Secrets of Death Page 21

  Promotion to DI suited him too. Some people thrived when they were given responsibility. Everyone who’d said he wasn’t ready for it had been proved wrong. And she had been one of those people herself.

  She’d also been thinking about DC Becky Hurst, after seeing her at West Street. Fry knew that Cooper really rated her. She was the best of the recent recruits to E Division CID. For a moment, Fry wondered if Hurst would appreciate a move to EMSOU if a vacancy came up. It was something to bear in mind for the future.

  ‘A killer?’ Cooper shook his head. ‘Roger Farrell had no criminal convictions. Not a thing on his record.’

  ‘That was what we were working on. Our enquiries suggested he was responsible for the deaths of three young women in Nottingham, unsolved murders spread over three years. We had been gathering evidence against him for months. It was a painstaking operation. He was a very careful man. The decision had just been made to go for an arrest, because we’d heard he was getting a bit spooked – perhaps he’d found out we were asking questions and was afraid we might be getting too close. We were going to take him as he arrived home, so that he didn’t have chance to dispose of anything in the house.’

  ‘What went wrong?’

  ‘We don’t know. He didn’t appear that night. He never came home. The next thing we heard was that someone had been into his house, people who looked like police officers. That would be you.’

  ‘But that was after he was dead,’ said Cooper.

  ‘You came to Nottingham to investigate a suicide?’

  ‘Not just one suicide.’

  Cooper told her about the other cases, but only in vague terms, instinctively holding back on some of the important details.

  ‘I see. A suicide epidemic.’

  ‘Not— Well, we’ve been trying to establish if there’s any connection between the victims.’

  ‘Well, there’s no doubt about Farrell.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘No doubt about why he did it. He must have known he was facing arrest, a court case and concurrent life sentences. He took the easy way out.’

  ‘Who is Roger Farrell supposed to have murdered?’

  ‘You want me to share details from our inquiry with you?’

  ‘It seems … well, are we going to work together or not?’

  Fry thought about it. ‘As long as it’s mutual. A mutual exchange of information.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Still she paused, deliberately making him wait. Cooper was just starting to get irritated when she opened her file and passed him three victim profiles, copies that were already prepared and ready for him to ask for them.

  ‘For a start, there’s no “supposed” about it,’ said Fry. ‘We’re confident that we have sufficient compelling evidence to enable us to get a conviction for Farrell. Or it would have done, if he’d waited for us to get our hands on him.’

  Cooper spread the profiles apart on the desk and studied the faces of the women whose photos were attached to them.

  ‘Three confirmed victims. It’s possible there were others. We very much wanted to question Mr Farrell about them. Now their cases will probably just lie in the archives. Their families may never know the truth about what happened to their daughters.’

  Cooper glanced at her. Coming from Diane Fry, the last words sounded like an uncharacteristic burst of empathy. He couldn’t see any corresponding emotion in her face, no flicker of sympathy or reflection. It dawned on him that she was saying what she thought he wanted to hear. In fact, she was speaking out loud what she imagined he himself would say in the same circumstances.

  So she was manipulating him blatantly. Did she believe he wouldn’t notice it? But she knew him better than that. She didn’t care whether he saw through it. She knew her strategy would work on him anyway.

  And she was right. As Cooper lowered his gaze and read through the profiles, he was already thinking about the other victims, the ones who might never get justice. It was an outcome he had always hated as a police officer. Everyone deserved justice of some kind. He’d said it many times.

  Cooper bit his lip as he read. Damn Diane Fry. He was her senior officer, yet she knew how to play him as if he were still a young, inexperienced DC.

  ‘The first one was Sarah Mittal,’ said Fry. ‘Aged twenty, from Birmingham. Studying graphic design at Nottingham Trent University.’

  ‘A student,’ said Cooper.

  ‘They were all students. Nottingham is full of them.’

  ‘And she was found strangled.’

  ‘Yes.’

  And there were photographs to prove it – a body lying sprawled in an alleyway and a headshot with the bruises on her neck clearly visible.

  He turned the page. A second body.

  ‘Anna Balodis, aged twenty-one, from Jelgava in Latvia. She was in the final year of a degree in health and social care. She was strangled in the same way.’

  ‘He used his bare hands?’

  ‘No, he wore gloves,’ said Fry. ‘No fingerprints. We had some DNA traces, but of course Roger Farrell wasn’t in the database to compare them to.’

  ‘Farrell had no criminal record,’ said Cooper again.

  ‘Exactly. We needed enough evidence against him to make an arrest so we could get the swabs and do a comparison.’

  ‘I see.’

  And then there was another.

  ‘Victoria Jenkins. Also aged twenty, a media student on the Clifton campus.’

  ‘Apart from being students, did they have anything in common?’

  ‘Well, they weren’t the most striking of girls,’ said Fry coolly. ‘Everyone who knew them agrees on that, except their mothers. They also weren’t from the most affluent backgrounds. Trent takes a very diverse range of students. These girls were from poor working-class families. There was no money coming in from Mummy and Daddy to help them through their university courses. Nottingham is a big student city, but it can be an expensive place to live.’

  ‘Were they doing part-time jobs to help pay their way?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘Yes, they were.’

  He looked up at Fry, trying to interpret her expression.

  ‘Are you suggesting they were prostitutes?’ he said.

  ‘We call them sex workers in the city,’ said Fry. ‘I don’t know what you call them here.’

  ‘I’m not sure we have any in Edendale.’

  ‘Are you kidding me?’

  ‘Well, they’re not mentioned in the visitor guides,’ said Cooper.

  Fry scowled. ‘We’re not saying that anyway,’ she said. ‘Not publicly. And certainly not to the families. It would be difficult and time-consuming to prove. And it wouldn’t be considered appropriate to start destroying the reputation of the victims.’

  ‘But …?’

  ‘Well, if they were turning a few tricks, it was very much on a part-time basis. I’d call them amateurs, except they were doing it for the money.’

  ‘So there would be no pimp, no madam, no established brothel or massage parlour they were working from?’

  Fry shook her head. ‘No organisation at all. Strictly casual. Pick-ups in bars or on a street corner.’

  ‘I bet the professional working girls knew all about them, though.’

  ‘Well, they don’t like competition. Who does?’

  ‘So perhaps they weren’t too upset when these three were killed.’

  ‘They certainly haven’t been providing us with information. We might have concluded the inquiry a lot sooner if they had. The feeling was they were glad to see the part-timers go. On an “it could have been me” basis.’

  ‘That’s a shame.’

  ‘We pieced the evidence together bit by bit over a prolonged period,’ said Fry. ‘Hundreds of interviews, thousands of hours of CCTV footage and endless PNC checks on car registrations.’

  ‘You identified Farrell’s blue BMW?’

  ‘No, he was too cunning for that. He changed his car between attacks. First he had an old
Mercedes B Class, then a Peugeot 508 and a Škoda Octavia, before he switched to the BMW. When we studied the cameras from the streets near the incidents, we never saw the same vehicle twice, no matter how much footage we looked at.’

  ‘Did you do anything else?’

  ‘The murders meant increased patrols from the local cops. High-visibility policing on the streets, but also regular undercover operations by the vice squad. They picked up a lot of men for soliciting, recorded a lot of car number-plates, warned a lot of girls who were out touting for business. You can imagine how popular that was with the sex industry. It was disastrous for their business.’

  ‘Yes, I can.’

  ‘So there are plenty of people in Nottingham who would have been glad to arrange Roger Farrell’s death. Some of them wouldn’t even need paying. They would have done it for the pleasure.’

  ‘Three girls, a year apart,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Yes. So things were just getting back to normal when the next one happened. Assaults aren’t unusual. There are plenty of arguments over money. Sometimes a customer gets robbed and goes back for revenge. Occasionally the girls get into fights with each other over territory. These incidents were different. They were cold and calculated.’

  ‘Planned?’

  ‘Undoubtedly. One of our difficulties was that we are fairly certain Roger Farrell had an accomplice or an associate. Some of the women report seeing two men together. And the other man is captured on CCTV, we believe.’

  ‘Have you identified him?’

  Fry hesitated. Then he knew she wasn’t telling him everything. This had all just been for show. But why?

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘We haven’t identified him. Not definitely. There are some possibilities we have in mind.’

  ‘Can I see the CCTV?’

  ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea.’

  ‘So far and no further, then.’

  ‘It’s a sensitive operation. We’ve already had one disaster with the loss of Farrell.’

  ‘And I’m just too much of a risk.’

  She didn’t answer that. Cooper sat back. He supposed he would just have to be grateful for what he got.

  ‘Trust me,’ said Fry.

  That was too much for Cooper. One step too far.

  ‘Trust?’ he said. ‘I’m surprised you don’t choke on the word.’

  Fry stood up suddenly. ‘Come with me. I want to show you something. I want to show you where we’ve been making our enquiries. It’s a long way from your rural backwater in Edendale. Only a forty-mile drive. But a world away.’

  Diane Fry slowed down as she turned her car into Forest Road. Evening was coming on, but it would stay light for a while yet. The real business wouldn’t get under way until the sun began to set.

  A few street girls operated in the area between Mapperley Park and Radford, despite repeated crack-downs by Nottinghamshire’s vice squad. It was largely residential and many independent prostitutes worked safely from the flats, all charging their clients a standard rate. On the street, the girls were cheaper and more dangerous. For years, many of them had been teenagers trying to raise cash for drugs, angering the established prostitutes by invading their patch and undercutting prices.

  From her own experience, Fry had seen girls going through the care system and straight on to the street. They got hooked on cocaine in their teens and discovered that prostitution was the only way to earn enough money to feed their habit when state benefits weren’t available.

  You still saw a few of them at night. The older women were identifiable by their mini-skirts, leather trousers, thigh-length boots and wigs. But the younger ones could be any teenager in their jeans and track shoes. The way they were hanging around gave them away. Most of the street girls came out after dark. They would take a position near a convenient side road or alley, or in the recreation ground. Any woman who stood around long enough in the Forest Road area would be asked how much she charged by a man in a passing car.

  More recently, some Eastern European girls had been walking the streets off Radford Road. Parts of the district were upmarket middle-class suburbs, streets of solid Victorian town houses and open parkland. Understandably, residents were exasperated with the area’s continuing reputation as the red light district of the city.

  Ten years ago, there had been more than three hundred girls known to the Kerb Crawling Taskforce, but the figure had been reduced dramatically. Efforts to eradicate prostitution from the streets of Nottingham had included drop-in centres and outreach programmes, as well as rehabilitation courses for men caught buying sex who weren’t charged but given a police caution to cut reoffending.

  Of course, everyone knew prostitution hadn’t disappeared. It had just moved off the street. Prostitutes worked from a crack house instead of roaming the streets around Forest Road. They had resorted to using mobile phones and computers to get custom.

  There were definitely risks for men like Roger Farrell. Street prostitution was illegal and so was kerb crawling. If a police operation didn’t catch you, the girls were likely to rob you or leave you with a disease.

  ‘So you think Farrell is right at the centre of your inquiry,’ said Cooper, gazing out at the passing streets.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And our inquiry too?’

  ‘It would help, wouldn’t it? Since Farrell is dead.’

  Fry could see Cooper didn’t like that answer. He probably thought she was being too flippant. He always worried so much about everyone.

  ‘These suicides of yours,’ she said. ‘Aren’t they just self-created victims?’

  ‘You’ve never had much sympathy for victims, have you?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Not for some of them.’

  It was true and she didn’t feel guilty about it. Fry thought of all the times she’d observed the behaviour of victims and felt a twinge of contempt at their weakness. Often she’d wanted to tell them that it wasn’t so bad as all that, that they should have a bit of back-bone and pull themselves together.

  She’d seen plenty of genuine victims, individuals whose lives had been destroyed by some horrible crime. But so many people were just self-obsessed narcissists who deliberately over-dramatised their problems because they longed to be the centre of attention. They were the same people who dialled 999 because they’d broken a fingernail or to complain their kebab was cold.

  ‘Where are we going now?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘This is one of our few witnesses. At least, one of the few who have been willing to talk to us about what happened. I’ve been given permission to let you talk to her.’

  ‘Oh, thanks.’

  ‘You might not thank me afterwards.’

  The girl was thin and her eyes were sunk in shadows as dark as bruises. Of course, girl was the wrong word for her. She was a woman, probably well into her thirties, though she looked and dressed like someone much younger, with the thin limbs of a teenager in tight jeans and a ripped T-shirt that continually slipped off one shoulder.

  Cooper guessed that if he met her at night he wouldn’t recognise her. He was seeing behind the façade. It was a privilege of a kind, he supposed.

  ‘Of course I’ll never forget him,’ she said. ‘I didn’t like the look of him from the word go. But you can’t be too fussy when you need the money.’

  Cooper opened his mouth to ask what she needed the money for, but Fry gave him a sharp look and he changed his mind.

  ‘Can you describe him for us?’ he asked instead. ‘What didn’t you like about him in particular?’

  ‘He had those spider eyes,’ she said.

  ‘He had what?’

  ‘Spider eyes. Do you know what I mean?’

  She stared at him, then turned away and looked at Fry, as if suddenly realising that Cooper was a man and wouldn’t understand.

  ‘They crawled all over your body,’ she said. ‘It made my flesh creep where they touched me.’

  Fry just nodded. ‘And what did he say to you?’

  �
��When I turned him down, he got really angry. He said he’d kill me. He reached out to try and grab me. So I started running and screamed. He panicked then. He got back in his car and drove off. Went hell for leather up towards Alfreton Road.’

  From time to time, Cooper thought she looked even younger – almost like a child, as she hugged her knees for comfort at the memories.

  ‘And the other one,’ said Fry. ‘Tell us about the other man.’

  She looked really frightened then.

  ‘You mean the one who came after him,’ she said. ‘I don’t know which was worse.’

  ‘So who was she talking about?’ asked Cooper when they were back in Fry’s car. ‘The other man?’

  ‘There are two other men who came into our enquiries,’ said Fry as she started the car. ‘Simon Hull and Anwar Sharif. The plan was to arrest Roger Farrell and question him to establish what his relationship was with the other two. Now we can’t do that.’

  ‘Were they his friends or accomplices?’

  ‘Personally, I don’t think so. I believe they knew what he was doing, though.’

  ‘Might they have being trying to stop him?’

  ‘By what means? Persuasion, intimidation? We don’t know.’

  ‘Blackmail?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Ah, now,’ said Fry, ‘you might be talking some sense.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We’ve been analysing Roger Farrell’s bank accounts. There was some unusual activity during the past year. A series of large cash withdrawals at monthly intervals.’

  ‘Cash? So you can’t trace who it went to.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Fry drove around for a while, then parked in front of a row of shops. Cooper had no idea where he was now. Many of the streets looked indistinguishable. He wasn’t sure how he would choose one from the next. This city seemed to go on for ever and there was no indication when you’d passed from one area into another. He supposed people here must know whether they lived in Forest Fields or Hyson Green, but he couldn’t tell.

  Fry pointed out a bulky figure in a hooded jacket.

  ‘There. That’s Simon Hull,’ she said.

  ‘Does he live in this area?’