Secrets of Death (37 page)

They sat and looked at each other for a while. Cooper was seething inside, but with mixed emotions. Fry had interfered, but he had to admit that she’d achieved results. Dev Sharma should have told him what Fry had asked him to do. He should have referred the request to his DI straight away, since Fry had no authority here in Edendale. But Sharma hadn’t done that. He seemed to have switched loyalties very easily. But he had also got results.

Cooper
knew it would be churlish of him to object. He should be thanking Fry. But the words wouldn’t come out of his mouth. He mentally filed it away to deal with later, when he could figure out the right response. Now wasn’t the time. He could only move on.

‘So that’s how you know Tate paid the girls for information,’ he said finally.

‘Yes,’ said Fry, visibly relaxing.

Cooper nodded. ‘I suppose Tate must have run out of money in the end. That was why he moved into that grotty flat in Edendale. He said it was because he liked it. It should have occurred to me to wonder what he’d done with his money.’

‘Well, he had no one to leave it to in his will,’ said Fry. ‘And I don’t suppose he was much into charitable giving. He doesn’t seem the type.’

‘So he figured out who killed his daughter and the other girls, or he believed he had. Why didn’t he report his suspicions? No faith in the police?’

Fry sniffed. ‘Possibly.’

‘And instead he decided to take things into his own hands.’

‘Yes. But not the way some men would have done. Many fathers would have cornered Farrell in an alley somewhere with a few friends and beaten him to within an inch of his life. That’s the usual sort of vigilante justice we’re used to.’

‘Anson Tate isn’t that kind of man. He doesn’t approve of violence. He said so.’

‘Well, that’s ironic for a man who’s killed half a dozen people,’ said Fry.

Cooper
had begun to feel very weary now. ‘He didn’t actually kill them, Diane. He was just partly responsible for their deaths.’

‘Just partly responsible? What a woolly expression. I’m sure you don’t really believe that.’

‘No, not really.’

‘And you still don’t think he was trying to blackmail Farrell?’

‘For money? No. Anson Tate was cleverer and more subtle than that. He didn’t want money from Farrell. He wanted his death. That was a pretty good reason for him to sell his house in Mansfield and move into that cheap flat. He had nothing else he wanted to do with his money, except to track down Roger Farrell and end his life in some way.’

‘He could have hired a hit-man,’ said Fry. ‘I believe they’re easy enough to find in the city, if you’ve got the money.’

Cooper shook his head. ‘No, that wouldn’t have satisfied Tate. He needed the feeling of power and control. He wanted to play God. In this case, a vengeful God.’

‘Of course, vigilantism is wrong, no matter what form it takes. Whether it’s a baseball bat in an alley or psychological pressure. The outcome is the same.’

‘Yes, it’s wrong. On the other hand …’

‘We’re not going to spend much time regretting it in Farrell’s case, are we?’

‘No. Just the others.’

‘The collateral damage.’

‘I’m not sure they could be described as that really. Denning,
Kuzneski, Burgess. They weren’t just accidents. I think Tate got a buzz from it. He got a taste for the feeling of power. For him it was like being God.’

A few minutes later, after Fry had left, Cooper looked up suddenly, as if he had just been jerked out of sleep. Carol Villiers was standing in the doorway and she’d brought him a coffee.

‘You looked as though you needed this.’

‘You’re right. I need it so much.’

Villiers stood and watched attentively as he drank it, like a mother making sure her children ate their greens.

‘You were right in what you said the other day, Carol,’ said Cooper.

‘Was I? When was that momentous occasion?’

‘When you said that Bethan Jones was the odd one out. And not just because she was female. As far as Dev and Luke can tell from trawling through her online activity, she may have visited other suicide sites but she had no contact with Anson Tate and his
Secrets of Death
website. She was entirely the wrong sort of victim for him to prey on.’

‘She was an ordinary suicide, then?’

‘If there is such a thing,’ said Cooper.

‘She made her own decision and decided to give up the fight.’

‘There’s a difference between giving up trying and coming to terms with what life has thrown at you. One’s fatalistic, the other’s realistic.’

‘You should never give up trying,’ said Villiers vehemently. ‘Never.’

Cooper
turned over a plastic evidence bag. At least Anson Tate had left a note in his flat on Buxton Road, though it was a strange form of farewell that he’d written. What an irony. A suicide note without a suicide. Finally, Tate’s planning had gone wrong. There was an unpredictable factor he hadn’t taken into account.

‘So what are we going to charge Tate with?’ asked Villiers.

‘We’ll have to talk to the CPS. But we’ll never get him to trial.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘There’s only one way out that Anson Tate will be planning. And you can bet it won’t be a long spell in prison, followed by old age and a gradual decline into senility. He’ll have to be on suicide watch while he’s in the cells. And I doubt even that will be enough.’

‘I’m not sure you’re right,’ said Villiers. ‘He thought it all through too carefully. All that stuff about the right to control your own destiny. He’s come to terms intellectually with death. But he’s a sociopath. There’s no emotion in him. You need some kind of emotion behind the act to take your own life.’

‘He did have an emotion,’ said Cooper. ‘He was consumed by the desire for revenge.’

‘But Tate’s first suicide attempt on the bridge was a fake, wasn’t it?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Cooper. ‘I think he wanted to know for himself what it felt like in that moment, when you stand on the verge of killing yourself. He was preparing himself for Roger Farrell.’

Sadly,
Cooper shook his head over the story of Anson Tate. He might still be alive physically, but what he’d done already was a form of psychological suicide. Surely you had to kill something inside yourself before you could kill someone else?

The dregs of his coffee were cold when Diane Fry came and asked to see the note that Anson Tate had left in his flat in Buxton Road.

‘You know, I thought of Anson Tate as a victim,’ said Cooper. ‘But he wasn’t, was he?’

Fry raised an eyebrow. ‘Really? Is that the way you treat victims these days? If so, you’ve changed even more than I thought.’

Cooper looked away. Was she right? Had he changed that much? He hoped not. Everyone changed slowly, bit by bit, over the years. It happened while you were busy doing other things. Sometimes you didn’t notice yourself that you’d become a different person. And by then the change might be irreversible.

Frowning, Cooper read Anson Tate’s note again before he passed it to Fry. He wondered if Carol Villiers was right and Tate would take the first opportunity to end his own life. And, if so, whether Tate’s victims would be waiting for him on the other side. And what they might have to say to him.

The note read:

This is the third secret of death. A secret they don’t want you to know. That death is actually quite … pleasant
.

Yes, death. It’s a subject I think about often. Not that I
spend much time wondering what happens afterwards, whether there’ll be something waiting for me on the other side. Eternal life, rebirth, heaven or hell. Whatever. Nor do I waste any effort wondering when it will happen. I don’t understand that obsession with how long you’ll live, what disease will carry you off, whether you’ll survive to see your grandchildren growing up or if you’ll face growing old alone. Speculation about the future. None of that interests me
.

For me, it’s the moment. The actual instant of death. What is that like? How do you feel and what are you thinking? What goes through your brain in those final seconds? Is it like falling asleep? Or something quite different – something unique, which we’ll never experience at any other time? What is it like
?

I can’t wait to find out
.

Cooper
was getting ready to go home now. He didn’t dare look at the time. His stomach told him he was hungry, but he didn’t feel like eating. Takeaways had been brought in for the team in the CID room and he could smell the spices from here, but they just made him feel sick.

Diane Fry stuck her head round the door.

‘Still here?’ she said.

‘Yes, but I’m surprised you are. Nothing to go back to in Wilford?’

‘No, thank God.’

Cooper was puzzling over that remark, but not making any sense of it. He probably wasn’t capable of making sense of much in his present condition.

‘I thought you’d like to know,’ said Fry. ‘We’ve tied both Hull and Sharif in to the break-in at Forest Fields now. When we pulled Sharif in we were able to take prints and DNA, and we got matches for both. Hull has admitted the blackmail. Sharif isn’t talking, but Hull has already implicated him on that one. We’ll have a tight case against them.’

‘I
suppose Hull’s concern was to remove anything from the house that might still link him to Farrell. They used to work together at the car dealership in Arnold. The two couples became quite friendly, hence the photo.’

‘Yes, and, when Simon Hull set up on his own, Farrell continued taking his cars to Hull’s garage for servicing.’

‘Of course – the invoices and MoT certificates.
Those
were what had gone from that file.’

‘If you say so. And, at a guess, he was probably looking for that photo.’

‘It wasn’t there. It was in Farrell’s car.’

Fry hesitated. ‘Hasn’t this inquiry been the wrong way round somehow?’ she said.

‘I know what you mean. The perpetrator is supposed to take the honourable way out at the end of the story, not at the beginning.’

‘I don’t even know what that means,’ she said.

‘Never mind. It’s to do with a study of suicide. The socio-economic factors.’

‘Have you been taking night school classes in psychology?’

‘No, just talking to someone interesting.’

‘Oh, well. I can take a hint. Goodnight, Inspector.’

‘Okay,’ said Cooper distractedly. ‘Yes, goodbye. Goodbye, Diane.’

But Cooper still wasn’t finished. Carol Villiers came running in for instructions about the next day. He was the DI, after all. It was his responsibility to decide these things.

‘There’s
the post-mortem on Gordon Burgess happening in the morning,’ she said. ‘Do you want to go yourself, Ben?’

Cooper hesitated. He wouldn’t be at his best in the morning. He was bound to say the wrong thing, blurt out some embarrassing remark. How awkward would that be?

‘You could do it, Carol. Or I could send Dev Sharma, if you prefer. Now we’ve got him back, he might as well be doing something useful.’

‘Oh, I don’t mind doing it,’ said Villiers cheerfully. ‘There’s a new pathologist there, you know.’

Cooper wondered how she managed to stay so cheerful, even at this time of night. She must have an almost superhuman constitution.

‘Ah, yes, I’ve met her,’ he said.

‘Chloe Young. I know her family – they’re from Sheffield. Believe it nor not, I went out with her brother for a few months. It was years ago, of course, before I met Glen.’

‘You already know her, then?’

‘Very well. In fact, she got in touch with me when she first came back to the area.’

‘Really?’

‘As it happens,’ said Villiers, ‘it was Chloe I went to Derby Book Festival with the other day. She’s great company. She’s very bright too, you know. She’s got qualifications coming out of her ears.’

Cooper’s mouth hung open as he watched Villiers leave. The news came as a complete shock. His exhausted mind began to whirl with questions. Had
Chloe Young been hearing all about him from Carol Villiers before she met him that evening at the Barrel Inn? And did that also mean Villiers knew where he’d been on the night his car was run off the road? What had they been saying about him?

Slowly, Cooper put on his jacket and closed the door. Like so many other things in his life, he might never find out.