Secrets of Death Read online

  Cooper realised Mrs Kuzneski had been listening politely without taking in a single word. And she had not looked him in the eye when he was speaking. Instead, she watched his mouth, as if his lips were saying something quite different from the words he used. It was very disconcerting. What did she read there that she couldn’t see in his eyes?

  Of course, he’d seen this before. Mrs Kuzneski was a woman who wished she were anywhere else but here, who wanted to be hearing anything except all these well-meaning platitudes she was bombarded with. Her mind had probably disconnected her from the reality of the cemetery and taken her somewhere else.

  All he could do was repeat his request.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you with this, Mrs Kuzneski,’ he said. But he might as well have been talking to the wall of the chapel.

  A male family member standing nearby stepped in, told Cooper with a scowl that it would be all right, then took Mrs Kuzneski by the arm and led her away.

  Cooper said goodbye to Lily Haynes and walked back through the cemetery to the car park, passing among rows and rows of gravestones, memorials to generations of the dead of Sheffield. How many of these had died natural deaths or had decided to take their own lives? It was a fact never recorded on a gravestone. It was an act no one wanted to acknowledge.

  * * *

  Bethan Jones sat looking out over a hillside at the upper end of the Eden Valley, then stared at her wrists. The skin seemed very pale over her veins. Pale, thin and translucent. Where they snaked over the tendons, her blood vessels were like a tracery of branches from some strange blue plant. The more she stared at them, the stranger her wrists looked. They were like the limbs of an alien creature or a lifelike plastic model.

  Bethan had plenty of time. But she knew it was already working. This was how you did it. You trained yourself to see your body as nothing but an object. It wasn’t the real you, it didn’t contain your soul, it was just a shell. Shells were made to be cast off, like a used skin. Sometimes your body became useless. Less than useless – a burden, a pain, a torment.

  All of the dialogue had already taken place inside her head, with her own voice dominant and insistent as she ran through her arguments. Irrefutable arguments. She didn’t need to be convinced any more.

  She had the door and windows open to let in the summer air. From the big window running the width of the lounge area, she was looking straight across the valley. There wasn’t another human being in sight. On the far side of a dry-stone wall, she could see a herd of black-and-white cows grazing. Half an hour ago, she’d watched them ambling back to their field from milking. The air of serenity hanging over them made her smile.

  Beyond the cows, the valley itself looked deep and green, a place to dive into like a cooling lake. Sheep dotted the opposite hillside and the moors blended into the sky as they ran away into the far distance. A helicopter passed overhead. Somewhere nearby, a child laughed.

  Bethan took another drink of water. She thought about her sister and then about all the plans she’d made. She’d done what she could. There was no more. Nothing left for her to do with her life.

  She pushed back the door of the shower unit. The water would be nice and hot now. Then she unwrapped the small packet on the worktop and carefully slid out the first razor blade. She tested the edge with her finger. A tiny drop of blood oozed from her skin and fell on to the worktop. She was more than ready.

  12

  That evening, Ben Cooper was sitting in the backyard of his new house enjoying the early evening sun, when he heard voices. He frowned. One of the voices seemed familiar, but he couldn’t place it and he couldn’t hear what was being said.

  After a few minutes of conversation, two or three people laughed together. Now he recognised one of the voices. It was very familiar. Yet it was so out of context that he’d failed to put a name and face to it. Even now, he couldn’t quite accept this was true.

  He got up and peered cautiously over the low wall. His neighbours from up the row were just about to go back into their house – the one with the wrought-iron gate. And ambling towards him along the path was a third figure.

  Cooper pulled open the gate. ‘Gavin – what are you doing here?’

  ‘Well, that’s nice,’ said Murfin. ‘Can’t I visit an old mate in his new home? Are you too posh to have common folks like me calling by now you’re a middle-class property owner?’

  ‘Come in,’ said Cooper, taking Murfin’s arm to steer him towards the back door.

  ‘Ah, I see you’ve got the booze out to welcome callers,’ said Murfin.

  ‘You’ll be driving, if I’m not mistaken. I don’t suppose you were out for a country ramble and happened to be passing through Foolow.’

  ‘No, I was drawn by the unmistakable odour of money and success,’ said Murfin, gazing around the room. ‘Very nice too. Needs a bit more furniture, I reckon.’

  ‘I’m working on it.’

  Murfin sat down on the settee without being asked. The cat strolled in nonchalantly and gave him a once-over.

  ‘Gavin, what were you doing talking to my new neighbours?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Have you forgotten what my job is? I’m a property enquiry agent. Would you like a card?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Well, I appreciate it’s a bit late for you, like. Since you seem to have gone ahead and purchased the property without calling on my services – a bit of a risk that, you know. Impetuous. Not like you, Ben. What was it that tempted you? I bet it wasn’t the council tax band or its energy efficiency rating?’

  ‘I just liked it,’ said Cooper defensively.

  ‘Ah. You’ve no idea how often we hear that when it’s too late.’

  ‘So you’re telling me you’ve been checking out my neighbours?’ said Cooper.

  ‘That’s what I do. And in your case the service comes free. Call it a housewarming present, if you like. You’ll be pleased to know that the old biddy next door will be no trouble to you, as long as you make a fuss of her cat. The couple two doors down are a different matter. She’s a teacher and you know what they’re like.’

  ‘Gavin, I don’t want to know any of this.’

  Murfin shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. You’ll thank me for it one day.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Just imagine if they thought I’d been snooping on them. That would be a great start.’

  Murfin looked round the room again. ‘So no beer, then?’

  ‘How about a coffee?’

  ‘That will do.’

  Murfin and the cat stared at each other while Cooper went into the kitchen to put the coffee on. When he came back, Hopes had turned away, as if deciding that it was nothing she hadn’t seen before. Gavin looked smug, as if he’d just won a staring match.

  ‘So how is the job going?’ asked Cooper. ‘Is it still the best decision you ever made?’

  Murfin’s expression changed. ‘It’s pants really. Dealing with members of the public all the time. It’s like … well, you know what it’s like.’

  Cooper laughed. ‘Yes, I do. But didn’t you expect that when you went into the business, Gavin?’

  ‘I thought I’d be dealing with a better class of person.’

  ‘And aren’t you?’

  ‘No such luck. I don’t spend my time in nice villages like this. People keep sending me to housing estates in Edendale. I know the streets up there like the back of my hand. Can you believe it, some kids on the Woodlands Estate keyed my car the other day.’

  ‘They probably thought you were still a copper.’

  Murfin sniffed dismissively. ‘Do I look like a copper these days?’

  ‘Not really,’ Cooper admitted. ‘You’re much too unfit now. They’d never have you.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But then, you’ve looked like that for years. I was surprised you lasted that long.’

  ‘Me too, to be honest,’ said Murfin.

  ‘So it’s not working out? It’s not what you imagined yourself doing when you left
the job?’

  ‘You wouldn’t credit it,’ said Murfin. ‘People see houses advertised on the Woodlands Estate and they’re fooled by the road names. They actually think Elm Street will be lined with elms and Sycamore Crescent is a shady little wooded dell. I’ve never seen anything less like woodland than the Woodlands. The only similarity is the amount of grass the Woodies smoke.’

  Cooper found himself smiling broadly as he listened. Hearing Gavin Murfin complaining about the residents of the Woodlands Estate was so comfortably familiar that he could easily have been sitting in the CID room at West Street a time long ago, when they were both detective constables and Gavin was the one he looked up to because of his age and experience. Times changed. But some things stayed the same, and Gavin was one of them.

  ‘Have you actually found any Woodies who’d make suitable neighbours for your agency’s clients?’ he asked.

  ‘Are you kidding? Not unless they’re obsessive social workers in their spare time and like the challenge of having a dysfunctional family of scumbags next door. You don’t come across many of those.’

  ‘So what do you tell them? Without putting them off completely, I mean.’

  Murfin hid his face behind his mug. ‘There are ways,’ he said. ‘A certain form of words you can use.’

  ‘You lie, then.’

  ‘It’s a business,’ said Murfin, suddenly gloomy. ‘A way of earning a living.’

  ‘You put in your thirty years, Gavin. You’ve got your pension to fall back on.’

  ‘It doesn’t go as far as you might think. Not these days. Not in the circumstances.’

  ‘Circumstances?’

  Murfin didn’t seem to want to elaborate on the circumstances that were leaving him short of money. And that was something you didn’t pry into, if it was personal. Not unless the other person volunteered to share his problems.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it anyway. I thought you’d got yourself set up nicely.’

  ‘The best-laid plans and all that, like. But you’re doing all right for yourself. Bounced back, Ben?’

  Cooper stared at the floor. ‘In a way.’

  ‘Yep.’

  And that was all they needed to say. Cooper and Murfin sat in silence drinking their coffee for a while.

  No traffic passed outside. Somewhere a dog barked, the noise reaching far across the hillside from a distant farm.

  ‘And other irritations out of your hair,’ said Murfin finally, without feeling the need to explain what he was referring to.

  ‘Yes,’ said Cooper. ‘That too.’

  After their evening meal, Diane Fry spent ten minutes going through some gentle exercises, winding down from the day. She always did it after a day at the office, but today had been just as stressful for a different reason. The presence of her sister and the baby in her apartment had disrupted her life in a way that she could never have imagined.

  She stood up and looked through the door into the sitting room. Angie was on the sofa, watching TV. The child was sleeping in a carry cot. Thank goodness he was asleep at last. For a while, the noise had been unbearable. She had expected her neighbours downstairs to be banging on the door at any moment to complain.

  ‘Everything okay?’ she said.

  Angie didn’t even look up. Her eyes were glued to the screen. Some reality show was on that Diane had never heard of.

  ‘Fine. We’re fine.’

  ‘Great.’

  What she really wanted to ask was when her sister was planning to leave. Angie was here for now, she’d been forced to accept that. When the bed in the spare room was made up for her, Angie had scoured the room like a Secret Service agent to make sure it was safe for a small child. No exposed wires or bare flames, no dangerous wild animals or monsters lurking behind the curtains.

  Diane wondered what was wrong with her. She’d observed other people’s reactions to babies, but couldn’t understand them. Women were supposed to feel a particular emotion – an instinctive warmth, a maternal affection. But she didn’t have those feelings at all. So that meant there was something wrong with her, didn’t it?

  Yet she would never have imagined Angie as a mother either. Perhaps there was some disastrous change that happened to you when you reached a certain age. A catastrophe in your hormones or a loss of rational thinking in your dying brain cells. That was something to dread in the future, then. How nice.

  ‘What are you watching?’ she said.

  Angie didn’t look up from the screen. ‘Strictly.’

  ‘Strictly what?’

  That made her sister stare. Diane didn’t watch much TV. Well, that wasn’t true, she did watch quite a lot, but it didn’t really register with her what was on. She switched it on when she came home for the sake of a bit of noise in the apartment. But the sense of it sort of bypassed her brain, like background music in a lift. She could tell from the music whether it was drama or comedy, or news. Otherwise the screen just showed faces, talking.

  ‘Come Dancing,’ said Angie with a mocking lift of the eyebrow.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Strictly Come Dancing. Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of it.’

  ‘I suppose I have.’

  ‘They’re doing a summer special.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Normally, it would be Bake Off.’

  ‘Right.’

  Diane’s colleagues at St Ann’s never mentioned these programmes. They talked about football, of course, or some other sporting event. Apart from that, the titles they referred to were Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead. No crime dramas. They hadn’t seen one they liked yet.

  But Strictly Come Dancing? Never. It sounded very middle class to Diane’s ears – the kind of programme the Daily Telegraph would write headlines about after Downton Abbey had finished, when the red-top tabloids were still writing about EastEnders and Coronation Street.

  She didn’t feel like talking about it. But Angie looked settled for a while.

  ‘I’ll be going to bed soon,’ said Diane.

  ‘Seriously?’ Angie made a pantomime of looking at her watch. ‘What are you, twelve years old?’

  ‘I’ve got work in the morning. I like to be in the office early.’

  Angie laughed. ‘Oh, of course you do. I’d forgotten.’

  ‘And the traffic can be a nightmare getting across Nottingham from here.’

  Her sister had lost interest already. The audience was hooting and cheering on the TV, and her attention was drawn back to the screen.

  ‘Will I see you tomorrow?’ asked Diane, forced to raise her voice as Angie increased the volume with the remote. The one thing she didn’t want to do was seem to be shouting, but it was happening despite her intentions.

  ‘Yes, we’ll be here,’ said Angie.

  ‘Is your friend …?’

  She didn’t finish the sentence and Angie wasn’t listening anyway. She wanted to ask if her sister’s boyfriend with the Renault would be coming back to pick her up when he’d finished his business in Nottingham. She had a suspicion he would be here during the day as soon as she’d left for work.

  But she’d just realised that she didn’t want to see him. She didn’t want to know anything about him. Diane nodded to herself. Yes, that was definitely for the best. Some things were better not faced up to.

  She produced a package she’d been saving for the right moment. This wasn’t the right moment, but if she waited any longer it would never arrive.

  ‘Here,’ she said, handing it to Angie.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘It’s something I bought for you. Well, for … Zack, really.’

  Angie ripped open the packing and pulled out the contents. It was a romper suit with a cartoon of a car on the front and the slogan ‘I’m a Little Classic’.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ said Angie. ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘I went into Mothercare.’

  Angie’s mouth fell open in surprise. ‘Sis. You never.’

  ‘Well, I happened
to be passing.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘So make the most of it,’ said Diane. ‘Because I’m never going in a place like that again for the rest of my life.’

  13

  Day 4

  Ben Cooper called at Bridge End Farm on his way from Foolow into Edendale next morning. He’d remembered that he still had some items in storage at the farm, left there when he’d moved into the flat in Welbeck Street and hadn’t had room for them.

  He knew there were some books and a box of CDs, perhaps even some small pieces of furniture that would make the new house look more like home. They were stored up in the loft of the farmhouse, but he could probably manage to get them down on his own if Matt was too busy on the farm.

  The track down to the farm had been resurfaced when the caravan site was developed. Visitors would never have made it through the immense potholes and Matt Cooper’s makeshift repairs with rubble and broken bricks.

  Ben missed the old track, though. It had been part of the character of the farm, so familiar from growing up there that he knew he was coming home every time his suspension hit the biggest hole on the bend before the yard gate. Driving down to Bridge End on a level tarmac surface felt wrong, as if part of his childhood had been smoothed out and erased.

  He parked the Toyota in the yard in front of the farmhouse door. He could hear Matt’s dog Tess barking, but the noise was coming from the shed behind the house, where she was kept when she wasn’t out with Matt.

  The field used by the caravanners was just to the south of the barn. When he looked over the gate, Ben saw his brother and he knew straight away something was wrong. He could see Matt running up the field, his hands held away from his body, palms raised as if he was praying. He could see his brother’s face contorted in distress.

  And then he saw the blood.

  Diane Fry pulled into the forecourt of the BP filling station on Clifton Lane, where she withdrew some cash from the ATM, filled up the tank of her Audi and bought a couple of bottles of water in the shop.