Secrets of Death (2 page)

Fry pulled her phone out of her pocket as it buzzed on vibrate, and glanced at the screen. There had been two calls from her sister, Angie. She could guess what they were about. Angie only had one subject of conversation recently. It could get tedious after a while.

‘I
will
call back later,’ she said as she put the phone away. ‘I promise, Sis.’

For a moment, she wondered why she had to say
that out loud to herself, when Angie couldn’t hear her. She seemed to be doing it more and more often recently. Probably because there was no one else she could talk to about the things that were going through her head.

A woman in multi-coloured leggings and ankle boots tottered past, her lank blonde hair as long as the tassels of her shawl. An old man in a flat cap came out of a convenience store with his lottery tickets and crossed the road towards the Polish delicatessen. He gave Fry an inquisitive look from under the peak of his cap.

Behind the old man, a group of Asian men had stopped on the pavement and were discussing something with shakes of their heads and emphatic hand gestures. Next year’s trip to Mecca, perhaps? It was a sign of status if you could afford to make the pilgrimage. Fry could hear their voices from here, speaking in a mixture of Urdu and English. They were probably Kashmiris and Mirpuris. The Punjabis tended to live in other parts of the city.

Fry turned her head as she heard a different noise. Fifty yards up the road, a halal butcher’s stood between an off-licence and an Indian jeweller’s. Beyond them, a NET tram was rattling past the junction, heading north up Noel Street towards the Asian Women’s Project. Its sides advertised a local law firm and home deliveries from Asda.

She shaded her eyes with a hand against the dazzle of sunlight. The shadows of the parked cars were lengthening towards her. The sun was gradually getting lower in the west over Aspley, where the geometric shapes
of the vast housing estates had looked like crop circles on the satellite photos they’d studied when this operation was being planned.

Fry watched the driver of a white Transit van park by the butcher’s and leave his doors open as he walked up the pavement. He stopped and leaned against the wall, half hidden from her view by one of the big black commercial wheelie bins. He seemed to be making a phone call.

Her personal radio crackled into her earpiece.

‘Is that him, Diane?’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘We’re looking for a Caucasian male, aren’t we? This one’s Asian.’

‘Right.’

Her boss from the Major Crime Unit was parked across the other side of Noel Street. Detective Chief Inspector Alistair Mackenzie didn’t want to put himself out on the street. He’d argued that he would look more conspicuous, that he was a more obvious copper than DS Fry. And he was probably right. But sitting in his Mercedes, a middle-aged white man on his own, doing nothing but watching – well, that might make him look like someone equally unwelcome in Forest Fields. That was a thought Fry had only expressed to herself.

‘DC Callaghan is going to call at the target’s house again,’ said Mackenzie. ‘We must have missed him. He’s got by us somehow.’

‘Understood.’

Fry shrugged. She thought he was wrong this time, but Mackenzie was in charge of the operation. She’d
learned that there was no point in contradicting him unless she had an undeniable argument.

She turned back to the toilet roll display, saw a member of the shop staff staring back at her through the glass, and switched her attention to the window of the sari shop a few paces away. She chastised herself silently. She was starting to lose concentration. It had been a long day and it was warm in these narrow streets – not like sitting in an air-conditioned car. The glare of the sun was making her eyes feel tired. Still, she didn’t think she’d missed anyone.

The East Midlands Special Operations Unit was proving to be a challenging assignment. That was what she’d wanted of course, after her spell in Derbyshire E Division CID, out there in the rural wastelands of the Peak District. The remit for Northern Command covered the whole of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, which suited her fine. She felt less chained to one area, the way she had been on divisional CID in Edendale.

Of course, her work at EMSOU had turned out to be demanding in unexpected ways. Life at St Ann’s police station, where the unit’s Northern Command was based, had complications she hadn’t anticipated. One of those complications was Detective Constable Jamie Callaghan.

Fry glanced at her phone again. No more messages from Angie. But there would be more later on. Her sister had probably realised she was working late on a job and would try another time. Fry had been surprised by how happy Angie seemed in her new
relationship. It had lasted a couple of years now, which was something of a record. So it was possible.

‘There’s nothing doing,’ said Mackenzie. ‘Callaghan has called at the house again and there’s no one home – no lights on, nothing. So I’m calling it off for today. Do you want to join us up the road at the Lion?’

‘Why not,’ said Fry.

She turned and saw a Muslim woman in a niqab slipping into a house behind her, a quick flash of suspicious eyes directed her way before the woman disappeared. Fry hadn’t even noticed her as she passed. She wondered if her own eyes looked equally suspicious.

The Lion Inn was just up the tram tracks off Shipstone Street and almost overshadowed by the bulk of the old Shipstone’s brewery. They could have gone to the Clock on Craven Road, which was nearer. There, though, the attractions were soul and curry nights or evenings of spiritual mediumship, rather than lunchtime jazz sessions. Worse, they would probably have been questioned by the regulars about who they were.

When Fry entered the Lion, she found that Mackenzie had already laid claim to a corner of the pub. It had bare brick walls, but comfortable stripy chairs arranged round a low table near an upright piano.

Jamie Callaghan was at the bar buying the drinks. Oddly, Callaghan reminded her of a Bulgarian police officer she’d known briefly when he visited Derbyshire to liaise on an inquiry a few years ago. Not that Callaghan was Eastern European. There was nothing
Slavic about him. It was more the way he moved, the confident swagger, a swing of the shoulders.

He was definitely the kind of man she shouldn’t be attracted to, especially as he was recently divorced, escaped from a marriage that had only lasted a year or two according to the gossip at St Ann’s. They said his wife had been caught having an affair with a Nottinghamshire dog-handler. That detail might have been invented for the sake of the cruel jokes it provided the opportunity for. Who knew whether it was true or not?

But then, who knew why any marriage ended? There were always two sides to any story. She had a strong suspicion that Jamie Callaghan would be telling her his side before too long.

‘Have we lost him, sir?’ asked Callaghan, setting a round of drinks down on the table. He hadn’t asked Fry what she wanted, but he didn’t have to. Vodka when she needed it. A J
₂
O apple and mango flavour when she was driving.

‘What do you mean?’ said Mackenzie, accepting a bottle of Spitfire.

‘Has Farrell skipped? Left the area?’

Mackenzie clutched his beer bottle tightly as his face twisted into a grimace of frustration. ‘Someone must have tipped him off, if he has.’

‘I suppose it might just be a coincidence. He could have headed out for an evening with friends just when we decided to come for him.’

‘We didn’t identify any friends,’ pointed out Fry as she took a chair at the table.

‘That’s
true. But it doesn’t mean he hasn’t got any.’

‘A man like Farrell doesn’t have friends,’ she said.

Callaghan grinned, looked as if he was about to say something, then stopped. Fry wondered if he’d been going to make some joke about her not having any friends either. It was the kind of sly dig she’d heard often from colleagues during her career. Everyone thought twice now. It was hard to tell when banter crossed the line.

Instead, Callaghan chose something worse.

‘He might have picked someone up in the past few days,’ he said.

Fry shuddered. ‘No, don’t say that.’

‘Well, it’s a possibility.’

He was right. But it was a possibility that didn’t bear thinking about as far as Diane Fry was concerned. That was what they’d worked so hard to prevent, after all.

Mackenzie shrugged and took a drink of his beer.

‘Well, we’ll just have to find a way of tracking down Mr Farrell,’ he said. ‘He can’t hide from us for very long.’

Fry’s phone buzzed again. And of course it was Angie. She had waited for her sister to get home, but she was still sitting in the pub. Fry saw that she’d been sent a photo. As soon as she clicked to open it, she knew perfectly well what it would be. The squashed-up Winston Churchill features of a hairless, goggle-eyed baby stared out at her from the screen. Fry flinched. She was finding it really difficult getting used to being an auntie.

‘What is it, Diane?’

She
put the phone away hastily before Callaghan saw the picture. ‘Nothing important. Just my sister.’

‘Oh, okay. I thought it looked like bad news.’

Fry squinted at him nervously. He wasn’t supposed to be so observant. That would never do.

‘Do
you
think Roger Farrell has done a bunk, Diane?’ asked Callaghan as they left the pub.

‘No, I don’t,’ said Fry. ‘He just isn’t the kind. He’s the sort of man who’ll try to brazen things out to the end. He’ll turn up somewhere. I’m certain of it.’

Well,
that was really odd. Not the ideal start to the day. Marnie Letts sighed irritably as she pulled on the handbrake. And it wasn’t even Monday. Those were the worst days of the week. She always felt ill when she woke up on a Monday. Nothing was actually wrong with her. It was just knowing that the rest of the week stretched ahead.

Marnie had been the first to arrive at work that morning, which was unusual in itself. On every other day Shirley was already at the visitor centre before her, with the lights on and the kettle boiling in the kitchen.

Six months ago, Shirley had been appointed manager at Heeley Bank Information Centre, and opening up was part of her job. She unlocked the doors in the morning and locked up again at night. If the burglar alarm went off in the early hours of the morning, Shirley got the call-out. That was why she was paid more. Marnie didn’t even have a set of keys. And that was the way she liked it. She wouldn’t have wanted the responsibility – not for just a few pounds extra
every month. She certainly wouldn’t want to get called out in the middle of the night. She had better things to do with her time. If that was what promotion meant, the likes of Shirley Gooding were welcome to it.

So Marnie sat in her little Nissan in the staff parking area and listened to the news as it came on the radio. She was tuned into Peak FM and they didn’t waste much time on the headlines. Their listeners were more concerned about traffic alerts – the latest closure on the motorway, the length of delays on the A61, a reminder of the temporary lights in Baslow, where visitors were already queuing to get into Chatsworth.

Marnie tapped her fingers on the steering wheel as she listened. None of it was relevant to her on her drive out of Edendale to the visitor centre. She lived on the Woodlands Estate, close to the northern outskirts of the town, and she always took the back roads to reach Heeley Bank. They were narrow and winding, but always quiet. Just a few farmers on tractors, a herd of cows on the way back to the fields from milking. Who wouldn’t prefer a commute like that?

She frowned when she noticed the car. She recognised it as a BMW. One of her neighbours on Sycamore Crescent had one. It was always left out on the street in everyone else’s way, and she’d often had bad things to say about BMW drivers. One night, someone on the street had keyed the paintwork, so she obviously wasn’t alone.

This one was neatly parked and undamaged, though – unlike the condition of a stolen car that Marnie had seen abandoned here a few months ago. The BMW
sat in the car park under the shade of the trees on the banking above the river. There had been a bit of mist overnight and the car was covered in condensation. In a few minutes’ time, the sun would reach it and the moisture would begin to clear.

Marnie hesitated, looking round at the entrance but seeing no sign of Shirley. That was typical of her. When there might be a problem, she wasn’t there. It could wait until she arrived, couldn’t it? Shirley was the manager, after all.

But something made Marnie open her car door and walk across the gravel towards the BMW. The car was sitting there silently, mysteriously. It seemed to be drawing her towards it. She believed very strongly in fate, always read her horoscope in the newspaper every morning. She was a water sign, Scorpio, and was led by her instincts.

Her footsteps sounded unnaturally loud in the early morning air. She moved confidently at first but found her feet gradually slowing of their own accord as she approached the car. She could see nothing through the windscreen because of the condensation. Had someone slept in their car overnight? Perhaps two people? She had heard of all kinds of things going on.

If you were doing that, you’d leave the windows slightly open to let in some air, wouldn’t you? These were all rolled firmly shut. So the BMW was just abandoned, then? That must be it.

Marnie rapped on the driver’s side window. There was no response, no sudden movement rocking the car, no startled noises. Relieved now, she ran her sleeve
across the glass and stuck her face close to it, shading her eyes against the glare of the sun as it broke over the trees.

At first, she couldn’t understand what she was seeing. It didn’t seem human, or animal either. Her brain whirled, trying to make sense of it. A shop window dummy, a practical joke of some kind?

She tried the handle and found the door unlocked. As she pulled it open, the realisation hit her. She knew it was no practical joke. A man sat in the driving seat. A real man, flesh and blood. But there was something wrong with his head. Something very wrong.