Free Secrets of Death by Stephen Booth Page A

you can find it out if you want to. And I didn’t know
him
at all.’
    ‘You must have had some contact,’ put in Cooper. ‘Mr Farrell had lived here for ten years.’
    ‘Oh, I saw him. But that’s all. He meant nothing to me. Nothing.’
    A few minutes later, Cooper turned the Toyota on to Noel Street and followed the tram lines south to work his way through the Hyson Green shopping area towards Bobbers Mill and the M1.
    ‘
I saw him, but he meant nothing to me
?’ said Villiers as they stopped at lights on Radford Road opposite a store with a vast display of vegetables all along its frontage. ‘That’s really sad, isn’t it?’
    ‘I don’t think we can blame the neighbour,’ said Cooper.
    He was thinking of the initial reports about Roger Farrell brought in by Luke Irvine and Becky Hurst. The description of a man whom his work colleagues hardly knew, who had no interest in joining local organisations, or in going to the pub. The ghost in a suit and tie. His own sister had never visited him. So it was hardly surprising that even his next-door neighbour denied knowing anything about him.
    Yet Farrell couldn’t have been completely anonymous, could he? So what had he done with his time in that house in Forest Fields?
    ‘After all, who
did
Mr Farrell mean anything to?’ said Cooper as the lights turned green and he drew away.
    Itwas a question that troubled him all the way back from Nottingham to Edendale.
    Diane Fry had told lies to get out of her own apartment. She didn’t feel proud of it. But there was only so much she could take at short notice. She’d been entirely unprepared for the arrival of her sister and the child. It had come as a shock to her system.
    And it was one of her rest days, for heaven’s sake. She deserved a break. A break from, well … most things. There
were
a few exceptions.
    So she’d told Angie she had work to do. Angie had protested and scoffed at her dedication to the job. But she knew from experience that there was really no point in arguing. She’d got used to Diane being a police officer a long time ago.
    ‘Well, don’t worry. We’ll manage on our own for a while, won’t we?’
    Half the time, it wasn’t clear who Angie was talking to – her sister or the baby. When she was holding the child, she hardly ever looked up from him. So Diane had to work it out from what Angie was saying and the tone she said it in. The babyish voice was a clue. Though sometimes she forgot and spoke to Diane the same way, as if her sister were an overgrown toddler with minimal language skills.
    ‘You know where everything is,’ said Diane, hastily pulling on her jacket.
    ‘Have you got any beer?’ asked Angie.
    ‘There’s some white wine in the fridge. And half a bottle of vodka.’
    ‘Thatwill do. Won’t it, little one?’
    Diane resigned herself to finding all her booze gone when she returned home. She should probably call at the Co-op on Wilford Green to stock up. They had an offer on Chardonnay, and she might be in for a siege.
    Jamie Callaghan was on a rest day too, after the job the previous evening. He was surprised to get a call from Fry. He was just finishing a session on the benches and cross trainers at a fitness centre in Chilwell.
    ‘Give me half an hour,’ he’d said.
    So Fry found herself in a beer garden overlooking the water at the Castle Marina, drinking cappuccino. The marina itself was packed with narrowboats and small pleasure craft. Every few minutes, one of them chugged slowly by near her table to pass under a footbridge into the Nottingham Canal.
    The last of the office workers from the Castle Meadow Business Park were just leaving to go back to their desks at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs after their lunch break, so there were plenty of tables empty. No one would overhear their conversation.
    ‘I thought you’d be doing some shopping on your day off,’ said Callaghan, shading his eyes against the glare of sun off the water.
    ‘Shopping?’ said