Secrets of Death Read online

  ‘Sis – is this an interrogation or can we come in?’

  As she led the way into the apartment, Diane flinched at her sister’s use of ‘we’. People did it all the time when they’d just got married or formed a long-term relationship. But Angie didn’t mean that. She meant herself and the baby. They were a duo now, a permanent pair. Angie and the child …

  ‘So how is … Zack?’

  Diane was impressed by her own ability in remembering the new baby’s name. She’d tried quite hard to forget it. Zack Fry sounded too much like today’s special from a Chinese takeaway.

  ‘Oh, he’s grand,’ said Angie.

  ‘Grand,’ repeated Diane, her brain empty of all the other words she ought to use about a baby. Beautiful, bonny, gorgeous, cute? They all stuck in her throat the second they came into her head. Silently, she reminded herself of an important rule. Must say him, not it.

  Angie walked into the centre of the sitting room, the weight of the sling making her look slow and ungainly. She looked around critically. Diane was glad she’d managed to clear away some of the debris at least.

  ‘What a beautiful apartment,’ said Angie. ‘You’re so lucky. We’d love to have somewhere like this to live. Wouldn’t we, Zack?’

  Zack didn’t answer, which was a relief. In fact, he hadn’t moved since she opened the door. He was asleep presumably. His head was leaning against his mother’s body, the brim of the sun hat twitching occasionally, a foot in a tiny woollen sock protruding from the sling.

  Looking at her sister, Diane was momentarily overwhelmed with horror at how unalike they’d become, how little they had in common now. They used to be so close. As a teenager, she’d hero-worshipped her older sister, had been devastated when they were separated. Finding her again had been an obsession that had ruled her life for a while. She used to see an older version of herself when she looked at Angie. Now she saw a slow-moving middle-aged woman – which she herself would never be. She saw a woman who had only one topic of conversation and who talked to an unconscious creature attached to her chest. Diane felt as though she were in a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. An alien had taken possession of her sister’s body.

  ‘So – are you visiting Nottingham for some reason? A day out shopping?’ she said.

  Privately, she suspected the reason for the trip up from Birmingham was probably to do with some business of the driver of the silver-grey Renault, the mysterious man friend whom she hadn’t been introduced to yet. And there was probably a good reason for that. Angie’s boyfriends had always had reasons to avoid meeting police detectives. What was this one’s name again? Craig something?

  ‘Actually, we were thinking of having a break for a few days.’ Angie smiled. ‘Don’t worry – we’ve brought everything we need.’

  Diane was baffled for a moment.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  Angie smiled again. ‘Well, you do have two bedrooms in this beautiful new apartment, don’t you, Sis?’

  Horrified, Diane opened her mouth, but found nothing came out. Like beautiful, bonny, gorgeous and cute, the words stuck in her throat.

  Then the bundle strapped to her sister’s chest stirred and the head inside the hat lifted. A wrinkled face turned to look at her. After a second, the baby’s eyes seemed to focus. His face burst into a smile and a tiny hand reached out towards her.

  For a long, long time, Diane Fry was still without words.

  4

  Irritably, Ben Cooper swatted at something that landed on his face. Flies were swarming round the car. When he gazed across the car park, it looked as though every fly in North Derbyshire was zooming in on Heeley Bank. Their instincts were amazing. Did the first to arrive put up a sign: ‘Fresh meat here’?

  And the flies had judged it right. The body in the blue BMW was already starting to look swollen. The smell inside the car was definitely over-ripe.

  That was the trouble with summer. A corpse would normally be cold by now. But this one had been sitting in a car in full sun since daylight. As the interior heated up, so had the body. On a warm day in an open space, the interior temperature of a car could rise by five degrees Celsius in five minutes, ten degrees in ten minutes. The heat could reach a lethal level within half an hour, a much shorter time than many people thought.

  At Heeley Bank, the ambient temperature outside was about twenty-two degrees by now. Inside the BMW, it had reached an uncomfortable thirty-eight. That sort of temperature in an enclosed space was enough to kill a child or a dog. And it was enough to make a dead body begin to bloat.

  Winter was so much better for this kind of thing. Normally, the body began to cool down immediately after the heart stopped beating. It was the stage they called algor mortis, the death chill. Body heat fell about one degree Celsius each hour until it reached the temperature of the surrounding environment. On a cold day, you stood a chance of gleaning information about the time of death from the difference between the two, when you took the various factors into account. Body fat and layers of clothing were good insulators – they retained heat that would otherwise be lost as the blood stopped flowing and the muscles relaxed. Children and the elderly lost body heat faster than adults. A victim who had been in ill health would also lose heat more rapidly.

  Yet here it was all irrelevant. The nature of the victim’s death had destroyed his first line of forensic examination.

  ‘Mr Roger Farrell, aged forty-five, with an address in Nottingham,’ said Carol Villiers. ‘The BMW is registered to him and his driving licence is in his wallet, along with credit cards, a Tesco Clubcard and a National Trust membership card. Not much cash, but I don’t suppose he needed it today.’

  Cooper pointed at the windscreen, where a parking ticket was stuck to the glass.

  ‘Just enough for the parking charge.’

  Carol Villiers had always been an outdoor girl and the first bit of sun brought out the colour in her face. Sometimes Cooper was struck by how pale her eyes were. Sandy, as if bleached in a desert climate. They’d gone to school together, studied for their A-levels at High Peak College at the same time, got a bit drunk with a group of mates in a local pub when they received their results. She had been a good friend whom he’d been sorry to say goodbye to when she’d left to sign up with the RAF Police. She’d be the first to say that she’d changed now. She was much tougher, more confident. Experience had shaped her in those years she’d been away.

  Though he’d known her for such a long time, there were subjects Carol Villiers never talked to him about. One was her husband, Glen, who had been killed in Helmand Province on a tour of duty in Afghanistan.

  The medical examiner was straightening up from a crouching position, half in and half out of the car. His scene suit rustled and Cooper could see he was sweating underneath it. Trickles of perspiration ran from his temples into the neck of the suit. He’d been in the job for a long time and was probably unfit. He would never make it as a police officer, though he was a person they often had to reply on.

  ‘There isn’t a hope of getting a time of death,’ he said, confirming Cooper’s suspicion. ‘Not from the body temperature, anyway. Rigor might tell us something. In my opinion, you’d be better looking for witnesses or other circumstantial evidence to establish how long he’s been dead.’

  Cooper nodded. Oh, great. Another one who was reluctant to commit himself. But it was understandable in this case.

  He looked around the car park and scanned the roof line of the information centre, searching for cameras.

  ‘CCTV?’ he said.

  Villiers shook her head. ‘Nothing. It’s been discussed because the woods here are supposed to be a well-known dogging site. But there’s no money in the budget.’

  ‘No big surprise there.’

  It was one of the things you got used to in a rural area, outside the centre of town. No coverage from CCTV cameras.

  ‘So who found the body?’ he asked.

  ‘One of the staff at the information centre,’ sa
id Villiers. ‘Her name is Marnie Letts. She’s still a bit upset, I’m afraid. The experience has knocked her sideways.’

  ‘We’ll treat her gently.’

  It was standard practice for staff at sites like Heeley Bank to alert the police in these circumstances, though usually it was just a stolen vehicle, abandoned by joy-riders in a quiet spot. With luck, the car would be relatively undamaged and could be returned to its owner. Occasionally, a vehicle was found burned out and stood ruining the view until the insurance company arranged its removal.

  Not this one, though. The BMW was different.

  Villiers read from her notes. ‘When Miss Letts turned up for work this morning, the blue BMW was still in the car park from yesterday. She wiped the moisture off the window and said she could see the shape of a man slumped in the driver’s seat. His face was turned away from her and his head had slipped sideways at an unnatural angle. When she made the emergency call, she kept saying, “There’s something wrong with his head. Something very wrong.”’

  ‘Let’s talk to her, then.’

  The information centre had been closed for the time being. A stream of visitors’ cars were being turned away. Through the trees, Cooper could see vehicles creeping along the road, their occupants craning their necks to see what was going on in the car park. Rumours would be going around soon enough.

  Heeley Bank was a popular visitor location, just a few miles outside Edendale. It had a large car park, a toilet block and picnic area. Below the centre, marked trails wound their way through the woods down to a loop of the River Eden, where it ran fast and noisily through a steep limestone gorge, bubbling over rocks and weirs.

  Above the road, the hillside rose and rose through banks of heather and gorse to a gritstone moor topped by the outlines of weather-worn tors. Cooper had seen those tors up close. There were rock formations called the Old Man, the Witches, the Howling Dog. They created a dark and ominous landscape.

  ‘Yes, the car was there last night when I left,’ said Marnie Letts. ‘The blue BMW. I do remember it. Most makes of car I don’t recognise, but I know a BMW when I see one.’

  She was a slight woman in her late twenties, with dark hair cut into a short bob. She was wearing a baggy mauve T-shirt with a logo on the chest. Cooper supposed it was a kind of staff uniform. It didn’t do her any favours. But then it probably wouldn’t have suited anyone.

  ‘Did you take any notice of the driver?’ he asked.

  ‘None at all. I don’t think I really saw him.’

  Cooper nodded. It was probable that the driver hadn’t wanted anyone to notice him. If someone had, if just one person had seen him properly and realised something was wrong, the outcome for him might have been different.

  ‘What other vehicles were parked near the BMW last night, Miss Letts?’ he asked. ‘Can you remember that?’

  ‘I couldn’t really say. Well, there was a family in a big people-carrier sort of thing. A couple with bikes on the back of their car.’

  ‘Where were they in relation to the BMW?’

  Marnie waved vaguely around the car park. She wasn’t as distressed as he’d expected. Perhaps she’d got all the screaming and panicking out of her system. Some people were like that. They went off like fire-works, then calmed down very quickly. She was still slightly distracted, as if she couldn’t quite focus on what had happened. He could understand that. It was a bit unreal for anyone.

  ‘The people-carrier was near the centre,’ she said. ‘The cyclists were parked over by the toilets. They had a red car, a four-wheel drive, I think. They weren’t close enough to see the driver of the BMW.’

  ‘Can you be sure of that?’

  She shrugged. ‘No, I suppose not. You’d have to ask them.’

  ‘Did you recognise any of these people? Were they familiar faces?’

  ‘Are you kidding? They were just visitors. We get thousands of them in the summer. I only took account of them at all because they were the last here when we closed. When the place is full, I don’t notice anybody in particular.’

  ‘Yes, I understand,’ said Cooper.

  A memory passed across her face suddenly. ‘Oh, and there was a black Land Rover,’ she said.

  ‘Last night. Where was that parked?’

  ‘Under the big tree in the shade,’ said Marnie. ‘People who come here regularly in the summer always try to claim that spot if it’s sunny, so their car isn’t too warm inside when they get back from a walk. It’s in sun in the morning, but shade in the afternoon.’

  ‘Did you see who was in the Land Rover?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. I only noticed it because it looked more like a farmer’s vehicle. It’s unusual to get them in here among the visitors’ cars.’

  ‘She held up pretty well,’ said Cooper when they allowed Marnie to leave. ‘She would make a good witness.’

  ‘If she’d actually seen anything,’ said Villiers.

  ‘She may have seen more than she remembers, I think.’

  ‘There’s no way we’re going to be able to trace any of the people in those cars. Unless we put appeals out – local newspapers, social media? The trouble is, they could have been from absolutely anywhere.’

  Wayne Abbott, E Division’s crime scene manager, had taken the place of the forensic medical examiner and was writing notes on a clipboard. Abbott was a big man with a shaved head, which was revealed when he tossed back the hood of his scene suit. He looked up as Cooper and Villiers approached.

  ‘Gas,’ he said. He sounded oddly smug, as if he’d predicted it all along and was gratified to be proved right.

  ‘Gas?’ repeated Cooper.

  ‘It’s a popular choice.’

  Villiers covered her face with a gloved hand as she leaned in to look at the body. She must have thought Abbott was referring to the decomposition of the body.

  ‘What is that thing over his head?’ she said.

  ‘It’s for the gas. They call it an exit bag. It’s used for painless suffocation.’

  ‘An exit bag? Who uses a nickname for a suffocation device?’

  ‘You’d be surprised.’

  Then Villiers sniffed. ‘But you said gas?’

  ‘Helium. It doesn’t have any smell. Or taste for that matter.’

  ‘I was thinking carbon monoxide.’

  ‘Exhaust fumes? Yes, it used to be the traditional method, especially among depressed middle-aged men. A pipe from the exhaust into your car and the engine left running. Carbon monoxide is extremely toxic in high enough concentrations.’

  Cooper remembered deaths from the inhalation of exhaust fumes. He’d come across one as a young PC and been struck by how peaceful the dead person looked. And he’d learned a strange and disturbing fact about the human body. Given a choice between carbon monoxide and oxygen, the haemoglobin in your blood would always choose carbon monoxide first and ignore the life-giving oxygen. It seemed a suicidal impulse had been built into the bloodstream of every human being.

  ‘The design of modern cars has spoiled all that business,’ Abbott was saying cheerfully. ‘Tighter emission controls, you see. That means modern engines produce too little carbon monoxide for the purpose. It’s good for the environment – but bad news for the would-be suicide. Of course, most of them don’t research their methods well enough in advance to realise they need to use an old car.’

  ‘So how does this work?’

  ‘An exit bag? It’s pretty simple,’ said Abbott. ‘You just have a plastic bag with a drawstring or some other type of closure. All you have to do is fill it with an inert gas like nitrogen or helium. You see, the gas itself doesn’t kill you. Its purpose is to cause painless unconsciousness before suffocation occurs. The victim actually dies as a result of the high levels of carbon dioxide breathed into the bag. It can be a bit dodgy, if you don’t do it right. If you change your mind at the last minute, for example, there’s a good chance you’ll end up alive but with serious brain damage.’

  Two orange gas canisters stood
in the footwell of the car, with tubing snaking up and across the body of the driver. Cooper could see that several inches of plastic tube protruded all the way into the bag, sticking up alongside the dead man’s head like a snorkel tube.

  Helium. The gas of fun and laughter. Party balloons and people speaking in funny, high-pitched voices. The depths of irony around suicide were limitless.

  ‘So why choose this method?’ asked Villiers.

  ‘It’s supposed to be the quickest way of killing yourself and the least painful, if it’s done right,’ said Abbott. ‘The right-to-die groups recommend it, I understand.’

  ‘I can see it would be better than drowning or hanging, or throwing yourself in front of a train.’

  ‘Some of those cases can get very messy,’ agreed Abbott. ‘With this method, the helium prevents panic and the sense of suffocation, the alarm response usually caused by oxygen deprivation. Again, good planning is crucial.’

  ‘Why so? It sounds straightforward enough.’

  ‘There was a report some time ago about a world shortage of helium. As a result, some suppliers have been mixing air into their party balloon tanks. Even a level of twenty per cent air makes a tank unsuitable for use with a suicide bag. With that amount of oxygen, you’d know exactly what was happening to you. The alarm response would kick in and you’d start to panic.’

  There was no doubt that Mr Farrell had got it exactly right. His chosen method had worked perfectly. He was as dead as a doornail and had been for some hours.

  ‘It’s an interesting method actually,’ said Abbott. ‘It can make the cause of death difficult to establish if the bag and the gas canisters are taken away before anyone reports the death.’ He looked at Cooper. ‘People do that to hide the fact it’s a suicide, you know. I mean, members of the family. It’s the insurance pay-outs, I suppose.’

  ‘Or the shame,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Shame? About what?’

  ‘It could be all kinds of things.’

  Abbott looked at him with a confused frown. Cooper smiled. There probably weren’t many things Wayne Abbott would be ashamed of. Not enough to kill himself over anyway. But every individual was different. Roger Farrell might have had some unbearable shame in his life that had driven him to this final act.