Secrets of Death (8 page)

‘That’s right. I didn’t like her much, but she was good for him. She kept him on the straight and narrow.’

‘Really? You’re suggesting he went off the straight and narrow when she died?’

Mrs Laws shook her head vigorously. ‘Roger changed, that’s all I mean. He lost touch with his family and friends.’

Cooper wondered if that had been Farrell’s own choice. Or was it the other way round – his family and friends had gradually dropped all contact with him? It was probably academic, unless something in Farrell’s own behaviour had been the reason for the split.

He put the photo back. He’d recognised Natalie Farrell from the picture her husband had with him in his car when he died. Two couples, one of them a younger Roger Farrell and this woman, no doubt taken in happier times. He might have lost contact with the rest of his family but he’d still remembered his dead wife. As he used his exit bag, had he been thinking
about her death in that crash in fog on the motorway? There was no way of telling. No way of knowing what went through someone’s mind as they died.

In the sitting room, Cooper automatically checked the mantelpiece over a blocked-up fireplace. It was the traditional place to leave a note. But there was nothing except a thin layer of dust.

A thick folder and a laptop were on a table in the dining area. Cooper opened the laptop and switched it on. He saw it was password-protected. He would have to pass it on to the high-tech crime unit for examination if he wanted information on Farrell’s recent emails or online activity. The same with the small pile of USB memory sticks in the drawer of the table. He unfastened the folder and flicked through the papers. They seemed to be mostly household utility bills – council tax, bank statements, MoT certificates. So he bagged up the laptop and memory sticks, then turned to the next room.

He was looking for a sign of some kind. Anything that might explain why Mr Farrell had killed himself, or what he’d been thinking. Even a hint of his intention. Whatever Cooper could find might be useful, could cast the faintest of lights on what was happening.

In one of the neighbouring divisions, a teenage girl who committed suicide had been found with a semicolon drawn on her wrist in ballpoint pen, like a temporary tattoo. It had become a well-known symbol, indicating that the individual was suffering depression, anxiety or suicidal thoughts, or was self-harming. A semi-colon was said to represent a sentence that the
author could have ended but chose not to; the author was you, and the sentence your life.

Roger Farrell hadn’t left a note, though. He didn’t even say goodbye. Well, who did he have in his life to say goodbye to? They all seemed to have left him already.

But wait. Here was what he’d been looking for. An envelope, pinned to a corkboard in the kitchen. One sign, such as it was, that Roger Farrell had planned ahead, had been thinking past the moment of death and that flood of endorphins. Inside the envelope was a reservation for a plot at a woodland burial site in the Golden Valley near Ripley, booked about three weeks ago.

Cooper knew exactly where the site was, too. It lay barely a stone’s throw from Derbyshire Constabulary’s headquarters and was bounded on one side by a heritage railway line. Mr Farrell had booked himself a single grave there with a tree, costing him a little over £800. There were woodland burial sites around the Peak District too. Buxton, Hope, Thornsett. There, the dead helped to create new woodlands and provide habitats for wildlife.

For a few moments, Cooper looked at the booking form and brochure, wondering what they really told him about Roger Farrell’s intentions. The location of the burial site stood out. The Golden Valley. It sounded exactly the sort of place you might expect to end up when you reached that distant white light.

When they left, a man was leaning over the fence from the next house, watching them. He was black-haired
and unshaven, and his arms were covered in tattoos.

The man laughed as Mrs Laws ducked her head, turned away from him and scurried back to her car. He narrowed his eyes as he faced Cooper and Villiers.

‘You look like police,’ he said bluntly.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Villiers, showing her ID. In Edendale, it was usually considered a good thing to have neighbours keeping an eye on each other’s property.

‘What are you doing here, then?’ he said.

‘Making enquiries about your next-door neighbour, Mr Farrell.’

‘Oh, him. What’s happened to him?’

Cooper waited while Villiers weighed up how much information to give out. It was hardly a secret, though. The fate of Roger Farrell would soon be in the local news.

‘We’ve found his body,’ she said.

The man grinned as if she’d just told him he’d won the lottery.

‘Topped himself, did he? Not before time.’

Villiers looked taken aback.

‘Do you have no concern at all that your next-door neighbour is dead?’ she said. ‘No curiosity about what might have made him do that?’

‘Oh, should I pretend to care?’

‘You could try, sir. But it would be a bit late now.’

The man nodded smugly, as if he’d just won an argument. ‘There you go, then.’

‘Do you know your neighbour well, Mr …?’

He didn’t fall for that one. He was somebody accustomed to police officers trying to get his details.

‘My
name doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘I dare say you can find it out if you want to. And I didn’t know
him
at all.’

‘You must have had some contact,’ put in Cooper. ‘Mr Farrell had lived here for ten years.’

‘Oh, I saw him. But that’s all. He meant nothing to me. Nothing.’

A few minutes later, Cooper turned the Toyota on to Noel Street and followed the tram lines south to work his way through the Hyson Green shopping area towards Bobbers Mill and the M1.

‘
I saw him, but he meant nothing to me
?’ said Villiers as they stopped at lights on Radford Road opposite a store with a vast display of vegetables all along its frontage. ‘That’s really sad, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t think we can blame the neighbour,’ said Cooper.

He was thinking of the initial reports about Roger Farrell brought in by Luke Irvine and Becky Hurst. The description of a man whom his work colleagues hardly knew, who had no interest in joining local organisations, or in going to the pub. The ghost in a suit and tie. His own sister had never visited him. So it was hardly surprising that even his next-door neighbour denied knowing anything about him.

Yet Farrell couldn’t have been completely anonymous, could he? So what had he done with his time in that house in Forest Fields?

‘After all, who
did
Mr Farrell mean anything to?’ said Cooper as the lights turned green and he drew away.

It
was a question that troubled him all the way back from Nottingham to Edendale.

Diane Fry had told lies to get out of her own apartment. She didn’t feel proud of it. But there was only so much she could take at short notice. She’d been entirely unprepared for the arrival of her sister and the child. It had come as a shock to her system.

And it was one of her rest days, for heaven’s sake. She deserved a break. A break from, well … most things. There
were
a few exceptions.

So she’d told Angie she had work to do. Angie had protested and scoffed at her dedication to the job. But she knew from experience that there was really no point in arguing. She’d got used to Diane being a police officer a long time ago.

‘Well, don’t worry. We’ll manage on our own for a while, won’t we?’

Half the time, it wasn’t clear who Angie was talking to – her sister or the baby. When she was holding the child, she hardly ever looked up from him. So Diane had to work it out from what Angie was saying and the tone she said it in. The babyish voice was a clue. Though sometimes she forgot and spoke to Diane the same way, as if her sister were an overgrown toddler with minimal language skills.

‘You know where everything is,’ said Diane, hastily pulling on her jacket.

‘Have you got any beer?’ asked Angie.

‘There’s some white wine in the fridge. And half a bottle of vodka.’

‘That
will do. Won’t it, little one?’

Diane resigned herself to finding all her booze gone when she returned home. She should probably call at the Co-op on Wilford Green to stock up. They had an offer on Chardonnay, and she might be in for a siege.

Jamie Callaghan was on a rest day too, after the job the previous evening. He was surprised to get a call from Fry. He was just finishing a session on the benches and cross trainers at a fitness centre in Chilwell.

‘Give me half an hour,’ he’d said.

So Fry found herself in a beer garden overlooking the water at the Castle Marina, drinking cappuccino. The marina itself was packed with narrowboats and small pleasure craft. Every few minutes, one of them chugged slowly by near her table to pass under a footbridge into the Nottingham Canal.

The last of the office workers from the Castle Meadow Business Park were just leaving to go back to their desks at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs after their lunch break, so there were plenty of tables empty. No one would overhear their conversation.

‘I thought you’d be doing some shopping on your day off,’ said Callaghan, shading his eyes against the glare of sun off the water.

‘Shopping?’ said Fry.

Callaghan laughed at her tone. ‘We’re next to a retail park, if you hadn’t noticed. Furniture Village, Home Sense, Mothercare …’

‘Oh, thanks. I’ll bear it in mind.’

He sat across the table from her, his back to the
marina. His shoulders seemed to block out the sunlight.

‘You’re restless, I expect,’ he said. ‘You don’t like being away from the job, do you, Diane?’

‘Not at a critical point in an inquiry, no.’

‘So you’d rather be in the office than taking your rest day.’

Fry sipped her cappuccino. ‘I suppose so.’

Callaghan had ordered a southern fried chicken baguette, and his cappuccino was topped with cinnamon. The aromas mingled with the scent of his deodorant. His hair was still slightly damp from the shower after his workout.

‘Are you sure you don’t want anything?’ he said, waving a piece of baguette.

‘No, I’m fine.’

Fry watched another narrowboat go by, a small dog perched on the bow as its owner cautiously negotiated the turn. Across the water, at the entrance to the marina, was a sign for the chandlery. She had never known what kind of items they sold in a chandlery. She wondered if it was worth paying a visit just to find out, since she had nothing else to do. But it might feel a bit too much like shopping.

Callaghan was watching her curiously, as if trying to read her thoughts.

‘How do you think the boss is getting on?’ he said. ‘Will it be good news for us when we go back in?’

‘I doubt it,’ said Fry.

‘So what are you thinking about? I’m sure it’s something do with the Roger Farrell case.’

He was right, of course. She had been turning over
the details in her mind ever since she’d escaped from the apartment in Wilford.

‘Yes, it is.’

‘You’re worried that Farrell might have picked someone else up in the last day or two. I only mentioned it as a possibility. It’s not very likely, you know.’

‘It isn’t that,’ said Fry.

‘So what?’

‘Well, it’s those witness reports we’ve had,’ she said. ‘Someone asking questions around the Forest Road area.’

‘Questions about Farrell.’

‘Exactly. I’m thinking we ought to be looking into that a lot more seriously than we are. I’m going to press Mr Mackenzie on it tomorrow.’

‘I’ll back you up, Diane. You know that.’

‘Thanks, Jamie.’

He finished his baguette and wiped his fingers on a napkin. ‘It’s a pleasure. Is that all it was?’

‘No.’

Fry hadn’t really acknowledged it to herself, but there was more to her worries than that. She was becoming increasingly anxious about the possibility that Roger Farrell had somehow slipped through their fingers at the last moment.

‘I’m wondering if whoever was asking those questions might have something to do with Farrell avoiding our attempts to arrest him.’

‘They might have helped him to skip town, you mean?’

‘No, not that,’ she said. ‘It occurs to me that they might not be helping him at all.’

Callaghan
squinted at her, as if the sun was now directly in his eyes.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m wondering,’ said Fry, ‘if they might have arranged for him to disappear completely. And for ever.’

Ben
Cooper had made a major decision in his life. It was probably one of the biggest steps he would ever take. It tied him down for many years to come, putting him under an obligation to people he would rather not have been forced to deal with. But sometimes you had to take this sort of step. It was all part of moving on, facing facts.

He’d bought himself a house.

The village of Foolow was barely a stone’s throw from where he’d grown up at Bridge End Farm. He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. Of course he liked to go back and visit often, to see his brother and sister-in-law, and his nieces, who were getting taller by the day. On the other hand, he had a sneaking anxiety that it might be a sign of weakness, that he’d allowed himself to be drawn back towards the security of home when he’d been so close to breaking free completely.

His little flat in Edendale had been the first stage. His planned marriage to Liz and the future they’d mapped out for themselves would have been the second.
There would have been no need to look back at the past if it had all worked out. No necessity for him to be buying a house on his own if Liz hadn’t died.

And this wasn’t the property Liz would have chosen to live in. He was very aware of that. She had wanted something modern, a three-bedroom semi on an executive housing estate to the south of Edendale, a blank canvas she could make her mark on. But this cottage was old and small. Its stone walls oozed with history and the steps to its front door were worn smooth by generations of previous occupants.

It was squeezed into its village setting as if it had always been there, as if it had grown organically over the centuries, jostling with its neighbours for the available space and light, as much a natural part of its environment as the trees and the grass and the heather on the hills.