Secrets of Death Page 24

  Cooper turned and looked at Gavin Murfin. He remembered saying how little Gavin looked like a copper. He hadn’t done so for a few years. And he wasn’t a copper at all now. He was civilian support.

  Murfin met his eye and seemed to read what he was thinking.

  ‘Is that within your remit, Gavin?’ said Cooper. ‘Is it in your job description from HR?’

  ‘No direct contact with a suspect?’ said Murfin.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘And I have no power of arrest, remember.’

  ‘You won’t need it. He’s not a suspect. I don’t expect you’ll be carrying handcuffs anyway.’

  ‘I haven’t been issued with any.’

  ‘There you go, then. So …?’

  Murfin looked out of the window, probably to check it wasn’t raining.

  ‘Do I get a personal radio?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘Good man.’

  Cooper watched Murfin leave, still not quite able to believe that Gavin was working here again. He turned back to Villiers.

  ‘And what happened to Roger Farrell’s daughter, Ella Webster? Wasn’t she supposed to be flying in from Spain?’

  ‘Yes, you’re right.’

  ‘She hasn’t exactly been eager to talk to us, then.’

  ‘I’ll chase her up.’

  Cooper tapped his foot impatiently while Villiers was on the phone. It was his own fault. This was something he’d overlooked and should have kept track of. There were only so many priorities he could balance at once.

  He turned expectantly as Villiers put the phone down.

  ‘I spoke to Mr Farrell’s sister, Fay Laws. She says her niece arrived from Spain and has already been talking to the police.’

  ‘What? Which station?’

  ‘Nottingham,’ said Villiers. ‘St Ann’s.’

  ‘That’s the Major Crime Unit. Damn.’

  Fry had finished her call and had her head down checking text messages. She might not have noticed what was going on or she might be pretending not to hear.

  ‘Diane,’ called Cooper across the room. ‘Mrs Webster.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Ella Webster. Roger Farrell’s daughter. The one who’s been living in Spain.’

  ‘Oh, she arrived,’ said Fry casually.

  ‘I know. And the Major Crime Unit seem to have laid claim to her. You’ve intercepted her, when we wanted to talk to her.’

  ‘It’s all right. You can have her when we’ve finished with her. She isn’t being very helpful anyway.’

  ‘Oh, and I suppose she’s going to be thrilled to see us after you and your colleagues have muddied the waters.’

  ‘Don’t worry. You’ll be a bit of light relief.’

  Cooper sighed. ‘So you’ve not been getting anything out of her?’

  Fry stood and strolled slowly across the CID room, with Cooper and Villiers watching her. It was a long time since Cooper had seen her so deliberately marking out this room as her own territory. She must do it unconsciously.

  He glanced at Villiers out of the corner of his eye and saw a shocking expression on her face, a hostility he had never noticed before. A muscle was working in her jaw and her eyes were fixed on Fry. It was like watching one predator observe the approach of a rival in some blood-and-guts wildlife programme.

  ‘We’ve been getting nothing useful,’ said Fry. ‘She denies knowing anything about her father’s activities. But then, she hasn’t seen him for the past five years, has hardly even spoken to him on the phone. I’d be surprised if they exchanged Christmas cards. Yet she can’t explain exactly why they were estranged. Or she won’t explain, more likely. They “drifted apart”, she says.’

  ‘And you don’t believe that?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘Frankly, no. Spain seems a long way to drift.’

  Cooper thought of Roger Farrell’s sister who only lived across the other side of Nottingham in West Bridgford. She possessed a key to her brother’s house, yet never seemed to have visited. That wasn’t drifting apart. It was staying in the same place, but building an imaginary wall between you.

  Perhaps, in a way, it was like those families who went to great lengths to conceal the fact that a husband or father had taken his own life. Suicide was shameful and those left behind felt the guilt of it. There were also families who found themselves forced into a state of denial when they suspected criminal activity by one of their members. Some closed ranks and rallied in support, and might even become implicated. Others distanced themselves as far as possible, either physically or psychologically.

  Farrell’s family seemed to have fallen into the latter category. It would have made him even more isolated, more focused on his night-time activities, the obsession that must have developed in his long, lonely hours.

  Even convicted prisoners serving long jail sentences were encouraged to have visits from family members. Keeping in touch meant they were more likely to rehabilitate successfully when they were released and fit back into a normal life. No one took that trouble for solitary people living apparently ordinary lives in society. It was a case of the classic loner who kept himself to himself. They lived on the edge of society, thinking their own thoughts and making their own plans.

  ‘Did you ask her about her father’s suicide?’ said Cooper.

  ‘She says he’d never mentioned feeling suicidal.’

  ‘Do you think she ever actually talked to him about how he was feeling?’

  ‘No.’

  Cooper was sure Fry was right. Despite what else he might have done, Roger Farrell had been easy prey for a manipulative sociopath, an ideal victim, mentally well prepared to be led in an inevitable direction. Farrell might have had some deep-seated guilt gnawing at him or a paranoid fear of being caught. Either could have been used against him, or both.

  But what if there was someone else he was afraid of too? Had it all been camouflage? Had someone been encouraging people to take their own lives just to disguise a murder among an epidemic of suicides?

  ‘What about Hull and Sharif?’ said Cooper. ‘Did Farrell’s daughter know them?’

  ‘Never heard their names before.’

  He could hear the scepticism in Fry’s voice. She hadn’t believed a word that Ella Webster said. Mrs Webster had probably seen that plainly enough in her face, since Fry wasn’t good at hiding her opinions of people. Would that make Mrs Webster more likely to talk to E Division CID, or less?

  ‘We need to speak to her in any case,’ said Cooper.

  Fry smiled. ‘No worries. I’ve already been in touch with my office. Jamie Callaghan will bring her back in to St Ann’s later.’

  Cooper bit his lip. So Fry had been listening to everything. She was ahead of him all the time.

  The CID room looked better without the presence of Diane Fry. She’d taken the opportunity to make her exit without waiting to hear what he thought of Ella Webster. Carol Villiers was there, covering for him as always.

  ‘Bad news, Ben.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘We’ve just heard from Nottingham. Roger Farrell’s house has been broken into. It sounds like they’ve made a mess of the place.’

  ‘Damn. And I bet you and I were the last people to visit the house.’

  ‘Along with Mr Farrell’s sister, yes.’

  Villiers looked at him and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I should head straight there,’ he said.

  26

  At Forest Fields, a crime scene examiner handed Cooper a white overall in a plastic bag and a pair of elasticated overshoes. Inside the house, video was being shot, photographs taken, surfaces dusted for fingerprints.

  He could see straight away that this was being treated as more than just an ordinary house break-in. Volume crime like burglary must be a regular occurrence in the city. A SOCO might call a day or two after the event for prints and the duty PC would issue a crime number with a shrug of the shoulders about the possibility of reco
vering stolen items. The resources deployed here looked as though someone had escalated the incident to a serious crime.

  In the sitting room, a vase lay shattered on the floor. He could see that a pane in the French windows had been knocked out to reach the handle. Papers were strewn across the floor, a rug was rucked up at one corner. A struggle? Or just a hasty burglar?

  ‘What has been taken?’

  ‘We’re not sure, until the key holder arrives.’

  ‘Mrs Fay Laws?’

  ‘That’s her.’

  ‘I doubt she’ll have any idea,’ said Cooper.

  He moved into the dining area and looked at the table. It was lucky he’d removed the laptop and memory sticks. He couldn’t have known this would happen, but in retrospect his priorities had been right.

  Cooper saw that the folder was still on the table, but he had a feeling it had been moved. He could see that the area had already been dusted for prints so he flipped open the folder.

  ‘I did a job the other day,’ the crime scene examiner was saying. ‘It was a burglary at a big house in The Park. Do you know the area?’

  ‘Yes, vaguely.’

  He knew that The Park was a very upmarket private estate near the centre of the city, built on the former deer park of Nottingham Castle. It still had gas lighting and restricted access for cars. Not the kind of place he would be invited to visit.

  ‘The homeowners said the burglars had taken thousands of pounds in cash. It’s surprising how much people leave lying around, isn’t it? So I asked them, how many thousands of pounds? And they didn’t know exactly. So it just goes to show.’

  He didn’t specify what it showed. But Cooper could guess. It was the sort of comment Luke Irvine would have made. Luke had strong views on the uneven distribution of wealth, the divide between what he called the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. And, on his detective constable’s pay, he regarded himself as one of the ‘have nots’. He was probably right.

  Here at Forest Fields, the perpetrator had worn gloves, no doubt about it. There were no prints anywhere, according to the frustrated crime scene examiner.

  Through a window, Cooper could see Diane Fry watching officers in scene suits conducting a fingertip search in the alley. One of them reached the edge of the search area at a low wall and stood up, arching his back to relieve the pain from crouching for so long. Cooper saw him stop, lean over the wall and reach into the garden of the neighbouring property. Then he stopped and raised a hand to get the attention of his supervisor.

  ‘What have they found?’ asked Cooper when Fry entered the house.

  ‘A pair of latex gloves. It looks as though our man must have used them to avoid leaving prints, then chucked them in the neighbour’s wheelie bin.’

  ‘They never think these things through, do they?’

  ‘Not too often, thank God. It makes life a bit easier for us.’

  ‘Do we have any idea when it happened?’ said Cooper. ‘It must have been within the last four days.’

  ‘There’s no way of telling. It was reported by the postman, who noticed the damage this morning. But he hadn’t delivered anything to this address for the past week or more, so that doesn’t necessarily prove anything.’

  ‘What was he delivering?’

  ‘Oh, just the usual bundle of junk mail. You can’t escape that even when you’re dead.’

  Cooper remembered the neighbour he’d encountered on his last visit to Forest Fields.

  ‘Has anyone spoken to the people next door?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Fry. ‘It’s standard procedure, even in Nottingham.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They heard nothing, saw nothing, don’t have anything to say about it.’

  Cooper gestured around the sitting room. ‘A smashed window, a broken vase, an empty house being ransacked?’

  ‘The gentleman says he has the TV on very loud because he’s a bit deaf.’

  ‘Deaf, blind and dumb, then.’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  Cooper looked again at the table where Roger Farrell’s laptop had been. The folder didn’t seem quite as full as when he was here last. He tried to recall what had been in it. Household utility bills, that was all. He hadn’t made a closer examination than that. And it still seemed to contain household bills.

  So what had been taken and why? Unless a perpetrator was identified from the latex gloves, he might never know.

  They found him a spare office to use at St Ann’s. Well, it probably wasn’t spare like those standing empty at Edendale. It was just vacant for the time being, as if a DI was on leave and would be back any minute.

  It felt odd to Cooper sitting in someone else’s office, with unfamiliar furniture and a different carpet. And a different view from the window too. The city was out there, a world he didn’t belong to.

  A short while later, Detective Constable Jamie Callaghan arrived with a woman Cooper didn’t recognise. Callaghan spoke to Diane Fry, then came to the office, making a show of knocking on the door before entering.

  ‘This is Mrs Ella Webster,’ she said. ‘Detective Inspector Cooper. DI Cooper has been investigating the circumstances of your father’s suicide.’

  ‘Oh, come in,’ said Cooper. ‘Thank you for taking the time.’

  He’d almost forgotten Ella Webster was coming in, though he’d insisted on seeing her.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ said Callaghan.

  ‘Er, thank you, DC Callaghan.’

  Callaghan smiled as he closed the door. Cooper studied the woman sitting across the desk, looking at him expectantly.

  ‘So, Mrs Webster,’ he said, ‘there are just a few questions I’d like to run through with you.’

  Ella Webster looked nothing like her father or even her aunt, Fay Laws. She had blonde hair and lots of it. Cooper looked closely for dark roots, suspecting it was dyed. She was more tanned than anyone in Derbyshire had a right to be, unless they spent a lot of time on a sunbed. And when she waved her hands around, her fingers glittered with rings. She was wearing a sweater, as if she found it cold.

  As he ran through his questions, Cooper could see that Mrs Webster was bored. She’d been through the whole thing once and had lost interest. She gave him the same replies that Fry had reported. She knew nothing and recognised nobody.

  He did discover that she had two young children back in Spain, aged five and eight. She mentioned them frequently. They were her justification for needing to return soon, her main concern when it came to arranging a funeral and all the ‘fuss’ that went with it.

  Cooper gathered that the precious children would not be attending the funeral. He was shocked to learn that they had never actually met their maternal grandfather.

  Ella Webster shrugged when he asked. ‘We weren’t close. We hadn’t been close for a few years.’

  ‘Three years or so?’ he guessed.

  She tossed back her hair. ‘About that long.’

  ‘Was there any reason for that?’

  Her face fell into a stiff mask and her lips pressed tightly together.

  ‘Nothing in particular,’ she said. ‘We just drifted apart.’

  Cooper thought about the prisoners he’d seen when they were released from a long spell inside. Many of them, too, found their families had drifted away from them. They were often cut off from society completely, left at sea with no anchor. It rarely ended well – for them or for society.

  Simon Hull was in the first interview room with the duty solicitor. He’d already been interviewed once, but a second session often produced results. Suspects became impatient or frustrated. They got tired of the tedium of walking from a cell to an interview room and back again, listening to the same old questions over and over. Sometimes, they would do and say anything to bring it to an end.

  Hull was aged in his mid-forties, with heavy shoulders and large, thickly knuckled hands that he planted firmly on the table when Ben Cooper and Diane Fry entered. Cooper sat to the side and let Fry take the le
ad. It allowed him to study Hull more carefully. He had sandy, almost ginger hair cut in a ragged fringe. A silver stud glinted in one ear. During his time in a cell, he’d already developed that blank, hooded stare familiar from a thousand custody suite images.

  Fry started the digital recording and they introduced themselves. Hull wearily repeated his name, then sat back in his chair as if he’d completed his part of the process. The solicitor glanced at his watch and ostentatiously made a note.

  Fry didn’t start straight away. She’d brought a dauntingly thick file of papers with her, which she placed on the desk with a thump. Most of the reports couldn’t possibly refer to Simon Hull. They were just padding, to give the impression she had far more information than she actually did. She took her time studying it before she looked up, knowing Hull would be watching her with growing unease.

  Then she met his eye and smiled. Cooper knew that smile. He hoped it was making Simon Hull even more uneasy.

  ‘You won’t have met my colleague before,’ said Fry. ‘Detective Inspector Cooper is from Edendale CID in Derbyshire.’

  Hull looked at him then and narrowed his eyes. ‘I don’t have anything to tell you,’ he said. ‘I have no idea what this is about. You’re going to have to let me go really soon.’

  The solicitor nodded and made another note. Apart from the time the interview had started and finished, he could only have been writing down the names and ranks of the interviewers. But it was all for show, all part of the charade, like Fry’s padded file and Hull’s protestations of innocence. If the evidence was there, they all knew there would be charges. If not, Hull was right – he would be walking out of St Ann’s very soon.

  ‘DI Cooper is here because the death of Mr Roger Farrell occurred in his area,’ said Fry. ‘But you knew that – didn’t you, Mr Hull?’

  Hull’s eyes flickered. ‘No comment.’

  ‘But you did know Roger Farrell? Is that right?’

  ‘No comment.’

  Fry drew out a form. ‘This is a statement from your previous employers, Arno Vale Motors. They confirm that you and Mr Farrell were both employed at their premises during the same period. I can give you the dates, if you’d like.’