Secrets of Death (16 page)

‘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 after 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.

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.

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.