Secrets of Death

by Stephen Booth

  When he was a child, the idea of death had made him think of autumn nights, when darkness came earlier and earlier in the evening until there was hardly any daylight left. On those nights, he would lie in his bed at Bridge End Farm listening to the scream of mating foxes or the blood-curdling screech of badgers as they fought over territory.

  Death was like that, wasn’t it? A dreadful and unseen presence out there in the darkness, whose closeness only made you cling more tightly to the comfort of life. Or it should do.

  14

  Ben Cooper was driving on the A50, the noisiest road in Derbyshire. It had a ragged tarmac surface that made his car sound as though it was falling apart and turned every lorry he passed into a rattling cattle truck.

  It was a drive of about thirty-five miles from the Eden Valley down through Derbyshire to the Lightwood area of Stoke-on-Trent. On Derbyshire roads, that took well over an hour.

  Megan Roberts was married, with a couple of young children, whom Cooper could hear playing somewhere upstairs in her nice detached house. The property had an annexe, which had been converted into a sort of granny flat – except that it had been used to accommodate Megan’s terminally ill sister Bethan for the last few months of her life.

  ‘It was the tiredness Bethan complained about most,’ said Megan. ‘The constant fatigue. In many ways, it was the most upsetting symptom she had. There were so many things she wanted to do before it was too late, but the tiredness meant she often couldn’t manage. Apparently, it’s very common with a case of advanced cancer.’

  ‘And then she began to have pain?’

  ‘Yes. It was an annoyance at first, but she knew it would become so bad that it would be debilitating. Sometimes the pain made her irritable and stopped her sleeping properly. She was hardly eating either. She used to enjoy her food, but her appetite had gone.’

  ‘So do you think your sister did the right thing, then?’

  Megan Roberts hesitated, as if weighing up what her response should be and how he would react.

  ‘Let me put it this way,’ she said, ‘I can’t argue with what she decided to do. If she felt it was the best thing for her in the circumstances, because of the way she was suffering, how can the rest of us say it was wrong? We can’t fully understand what’s going on in someone’s life.’

  Cooper examined the rooms in the annexe. He wasn’t expecting to find anything, even though Bethan Jones didn’t fit the pattern. Bethan had been too well organised and properly prepared. She wouldn’t have left anything behind that she didn’t want found. Given that she lived in her sister’s house with two young children around, she would have been particularly careful. He felt certain there would be no link to a suicide website left on a Post-it note, no printouts that someone might ask awkward questions about.

  On a cushion in the sitting room, he did find something that surprised him: a stack of Brides magazines. Cooper had seen these magazines before. He’d been forced to look at them himself, obliged to examine the photographs, asked his opinion on dresses and bouquets and table decorations. He knew it meant only one thing – someone had been planning a wedding.

  He glanced at the dates on the covers. They were all published in the last few weeks. Had Bethan Jones been dreaming of her own wedding? And, if so, who had she been planning to marry at such a late stage in her life?

  Or was it just one of those dreams that approaching death had brought into sharp, ironic focus? Bethan had been the kind of person who made plans. She’d planned her death and her funeral too. He could picture her sitting down with these magazines, turning the pages and planning a wedding. A wedding that she knew would never happen.

  Back at West Street in Edendale, Cooper gathered his team together to review their progress. If another death could be regarded as progress.

  ‘I’ve found Bethan Jones’s profile online,’ said Irvine. ‘She was very active on social media. She talked mostly about TV shows and animals, shared a few cat videos – that sort of thing. She also did a lot of promotion for charity fundraising projects.’

  ‘Cancer charities?’

  ‘Those, and others. And do you know the funny thing?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She had more than two thousand friends on Facebook. And none of them seems to know that she’s dead.’

  ‘Any luck with a suicide website, Luke? Secrets of Death?’

  ‘Not yet. It’s very difficult. There are so many of them. You wouldn’t believe it. But none I’ve found so far suggests any connection.’

  ‘Keep trying.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘All of these people were disturbed in some way, even if only temporarily,’ said Hurst. ‘They must have been. You have to be unbalanced to kill yourself.’

  Cooper saw that her hand was trembling a bit, though she tried to conceal it. Seeing the body of Bethan Jones had shaken Hurst up more than she would probably care to admit. Yet it seemed to have made her angry rather than sympathetic. It was the reaction he sometimes saw from family members after a death, as if it was something that had been done to them rather than to the victim.

  ‘Unbalanced?’ he said. ‘Is that the right word?’

  ‘They say one in four people is mentally unbalanced in some way,’ said Irvine.

  Uncomfortably, they avoided looking at each other. Nobody needed to take a quick head count. There were clearly more than four of them in the room. So which one of them was it?

  ‘It’s an average, of course,’ said Cooper after a suitable pause. ‘There are a higher proportion of mentally unbalanced people in some professions than in others.’

  ‘CPS lawyers?’ suggested Irvine. ‘Judges?’

  ‘None of these individuals was considered to be so much of a risk to themselves that they had to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act.’

  ‘And there are things you can do before it gets to that stage,’ said Villiers. ‘There are people you can talk to. Why aren’t they getting help?’

  ‘That’s the trouble,’ said Cooper. ‘I think they are.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There’s a plan,’ he said. ‘Someone is orchestrating these suicides. Yes, a lot of people reach a point when they badly need help. And sometimes they reach out for help in the wrong direction. They get the worst kind of help.’

  ‘There’s absolutely no evidence that these individuals had been in contact with each other in any way. We’ve been through their phone records, their emails. There’s no link through family or work, or even similar interests.’

  ‘There’s a connection, though. There must be. Some link that binds them together. Mr Tate is the only one who could tell us, but he’s keeping his mouth shut. Whether he’s sworn to secrecy or someone has a hold over him, I don’t know.’

  ‘Who knows what commitment people sign up to,’ said Irvine. ‘Perhaps he was thrown out of the club for not dying.’

  ‘Blackmail perhaps?’ said Villiers.

  ‘Possibly. A threat that their shameful secrets will be revealed unless they take the honourable way out. So what would a blackmailer get out of that? How would they benefit? There’s no financial gain, no suggestion of revenge.’

  ‘No. Unless someone out there just likes to watch people die,’ said Villiers.

  Cooper looked at her. It was a horrible thought, but it was feasible. Too feasible. Had someone been present at the locations, waiting for victims to reach their final moments? Could there be some psychopath who found satisfaction from controlling other people’s lives to the extent that they could dictate how and when they died? And even where?

  Well, of course there could. There was no limit to the twisted logic and desires of true psychopaths. And Cooper knew they tended to have another characteristic in common. Psychopaths were manipulative. They were masters at making themselves convincing and credible, at creating a false empathy with their victim. They could be very, very persuasive.

  ‘I need something to put to Anson Tate,’ he said. ‘To break
through his façade. I’ve got to get him to open him up about what actually happened. Whatever it is, something is keeping him from telling us what we need to know.’

  ‘He’s probably ashamed. He feels a failure,’ said Irvine.

  ‘Yes. Of course, what interests me,’ said Cooper, ‘is whether Mr Tate is someone else’s failure.’

  Cooper went upstairs and along the corridor to report to Detective Superintendent Branagh. During his report, he carefully avoided the use of that word progress. It would have felt like a lie. He explained his theory that the suicides had been getting advice and guidance, probably encouragement. That they were someone else’s puppets.

  ‘It looks to me as though someone is being very controlling, taking the decisions out of the hands of desperate individuals,’ he said. ‘They don’t have to worry about method and means, about whether it will go wrong or even about where to do it – all those details that potential suicides stumble on, the small stuff that stops people going through with it. It’s all done for them.’

  ‘It’s presented as an easy option,’ said Branagh.

  Cooper nodded. ‘Or the only option. Once you’ve signed up, you’re made to feel obligated, as if you’re engaged in an inevitable process that you can no longer stop, even if you want to.’

  Branagh frowned as she listened to him.

  ‘So what direction is your thinking taking you, Ben?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, at the moment, I’m asking myself a difficult question. If any of these individuals were persuaded or coerced into doing what they did by someone else, would we have a case against that person?’

  ‘It would depend on the evidence,’ said Branagh.

  ‘Doesn’t it always?’

  ‘I mean, there would have to be proof of definite intent. Just discussing suicide methods on a website wouldn’t count. Putting suicidal individuals in contact with each other certainly doesn’t. You might argue that that was a kind of support group. Even talking to someone about suicide doesn’t prove anything – you would need a record of that person being actually encouraged to commit the act.’

  ‘It’s very frustrating when you suspect someone has been doing it deliberately. Is there no legislation we can use?’

  Cooper had thought about it himself, turning it over in his mind. He came up against the one unanswerable question. You could prosecute for murder without a body. So what could you do with a body, but no suspect or motive?

  ‘I know how you feel, Ben,’ said Branagh. ‘It’s been a frustration to us for a long time. There have been some glaring incidents, even in public. Like that young man in Derby.’

  Cooper was familiar with the case she was referring to. A few years previously, police negotiators had spent two hours trying to coax down a suicidal boy from the top floor of a shopping centre car park in the city of Derby. Meanwhile, a group of youths on the street below had shouted taunts at the boy, telling him to ‘Jump!’ and ‘Get on with it’. Some had filmed the incident on their mobile phones and uploaded clips online for everyone to see. Seconds before he jumped, the boy almost touched an officer’s hand but was distracted by the taunts. He counted down from ten and hurled himself off the car park roof.

  At the subsequent inquest, the coroner had said the taunting youths were partly responsible for the boy’s death. Despite the coroner’s comments, no one had ever been arrested or charged for their role in the incident. The trouble was, there was no specific offence that people could be charged with if all they were doing was shouting comments.

  There had been similar incidents around the country, so it wasn’t just a Derbyshire problem. For Cooper, this was more than mindless insensitivity and a lack of concern for another human being. People had become passive consumers of tragedy, incapable of separating reality from entertainment. Now smartphone users were engaging in the tragedy itself, goading a suicide to his death so they could share the footage on Facebook and YouTube.

  Like it or not, there were people out there who liked watching someone die.

  ‘So, you’re talking about a sociopath or psychopath of some kind,’ said Branagh.

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  He’d realised that on his way up the corridor, as the lights went on and off. In fact, what he had in mind was the very definition of a psychopath. While one in four people might be unbalanced in some way, there was another statistic that was even more disturbing. One in ten went so far as to have sociopathic tendencies.

  And they became the violent psychopaths. Their violence was planned, purposeful and emotionless, reflecting a detached and disassociated mental state. They were motivated by a desire for control and dominance. Their attitude was one of absolute entitlement.

  Most of all, psychopaths often possessed an almost demonic ability to manipulate others. They could persuade their victims out of everything they owned, even their lives. He thought of the leaders of religious cults who led their followers to their deaths. They might even believe in their own lies, convince themselves of their own omnipotence.

  ‘Yes, someone out there thinks he’s become a god,’ said Cooper. ‘A god with the power of life and death.’

  15

  David Kuzneski had lived in the Totley area of Sheffield. His street was right on the southwestern edge of the city, close to the moorland that began almost at the city boundaries. From here, you could see the outline of Blacka Moor, where a footpath through Cowsick Bog had recently been relaid with stone slabs recycled from disused cotton mills in Lancashire and dropped in by helicopter.

  Cooper wondered if Kuzneski had spent much time up there, braving the quagmires of Cowsick. A herd of red deer lived on the moor and were said to raid gardens in Totley from time to time. Kuzneski had lived as close as he could to the Peak District while still being in the city.

  He’d been on medication for bipolar disorder. But his bipolar extremes had lasted for weeks. His wife said she couldn’t remember when he’d been in a condition she would describe as ‘normal’. He’d been taking lithium carbonate and valproate, but he was troubled by the side effects of the lithium – diarrhoea and vomiting. When in a manic phase, he simply stopped taking the medication. And the cycle began all over again.

  ‘I did begin to wonder whether David wanted to kill himself,’ said Stephanie Kuzneski. ‘Whether he was just waiting for the right moment, for everything to come together. He never said anything to me, but it was part of the manic depressive cycle. When he was up, he made plans. When he was down, he knew it was all useless. After a while, I don’t think he could convince himself there was a future, no matter how hard he tried. How hard we all tried, everyone who cared about him.’

  She got up and walked to the window to stare out at the road, with her back to Cooper so he couldn’t see her face. He sat quietly and waited, trying to pretend he wasn’t there while she collected her thoughts.

  ‘That condition,’ she said. ‘It possessed him as surely as any demon. And in David’s case there was no hope of exorcism. He once told me it was like having your own personal bully. A voice inside your head constantly telling you how rubbish you are, banging on and on about how you’ve failed in every single thing you’ve tried to do, destroyed every relationship you’ve had. It tells you over and over that you’ve let everyone down. That you might as well … Well, you know …’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  Mrs Kuzneski took a deep, ragged breath before she continued. ‘He told me the voices were saying, “The pain will never end. It’s time for you to die. You know you want to die.”’

  Cooper shook his head in frustration. ‘He shouldn’t have reached that stage,’ he said. ‘If things had been done properly for him.’

  ‘I know. But it’s a bit late now to look back and say how things might have been done differently. In the end, David was still in control of his own fate.’

  ‘I suppose that’s true. Did you ever see a card like this in your husband’s possession?’ asked Cooper, showing her the Secrets of Death business card
from Roger Farrell’s car.

  Mrs Kuzneski went pale. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I found one in his jacket pocket.’

  ‘What did you do with it?’

  ‘I burned it,’ she said. ‘Was that the wrong thing to do?’

  ‘I suppose it can’t be helped.’

  ‘And there were some extra tablets too. What was left of the lithium he’d bought online. He must have known exactly how many he needed to take.’

  Stephanie Kuzneski gazed into the distance, as if running the whole episode through her mind.

  ‘David hated taking tablets, you know,’ she said. ‘He insisted it was unnatural. He said the drugs were taking his personality away and changing him into a different person, someone he didn’t like.’

  ‘I think that’s quite common,’ said Cooper. ‘It must have been difficult for you to deal with.’

  She nodded. ‘I often used to nag him to take his tablets. He took no notice of me. And what could I do? He was as difficult to handle in that phase as he was when he was depressed. He was a grown man, for goodness’ sake. I couldn’t physically force him to take them.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Finally, she turned away from the window and looked at Cooper again.

  ‘I think he was right, too,’ she said. ‘The medication had changed him into someone else. And it was a person I didn’t like very much either. Definitely not the man I fell in love with and married. In a way, his death was a release. For both of us.’

  As Cooper was leaving Totley, his mobile rang and a number he didn’t recognise came up on the screen. He was always cautious about unidentified numbers. They often turned out to be randomly generated sales calls. But something made him answer this one rather than let it go to voicemail.

  ‘Hello?’ he said.

  ‘Hi. It’s Chloe Young,’ replied a woman’s voice.

  ‘I’m sorry?’