Secrets of Death

by Stephen Booth

  Cooper had worked closely with her for long enough now to know that it was only superficial, a façade she used when it was useful. Underneath, she cared deeply about the job and about the officers working for her. It was rare enough these days. She was a genuine copper.

  Hazel Branagh had gone through the ranks, spent her time on the streets as a PC and working on the front line as a response officer before moving into CID. She’d followed the traditional route, moving with each promotion to a different role, from one division to another, from speciality to desk job, before ending up as crime manager in charge of E Division CID.

  Like most officers, Cooper respected someone who’d got the experience under their belt. These days, with fast-track procedures, it was possible to progress from constable to superintendent in seven years. And now the first direct entrants were coming in, recruited from other professions to take on superintendent roles without any experience in the police service at all. They came from finance, law and the civil service. They were expected to bring different perspectives and be from diverse backgrounds. In other words, they were anything but police officers.

  ‘So do these individuals have anything in common?’ asked Branagh. ‘Apart from suicidal tendencies and a fondness for a nice view.’

  ‘Nothing that we know of yet. But that’s the direction our enquiries will be taking.’

  Branagh glanced at his summary of the incidents so far. She noticed the widespread and unrelated addresses.

  ‘And really,’ she said, ‘why are they coming here? Did it have to be our division? It doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘It’s because of who we are,’ said Cooper.

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Yes, it’s to do with the nature of the area.’

  And he felt sure that was true. The Peak District wasn’t just the UK’s first national park, it was one of the most visited national parks in the world. That was because the Peak District wasn’t remote. It was surrounded by a ring of cities and large towns – Sheffield on one side, Greater Manchester on the other. Not to mention Derby and Nottingham, and Stoke-on-Trent and Chesterfield. There was a huge urban population within an hour’s drive of the park and they treated the place as their own backyard.

  For some people, it was also a place to go to die.

  ‘My feeling is that there’s some element of organisation behind this wave of suicides,’ he said. ‘It’s more than a series of coincidences.’

  ‘Organisation?’ said Branagh. ‘I don’t like the sound of that. An orchestrated trend? Are you sure, Ben?’

  ‘Well, no,’ said Cooper. ‘I’m not. But it’s a possibility.’

  ‘I sincerely hope you’re wrong,’ said Branagh. ‘That sounds very disturbing.’

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘We need to get to the bottom of it, anyway. Whether organised or not.’ She looked at Cooper for a moment. ‘Are you happy to stay with this, Ben? I can let you have time, and of course your existing team. We’ll find a way to ease the current workload so you can concentrate on this issue.’

  ‘It’s considered that important?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Well, it can’t be allowed to go on. It’s starting to attract the attention of the media. The press office have been getting enquiries from national newspapers. We can all imagine the headlines, can’t we?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘I appreciate it wouldn’t normally be something that lands on your desk, but these are unusual circumstances.’

  ‘We’re on top of it already,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘There’s just one condition,’ he said. ‘If I may?’

  Now Branagh did raise an eyebrow. ‘And what’s that, DI Cooper?’

  ‘I’d like to see Carol Villiers moved up to Acting DS.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Her promotion is long overdue, ma’am.’

  ‘She came to us with a lot of experience, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, from her service with the RAF Police. Besides, we’ve lost DS Sharma to liaison with Immigration Enforcement.’

  ‘You’re probably right.’

  Cooper was pleased to hear her say that. He’d been recommending a promotion for Carol Villiers for the past year or so, without any success.

  He knew he could always rely on Villiers to support him, and without the sarcastic and dismissive comments he would have got from Diane Fry when she was in E Division. So there was nothing he wanted more than a promotion to detective sergeant for her. The irony was that she might then get transferred away from E Division, since there was no vacancy at Edendale at the moment.

  Branagh made a note. It always looked official when she made a note. If she didn’t, it suggested she was going to forget what he’d said as soon as he left the room.

  Then she looked again at his summary of the suicide cases.

  ‘At least these locations are relatively remote,’ she said.

  ‘So far, ma’am.’

  ‘Yes, so far.’

  It was a nagging worry in the back of Cooper’s mind that an incident would happen one sunny weekend in a packed tourist hotspot like Castleton or Dovedale. That would cause chaos.

  The entire population within the national park was no more than the size of a couple of small towns. The people who lived and worked in the area were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of visitors, who numbered in their millions. The Peak District’s proximity to major conurbations meant that about twenty million people lived within an hour’s drive.

  Yet the distribution of visitors was very uneven. There were vast areas of the Peaks you could go to where you might see no one all day. You just needed a bit of energy and determination to get there.

  On the other hand, Dovedale alone received an estimated two million visitors each year. The famous and much photographed stepping stones across the River Dove were like a tourist highway in the summer, with their own traffic jams and their own incidents of road rage. Or stepping stone rage. So far, there had been no injuries apart from a few wet feet when someone went into the water.

  Then there were Bakewell, Castleton, Chatsworth, Hartington – their role as honey pots attracting crowds of visitors created ever more pressure. The last thing they needed was suicide tourism.

  ‘As for the staff situation …’ began Branagh.

  ‘Yes, ma’am?’

  ‘Of course, the senior management team is very much aware of the pressure on front-line resources,’ she said, as if reading from a press release. ‘We’re currently looking at ways of supplementing staff levels.’

  ‘Really?’ said Cooper.

  The superintendent gave him a surprised look, as if he’d just flatly contradicted her. But he wouldn’t have been able to do that, since he wasn’t clear what she was saying.

  ‘That’s good news, ma’am,’ he said.

  ‘Absolutely. I knew you’d be pleased.’

  Cooper left Superintendent Branagh’s office and walked back down the corridor, watching the lights come on and off as he passed through the sensors. He was wondering whether he really was going to be pleased, or not.

  6

  Back in his own office, Ben Cooper sat down with Carol Villiers to go through the reports again. Individually, the cases were sad. Taken as a whole, they were part of a growing tragedy. But was there a pattern?

  There were always a small number of suicides to deal with. But the figures plotted on to a chart showed a steep upward trajectory in recent weeks, a worrying trend that couldn’t be ignored. Four in April, only two the month before. Then six in May. Now June was looking even worse. It was still early in the month, yet the suicides were mounting up.

  So the reports made a large, daunting stack on his desk.

  ‘There are too many,’ said Villiers. ‘We can’t review all these, Ben. And there’s no obvious pattern. These earlier ones are such a diverse bunch. A student, a single mother, a disgraced curate, an ex-soldier, a convicted paedophile. And they’re from all over the region too
.’

  ‘No pattern at all,’ agreed Cooper. ‘Not on the surface, anyway.’

  ‘So what should we do?’

  ‘Divide them up. You and I will take a look at the most recent. As many as we can examine in detail. We’ll let the rest of the team handle the older cases. They can trawl through them and see if they can come up with any connections.’

  Villiers took a file from the stack and slid it on the desk.

  ‘Okay, how about starting with this one?’ she said.

  On the twenty-first of May a young man had been found sitting on the bank of the River Wye at Upperdale. His motorbike was standing in the adjacent lay-by. It had recently been polished and still smelled of oil. His helmet was placed neatly on the seat. Underneath it was an envelope addressed to his mother.

  Three weeks earlier, he’d been made redundant from his job at a theme park, where he’d been helping to maintain the rides. Then his long-term girlfriend had left him when she’d discovered she was pregnant. Not because the child wasn’t his, but because she knew perfectly well he was the father. He’d been present at the conception, but she didn’t want him there for the birth. Or for the rest of the child’s life either.

  He’d lived in the Allestree area of Derby, renting a small one-bedroom flat close to the Park Farm shopping centre. He paid a month’s rent in advance – probably about all he had to his name after he’d bought food and a tank of petrol for his bike. How had he imagined he was going to support a family? Well, perhaps that was a question he’d asked himself and been unable to answer.

  The young man’s name was Alex Denning. He was twenty-two years old.

  ‘I can’t imagine how anyone would get so desperate at that age,’ said Villiers, touching the file softly with the palm of her hand, as if she couldn’t be quite sure it was real. Or as if she was trying to read more from it than the printed words actually said.

  Cooper shook his head over the report. ‘I don’t know for sure, Carol. I think you can reach that position at any age, where you can see no point in going on. There has to be a point, doesn’t there? At least, we have to believe there’s one.’

  ‘But he had his whole life ahead of him. Okay, a couple of things hadn’t worked out for him, but that’s the way life is for everyone. He would have found another job. Someone else would have come along. Someone better. And it won’t happen for him now. It’s such a waste.’

  ‘Mr Denning couldn’t see that, I suppose. He wasn’t looking that far ahead, just to the next day, the final tank of petrol, the last ride out into the Peak District.’

  ‘He must have had family or friends he could talk to. He rode a motorbike – bikers tend to hang around together, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes. But I think they only talk about bikes.’

  She put the file aside reluctantly and picked up another.

  ‘Who’s next?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘David Kuzneski, aged forty. He was a credit controller for one of those outsourcing operations that have contracts with local authorities and large companies. He’d been there for five years, was well qualified for the job and well regarded by managers. Kuzneski worked in an office in the centre of Sheffield, but he’d been off work due to illness for several months. He lived on the outskirts of the city, at Totley. And he’s the only one on our list who was married.’

  ‘And he was found at Monsal Head,’ said Cooper, picturing the location.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Cause of death?’

  ‘An overdose of lithium carbonate. The pathologist’s report says that the minimum fatal dose for lithium carbonate is fifteen 300mg tablets. When we examined his computer, we found that David Kuzneski bought sixty tablets for less than thirty pounds on a US internet site, without the need for a prescription.’

  ‘He can’t have taken all sixty.’

  ‘No, surely not. Even fifteen tablets are a lot to take at once. A larger number becomes physically difficult to swallow.’

  ‘So have we found the ones that were left?’

  ‘Not yet. We’re still looking.’

  ‘They could be important,’ said Cooper, though he didn’t know why and was glad that Villiers didn’t ask.

  ‘Kuzneski?’ she said instead. ‘What do you think …?’

  ‘It’s a Polish name.’

  ‘Yes, but he isn’t a recent immigrant. He was born in Sheffield and his family are from Sheffield too.’

  ‘He probably had a grandfather who settled in the area after the Second World War. There were quite a few Poles here already before the EU. They just didn’t have the delicatessens.’

  ‘There’s no indication here that he left a note,’ said Villiers.

  ‘No, and that’s odd, isn’t it?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘If he was married. There would usually be a letter or a message of some kind for the wife, even it’s to say, “It’s all your fault”.’

  ‘Perhaps we should ask Mrs Kuzneski again. She might have been treated with kid gloves at the time of the death.’

  ‘Whereas we can be tougher on her now?’ said Cooper. ‘So which of us is going to play bad cop?’

  Villiers grinned. ‘I know you can’t do it, Ben. But I can.’

  ‘That’s why I like you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘By the way, there’s a note in the file here that Kuzneski’s funeral is this week.’

  ‘Interesting. That’s worth bearing in mind.’

  Villiers looked up and met his eyes. ‘Lithium carbonate,’ she said. ‘It’s prescribed for the treatment of bipolar disorders. What they used to call manic depression.’

  ‘I know,’ said Cooper.

  ‘David Kuzneski had been suffering from a bipolar condition for nearly eighteen months before his death. It was why he’d been on sick leave from his job for a while. The condition was getting worse, despite the medication.’

  ‘Then he bought himself an extra supply of lithium carbonate tablets online, presumably without his doctor’s knowledge.’

  ‘And he took enough of them to end his own life.’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Cooper thoughtfully. ‘I doubt his GP told him what a lethal dose would be, though. That would be totally unethical.’

  ‘Of course. What are you thinking?’

  ‘That he must have got the information somewhere else, of course. And what about our latest case, Roger Farrell. He’s from Nottingham?’

  ‘Right. Forest Fields,’ said Villiers. ‘We’ve managed a good geographical spread, haven’t we? Just in these last few cases, we’ve got Nottingham, Derby and Sheffield. It’s almost as if they’ve been chosen to have as little connection as possible.’

  ‘And their jobs too. Farrell worked as a sales representative.’

  ‘Yes, for a company producing memory foam beds, orthopaedic mattresses and back-care products.’

  Cooper shook his head. ‘I don’t see any connection from these reports. Quite the opposite.’

  ‘Nor me.’

  ‘We need to look at each individual and check their online activity. Look for any connections between them, any links or references to suicide websites.’

  Villiers made a note. ‘Okay. And there’s this one too,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if it fits, though.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s a man called Anson Tate, who attempted suicide from a bridge here in Edendale.’

  ‘I remember that,’ said Cooper. ‘The bridge incident.’

  And it wasn’t just any bridge either – it had been the seventeenth-century Bargate Bridge, much photographed by tourists, where water foamed over a stone weir and the riverbed was littered with dangerous rocks.

  Mr Tate’s leap into the River Eden had been prevented by passers-by at the last moment. He’d left a note in a bag on the pavement, which had been picked up by a community support officer. In the note, he blamed loneliness and isolation, a feeling of worthlessness, the fact that no one cared about him, that there was no future for him to look forwa
rd to. It was the standard sort of suicide note, blaming no one in particular but society and life in general. It was a letter written by someone who saw himself as a victim.

  Anson Tate had certainly been a loner, according to his details. He was aged fifty, a former journalist with a major newspaper group who’d gone freelance when his job had been rationalised out of existence, but had struggled to make a living. He had no family locally, having moved to Nottinghamshire from the Northeast of England many years ago. He had never married.

  ‘Mr Tate was the first one,’ said Villiers. ‘Well, the first of this recent surge.’

  ‘A survivor,’ said Cooper. ‘He’s the one we should talk to. He might have some useful information.’

  ‘A failed suicide, though. He won’t be feeling any better about himself, knowing he can’t even do that right.’

  ‘It says here he was referred to the mental health team. He should have been getting counselling since the incident.’

  ‘Working on his feelings of failure?’ said Villiers doubtfully. ‘Well, I suppose it works for some people.’

  ‘We need to track him down and talk to him.’

  ‘There’s an address for him in Mansfield. I’ll get someone to check it out and see if he’s still there.’

  ‘To see if he’s still alive even.’

  Villiers collected the files together. ‘So what do you want to do, Ben? How are we going to handle it?’

  ‘We should visit Roger Farrell’s home first,’ said Cooper. ‘That’s probably all we’ve got time for today.’

  ‘Nottingham? I’m ready.’

  ‘And tomorrow I’d very much like to visit some of these locations.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘To look at the view,’ he said. ‘And to think about death, of course.’