Secrets of Death (26 page)

Cooper knew he ought to share his suspicions with her. They were on the same side, after all. Well, weren’t they? But his instant reaction to her had been the opposite. He was reluctant to share anything with her. The fact was, he didn’t trust her any more.

‘He was an associate of a suspect in a murder inquiry.’

‘Not any more. Not unless your suspect is on the other side too. Perhaps there’s where you should go if you want to interview them.’

Fry’s mouth twitched. ‘Are you telling me to go to hell? Why don’t you just come straight out with it, instead of trying to be clever and saying it in that pathetic roundabout way?’

Cooper
dropped his eyes. Fry’s plain speaking had disarmed him before. She was right to call him out on his words. He needed some way of defusing the situation if they had to work together.

He wondered if he could ask about the baby. Angie must have had it by now. He’d been out of contact with Diane for months and he didn’t know if everything had gone smoothly. It might be intrusive to enquire. You could never tell what Diane’s reaction would be.

‘And are you an aunty now?’ he said finally, trying to make it sound light, but knowing as soon as he got the words out that it was entirely the wrong way of putting it.

‘You can keep your cheap jokes to yourself,’ snapped Fry, ‘if that’s what you were thinking of.’

‘But Angie—’ he began.

‘Yes, she’s a mother. She had a boy.’

She glared at him, daring him to ask the next question. Cooper was practised enough in these situations to know that you usually asked what name the child had been given. Fry’s glower deterred him.

‘And Angie’s well, is she?’ he said instead.

‘Yes. She’s fine.’

And that was said with unmistakable finality. Diane’s sister was out of the conversation.

Cooper wondered what had happened that he’d missed. It could be pretty much anything. He was uncomfortably aware that there was more to Angie Fry’s history than her sister suspected. After she’d met
him at the Hanging Gate once, he’d followed her through the market square to the corner of the high street. He’d watched her as she approached a car parked on the street and got into the passenger side. He’d managed to take the car’s registration number before it drove off, and requested a PNC check. It was a blocked number – the first time he’d come across one in all his years of police service.

Angie had always tried to give the impression she mingled with low-life criminals, that she was herself a drug user. He’d seen plenty of smackheads in Edendale and they were blank-faced and skinny, with discoloured teeth. There were places on the housing estates where kids went to inject themselves every night and the council came round every morning to pick up the needles. Those smackheads had dead eyes, not like Angie’s. Diane had been too blinded to see that.

And criminals and drug addicts didn’t have blocked numbers on their cars. It was a privilege only for investigators in vulnerable positions or police officers involved in sensitive operations. Cooper didn’t think that Diane had ever known that either. He’d felt it in the look that Angie had given him on the few occasions when he’d encountered her since.
She
suspected he knew. But she trusted him not to tell Diane. It had always troubled him and he’d never got to the bottom of it. To be honest, it was one mystery that he hoped never to hear of again.

It was just one of the reasons that talking to Fry
was like treading on eggshells. Cooper was always afraid that he would say the wrong thing.

‘So why were EMSOU looking for Farrell?’ he said.

‘It’s quite simple,’ said Fry. ‘Roger Farrell was a killer.’

Diane
Fry eyed Cooper critically. He was no longer the slightly dishevelled innocent with the scuffed leather jacket and a crooked tie. He had matured, filled out and smartened himself up. They said what didn’t kill you made you stronger. Cooper had come through his recent problems looking as if he could cope with anything.

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.’