Now, this was an interesting room. On the middle shelf at about eye level was a six-sided terrarium with stained-glass panels and openings for variegated ivy to trail through. Next to it was a less elaborate container with straight sides and less vegetation, sitting among a selection of coffee-table books and Chinese vases. It wasn’t until he was sitting on the sofa that Cooper noticed the focal point of this terrarium. It was a small chameleon, vivid green and standing perfectly still.
At least, it looked like a chameleon. The only thing he knew about the species was that they were supposed to change colour to blend in with their background. If this one was real, shouldn’t it be light grey, like the material covering the floor of the terrarium? Or a dark pine colour, like the varnish on the shelving?
While Cooper watched, it didn’t so much as blink. Was it actually alive?
‘The ashes came in a plastic urn,’ said Mrs Askew. ‘We
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decided to do something a bit different and display them. He would have liked it, I think.’
At first, Cooper didn’t know what she meant. Then his gaze strayed past Mrs Askew’s head to the bookshelves. He thought the chameleon had moved, perhaps raised a front leg to allow the passage of air under its belly. It might only have been a slight shift that had attracted his attention. Or it could have been the realization that the material on the floor of the terrarium was a light grey, granular material, like fine cat litter.
Mrs Askew followed the direction of his gaze. ‘Seven pounds of ashes go a surprisingly long way,’ she said. ‘There were even a few ounces left over, so I shared them out into a set of little brass boxes that I found in an antique shop near the Buttercross. I gave a box to each of his grandchildren. That’s the best way to be remembered, I think - to have your memory passed down through the generations of your own family. Don’t you agree?’
‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right.’
Of course, Cooper had immediately thought of his own father. It was an instinctive reaction when someone mentioned keeping the memory of a family member alive. It didn’t seem to trouble him the way it once had. He found he could even think of the practicalities - whether it would have been better if Sergeant Joe Cooper had been cremated, rather than buried in Edendale Cemetery. And how much his ashes would have weighed, if he had. More than eight pounds, certainly. Plenty to have shared out into little boxes for everyone. And then, perhaps, his father’s memory wouldn’t have weighed quite so heavily on one pair of shoulders.
There were several Venus flytraps growing in the other terrarium. Cooper could see their thick triangular bases and the teeth on their traps. They looked capable of ensnaring something the size of a bumble bee, let alone a fly.
‘Do you know anything about carnivorous plants?’ asked
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Mrs Askew, noting his gaze and assuming interest, the way people did.
‘No. Do they catch many flies?’
‘Each leaf can catch and digest three meals before it dies,’ said Mrs Askew. ‘Leaves can open and close without catching anything, but eventually they exhaust themselves.’
‘Only three meals in their lives? No matter how big they are?’
‘If a meal is very large, the effort of digestion can be too much. Then the leaf dies without ever reopening.’
Cooper had always hated flies, but he found himself feeling sorry for them - especially the ones that ended up trapped and half-digested inside the leaves of a dying plant.
Mrs Askew pointed into the terrarium.
‘There’s a leaf at the back that caught a fly about a week ago. It’s just reopening now, look.’
Cooper peered between the teeth of the flytrap into the fleshy mouth, and saw that the plant had finished digesting its meal. All that remained on the leaf was the dried-out husk of its prey. The fly’s brittle wings and the shell of its thorax had been left intact, but its body had been sucked empty of its juices. The insect had been digested alive.
‘Interesting, isn’t it?’ said Mrs Askew with a smile.
Cooper turned, hardly daring to look at her face. He felt that sense of unease again, a discomfort in the presence of an unnatural fascination with death.
‘Mrs Askew, I have to go now,’ he said. T have other people to visit.’
She looked disappointed. ‘Oh, well, if you must. But do call back if there’s anything else you want to ask me.’
‘Thank you. I’ll do that.’
She waited on the doorstep and watched him leave. As he got into his car, Cooper looked back and waved. He wished Mrs Askew wouldn’t keep smiling quite so much. He was starting to find the sight of her bared teeth a bit disturbing.
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David Royce had his brother-in-law’s ashes somewhere, if only he could remember where he’d put them.
‘What’s in this cage?’ called Cooper as he waited in the sitting room for Mr Royce to search the cupboard under the stairs. The cage was covered completely, so it might be empty. But Cooper thought he could hear a faint clicking of claws.
‘That’s Smoky. He’s an African Grey.’
‘You have a parrot?’ Cooper tried to remember the last time he’d seen a parrot in a cage in someone’s house. There had been one a while ago, but he couldn’t recall where. And somehow David Royce didn’t seem the type to keep a cage bird at all. A large dog, perhaps. A Rottweiler called Tyson or Satan. But a parrot?
‘My sister asked me to have it,’ said Royce, his voice muffled by the interior of the cupboard. ‘It belonged to Jack. But after he died, she couldn’t bear to have it in the house. He taught the thing to speak, you see. And it copied his voice perfectly. It has the sound of him off pat, believe me.’
‘They’re very good mimics.’
‘Good? It’s bloody frightening. Well, Joan couldn’t stand hearing the old man’s voice in the house when she knew he was dead. It was tearing her up, poor lass. Every time she came home, she heard his voice. I didn’t really want the thing myself, but I couldn’t refuse, could I?’
‘What does it say?’
‘I wouldn’t claim it has a wide vocabulary exactly,’ said Royce.
He came back into the room and pulled the cover off the cage. The parrot opened its eyes and looked at Cooper.
‘Hello, sweetheart,’ it said. ‘Where’s Jack?’
Then it switched its attention to scratching under its feathers with the claws of one foot, and Royce went back to his search.
‘Is that it?’
‘Well, I haven’t tried to engage it in conversation,’ said Royce. ‘But sometimes it says “crap” if it doesn’t like what’s on the telly.’
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‘And is that often?’
‘Yes.’
‘They live a lot longer than people, don’t they?’ said Cooper.
‘Do they?’ Royce sounded surprised. ‘Bloody hell. I was hoping it’d die a natural death before too long, like my kids’ hamsters do.’
‘Not parrots. They can live to over a hundred. Winston Churchill had one, and it died only last year. It was a hundred and five.’
‘I bet Churchill didn’t teach his parrot to say crap.’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure.’
Cooper went out into the hall to see what progress David Royce was making. All kinds of stuff had been pulled out of the cupboard: toys, boxes of shoes, a spare TV set, the ironing board.
‘I think it might be upstairs,’ Royce said.
‘Can I help you to look?’
‘Yes, take a wardrobe.’
After another ten minutes, Royce decided they must have scattered the ashes in the garden and thrown the urn away.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘Don’t worry about it.’
Cooper walked back into the sitting room. At least the parrot remembered its owner, even if it had survived him. In fact, if it was a young bird, it might outlast everyone now living in Derbyshire. Winston Churchill’s parrot had seen out not only its owner but nine other prime mini
sters, right up to Tony Blair. To a parrot, people must seem to come and go like flies in summer.
As he passed the cage, the parrot stopped scratching and fixed Cooper with a sharp eye.
‘Crap,’ it said. ‘Where’s Jack?’
In the next house, a row of unmatching straight-backed chairs stood in the bay window, as if set out for an audience at a
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performance. Then Cooper noticed that other incongruous furniture had been crammed into the room between the sofa and the armchairs - a wrought-iron seat from the conservatory, an office-style swivel chair, and a low, squishy object that his mother would have called a pouffe. A long table had been pushed against the far wall and was loaded with plates and dishes covered with cling film or draped in tea towels.
‘I hope I’m not intruding,’ he said. ‘Is it a bad moment?’
‘It’s my mum’s funeral today. But it’s OK, we’ve got everything ready early,’ said Susan Dakin.
‘People are coming back here after the funeral?’
‘Of course. We don’t know who’s going to turn up exactly. I don’t suppose there’ll be many.’
It felt as though the Dakins were preparing for a party. At one time, a death would have meant a silent house and hushed voices. Not here, though. Susan Dakin seemed entirely content that her mother should be joining her father, wherever he’d gone.
Later, Cooper visited a bungalow at Southwoods where two old women with tight perms sat eating Belgian chocolates shaped like sea horses. He called on a Hucklow couple who had lost their child in a road accident and had never spoken about it since scattering her ashes in the paddock where her pony still grazed.
‘My grandma used to say we should draw the curtains and cover the mirrors, as a sign of respect,’ said one of the old women, licking a coating of chocolate from her finger. ‘But I say that’s just daft. Life goes on, doesn’t it?’
‘She still lives in my heart,’ said the child’s mother. ‘Every day.’
In a house on Manchester Road he met a mother and daughter who both wore cropped jeans and ankle chains, and a ring through the right nostril. It was almost as if they were trying to look like sisters. But where the girl had a studded belt and jeans cut low enough to reveal bony hips, the mother
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had a smooth roll of fat. The daughter was fashionably pale, but her mother was tanned - though it was the sort of tan gained in a cubicle on the High Street at thirty-nine pence a minute.
‘It can bring you closer,’ they said, almost together. The father had nothing to say. His ashes were in the brass urn they allowed Cooper to sign for.
His last visit was to the Devonshire Estate again, where Maureen Connolly told him that her sister had stolen their mother’s ashes.
‘She had no right to take them. They belonged to me. Good riddance to her, I say. She was always a tart, anyway. My only consolation is that she’ll be suffering for it, wherever she is.’
‘She’s dead?’
‘No, not her. Last I heard, she was living on some council estate in Derby with four snotty kids by two different blokes both of them in prison. One or the other will do for her when he comes out, unless she drinks herself to death first.’ ‘When did you last see her?’
‘See her? Not for almost a year. Oh, she rang me a few weeks ago. Wanting money, naturally. She must have been down to the last dregs, or she wouldn’t have bothered with me. Desperation, that was. I never doubted it, no matter what she said.’
Mrs Connolly pressed her lips together in an expression of satisfaction. It wouldn’t do to smile, of course. It wasn’t nice to be seen enjoying someone else’s misfortune. But her face came as close to a smile as was permissible.
‘I don’t suppose you have an address?’ said Cooper.
‘I didn’t ask her for it - why should I? Besides, she’s probably moved by now. Persuaded the council to give her a different house somewhere, hoping she can’t be found. Some hopes.’
‘Well, I can see there’s no love lost between you and your
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sister,’ said Cooper, ignoring the look of derision on her face
at his understatement. ‘But aren’t you at all concerned about
what might happen to her children?’ ‘Why? They’re nothing to do with me.’ ‘They’re your nephews and nieces.’ Mrs Connolly snorted. ‘Nephews and nieces?’ She leaned closer, her face communicating a mixture of
disgust and triumph.
‘Two of them,’ she said, ‘are black. Almost.’
Cooper was sweating by the time he got back into his car. The effort of remaining polite and sympathetic in Maureen Connolly’s house had been almost intolerable. Now he felt more depressed than he had in any of the places where death had been all around him. The professional morbidity of the funeral parlour, the intellectual prurience of Freddy Robertson, the cremated remains as an interior-design feature. None of them had seemed so negative, or so tragic, as the things that people could do to each other in life.
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16
‘Of course, while we were all feeling sorry for Geoff Birley, what he didn’t bother telling us was that Sandra had been threatening to leave him for some time,’ Fry said in the DI’s office. ‘He says he didn’t believe she meant it, that she would never really leave him.’
‘He was fooling himself, then,’ said Hitchens. Fry shook her head. ‘Actually, no. Sandra agrees with him. She says she wasn’t planning to leave her husband at all, just to stay away for a night or two to teach him a lesson. In fact, she was planning to phone him today. The Birleys might have been back together by tonight.’
‘But what about Ian Todd? He’s Sandra’s lover, surely?’ ‘There’s certainly more to the relationship than being just good friends, as they’d like us to believe,’ said Fry. ‘Todd wants Sandra to leave her husband and stay with him permanently. But, as for her, well…’ Fry shook her head. ‘Who are we to try to understand other people’s relationships? A lot of us don’t understand our own.’
‘So the business in the car park - what was that all about?’
‘Sandra had arranged to meet Ian Todd in the pub after
work, before they went back to his place in Darton Street.
But she was kept late at the office by a meeting that overran.
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Naturally, Todd thought she’d changed her mind. He couldn’t get hold of Sandra on her mobile, because she had it turned off while she was in the meeting. So he went to the car park to see if he could catch her on her way home. When he found Sandra’s Skoda on Level 8, he decided to wait for her. And by then, he was out of contact because there was no mobile signal on his network inside that multistorey.’
‘Why didn’t he wait by Sandra’s car?’ said Hitchens. ‘That would have been the logical thing to do.’
‘He said he didn’t want to give her a chance to get away,’ said Fry. ‘So he waited by the lift. He felt sure she’d come up that way, and he wanted her to see him as soon as the doors opened.’
‘He doesn’t know Sandra quite as well as her husband does, then.’
‘No.’ ‘I suppose it all fits. But it’s a pain in the neck that people can’t sort their lives out without giving us all this trouble.’
‘It’s not sorted out quite yet. Mr Todd is seriously pissed off at this moment.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Hitchens. ‘Not only has he been used as a pawn in a row between the Birleys, but he’s been pulled in and questioned by us on suspicion of a serious crime that he didn’t commit.’
Fry remembered the snatch of CCTV footage from the camera in New Street, the two figures walking towards Ian Todd’s car. She recalled a brief struggle, a woman apparently trying to break free from the grasp of a man much bigger and stronger than she was.
‘It won’t do him any harm,’ she said.
Fry had been away from the DFs office for only a few minutes when Hitchens threw open the door again and shouted for her. When she w
ent back in, he was on the phone. He talked to her while holding the phone to his ear.
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‘What’s happened, sir?’
‘There’s been another call.’
‘From the same man?’
‘Sounds like it.’
‘Have you got a trace on it?’
‘What do you think I’m doing?’
Fry folded her arms and waited.
‘Yes?’ shouted Hitchens into the phone. ‘It’s where? OK, yes. I’ve got it. I want units there now. They’re to seal off the area around the payphone, and make sure no one leaves.’ Hitchens listened, raising his eyes to the ceiling. ‘Yes, I realize there’ll be a funeral going on. I’m not asking them to wade in with their batons out and lob CS gas at the mourners. They can be as discreet as they damn well like. They can take flowers and hand out sympathy cards, if they want. But no one leaves until we’ve had a chance to talk to them.’
He slammed down the phone and pulled on his jacket.
‘Not another funeral?’ said Fry.
‘Yes, another funeral,’ said Hitchens. ‘This time, he called from a public payphone in the visitors’ waiting area at Eden Valley Crematorium.’
‘You think our man is actually attending the service?’ said Fry in the car on the way to the crematorium.
‘He’d be conspicuous if he didn’t. Have you ever been to the crem, Diane?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Well, this is quite different from the situation at Wardlow. There’s no way you can give the impression you’re just passing. Our man will have had to drive through the crematorium grounds to the visitors’ car park and then walk up to the chapel entrance. And it’s not as if you could pretend you were visiting the crematorium for some other reason. There’d be other mourners there. They might well notice someone who turned up, then went away again.’
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