Secrets of Death

by Stephen Booth

  A set of InPost lockers stood in a corner of the forecourt next to the air pump. She had a medium-sized locker of her own for items she’d bought on Amazon or eBay and was never at home to receive. She scanned the QR code from her phone to open the locker and smiled at the CCTV cameras overhead. She slid out a bright yellow box and clicked the locker shut again.

  She cast a glance at the small Christadelphian chapel next to the petrol station. Fry had no idea what a Christadelphian was or why they’d chosen this spot for their place of worship. It looked faintly suspicious.

  Then she got back into the car and swung through the roundabout to join the roar of traffic towards the Clifton Bridge. She would be in St Ann’s in twenty minutes’ time, though it ought to be less, considering the distance was no more than four miles. The most direct route was eastwards, but that took her past Trent Bridge and both the Forest and County football grounds, then right through the city centre past the Motorpoint Arena. In the morning, the volume of traffic could add another quarter of an hour to her journey.

  Instead, she crossed the Trent on the Clifton Bridge and cut north of The Park estate to St Ann’s Well Road. She felt so much more at ease having a multitude of routes and side roads she could choose from if her way ahead was obstructed.

  When she had first transferred to Edendale from the West Midlands, she’d been amazed to find that the Snake Pass had no way to turn off it once you were on it, no side roads or alternative routes, for fourteen miles, all the way from Ladybower to Glossop. Fourteen miles! And that was the A57 for heaven’s sake, one of the major routes between Sheffield and Manchester. She couldn’t understand how people coped with it, especially when the Snake was frequently closed by snow in the winter. The road ought to be littered with abandoned vehicles, left there by frustrated drivers who’d given up and decided to walk.

  Soon Fry had dodged the trams to get across the city and reached St Ann’s. When she got out of the Audi, she took a deep breath of air. There had been a distinct smell from it, which grew stronger during her journey, perhaps as the car got warmer in the sun. It was something rancid and unpleasant that she couldn’t identify. She looked around the outside, but could see nothing. She wondered whether she ought to take it into the garage to be checked out or just to the car wash for a good hosing down. That would have to do later on.

  She keyed in the code number and entered the building. St Ann’s was a modern police station, unlike the building she’d worked in at Edendale with its leaking roof and draughty corners. The small windows, screened by blue louvre blinds, looked out on a road and a sprawling housing estate, with perhaps a glimpse of the office blocks in the city centre or the old cinema that was now a cash and carry warehouse.

  Jamie Callaghan and DCI Mackenzie were already waiting for her when she arrived upstairs, as if she was late for work, which she never was.

  And the looks they gave her as she came in seemed significant, expectant. Was she in trouble? She’d done nothing wrong. She knew she hadn’t, not since she’d been with EMSOU, probably not ever in all her time as a serving police officer. In her personal life, yes. There had been a lot of mistakes, things she’d done that she’d known were stupid. But professionally, no. In her job, she was confident in her own ability to do the right thing.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said cautiously. ‘Is something up?’

  Mackenzie nodded. He was perched on the edge of a desk, trying to convey a casual air. It wasn’t working.

  ‘Roger Farrell,’ he said. ‘He’s been located.’

  ‘Well, that’s great. How far did he get?’

  ‘Not far. But far enough.’

  Fry frowned. Mackenzie was being uncharacteristically cryptic. Her DCI didn’t do enigmatic. He said what he thought, which was one of the reasons she liked working for him.

  ‘It’s bad news, Diane. In a way.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Farrell is dead,’ said Mackenzie.

  ‘Topped himself,’ added Callaghan.

  She looked from one to the other, wondering when they had turned into a double act. Ant and Dec had no reason to worry.

  ‘It closes our inquiry, then?’ she said.

  ‘We always prefer to get a suspect into court, Diane.’

  ‘Of course. Although …’

  ‘It is convenient,’ said Callaghan. ‘I know what you mean.’

  ‘That wasn’t really what I meant.’

  Callaghan smiled at her. She detected sympathy in his eyes. She didn’t like that very much either.

  DCI Mackenzie cleared his throat. ‘Well anyway, a report has come in from our colleagues in Derbyshire that Roger Farrell was found dead the day before yesterday in a car park.’

  ‘Derbyshire?’ said Fry.

  ‘Near Edendale. A place called Heeley Bank.’

  Fry bit her lip, anticipating the worst. ‘What on earth was he doing there?’

  ‘Topping himself,’ said Callaghan. ‘Obviously.’

  At Bridge End Farm, the furthest caravan was still cordoned off by police tape, with a uniformed officer trying to look casual as he guarded the scene under the inquisitive gaze of the remaining visitors.

  ‘One family left at lunchtime,’ said Matt. ‘They said it was spoiling their holiday.’

  Ben nodded. ‘Yes, a sudden death does that.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. I’m only used to the odd dead sheep.’

  ‘So what happened exactly, Matt?’

  ‘It’s one of our caravan people. A woman staying in the six-berth at the far end of the field. She particularly asked for that one when she booked.’

  ‘I know the one you mean. It has a view over the valley, doesn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right. It’s popular with couples because it’s quiet, a bit out of the way of the other caravans. You can be pretty much on your own down there.’

  ‘And this woman was alone?’

  ‘Completely.’

  ‘Do you know if she’d stayed here before? Perhaps with a husband or a friend?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I’ll get Kate to check. She keeps records of all the visitors. To be honest, I don’t really notice them unless they cause trouble.’ Matt’s expression became sheepish. ‘Not that I’m complaining she’s caused us trouble by dying. That makes me sound a bit callous, I suppose.’

  ‘God forbid.’

  Matt shook his head. ‘I don’t understand why she’d do it here, though. You’d think she’d go somewhere more … private, like.’

  ‘That doesn’t seem to come into their planning,’ said Ben.

  ‘Who’s “they”?’

  ‘I honestly don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t really know much, do you?’

  ‘Not as much as I’d like to.’

  Matt stared across the field at his caravans. ‘It’s all a bit of a secret, then,’ he said. ‘And I suppose that’s the way she wanted it.’

  Ben was silent. It was an unusually perceptive remark from his brother. And he didn’t want to ruin the moment.

  Cooper found DC Becky Hurst leaning against a Scientific Support van. She looked pale and she was clutching her arms around her body as if she was cold. Yet it was warm out here, even in a field at Bridge End.

  ‘Are you all right, Becky?’ he asked.

  She straightened up when she saw him. ‘Yes, I’m fine.’

  Cooper wasn’t convinced. Her reassurance just made him more concerned.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Hurst shook herself and blew out a long breath. ‘It’s being so near,’ she said. ‘So close to someone in death that you can smell their blood.’

  Cooper knew exactly what she meant. A body glimpsed from a distance was one thing. A still shape shrouded under a blanket or zipped up in a body bag, that was an occupational hazard. But when you got up close it was a different matter.

  And yes, it was the smell of blood. He could smell it himself – that unmistakable metallic tang of substantial bleeding. It was that, and knowing the dead
person must have been able to smell their own blood too, in those final moments.

  He wondered if he’d become too used to it, that he should need a DC like Becky Hurst to point it out, to remind him how upsetting a violent death could be. He ought to feel the effect of it more, shouldn’t he? At one time, he would have cared deeply about what drove these people to their deaths. Yet when he set off from Foolow this morning he’d been thinking of them as a major nuisance at best.

  Maybe there was something wrong with his routine. Perhaps he should put a new CD on for his morning drive to West Street.

  ‘She cut her wrists,’ said Hurst. ‘Sliced right through the arteries with a razor blade.’

  Cooper winced at the thought. ‘Take a break for a while anyway, Becky,’ he said. ‘We’ll manage fine here.’

  Carol Villiers was here too, and once more Cooper was impressed by the cool way she’d taken control of the situation and begun to establish the facts.

  Whenever a dead body turned up, whatever the circumstances, the first officers to arrive had to assess the scene and take steps to protect evidence before the chain of command began to shift upwards. For Ben Cooper, the moment of interpreting the scene was critical. If he set up a murder investigation when it turned out to be suicide or natural causes, he would be criticised for wasting resources. If he got it wrong in the other direction and a post-mortem revealed suspicious circumstances, this initial decision would have hampered the investigation.

  Everyone knew the first twenty-four hours after a sudden death were the most important. But the assessment was always made under pressure and it took good judgement and a lot of luck to get it right on limited information. Death could be messy, even when it resulted from natural causes. Blood could confuse the interpretation, especially for officers with little experience in dealing with death.

  Cooper had come to rely on instinct, a gut feeling. From experience, he trusted his instincts, the sense that something wasn’t right. He would hear a warning bell going off in his head, telling him to step back and review the situation. Death was suspicious until proved otherwise.

  ‘Are we sure it’s suicide?’ he asked Villiers.

  ‘No suspicious circumstances,’ she said. ‘No evidence of anyone else being present.’

  ‘Okay. Name?’

  ‘Bethan Jones,’ said Villiers. ‘She’s from Cheshire. We’ve made contact with a next of kin.’

  ‘And who is that?’

  ‘Her sister, Megan. It seems Miss Jones had been diagnosed with cancer. Until the last few weeks, she wasn’t really suffering any symptoms, but she knew she had limited time to live. Her sister says she’d started getting pain recently, but she’d stopped talking about it. “As if there was no point in talking any more.” That was the way the sister described it.’

  Cooper nodded. ‘I bet her affairs were in order, though.’

  ‘Absolutely. Bethan left a list of all her bank account details with her sister, showing that her utility bills were in credit and her funeral was already paid for. And she’d chosen the music.’

  ‘The music?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Villiers. ‘That’s the first thing you’d think of, isn’t it? The music makes a difference to what sort of funeral you get. You can make them play something cheerful as a celebration of your life or you can pick something really moving and sad to make everyone cry in church.’

  ‘I hadn’t really thought of that.’ Cooper glanced at Villiers curiously. ‘Have you planned your funeral?’

  She shrugged. ‘Well, you know – when you’re on active service, it’s something you think about. Making a will and all that. You never know what’s going to happen.’

  ‘No, of course. You’re going into a dangerous situation. You can’t choose the time and place you die. Most people can’t do that. But our suicide tourists have.’

  Matt Cooper was still standing around, outside the tape that had hastily been strung around the caravan. He looked like a bull that had just been stunned and was waiting for the slaughterman’s knife to finish him off.

  ‘It’s a six-berther, if you fold everything out,’ said Matt glumly. ‘We wouldn’t normally rent it to a single person or even to a couple. But Kate says she asked for this one and was very insistent. She booked well in advance and was happy to pay the full price. And it’s still fairly early in the season …’

  ‘So you don’t have many families booked in yet,’ said Ben.

  ‘Not until the school holidays in July.’ Matt shook his head. ‘God knows what we’re going to do with this caravan now. It cost a fortune to buy and get on site. Do you think the insurance will cover it?’

  ‘I have no idea, Matt.’

  ‘Bugger.’

  Matt shook his head. ‘Well, I’ll go and ask Kate to check the bookings. She might remember the woman, or she’ll be able to look it up.’

  He walked off and Ben watched his brother go, noticing his shoulders hunched with tension, and his fists clenching and unclenching. Matt couldn’t go on like this, staggering from one crisis to another, the strain and anxiety getting worse all the time. He would drive himself into an early grave. For his own sake, it might come time to give up the farm one day. It would be a very tough decision to make. And what his brother would do instead, Ben couldn’t imagine.

  It was a big caravan, an Elddis Crusader, twenty-six feet long. The largest static they had on the site. It had a separate washroom at the far end with a shower unit and a cassette toilet. And this was where Bethan Jones had performed her final act.

  She’d laid towels on the floor to block the drain, so that water had pooled inside the cubicle. The condensation from the hot water was still running down the walls and the floor was pink with swirling trails of blood-tinged water. Some of it had overflowed into the bedroom and soaked into the carpet.

  In the kitchen area, several empty bottles of Buxton Spring water stood on the worktop. A freshly opened packet of razor blades lay by the sink. A used blade had been bagged from the floor of the shower.

  ‘She did a good job of it,’ said the medical examiner, removing a pair of bloodstained gloves. ‘No hesitation marks.’

  Cooper thought about that. Hesitation marks were usually found in suicides who slashed their wrists. It was such a dramatic thing to do that people normally made a number of attempts before getting up the courage for the final slash, or they realised they couldn’t do it. He felt sure this woman must have practised. It would fit the pattern of these carefully planned suicides. But what had she practised on? There was probably guidance available on that too.

  ‘She went really deep too. Yes, she definitely did the job properly.’

  Cooper had no doubt about that by now. He was sure Bethan Jones would have done it exactly right – not cutting across the wrists, but lengthwise down the forearm. A firm, straight cut. Deep enough to expose the artery. And then a quick switch to the other hand before she lost too much blood.

  ‘What’s the significance of the water, doctor?’ he said, indicating the empty bottles.

  ‘If you drink plenty of water in the twenty-four hours beforehand, it enlarges the veins and speeds up the flow when the blood vessels are severed.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Not that drinking bottled mineral water would make any difference from plain, ordinary tap water in that respect.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘People have their little idiosyncrasies, don’t they? Their own preferred brand of water.’

  Back outside, Cooper crouched and looked under the caravan. The water from the shower had soaked through the floor and was dripping on to the grass. Drip, drip, drip. It was still falling in a steady, blood-tinged trickle.

  A small amount of blood didn’t produce any particular smell. There had to be substantial bleeding for the smell to be noticeable. The metallic, coppery scent of fresh blood was very distinctive. And fresh blood was warm. If you saw it close to hand, its surface steamed gently in the air.

  But now, hours a
fter the death of Bethan Jones, the decaying blood had begun to produce a sickly-sweet aroma.

  Matt came back across the field from the farmhouse clutching a page torn from a notepad, with some dates scrawled on it in his wife’s handwriting. Ben glanced over at the house and saw Kate standing in the doorway looking anxiously after her husband. Ben gave her a wave, but she didn’t seem to notice, instead ducking back inside.

  Of course, he could appreciate how she must be feeling. Kate had been the one who’d talked Matt into setting up the caravan site at Bridge End. It had been an expensive investment for the farm. It was her responsibility, her voice reassuring Matt when he grumbled about townies camping on his land.

  And now this, the last thing she could have expected. She must be imagining the worst scenario, what might have happened, with the girls around the farm trying to make friends with the caravanners, asking where they were from, offering to bring them milk and eggs. Kate would be picturing Amy and Josie knocking on the door of the furthest caravan and seeing the body or noticing the blood-tinged water dripping through the floor.

  Villiers took the note from Matt, who allowed her to have it like a child reluctantly giving up a toy. Then he nodded at his brother and hurried back to the farmhouse, where Kate would be waiting for him. There would be some difficult conversations at Bridge End.

  Cooper turned back to Villiers.

  ‘Whereabouts in Cheshire is Bethan Jones from?’ he asked.

  ‘Not this side of the county – somewhere over near Northwich.’

  ‘Northwich? Right in the middle of the Cheshire Plain. It’s barely fifty feet above sea level there, even where the salt mines haven’t made the land sink even further. So she came looking for the hills.’

  ‘She could have gone over into North Wales from there.’

  ‘Yes, she could,’ said Cooper. ‘But Derbyshire has better hills.’

  He stood looking at the caravan and at the view across the Eden Valley. This was definitely the best pitch on the site. Nevertheless, it was unnatural to think about death as desirable. He’d grown up with the impression that death was something strange and frightening, an unknown terror that would one day come for him, as it did for everyone sooner or later.