Secrets of Death (11 page)

‘And the cause of death was lithium carbonate poisoning.’

‘That’s right.’

It wasn’t a very common form of suicide. Lithium was sold under several brand names and was used for the treatment of recurrent bipolar depression and affective disorders. It evened out the highs and lows, the mania and depression. In some cases, it was added to the medication for patients who didn’t respond to anti-depressants alone.

David Kuzneski had been prescribed lithium carbonate for a bipolar condition. Yet he’d also bought
an extra sixty 300mg lithium carbonate tablets for less than thirty pounds on a US internet site, without the need for a prescription.

Kuzneski had taken the tablets as he sat on this bench at Monsal Head. He had still been alive when found, but only just. Despite medical intervention, he was pronounced dead on arrival at hospital.

In the viewpoint car park, a series of wooden benches overlooked the dale and the viaduct. Each bench had a plaque attached to it, dedicated by families in memory of some deceased relative.

‘This one,’ said Villiers.

The bench David Kuzneski had chosen bore a plaque. Cooper stood looking at it, reading the words.

Rest here a while
, it said.
When you go, leave all your troubles behind
.

Upperdale was close to Monsal Head. It lay just down in the valley, a slightly hair-rising drive along a narrow, winding road, where he had to dodge tourists’ cars coming the other way, as well as walkers and cyclists.

At the site of Alex Denning’s suicide, they found a dozen cars tucked into a pull-in deep in the dale, their bonnets pointing towards the river. Beyond Upperdale, the Monsal Trail ran on through two more tunnels at Cressbrook and Litton.

‘Sleeping pills. Benzodiazepines. They’re not as dangerous as barbiturates used to be. Well, not unless you take them in combination with alcohol or an opioid such as methadone or tramadol,’ said Villiers.

‘Which did Alex Denning combine them with?’

‘Both.
Meth and a bottle of vodka.’

‘He would have experienced all the symptoms of impairment of the central nervous system. Intoxication, drowsiness, lack of balance, slurred speech.’

‘Someone who saw him earlier on at Upperdale said he was drunk. They thought he’d stretched out on the grass to sleep it off.’

‘I suppose that’s exactly what he did,’ said Cooper. ‘In a way.’

Who had called sleep ‘the brother of death’? It was terrifyingly true. In a way, we died every night, he thought. He wondered how many people went to sleep at night not feeling entirely sure that they’d wake up in the morning. Or whether they wanted to.

But people craved certainty, didn’t they? A definite end. The finality of death. That might be preferable to the ceaseless uncertainty of life.

Alex Denning’s home was in a seven-storey block, six storeys of flats above a row of garages and service areas at ground level. It was almost opposite the Park Farm Shopping Centre, an outdoor precinct where Cooper could see a Boots, a Wilko and a Co-op.

From a communal entrance, he walked into a tiny hallway. A sitting room, a bedroom and a kitchen with modern units. The neutral decor in all the rooms looked quite recent. The bedroom even had a small balcony overlooking the shopping centre car park. The place looked as though it must have come unfurnished. The contents were sparse and randomly matched. The sofa
might have come from one of those charity shops selling second-hand furniture. Yet the TV screen was new and attached to a Sky box.

Denning was a former pupil of Woodlands School, just a few streets away from his flat. He wasn’t a low-achiever. He’d done reasonably well in his A-levels, but had never been able to find a well-paying job. He’d been unemployed and on Job Seeker’s Allowance for eighteen months before the theme park opening came up. And that hadn’t lasted long.

Cooper found a framed photograph on the window ledge. It showed Denning standing on a bridge with his arm round a young woman, presumably the now-pregnant girlfriend. They both looked happy and untroubled. The bridge spanned a river – Cooper could see a weir to one side and dense trees on the other bank.

Then he looked more closely. He realised it was the Lovers’ Bridge in Edendale, but before it became completely covered in padlocks. Just a few were visible, near the standing couple. In fact, the locks seemed as much the focus of the picture as the young people themselves.

In the car on the way back to Edendale, they were both quiet with their own thoughts. They were within a mile of West Street when Carol Villiers broke the silence. It hadn’t been an uncomfortable one, like the many long, awkward pauses he had experienced with Diane Fry. But he was glad when she spoke. It was better than the thoughts that were going through his head.

‘So how is the new house, Ben?’ asked Villiers.

Cooper
smiled. A safe topic.

‘Fantastic,’ he said.

‘Foolow?’ she said.

‘That’s right. It’s perfect. Come and see it for yourself. Call round for a drink tonight, if you like. I’ve got some beer in the fridge. One of the first priorities, after feeding the cat.’

‘No, I can’t. I’m going out tonight.’

‘Oh?’

Cooper knew Villiers had an active social life. She had plenty of friends in the area, old mates she’d picked up with again when she returned to Derbyshire from her career in the RAF Police. She was a member of a couple of sports clubs in the Eden Valley and probably knew lots of people he didn’t. So usually he didn’t wonder where she was going and who she was going with. Yet he found himself wondering now and hardly daring to ask.

‘Anywhere interesting?’ he said, as casually as he could.

‘Derby,’ said Villiers. ‘For the book festival.’

‘There’s a book festival in Derby?’

‘Of course. Didn’t you know?’ She laughed. ‘Oh, I forgot – it’s the city. Outside your experience.’

‘You almost sound like Diane Fry,’ said Cooper. ‘But I know you’re not really a city girl yourself.’

He saw her face crease uncomfortably at the comparison, but didn’t know how to backtrack. Even to him, it sound like an insult now he’d said it.

Villiers let it pass. ‘They’ve got a couple of good authors on. Military history, you know.’

‘Oh,
I see.’

‘Not your sort of thing.’

‘I suppose it might be interesting.’

Villiers smiled. ‘I hope so. I’m going with a friend.’

‘Right.’

Cooper felt irrationally disappointed. Not that she was going to the book festival with someone else – he was only a workmate, after all. And not even that really, since he was her boss while they were at work. It was the fact that she didn’t tell him
who
she was going with specifically. It looked like a deliberate withholding of information, as if she didn’t want him to know who her friend was. He wasn’t sure he liked that. Not from Carol Villiers.

Becky
Hurst looked up brightly when they returned to the CID room at West Street.

‘We’ve tracked down that failed suicide, Anson Tate,’ she said. ‘Believe it or not, he’s moved from Mansfield and is right here in Edendale. Do you want the address?’

‘Of course.’

Cooper took the note with Anson Tate’s address. It was out on Buxton Road, where many of the properties were large Victorian houses divided into flats.

He hesitated. Something was nagging at him, something that had been left undone.

‘Carol,’ he said, ‘did you check for recent calls on Roger Farrell’s mobile phone?’

‘Yes. He hadn’t made any calls for several hours before his death. In fact, his phone was switched off when we found it in the car.’

‘Of course it was,’ said Cooper. ‘I suppose he didn’t want any interruptions to his final preparations. Some randomly generated sales pitch from a call centre would ruin the moment.’

‘It ruins any moment,’ said Villiers.

‘Nothing
else?’

‘Well, there was one call from a pay-as-you-go mobile, which must have come in while he was parked at Heeley Bank. But there was no voicemail message left. So that gives us nothing either.’

Cooper hated getting nothing. And it didn’t feel right in this case.

‘Carol, can you stay here and chase up some of those earlier suicides?’ he said. ‘We really need to pin down more connections. At the moment, we’re just not putting the facts together.’

‘I’m on it.’

Recently, a number of asylum-seekers had been dispersed to Derbyshire, and some were housed in Edendale’s vacant properties, including a series of sprawling houses in the Buxton Road area. The first appearance of Syrians and Somalis had been met with a degree of hostility in the Eden Valley. Racist slogans had been scrawled on walls and the British National Party were said to be holding recruitment meetings in a local pub. Cooper felt sure it would be short-lived.

This was one of the few areas in the older part of Edendale where the streets weren’t lined on either side with parked cars. At least, there were no cars evident in front of the house where Anson Tate lived. But a gravel drive ran alongside the house and disappeared around the back. Perhaps there were garages, an old coach house, or just some space cleared from the garden for residents’ parking.

The house hadn’t been painted in recent years and
some of the window frames on the upper storeys were beginning to rot from the damp. A set of buttons by the front door had flat numbers on them rather than the names of residents. Probably the occupants changed so often that it wasn’t worth listing their names. That, or they preferred to remain anonymous.

Cooper pressed the button for flat 5 and waited. Nothing happened, so he tried again. He couldn’t hear anything from inside the house and he wasn’t sure the bell was working. Then there was a thump of footsteps descending stairs and a vague shape moved behind the leaded glass of the door.

When he finally answered the bell, Anson Tate turned out to be a rather insignificant-looking man. He was a few inches shorter than Cooper, running slightly to flab, with a narrow mouth and anxious eyes. Well, he was insignificant except for his hair. It was receding, but he’d gelled it forwards into a stiff wedge that came to a point on his forehead. It looked oddly aggressive.

Cooper introduced himself and showed his ID. Tate was initially reluctant to let him into the house. That was perfectly normal. Even innocent people resisted his presence, unless they’d actually sent for the police.

‘It’s nothing to worry about, sir,’ said Cooper. ‘I just want a chat.’

‘A chat?’ said Tate sceptically.

‘Yes, that’s all.’

Tate led him slowly upstairs. The staircases and corridors were wide, and the ceilings were high, with Victorian architraves and elegant mouldings from which
the plaster was peeling. The property would have housed an affluent family at one time, with servants living on the top floor. It was exactly the sort of place that was now in multiple occupancy, divided up into cheap flats and bedsits for people who had no intention of staying long.

‘So what can I do for you, officer?’ asked Tate.

‘I’m hoping you might be able to help me with some enquiries we’re making.’

‘Helping with enquiries, is it? I didn’t realise that old cliché was still in use.’

‘I’m sure it will disappear when we find a better one.’

Tate smiled, though it was a smile without humour. ‘Sit down, please. Make yourself at home. Such as it is.’

‘You haven’t lived here long,’ said Cooper.

Tate recognised that it was a question. ‘No, just a few weeks. Temporary accommodation really.’

‘I see.’

‘Well, you must know about me,’ said Tate. ‘The only thing that’s of any interest about me, anyway. The fact that I’m still here, when I shouldn’t be.’

‘I wondered if you would mind talking to me about what led to your attempt to take your own life,’ said Cooper, feeling that he was speaking more carefully than was really necessary with this man.

‘Oh, all that,’ said Tate. ‘All that stuff I was planning to leave behind me.’

‘I’m sorry if it’s distressing for you, sir.’

Tate stared at him, seeing something far distant
from the walls of the little flat. Then he took a deep breath.

‘I haven’t got any coffee,’ he said. ‘But I can offer you a herbal tea.’

‘That will be fine.’

‘Peppermint, or lemon and ginger?’

‘Er, lemon and ginger. Thank you.’

‘I won’t be a tick.’

Cooper looked around while he waited. The flat was depressing. The furniture looked cheap and ancient, scuffed by the feet and elbows of countless previous tenants careless of someone else’s property. The carpet had a threadbare patch in the doorway, the torn pile held down by a strip of tape. Because they were on the top floor, the windows were small and set high in the walls. The old servants’ quarters. Servants famously had no need of air and light, or even heating. There was probably a view of Edendale from here if you took the trouble to stand on a chair and peer through the grimy panes.

Although the lights were on, the rooms seemed dark and dismal. Anson Tate had looked quite at home in the gloom, but Cooper felt uncomfortable. It was as if the June weather and the sun-bathed Peak District had disappeared for the length of his visit. He hoped they would still be there when he left.

‘He was Canadian, you know,’ called Tate from the kitchen area, above the sound of a boiling kettle. ‘From Vancouver.’

‘Who was, sir?’

‘The man who interrupted me that day. On the bridge,
I mean. He stopped me going over. He was a lot bigger than me and very strong. He had a grip like a vice. Perhaps he was a lumberjack. I never bothered to ask him.’

Tate put his head round the door. ‘Would you like to see my bruises? They’re still there. I probably ought to sue him. Don’t you think?’

He put a cup in front of Cooper on the table. Aromatic steam rose from it, filling the room with the smell of hot ginger.

Before coming, Cooper had thought about how to approach Anson Tate. He wasn’t a suspect. He had no criminal record of any kind. All he’d done to be of interest was try to kill himself. That made him a victim, of a kind. Vulnerable. If he’d been in a cell at the West Street custody suite, he would be on regular suicide watch.