be enough.’

  ‘I’m not sure you’re right,’ said Villiers. ‘He thought it all through too carefully. All that stuff about the right to control your own destiny. He’s come to terms intellectually with death. But he’s a sociopath. There’s no emotion in him. You need some kind of emotion behind the act to take your own life.’

  ‘He did have an emotion,’ said Cooper. ‘He was consumed by the desire for revenge.’

  ‘But Tate’s first suicide attempt on the bridge was a fake, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Cooper. ‘I think he wanted to know for himself what it felt like in that moment, when you stand on the verge of killing yourself. He was preparing himself for Roger Farrell.’

  Sadly, Cooper shook his head over the story of Anson Tate. He might still be alive physically, but what he’d done already was a form of psychological suicide. Surely you had to kill something inside yourself before you could kill someone else?

  The dregs of his coffee were cold when Diane Fry came and asked to see the note that Anson Tate had left in his flat in Buxton Road.

  ‘You know, I thought of Anson Tate as a victim,’ said Cooper. ‘But he wasn’t, was he?’

  Fry raised an eyebrow. ‘Really? Is that the way you treat victims these days? If so, you’ve changed even more than I thought.’

  Cooper looked away. Was she right? Had he changed that much? He hoped not. Everyone changed slowly, bit by bit, over the years. It happened while you were busy doing other things. Sometimes you didn’t notice yourself that you’d become a different person. And by then the change might be irreversible.