The Discourtesy of Death (Father Anselm Novels) (16 page)

Michael came to a halt. He was still terrified of what he might have heard. He looked around at the bare marshland, feeling sweat cool on his brow and itch upon his back. He felt hunted and exposed. There was no escape. The voice hadn’t finished. It was going to say something else. If Michael persisted with his plan to kill Peter Henderson, then that voice was going to deliver its message.

Michael began to run again, stumbling once more in a panic. Danny the shrink had said nothing about this kind of thing. He’d encouraged Michael to talk about the past, because the past was dead and it could no longer harm him. He’d never remotely suggested that the past was very much alive; that
it
might speak to
him
. That it was more dangerous now than ever before.

Anselm was forced to admit that the sensation was unpleasant. He felt like a junior to Mitch the QC.

Having walked silently to the front door of Vincent Cooper’s home – an Edwardian terraced house near Newmarket railway station – Mitch took a key from his pocket, slipped it into the lock and gently pushed open the door. With caution and determination, he walked slowly down the corridor. Anselm, too late to make any protest at the conduct of his leader, shut the door and followed Mitch to the entrance of a back room. Cooper was on his knees by a hastily lit fire, prodding what appeared to be burning letters with a bold finger.

‘I wouldn’t bother, if I were you,’ said Mitch. ‘I’ve already read them.’

Cooper made a jolt and turned.

‘What the—’

‘I made copies,’ interrupted Mitch, his tone all reassurance. ‘Just in case. But carry on, if it makes you feel any better.’

Anselm was quite sure that wasn’t true, but Cooper was utterly convinced. He rose in one perfect movement, his features drained of all emotion save fear.

‘How the hell did you get in here?’

‘I opened the front door.’

‘Get out, now, or I call the police.’

‘Ask for Detective Superintendent Manning. She thinks Jenny died of bowel cancer. Maybe you’d like to tell her why she’s wrong. Why you ran away from a monk and a layman. And why you made a fire.’

Cooper swallowed hard. He looked down at the grate and the soot on his hands.

Mitch entered the room, sauntering towards a bookcase to the right of the chimney breast. Volumes on dance, ballet and theatre gave way to a silver-framed photograph of Cooper and Peter flanking Jennifer, taken long, long ago. Mitch stared at the three of them. Two men and a woman. He had that look of reckless anticipation that preceded every improvisation.

‘Did you sleep with her?’

Cooper’s jaw tightened. ‘No. We were just friends.’

Mitch angled the picture to the light.

‘Why did you leave London?’

Cooper made no reply. Mitch continued.

‘Why come to Sudbury of all places?’

No reply.

‘Why leave town shortly after Jenny died?’

No reply.

‘You were there. At Polstead.’

‘I came and went before the others even arrived.’

Mitch seemed to speak to the photograph: ‘You loved her, didn’t you? Only Peter Henderson got there first. You knew things hadn’t quite worked out and you came to Sudbury hoping to make up for lost time. Only time, once lost, can’t be found again. You ended up killing her, didn’t you?’

Cooper moved sideways with slow strides, his eyes fixed on Mitch. One arm reached out for a chair at a cluttered dining table. Slowly he pulled it back and sat down, nodding at the other side of the mess, the heap of books, the bills and unopened mail.

‘I did nothing,’ he said as Anselm and Mitch took their places. ‘Only what Jenny asked of me. No more and no less.’

The emails started coming a month or so after Jenny had returned home from hospital – sometimes during the day, at others during the night, often more than once in the same hour.

‘She asked me to kill her,’ he said, addressing Anselm. ‘Sent me a key to the back door. She wanted me to come during the night and end it all for her. Said Peter couldn’t change a lightbulb. Said I was the only person she could trust. Only person who knows what it feels like to be a dancer who can’t move her legs, can’t feel them any more … to be attached to limbs that…’ Cooper had drifted into quotation, revered territory. He stopped himself, spitting, contemptuously, ‘You know what she said. You read them.’

Anselm’s eyes moved onto Mitch, and he was quite sure that Mitch hadn’t. But Mitch wasn’t surprised in the least.

‘I stopped replying to the emails and then I got the letters.’ Cooper sat back, arms folded tight. ‘Always the same thing. Please come and kill me. In the middle of the night, when she was asleep.’

Anselm spoke quietly, like Cooper at the outset of his story.

‘Did you visit her?’

‘Yes, course I did. And it was worse … said the same stuff, wanting me to push her under.’

Cooper’s throat was enflamed. A bulging vein snaked along his neck. He seemed to swallow a stone, nodding his head to get it down.

‘Why print off the emails?’ asked Anselm. ‘Why keep the letters?’

Cooper stared back in astonishment. ‘What else could I do? She was saying to me what she couldn’t say to anyone else … not even her father … I couldn’t throw them away. This was
Jenny
, stripped naked. This was all that was left of her … she’d given herself to me. Those letters were all I had.’

‘Then why set light to them today?’ asked Anselm, again very low.

‘Because your friend here thinks that in the end I went and did as I was asked.’

Cooper, too, had spoken softly, his voice charged with pain and injury.

‘Well, what
did
you do?’ Anselm glanced at the black curls of paper in the grate. ‘You told us a few moments ago that you’d only done what Jenny asked.’

After about six months, the flow of emails and letters dried up, explained Cooper. Jenny never mentioned the subject again. She just lay there, not exactly peaceful but abstracted. Peter read her stories. They watched films together. Prior to Jenny’s accident, Peter had pretty much ignored her … not maliciously … he just didn’t see her; didn’t recognise who she was. But afterwards – in the front room of the cottage where the bed had been placed by a window – he was like a nurse and friend, a sad man, devoted to this woman who kept saying sorry. Sorry for holding him down. And then, unexpectedly, an email went ping on Cooper’s inbox. Jenny wanted to see him. She had a special favour to ask of him.

‘As soon as I arrived, Peter left the room,’ said Cooper, one hand easing the tightness in his throat. ‘And then Jenny explained … she was sorry for having asked me to kill her – she was speaking completely calmly, as if suicide was the same thing as changing the sheets or doing the washing up. She said that it wasn’t right to have asked me because it could never have been my job. The law wouldn’t help, she said. And it wouldn’t help Peter either. So they’d made a decision … a big decision, and I wasn’t to tell anybody.’

Cooper glanced at Mitch and Anselm as if wondering who deserved the focus of his attention. He settled on Mitch, the accuser.

‘They’d made an agreement that if things got so bad that Jenny couldn’t take it any more, then Peter would help her to kill herself. Their doctor was a guy they could trust. No one would ever ask any questions.’

‘When was this, in relation to the cancer?’ asked Anselm, removing his glasses to blink at the mess in front of him.

‘A few months before the diagnosis.’

‘How many?’

‘I don’t know … three, four.’

Anselm spoke to himself, his eyes raised high. ‘A long time after the paralysis.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Cooper, unthinkingly, not caring about dates or times. ‘She was completely resolved. Relieved, even. Like someone who can hear a train coming on the Northern Line.’

‘What did she ask you to do?’ asked Mitch.

‘Make an Exit Mask.’

‘A what?’ interjected Anselm, still brooding on the timings, still looking upwards.

‘An Exit Mask. She’d researched it on the internet. She’d seen videos on YouTube showing you how to make one … and a demonstration by an Australian on how to use it. I looked, too, later. Couldn’t believe my eyes. It was like
Blue Peter
for grown-ups … “Here’s one I made earlier.” Peter had printed off the assembly instructions and put some money in an envelope.’

In accordance with Jenny’s wishes, Cooper had bought a helium gas cylinder from Amazon (designed to fill kids’ balloons), some electrician’s tape from B&Q, a roll of large freezer bags from Sainsbury’s and a long rubber tube from a home brew centre.

‘The idea is that you put a bag on your forehead, fill it with helium and then…’

Cooper looked helplessly at his two inquisitors. The anger had gone. He didn’t look so strong any more.

‘You made this thing?’ asked Anselm, nonchalantly, restoring his glasses.

‘What else could I do?’

‘Refuse.’

‘They’d have made it somehow. I just helped them do what they didn’t
want
to do … not what they
couldn’t
do. And anyway, Jenny wasn’t committed to using it, just having it ready … a parachute, she called it.’

‘Okay, having made the mask, what did you do with it?’ asked Mitch.

‘Just a moment,’ interjected Anselm. ‘Did Jenny say anything else about her motives for planning her suicide, apart from things getting too bad?’

‘Yes,’ nodded Cooper as if he’d left out something obvious and important. ‘The son. Her boy. Timothy. She felt she had nothing to offer him any more. She didn’t want him to watch her get frightened and struggle.’

‘No,’ said Anselm, ponderously.

‘That’s why she didn’t want to go to Switzerland or Holland, where they pull the plug and it’s all legal. She’d have to explain to Timothy why she had to end it all. She didn’t want to … she couldn’t. So I did as she asked.’

‘Odd that, really, when you wouldn’t do it before.’

‘Because before she was depressed, whereas this time she’d thought it through, carefully. Like I told you: she was real calm. Completely sure of herself. All the thinking had been done.’

Anselm made a nod. ‘So off you went to B&Q.’

When Cooper brought the completed Exit Mask to Jenny, she told him to leave it in a small potting shed at the end of the garden. The plan was this: if Jenny ever made the final decision to end her life, Peter would simply collect the mask and help Jenny to use it. Afterwards, he wasn’t to worry about getting rid of the evidence. All he had to do was put it back in the shed. When Cooper heard that Jenny had died, he was to come the same day and collect the mask, tube and cylinder and dispose of them.

‘She was protecting and helping Peter,’ explained Cooper, pushing aside more of the mess, and leaning on the table. ‘The doctor would look the other way, but if someone still had concerns they’d never find any evidence. The shed would be empty. Peter hadn’t bought anything. No one in the home brew centre would remember his face. Amazon hadn’t sent him any helium. It had all been kept simple, for him. He didn’t have to make anything; he didn’t have to dispose of anything. All he had to do was open that door on a plane that was losing height and falling to pieces in mid-air.’

Mitch then said, ‘But she was being smart, too, in asking for your help.’

‘Unless it was Peter’s idea,’ interjected Anselm, who’d reached the same conclusion on smartness.

‘How?’ snapped Cooper, resenting the hint of manipulation.

‘You already knew what Jenny was thinking and why,’ explained Mitch. ‘If she’d suddenly died, you might have said something to the police. You’d wanted to keep her alive. So you’d have told them your suspicions. And that would have led to an investigation and maybe Peter’s arrest. By involving you in the planning she tidied up those previous emails and letters.’

‘Or Peter did.’ Once again Anselm politely completed the diagram of due inference.

‘Jenny didn’t use me,’ explained Cooper, wearily. ‘She came to me because she knew I understood her. More than anyone. You name them … Peter, Emma, the doctor and, yes, even Michael, her father,
none
of them could even
begin
to understand her like
I
did, to understand what she felt like after her legs had been taken away from her. She didn’t need to explain a damn thing to me. Not a thing.’

‘Because you’re a dancer?’ offered Anselm.

‘Because I’m a dancer.’

‘Not now you’re not,’ threw in Mitch, dousing Cooper’s emotion. ‘You’re a mechanic who fixes second-hand cars that run on four star. What did you do with the mask after Jenny died?’

Cooper appeared suddenly stunned.

‘You kept it, didn’t you?’ whispered Mitch. ‘Like the emails and letters, you couldn’t get rid of anything that had come from her mind or hand. No wonder you couldn’t throw away the bag that contained her last breath. Where is it, Vincent?’

A flush of grief and surrender changed Cooper’s face. He stood up and left the room. A door opened and closed. Moments later he returned holding a white plastic carrier bag from Curry’s. He laid it warily on the table among the detritus of his life offstage.

‘You can’t prove she used it,’ he said, barely audible. ‘You can’t prove it killed her. Not now. You’re too late. You can only prove that I made it.’

‘Quite right, Mr Cooper,’ agreed Anselm. He stood up and gingerly opened the carrier bag, gazing intently at the homemade suicide kit: a crumpled freezer bag for those tasty leftovers, an orange rubber pipe to siphon off the young beer and a small gas cylinder with a picture of balloons on the side. ‘You’re all as safe as houses.’

‘A piece of advice, though, Vincent,’ added Mitch. ‘Don’t hide your spares under a plant pot. You’ll only invalidate your insurance.’ With a wink, he tossed the front door key high over the table.

Cooper didn’t move at first. He just glared at the thief who’d stolen Jenny’s secrets. Then, without even blinking, he snatched the key from the air, his arm following the sharp and savage arc of a punch.

Anselm sat in the passenger seat of the Land Rover with the carrier bag on his lap, astounded by Mitch’s performance. He’d sensed that Jenny’s friend was disconsolate. He’d seen into a grieving man’s vulnerability and then stunned him, brutally and without hesitation. It’s what QCs did. It’s why Anselm would never have made the grade. He looked at the plastic bag with distaste, wondering if the mask would fit Bede. For the time being he’d store it in the shed by his hives and later he’d—