Secrets of Death (3 page)

By the time Shirley Gooding arrived, running late from dealing with a child too sick to go to school, she was amazed to find Marnie Letts standing in the middle of the car park screaming.

Every morning, Detective Inspector Ben Cooper set off to work with his car full of sound. He needed it to insulate him from the world outside. The traffic passing in the street, the people on the pavements, the market stalls setting up in the square – all the bustle and activity of Edendale on a fine summer’s day. Sometimes, it could be too much.

For the past few weeks, he’d been listening to Bruce Springsteen. ‘Dancing in the Dark’. It was always the first track that started up when he switched on the ignition. Always the same CD in the player, always the same opening chords. He hadn’t bothered changing it. One day, he supposed he’d get tired of it. For now, it suited him fine. It was like a switch that turned him
on for the day, clicked him into professional mode and prepared him for the hours ahead, when anything could happen.

He halted in traffic at the Hollowgate lights, reflecting on how his feelings were mirrored by the outside world. During those few minutes of his drive to West Street, Cooper always passed from dark into light. Everywhere he looked, he caught his town in the process of changing its character. He could see it taking off one face and putting on another. During the past few hours, Edendale had hidden away its night-time turnover of drunks and clubbers staggering between takeaway and taxi rank in noisy clumps, shadowed by weary police officers with their high-vis jackets and riot vans. They had to be ushered indoors with the coming of daylight, like vampires retreating from the sun.

The morning brought an influx of visitors to the town. The roads got busier, the car parks filled up, the coaches crawled through the narrow streets, and the pavements became hazardous with boots and hiking poles. All the gift shops and visitor centres propped open their doors; the newsagents put out their ice cream signs.

Edendale looked so different in the sun. And it felt different too. The atmosphere was much more relaxed, the flow of movement slower. Walking groups met at their rendezvous points, chatting and adjusting their equipment for so long that you’d think they weren’t planning to do any walking at all. The pavements were full of strolling retired couples who’d decided to have a day out in the Peak District, with a nice lunch in a
pub garden and a doze on a bench by the river. Japanese tourists stood gazing into the windows of the Bakewell pudding shops or took selfies on the old bridge over the Eden, forcing passers-by into the road.

Unlike the visitors, Cooper could see through the façade. That darkness was never dispelled completely. He could sense it lurking in the background. He’d seen enough of it to know it was always there.

Cooper waited for the barrier to open and drove into the staff car park off West Street. Very little money had been spent on Derbyshire Constabulary’s E Division headquarters recently. As a result, the 1950s stone building was looking a bit the worse for wear. The guttering had come loose on the custody suite, creating an outdoor shower in the winter months. The tarmac of the car park was cracked in the north corner, where the riot vans were parked. Everybody expected one of them to disappear into a sink hole some day, probably in the not too distant future. On the first floor of the headquarters building, some of the offices were permanently empty and locked up. No one could remember who’d worked there now.

Across the road, Edendale Football Club had been doing well lately. Their ground was on West Street, and the windows on this side of the building looked out over Gate C and the back of the East Stand. These days, when the club had an important home match, the streets were filled with cars, which hadn’t been a problem when Edendale FC were struggling in the lower leagues. If they became any more successful, access might become a problem on match days: a
response officer trying to get to an emergency call would get blocked in and there would be trouble.

Cooper hadn’t quite reached his own office next to the CID room when he heard his phone ringing. He broke into a jog, though he knew it was against health and safety regulations to run in the corridors.

But the phone stopped before he could reach it and his mobile began ringing. It was Carol Villiers, this morning’s duty DC, somewhere outside Edendale at the scene of a sudden death.

‘What kind of sudden death?’ he said.

Villiers was always cautious, reluctant to commit herself. He didn’t remember her being like this when they were youngsters growing up together. She must have learned it in the services. Make a risk assessment, analyse the intelligence, don’t go into anything until you’re absolutely certain of the situation. It helped a lot in this job. More police officers got themselves into trouble by reacting too quickly than by standing back and doing nothing.

‘Heeley Bank,’ said Villiers. ‘Do you know where it is?’

‘Of course.’

‘There’s a body,’ she said. And then she added the crucial words: ‘A body in a car.’

‘I’m on my way,’ said Cooper.

Diane Fry had a couple of rest days after last night’s abortive operation. Today, DCI Mackenzie would be exploring the possibility of getting a search warrant on Roger Farrell’s address. It wouldn’t have been
needed if they’d made an arrest. The search would be going on right now, while Farrell was being questioned in custody. But things hadn’t gone the way they had planned.

Fry was renting a double-bedroomed top-floor apartment with its own parking space in a modern executive development in the suburb of Wilford. One of the roads on the development was called Halfpenny Walk – but her rent had cost her an awful lot more than that.

The properties were surrounded by neat grass verges and little access roads. There was barely a sign of human occupation but for lights behind curtained windows and a car parked in front of a garage door. She always had to remember to clear the burglar alarm when she let herself in. She didn’t have anything worth stealing – she’d never felt the urge to surround herself with material possessions – but it seemed like an obligation here, like being careful where you put your wheelie bin so that you didn’t make the development look untidy.

She hadn’t met any of her neighbours in the apartment block to speak to, and she probably never would. She’d nodded to one or two people as she passed them in the hallway or while getting into her car. She didn’t know who they were and had never stopped to chat, though sometimes they showed indications of wanting to introduce themselves before she could escape.

One couple downstairs had put a card through her door inviting her to a drinks party when they moved into their apartment. She hadn’t gone, of course. For
a few hours she’d listened to the faint sound of cheesy nineties pop music and hollow laughter drifting up the stairs, and told herself how glad she was she hadn’t accepted the invitation.

The rooms of the apartment had sounded very empty and strange when she first moved in. She hadn’t realised how accustomed she’d become to living in a shared house with students and migrant workers coming and going at all hours. The place in Grosvenor Road had never been quiet.

Here in the suburbs, she was only twenty minutes from the city centre with its pubs and shops and theatres. There was even a tram line now, cutting the journey time yet more. And the location suited her just fine. She liked the comforting roar of traffic on the Clifton Bridge, which carried the A52 over the River Trent.

That morning, Fry looked out of the window of her apartment as a car turned in from the direction of Clifton Lane and drew up in front of her building. It was a silver-grey Renault hatchback. Nothing unusual about that at all. But something about the occupants caught her eye, and she watched curiously as the engine was turned off and the door swung open.

Her heart sank when she saw a figure get out and open the tailgate.

‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ she said.

A pushchair came out first, then a bag full of goodness knew what – bottles, teats, steriliser, wet wipes, extra clothes. And packs of nappies. Nappies. God help her.

She looked around the apartment, anxiously scanning
for anything left out that she didn’t want seen. She wasn’t big on tidying up and dusting, because she never expected visitors. It was too late to do anything about it. That empty vodka bottle should go in the bin, and the box from last night’s pizza delivery. Oh, and the one from the night before.

Cursing, she burst into activity to make the sitting room at least look presentable. She was sweating from stress and effort by the time the door buzzed and she had to let her visitors in.

‘Sis! What a surprise.’

Angie stood there on the threshold of her apartment. Her sister. Barely recognisable now because of the weight she’d put on, which concealed her usually thin, angular frame. And because of the object clutched to her chest in a sling, something wearing a white floppy sun hat with pictures of animals on it.

‘Hello, Di,’ said Angie. ‘We thought we’d call in and see you.’

Diane heard a car engine and quickly stepped to a window in the entrance hall to gaze down at the departing Renault.

‘Who was that?’ she said.

‘A friend.’

‘A male friend?’

‘Yes.’

‘
The
male friend?’

‘Sis – is this an interrogation or can we come in?’

As she led the way into the apartment, Diane flinched at her sister’s use of ‘we’. People did it all the time when they’d just got married or formed a long-term
relationship. But Angie didn’t mean that. She meant herself and the baby. They were a duo now, a permanent pair. Angie and the child …

‘So how is … Zack?’

Diane was impressed by her own ability in remembering the new baby’s name. She’d tried quite hard to forget it. Zack Fry sounded too much like today’s special from a Chinese takeaway.

‘Oh, he’s grand,’ said Angie.

‘Grand,’ repeated Diane, her brain empty of all the other words she ought to use about a baby.
Beautiful, bonny, gorgeous, cute
? They all stuck in her throat the second they came into her head. Silently, she reminded herself of an important rule. Must say
him
, not
it
.

Angie walked into the centre of the sitting room, the weight of the sling making her look slow and ungainly. She looked around critically. Diane was glad she’d managed to clear away some of the debris at least.

‘What a beautiful apartment,’ said Angie. ‘You’re so lucky. We’d love to have somewhere like this to live. Wouldn’t we, Zack?’

Zack didn’t answer, which was a relief. In fact, he hadn’t moved since she opened the door. He was asleep presumably. His head was leaning against his mother’s body, the brim of the sun hat twitching occasionally, a foot in a tiny woollen sock protruding from the sling.

Looking at her sister, Diane was momentarily overwhelmed with horror at how unalike they’d become, how little they had in common now. They used to be
so close. As a teenager, she’d hero-worshipped her older sister, had been devastated when they were separated. Finding her again had been an obsession that had ruled her life for a while. She used to see an older version of herself when she looked at Angie. Now she saw a slow-moving middle-aged woman – which she herself would never be. She saw a woman who had only one topic of conversation and who talked to an unconscious creature attached to her chest. Diane felt as though she were in a remake of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
. An alien had taken possession of her sister’s body.

‘So – are you visiting Nottingham for some reason? A day out shopping?’ she said.

Privately, she suspected the reason for the trip up from Birmingham was probably to do with some business of the driver of the silver-grey Renault, the mysterious man friend whom she hadn’t been introduced to yet. And there was probably a good reason for that. Angie’s boyfriends had always had reasons to avoid meeting police detectives. What was this one’s name again? Craig something?

‘Actually, we were thinking of having a break for a few days.’ Angie smiled. ‘Don’t worry – we’ve brought everything we need.’

Diane was baffled for a moment.

‘I’m sorry?’

Angie smiled again. ‘Well, you
do
have two bedrooms in this beautiful new apartment, don’t you, Sis?’

Horrified, Diane opened her mouth, but found nothing came out. Like
beautiful, bonny, gorgeous
and
cute
, the words stuck in her throat.

Then
the bundle strapped to her sister’s chest stirred and the head inside the hat lifted. A wrinkled face turned to look at her. After a second, the baby’s eyes seemed to focus. His face burst into a smile and a tiny hand reached out towards her.

For a long, long time, Diane Fry was still without words.

Irritably,
Ben Cooper swatted at something that landed on his face. Flies were swarming round the car. When he gazed across the car park, it looked as though every fly in North Derbyshire was zooming in on Heeley Bank. Their instincts were amazing. Did the first to arrive put up a sign: ‘Fresh meat here’?

And the flies had judged it right. The body in the blue BMW was already starting to look swollen. The smell inside the car was definitely over-ripe.

That was the trouble with summer. A corpse would normally be cold by now. But this one had been sitting in a car in full sun since daylight. As the interior heated up, so had the body. On a warm day in an open space, the interior temperature of a car could rise by five degrees Celsius in five minutes, ten degrees in ten minutes. The heat could reach a lethal level within half an hour, a much shorter time than many people thought.

At Heeley Bank, the ambient temperature outside was about twenty-two degrees by now. Inside the BMW, it had reached an uncomfortable thirty-eight. That sort
of temperature in an enclosed space was enough to kill a child or a dog. And it was enough to make a dead body begin to bloat.

Winter was so much better for this kind of thing. Normally, the body began to cool down immediately after the heart stopped beating. It was the stage they called
algor mortis
, the death chill. Body heat fell about one degree Celsius each hour until it reached the temperature of the surrounding environment. On a cold day, you stood a chance of gleaning information about the time of death from the difference between the two, when you took the various factors into account. Body fat and layers of clothing were good insulators – they retained heat that would otherwise be lost as the blood stopped flowing and the muscles relaxed. Children and the elderly lost body heat faster than adults. A victim who had been in ill health would also lose heat more rapidly.