Secrets of Death (33 page)

As he was holding the photograph, Cooper felt something in the back. He prised open the clips and removed the backing. A black business card dropped into his hand. Gold edging, a string of letters and numbers. At least Alex Denning had taken some precautions to keep his
Secrets of Death
password secure.

A group of people went by, their footsteps making the deck of the bridge vibrate uneasily. Cooper recalled that this bridge was supposed to be haunted. A jilted bride who’d thrown herself into the river or something like that.

It was always the most tragic stories that left legends of ghosts behind. Nobody ever claimed to have seen the terrifying spectre of some benign granny who’d died peacefully in her bed from old age. There were
no hordes of ghostly flu victims haunting the streets of Edendale, though there ought to have been hundreds of them after the First World War. Legend had just left the murdered and executed, the desperate and helpless. And, of course, the suicides.

You could see the Bargate Bridge from here. It was an ancient stone construction, described in the guide books as seventeenth-century. No lorries or other HGVs were allowed on the bridge now. And the road itself was one-way, because of its narrow width. So cars drove near the middle, which took the strain off the arches and buttresses, and left room for pedestrians along the parapet. That was where tourists stopped to take photographs of the river.

And that was also where Anson Tate had intended to make his jump, until the Canadian tourist had intervened, locking Tate in a powerful grip to prevent him going over. Tate would have jumped without that intervention. He would have ended up in the water below the weir, where wet rocks protruded above the surface.

Cooper wondered about the passing tourist who’d been the first to restrain Anson Tate from throwing himself off. The picture in his mind made a distinct contrast with the incident Superintendent Branagh had referred to in Derby, when youths had taunted a young man on the roof of a shopping centre car park with shouts of ‘Jump!’.

But wasn’t that exactly what someone had been doing, though more subtly? The owner of the
Secrets of Death
website had appeared to be the friend and
adviser of potential suicides. In reality he was just one more person shouting ‘Jump!’.

Cooper liked the proportions of Bargate Bridge. They knew how to build bridges in the seventeenth century. Its arches were elegant as well as strong. It looked as though it would stand over the River Eden for ever.

There was one other thing that struck him today, though. The bridge wasn’t that high. A fall from that parapet to the water probably wouldn’t kill you.

Cooper remained staring at the bridge for a few minutes, until he sensed Carol Villiers standing impatient alongside him.

‘Anson Tate,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘He’s much cleverer than he seems. I bet he’s a success at everything he sets out to do.’

Villiers looked at Cooper in surprise. ‘Mr Tate? Ben, he attempted suicide, but was held back by a passer-by. He’s the one who failed.’

‘Failed? No, he didn’t,’ said Cooper. ‘He was very successful.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, think about it for a minute. What is his story? What did he try to do?’

‘He tried to throw himself off Bargate Bridge.’

‘Did he?’ said Cooper. ‘There are plenty of high places around here. Good long drops if you were going to jump. Stanage Edge, Kinder Downfall, Peveril Castle. Not that I’m recommending it – it’s insane. But if you
were
planning to do that …’

‘What are you saying, Ben?’

‘I’m not saying anything. I’m asking a question. I’m
asking why you would choose Bargate Bridge instead. It’s only thirty or forty feet, and you’d land in water. From Peveril Castle, the Peak Cavern gorge is nearly two hundred and fifty feet. So why that bridge?’

Villiers looked thoughtful. ‘Because it’s more public?’

‘You would make more of an impact at Peveril Castle, if you chose a busy time for visitors to the cavern.’

‘What other reason is there?’

‘Because,’ said Cooper, ‘there’s more likely to be someone passing who will stop you. A Canadian tourist from Vancouver, for example. You could almost count on it.’

Cooper was suddenly overwhelmed with horror at the realisation of what he was saying, at what Anson Tate must have done.

Diane
Fry arrived in Edendale and drove straight up to West Street. She entered the CID room, stopped and looked around. This was her former territory, yet she didn’t belong here any more. One of these desks had been hers, but there was no trace left of her presence, not even her initials carved into the surface.

‘Where is Ben Cooper?’ she said.

DC Becky Hurst looked up. ‘He’s out.’

Fry sighed. ‘Is this it, then?’

‘We do our best,’ said Hurst.

Fry hadn’t imagined working with DS Sharma and DCs Irvine and Hurst, let alone Gavin Murfin. But there they were at their desks and here she was. It would have to do.

‘Stop what you’re doing,’ she said. ‘I’ve got some important information on your inquiry.’

Hurst and Irvine looked to Sharma for guidance, but he barely responded. Murfin simply shrugged his shoulders and stopped what he was doing without argument.

‘I’m not sure how much you know about this
already,’ she said. ‘But let me explain EMSOU’s involvement.’

Fry briefed them on her interviews with Simon Hull and Anwar Sharif, her efforts to confirm their connection to Roger Farrell. She was surprised how little Ben Cooper seemed to have told his team. But perhaps he wanted them to focus on their own particular tasks.

‘Now Simon Hull has given us some significant details in an interview this morning,’ she said at last. ‘He says that he and Sharif were well aware of the person who was asking questions about Farrell. We’ve been told that he claimed to be an investigative journalist.’

‘Oh, that sounds like my territory,’ said Irvine.

‘And what are you doing, DC Irvine?’

‘I’ve been doing some research into Anson Tate’s history as a journalist. Trawling through links to articles he’s written in the past.’

‘Good. That sounds useful.’

Dev Sharma had been listening intently, leaning forward in his chair, his eyes fixed unnervingly on Fry but not commenting. So when he began to speak, Fry immediately paid attention.

‘Some of those prostitutes are trafficked,’ said Sharma. ‘The Immigration Enforcement team picked a couple of them up during the operation I was liaising on earlier this week.’

‘From the Forest Road area?’ asked Fry.

‘Yes.’

Fry studied him, wondering how much she could rely on him. She liked the look of Sharma and had heard positive things about him. She took a decision.

‘DS
Sharma, could you speak to Immigration Enforcement and see if one of the prostitutes might be willing to talk?’

‘I’m sure they would if they thought they could avoid deportation by co-operating,’ said Sharma.

‘Get on to it right away, will you?’

She saw Sharma hesitate then. Of course, she had no rank over him. He was Ben Cooper’s DS. He ought to take instructions from Cooper, not from this interfering detective sergeant sticking her nose in from the Major Crime Unit.

‘I think Ben would appreciate it when he gets back,’ she said more gently. ‘It will save a lot of time if you do it now.’

Sharma nodded reluctantly. ‘All right.’ He went back to his desk to make some phone calls.

‘We’ve been going through all the previous suicides in the area,’ said Hurst. ‘There are quite a lot of them.’

‘You’ve been told to look for connections to the Farrell case?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re probably wasting your time, I’m afraid.’

A few moments later, the atmosphere in the room changed suddenly and several pairs of eyes swivelled towards the door.

‘What’s going on?’

Fry turned to find Ben Cooper in the doorway, with Carol Villiers close behind him.

‘Sorry. But you weren’t here and this couldn’t wait.’

‘What couldn’t?’

‘Simon
Hull has opened up. We’ve got what we need from him. And you might not like it.’

Not for the first time, Cooper could see that something had been going on behind his back. Irvine and Hurst looked particularly guilty. He gestured Diane Fry into his office and made her sit down across the desk from him. Now he was in the DI’s chair again.

‘Let’s hear it, then,’ he said.

Fry went over the details again, impatient and fidgeting. He nodded as she talked. It seemed indisputable that Anson Tate had been the journalist asking questions about Roger Farrell in Nottingham. The description Simon Hull had given was very accurate and he’d since confirmed the ID from photographs. Anwar Sharif had backed him up on this, if nothing else.

‘Farrell is the link,’ said Fry. ‘Tate is behind your suicides, not Hull and Sharif. They were into the blackmail business.’

‘So you’ve come to the same conclusion as me,’ said Cooper calmly when she’d finished.

Fry stared at him. ‘You’re saying you’d already figured this out?’

‘It was starting to seem likely.’

‘I see. Well, it couldn’t have been one of the successful suicides, obviously. It would have to be someone who is still alive. A survivor, then. Your local man, Anson Tate.’

‘He isn’t really local,’ said Cooper. ‘He lives in Edendale now, but he only moved here a few months ago from Mansfield.’

Fry
had gone very still. ‘Mansfield?’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that?’

Cooper blinked. ‘It didn’t seem relevant. Why?’

‘One of the murdered students, Victoria Jenkins. She was from Mansfield.’

‘It could just be a coincidence.’

‘You’ve never really believed in coincidences, though,’ said Fry. ‘You’re the man who sees connections in everything.’

‘I can’t see the connection in this case.’

‘That’s because you’re not looking at it from the proper angle.’

Cooper gazed at her. From the start, he’d been trying to look at the situation from above, gain an overview without being blinded by the details. Had he failed to do that? Was there some other angle he could be looking at it from?

He hated to admit that. But Diane Fry was so often right. In the past, she’d nudged him into seeing things differently and it had turned out to be the right way in the end.

‘Tate must have spent a lot of time on this,’ said Cooper. ‘The planning alone had to be immense. So why did he target Farrell so obsessively? Presumably it was something to with the killing of the three girls in Nottingham.’

‘That’s right.’

‘What was so personal about it for him?’

‘I don’t know. Yet.’

Cooper got up and went back into the CID room, with Fry following him. Luke Irvine had his head down
behind his screen, as if trying to avoid any flak that might be flying around.

‘Luke, have you been focusing your search on when Tate was working in Mansfield?’ asked Cooper.

Irvine had his finger poised to keep scrolling, but he stopped, staring at the screen as if frozen.

‘Yes. This one,’ he said. ‘This is the one.’

‘What is it?’

‘See for yourself.’

Irvine tapped a couple of keys and several sheets of paper slid off the printer. Fry snatched one up. She hardly needed to read the text. She recognised the person in the photograph.

‘Victoria Jenkins,’ she said.

‘Who is Victoria Jenkins?’ asked Villiers.

‘Was,’ said Fry. ‘She was the last of the three murder victims. A media student at Nottingham Trent University. Twenty years old. She was found strangled in an alleyway. And she was from Mansfield.’

‘Like Anson Tate?’

‘And not only that.’ Fry waved the printout. ‘He’d written a story about her.’

Cooper took a copy of the cutting. There was a photograph of a young Victoria Jenkins waving a results sheet with a huge grin on her face. The accompanying story was glowing, and felt oddly creepy and sycophantic when it carried Anson Tate’s byline.

‘This goes back to two years before her death, before she became a student at NTU,’ said Fry.

‘Victoria Jenkins was a multiple A-star student in
her A-level results,’ added Irvine. ‘Tate did an interview with her for the local papers at the time.’

Cooper scanned through the article. Victoria was described as a brilliant student with a promising future ahead of her. In fact, Tate had used the word ‘rosy’. There were more clichés and purple prose, but a glimpse of the real girl did emerge.

Victoria Jenkins came from a poor family on a Mansfield housing estate, one of four children brought up by their mother on her own. Victoria told her interviewer about struggling to afford books and having to help look after her younger siblings. But she also talked about her determination to make the most of her opportunities and follow her dreams. She had ambitions to be a TV presenter one day. But there was a problem. She couldn’t move too far away to attend university because her mother still had the three younger children at home. So she had been delighted to be accepted on a media course not far away in Nottingham.

Fry put her copy of the article down. ‘Is this the reason for Tate’s subsequent actions? Did he fall for her? He was a single man, heading towards middle age. It can happen.’

Hurst looked up, aghast. ‘My God. She was an awful lot younger than him. Twenty-five years, at least.’

‘An unhealthy obsession certainly,’ said Cooper. ‘I wonder if he visited her in Nottingham.’

‘Perhaps he was a customer?’ suggested Fry.

Cooper shook his head. ‘I can’t imagine it, Diane.’

‘Well,
you never know. He is a man.’

‘Tate isn’t that type.’

‘If you say so. I’m not convinced.’

Cooper sat quietly for a moment, turning over the new information in his mind. There was a lot to take in.

Anson Tate had planned everything so carefully. That
Secrets of Death
website must have been his. For a start, it was no coincidence that he didn’t have a computer in the flat but had to use one at the library. He would have disposed of whatever machine he used, right after the death of Roger Farrell. It could be anywhere now and they would never stand a chance of finding it without information from Tate himself.