Secrets of Death (23 page)

‘Are you hoping to stay with EMSOU long-term, Diane?’ he asked. ‘Derbyshire Constabulary could still call you back, couldn’t they?’

‘They could,’ said Fry, ‘I suppose.’

Yes, it was true, but the thought made her blood run cold. Well, a transfer to D Division in the city of Derby might not be too bad. But a recall to E Division CID? That was her worst-case scenario. If that happened, she would have to resign. No question about it.

‘I was already working here in Nottingham,’ said Callaghan. ‘This is home for me.’

‘What – this?’

‘Well, not
this
,’ he said, gesturing out of the window. ‘I mean Beeston. My father was a civilian contractor at the Chetwynd Barracks in Chilwell.’

Simon Hull’s car repair business was located in a unit on an industrial estate, reached from the other side of the old Shipstone’s brewery. Doors stood open into a couple of bays with ramps waiting for customers’ vehicles. The windows on the ground floor were plastered over with signs, the blue triangles for an MoT testing centre surrounded by warnings of CCTV cameras and guard dogs. Hull’s black Jeep Grand Cherokee was
backed up to a padlocked gate. The yard beyond it was protected by security fencing topped by steel spikes. Blinds were pulled down on the first-floor windows of the building, where there must surely be far too much office space for a business this size.

‘There doesn’t seem to be much happening,’ said Callaghan, showing an ability to state the obvious.

‘Isn’t that always the case?’

‘They don’t seem to have any customers. There are no cars on the ramps. Perhaps we’ve come on a quiet day.’

‘Or they’ve got some other work on.’

A shadow moved on the blinds at one of the upstairs windows. A hand appeared, separating the slats, as if someone was peering out. Fry didn’t think they were visible here. There were plenty of vehicles on either side of the street and vans coming and going to the other units.

‘We’ve got a bit of movement,’ said Callaghan.

A mechanic in blue overalls emerged from the shadows of the workshop and stood outside in the sunlight to smoke a cigarette, leaning on a trade waste skip and knocking his stub out in a wall-mounted cigarette bin. A moment later, he was joined by a second man, who was talking on a mobile phone.

‘That’s Hull,’ said Fry.

‘He’s at work anyway. Everything looks normal.’

A recovery truck passed Fry’s car carrying a white Citroën with a badly crumpled wing and a missing bumper. It drew on to the forecourt of the garage and the driver unloaded the Citroën from the bed of the
truck with a winch. Hull and his mechanic gathered round to examine the damage and began to manoeuvre the car into the workshop.

‘Well, that should keep them busy for a while,’ said Callaghan.

Fry looked up at the first-floor windows, wondering what the rooms were used for. They might just be storage space, with shelves full of air filters and boxes of spark plugs. On the other hand, you could keep anything, or anyone, hidden up there. She itched to get a search warrant and give the place a going-over. But that wasn’t going to happen just yet. Procedures had to be followed.

‘Check with the team assigned to Sharif,’ said Fry.

Callaghan called using a direct channel on his personal radio and listened for a moment.

‘Same at their end,’ he said. ‘Anwar Sharif is at work as usual.’

‘So both Hull and Sharif are keeping themselves busy during the day.’

‘It seems they’re a couple of law-abiding, hard-working citizens. Nothing to raise a red flag.’

‘During the day, yes,’ said Fry. ‘It’s what they might have been getting up to in the evenings that I’m interested in.’

Callaghan shook his head, baffled. ‘But what did Roger Farrell mean to them, Diane?’

Fry took one last look at the garage, now busy with work going on around the damaged Citroën.

‘That’s what we need to find out,’ she said.

Jessica
Burgess had spent the morning picking fleas off her cats and popping them one by one between her fingers. There was something very satisfying about the way the insects burst under her fingernail with a tiny spit of blood.

When the police came to the door, she was baffled and couldn’t understand what they were trying to tell her about Gordon.

‘No, he’s at work,’ she kept saying.

She could hear herself saying it and knew from the expressions on the faces of the two police officers that it wasn’t true. She said it again anyway, though it didn’t satisfy them. It was all she could think of to say.

‘No, he’s at work. He’s teaching today. He’s taking extra classes, because they’re short-staffed.’

‘We’re very sorry, Mrs Burgess,’ said the female officer, ‘but we need someone to identify him. Perhaps there’s a relative …?’

She bridled at that. Were they suggesting she wasn’t capable of recognising her own son without help?

‘Where
do you want me to go?’ she said.

‘To the hospital.’

She nodded. Obviously, Gordon was just hurt. They’d got it wrong or she’d misheard.

Without hesitation, she picked up her packet of cigarettes and lighter from the table. ‘Are we going in your car?’

‘Yes, Mrs Burgess.’

She climbed into the back of the police car and smiled to herself as they drove her to the mortuary.

Ben Cooper got the news soon afterwards. ‘Gordon Burgess is dead,’ said Carol Villiers. ‘He never came out of the coma. He was declared DOA when they got him to the hospital.’

Mr Burgess had died from a gunshot wound. He was found clutching a 1930s Enfield No. 2 revolver, a standard sidearm issued to British Army officers during the Second World War and for many years afterwards in conflicts from Korea to Aden. Burgess’s were the only prints on the gun. But where had he obtained it?

‘Next of kin?’ asked Cooper.

‘His mother, Jessica. She’s a bit elderly, Ben.’

‘I understand.’

The Burgesses lived in the Underbank area of Edendale. Steep streets, old houses. Very different from the sprawling modern estates to the north of the town. It felt more intimate, more friendly. More like a proper community.

The sitting room of the house was crowded. Cooper picked out the elderly Mrs Burgess, but he had no
idea who all the other people were. Family members, friends, neighbours? Half the street seemed to be in Mrs Burgess’s house.

‘Please. Have a seat,’ said someone.

‘Thank you.’

Cooper hesitated. An armchair had been left conspicuously vacant. The moment he took a step towards it, he knew whose chair it was. He could sense the tension in the room, hear the sharp intake of breath from one of the family. He could feel their eyes watching him – the hopeless, agonised stares of people who could see a bus about to run them over but were too scared to move or protest. They were all too polite to ask him not to sit in the armchair. But he knew it would be a mistake and might stifle the conversation completely. Throughout his visit, they would be looking at him, but seeing someone else in his place. Seeing a ghost.

He turned and looked at Mrs Burgess. He followed her eyes to a dining chair that looked as though it had been brought into the sitting room to cope with an influx of visitors.

Cooper sat down. First, he expressed his condolences, which produced a series of nods and a few tears on faces already stained by too much crying.

He tried to assess the group. There was a large middle-aged woman in a baggy denim trouser suit and a man wearing a black quilted body warmer, with oversized lips and a piercing through his eyebrow. A very frail-looking younger woman sat bundled up in a coat. Where her hands protruded from her sleeves, they seemed unnaturally long and fragile.

A
young man of about seventeen kept moving restlessly from room to room. His hair was cut very short and his feet were in huge, bright blue trainers. He was talking on his mobile phone, but all Cooper heard him say was, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look.’

Like a lot of teenagers, he seemed to take up more space in the room than was physically necessary. With every movement, he came within inches of bumping into a wall or knocking over an ornament. Cooper was reminded of a large, clumsy dog whose limbs weren’t quite as co-ordinated as they ought to be.

This could be family. But his instinct was telling him they were neighbours, crowding in on the pretext of proving support for the old lady while picking up any information they could glean. A prurient interest was natural, he supposed.

He marshalled his first questions in his mind, but found he didn’t need to ask anything. Mrs Burgess began to talk, with her visitors chipping in comments occasionally. They barely even gave him chance to figure out who was who in the room.

The information came in no logical order. It was just brought out randomly as it occurred to someone. He gathered that Gordon Burgess was a volunteer with the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust and had recently been working on a badger vaccination programme in the Hope Valley, which was a designated ‘edge area’ where bovine TB hadn’t yet taken hold. His mother seemed particularly pleased with this detail, as she repeated it a few minutes later.

Gordon was a native Derbyshire man, born and raised
in the area. At one time, the idea of such a man committing suicide would have been almost inconceivable. Derbyshire hill people were bred to be stoical. The ability to cope and be imperturbable in the face of a crisis was second nature. And Gordon Burgess had always seemed that way, according to his family. His decision to take his own life was a total shock to them. At some point, Gordon had found it much too difficult to maintain the façade.

‘Yes, his father served in the army during the early fifties,’ said Mrs Burgess when Cooper got round to asking about the gun. ‘When he died, he left a box full of mementos. I never asked what was in it. It was a personal thing between them. I just thought they were medals and such.’

‘Do you know where the box is?’

‘It’s in Gordon’s room. At the bottom of the wardrobe.’

Cooper found the box easily. It was a solid metal construction, a bit bigger than a shoe box. A key was in the lock. Inside, there were indeed some service medals, badges, postcards from the Middle East, a shoulder epaulette. And a small, greasy cardboard carton with indecipherable printing, which rattled when he picked it up. Inside were half a dozen bullets.

And there was one other item. A black business card with a string of numbers and letters.
Secrets of Death
.

He closed the box up and locked it before he went back downstairs. Everybody turned and looked at him as he entered the sitting room. They seemed surprised that he was still there or had forgotten who he was. He
had never felt more like an unwelcome intruder, like the title character in
An Inspector Calls
.

‘I’m afraid I’ll have to take this away with me, Mrs Burgess,’ he said.

She nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘I’ll make sure you get everything else back.’

She nodded again. He wasn’t sure she understood what he was saying. Perhaps someone would explain it to her later.

‘I suppose he wouldn’t have felt a thing,’ said Mrs Burgess. ‘That’s what they say, isn’t it?’

‘So I believe,’ said Cooper, realising that she had jumped to the actual moment of Gordon’s death, trying to imagine it for herself.

‘And the dogs were with him,’ she said. ‘Abbey and Pepper. They’re outside in the garden now. They’re devastated. They know that he’s gone. Surely Gordon must have realised how much it would affect them.’

Cooper had a flashback to his interview with Anson Tate, the failed suicide. Tate had brought out all the arguments, much as if he’d been quoting them from books he’d read – or, of course, from a website.

Doesn’t it seem wrong to you that sick animals are put out of their misery by vets, but we aren’t allowed to end our own wretched existences? What is it about a human life that makes it so different, so sacrosanct? We’re just animals too, aren’t we? Why should we be forced to suffer
?

‘Abbey and Pepper?’ he said. ‘I haven’t heard those names used for dogs before.’

‘They’re named after Beatles albums,’ said Mrs Burgess. ‘Gordon was a huge fan.’

‘
Abbey
Road
and
Sergeant Pepper
,’ said Cooper.

Instinctively, he looked around the room for a stereo, or a CD player at least. But he could see nothing. What about a bookshelf? You could tell a lot about a household from the books on the shelf. There were hardly any books either. The shelves held a few ornaments and a couple of crossword puzzle books. And there was a huge plasma TV screen on one wall, which some of the visitors couldn’t resist glancing at, though it was switched off. They said you shouldn’t trust anyone whose TV screen was bigger than their bookshelf.

‘I think you’re right,’ said Mrs Burgess. ‘It was funny, the way he talked to the dogs on the last day. He said he was taking them for a walk, but I knew something was different.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Gordon was saying something to them about learning to let go. He didn’t realise I could hear him.’

‘He was saying this to the dogs?’

‘Yes. He talked to them all the time.’

‘Mrs Burgess, can you remember what he said exactly?’

‘I don’t need to,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘My memory isn’t very good, so Gordon always wrote things down for me. We kept a special notebook that he put things in he wanted me to remember. I don’t know why he wanted me to remember this. But I’m sure it was what he was telling the dogs.’

She handed Cooper a notebook. It was filled with dates and notes, most of them written in clear capital
letters and some of them underlined to emphasise their importance. On the final page was one last thing Gordon Burgess had wanted his mother to remember:

And this is the second secret of death. You have to let go. You have to learn to say goodbye
.

And underneath he’d written, in a more personal handwriting style:

Goodbye, Mum. I love you
.

Of course, Carol Villiers was a dog-lover. Her parents had two retired greyhounds adopted from a rescue centre and Cooper remembered how upset she had been by the death of a pet spaniel when she was about fourteen.