A Good Death Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Titles by Chris Collett

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  A Selection of Titles by Chris Collett

  The D. I. Tom Mariner Series

  THE WORM IN THE BUD

  BLOOD OF THE INNOCENTS

  WRITTEN IN THE BLOOD

  BLOOD MONEY

  STALKED BY SHADOWS

  BLOOD AND STONE*

  DEAD OF NIGHT*

  A GOOD DEATH*

  *available from Severn House

  A GOOD DEATH

  A D. I. Tom Mariner Mystery

  Chris Collett

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2016

  in Great Britain and 2017 in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  Trade paperback edition first published in Great

  Britain and the USA 2017 by SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  eBook edition first published in 2016 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2016 by Chris Collett.

  The right of Chris Collett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8687-3 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-765-4 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-832-2 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

  are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described

  for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are

  fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  A horn blares and Talayeh’s heart leaps in her chest as the monstrous vehicle bears down on her, the driver, partly obscured by the windscreen, gesticulating furiously. Scurrying to the safety of the pavement she drags her cumbersome bag up the kerb with a jolt, noting the many pairs of eyes looking her way, their boredom briefly alleviated by a moment of drama, and she glowers back at them. In a few short weeks she has come to hate this place and all its latent aggression. It was not as if life back home wasn’t an assault on the senses, but its exuberance seemed somehow more benign. Here everything is so relentlessly bleak and dark, most days quite literally, with an undertow of violence that is never far from the surface.

  In the ticket booth the official simply shakes his head from side to side with blank indifference. ‘It’s gone,’ he repeats, slowly and loudly, making a sweeping motion with his hand. ‘You missed it.’ Showing her his watch, he taps on it a couple of times. ‘Next one, tomorrow afternoon, same time.’ Talayeh’s English isn’t great but she gets that message, along with the even more explicit one contained in that flick of the eyes towards the customer behind her in the queue, who is already edging into her space. Their conversation is at an end. Talayeh moves away from the counter as the African woman, a toddler on her hip, pushes past her to the counter.

  Now what? She can’t go back. For all their earnest civility, it had been made perfectly clear that she wasn’t wanted. She was, at best, an inconvenience, and right from the start she’d seen the fear in their eyes that she might do something here to bring even more shame on the family. It had been as much a relief for them to send her on her way, as it had been for her to leave. But now with her journey aborted …

  Through the big windows at the back of the ticket office she sees people sitting at tables with food and drinks in front of them. In her pocket she has the currency to buy her coach ticket; she doesn’t know exactly how much it’s worth but it must be more than enough to buy her a drink and allow her to sit somewhere warm while she thinks about what to do next. In the cafeteria she stands patiently in another line. It had unnerved her at first, this way people had of standing silently waiting, instead of clamouring for attention as they would at home. She hands over the most striking-looking of the notes to pay for her bottled water. The black man behind the counter is unimpressed and responds with a scowl and a handful of heavy coins. Talayeh goes to a seat beside the window overlooking the busy road, watching the line of cars gather and disperse at the traffic signals, like blood pumping around the noisy, dirty veins of the city. As an announcement comes over the loudspeaker, the woman at a neighbouring table gets up to go, leaving behind her a glossy magazine. Talayeh reaches across to pick it up, comforted for a moment by its resemblance to magazines she sometimes buys when she goes into Sana’a. She can’t read many of the words in this one, but it is filled with photos of glamorous and successful Western women. They remind her, with a pinch of regret, of what her hopes and expectations were when she came to this country. She had even been foolish enough to boast about it to anyone in the village who would listen; her wealthy husband, her sophisticated life: ‘When I get to London …’ she had bragged. But now she will return home a failure. Suddenly, Talayeh knows she can’t do that. She has been too hasty and impatient. Would it have been so bad to go along with what was expected of her? Like the women in the magazine, Talayeh craves the freedom to do what she chooses. But their independence has been forged through their talents; acting or singing or presenting TV; things so far removed from her world that she wouldn’t know where to start.

  The cafe is hot and stuffy, and suddenly realising there’s no one to stop her, Talayeh takes off her hijab and shakes out her hair, enjoying the feeling of liberation. As she turns her head, her eyes meet those of a man sitting across from her. He is a white man, with dark eyes and a nice face. He smiles, showing good teeth, and there is something in his eyes that Talayeh has seen before. It is the way Ishaq used to look at her. It brings a pleasant warmth to her cheeks, and in that moment, Talayeh realises that there is something that she has a talent for – well, several things. Ishaq taught her some of them, but he also insisted that she had been given a natural gift from Allah; a gift that any man would enjoy and might be prepared to pay for. Sipping he
r water, Talayeh glances up to see that the man is still watching her. As she shyly returns his smile, he gets up from his seat and comes over.

  ONE

  Mariner and Suzy drew up outside the row of newly built houses. The small development, of about thirty dwellings, was unfinished. At the moment the gardens were little more than ploughed fields, cut through with open ditches where pipes and utilities were still being laid, and although there were already a number of ‘Sold’ banners pasted across the windows, the properties looked some way from being inhabited.

  ‘Is this it?’ asked Suzy, getting out of the car.

  ‘Think so,’ said Mariner. ‘It’s pretty much where Charlie described it.’ Taking out the estate agent’s printout of the development, he was struck by the contrast between the artfully composed photograph of a house standing in splendid isolation and the actuality in front of them, surrounded on both sides by a dozen or more identical cloned structures. ‘Not exactly ready to move into,’ he added, following Suzy up one of the garden paths. Stepping carefully to avoid the wettest of the mud, he peered in through a window. ‘Rooms are a bit small,’ he said. ‘Oh crap.’ He turned as a sporty Mercedes zipped purposefully along the newly tarmacked road towards them. ‘Try to look inconspicuous.’

  The car came to a halt outside the site Portakabin at the end of the cul-de-sac. A young woman got out, unloading a box stuffed with files and papers. Unlocking the door of the cabin, she disappeared inside for several minutes, emerging again minus the papers, and coming across to where they were standing. ‘Morning!’ she called. ‘Anything I can help you with?’

  She was in her early thirties at most, a small yet sturdy young woman, ‘pear-shaped’, Mariner thought was the expression, a feature emphasised by her mud-spattered Lycra leggings and bulky fleece. Her fair hair was tied back from her face, and what with the open, rosy-cheeked face and the impeccable accent, Mariner surmised (a habit that couldn’t be shaken, even on his days off) that before coming here she’d been horse riding.

  ‘We were just being nosy.’ Suzy made it sound casual. ‘We were passing by on the main road and thought we’d take a closer look.’ Both of those statements were true. What she left out was that the development had actually been recommended to them by Mariner’s colleague, Charlie Glover, and that they had quite deliberately driven out the eleven miles from Birmingham to see it. The hope had been that this early on a Saturday morning, they would avoid the inevitable hard-sell. It seemed that they had failed. The girl had brought a bunch of keys with her. ‘Would you like to have a look inside?’

  ‘Well, yes, OK then,’ said Suzy, shooting Mariner a look.

  ‘How many bedrooms are you looking for?’

  ‘Two or three,’ said Suzy.

  ‘Great, we’ll go into number nine.’ She gestured towards the house at the end of the terrace and they all traipsed along to it over soiled flagstones and Mariner wondered what the woman made of the formality of his suit, and Suzy’s dress, at this time of day.

  She unlocked the door and allowed them to step past her into rooms thick with the smell of damp plaster and fresh paint. ‘I think it’s all pretty self-explanatory,’ she said, as her phone buzzed for attention. ‘If you have any questions I’ll just be along in the office, and perhaps you could pop the keys back to me there when you’ve finished looking round? No hurry though, take as long as you like.’

  ‘Well, that’s a relief,’ murmured Mariner, to her retreating back. He’d had his fill of making polite small talk and smiling appreciatively while enthusiastic estate agents detailed, in wildly overstated terms, the merits of a particular property. Being new, this one was modern and clean, with state-of-the-art fitted kitchen and bathrooms, but the rooms were tiny. ‘These two should just about do for all your books,’ said Mariner to Suzy. ‘Where will you sleep?’

  Even at a leisurely pace, the grand tour took no more than ten minutes, and they finished it standing in the first-floor back bedroom, looking down into the euphemistically described ‘low- maintenance’ garden that at the moment was little more than a tiny construction site.

  ‘And not a mature tree in sight,’ Mariner remarked. Beyond the fence was a further row of similarly new properties, then the view extended to flat brown fields that would also no doubt in time be filled by further new housing. In a couple of years Suzy would be living in the middle of a sprawling estate.

  ‘Well, according to these details, it’s supposed to be in close proximity to the station, and within walking distance of a very good primary school,’ said Suzy.

  ‘That’ll be helpful,’ said Mariner, ‘should you ever decide to go into teaching.’

  Suzy sighed hard. ‘One for the short list?’ she said. It had become their code, normally in the presence of eager estate agents, for this one’s a definite no.

  Mariner walked up to return the keys to the site office. The door was a little ajar and the young woman was on the phone. ‘I told you, Sam, he’s only trying to help, really.’ A long pause. ‘Oh, don’t be like that—’ Mariner cleared his throat. ‘Look, we can talk about this later. I’ve got to go.’

  As she switched off her phone, Mariner knocked lightly on the door. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘That was really helpful.’

  ‘No problem.’ She smiled. Mariner was all prepared with his little speech about ‘other properties to view’, blah blah, but she was too distracted to even ask.

  Mariner’s research had thrown up two more developments in the vicinity, this time in a greater state of completion, but equally uninspiring. Then, as luck (or careful good planning) had it, they were left just a couple of short miles from the Cock Inn, only five minutes before lunchtime opening.

  ‘Well, fancy that,’ said Suzy, when he broke the good news.

  Mariner had wondered about the choice of pub. Ordinarily he could have imagined Suzy making some vaguely smutty allusion to its name – most people did – and he would have responded in kind. But today he guessed that she would feel the same slight inhibition that he did, and it went unremarked. The April afternoon would have made it warm enough for them to take their drinks out into the garden, but Suzy was less keen. ‘My heels, on the grass,’ she explained, so they took a table inside.

  ‘Why do estate agents always bang on about schools?’ Mariner wondered, depositing their drinks on the table and sliding on to the bench beside Suzy. ‘As if that’s the only important factor.’

  ‘You should be flattered that they think we’re young enough to have school-aged kids,’ said Suzy.

  ‘It would have to be second time around for me,’ Mariner pointed out. ‘And they certainly always assume that we’re both moving in. What did you think?’

  Suzy shrugged her indifference. ‘They’re all starting to look so much the same. I know what I said, but I actually think I’m going off the idea of something new. Sure, it would mean less maintenance and all that, but they’re all so … sterile.’ She trawled a finger through the condensation that had already accumulated on the side of her glass, before looking up at him. ‘In fact, that’s the last one,’ she announced, ‘at least for now. I don’t think I can bear to look at another “deceptively spacious” residence, however close to “local amenities” it might be, at least, not until after I’ve settled into the new job. I’ll be perfectly OK in postgrad accommodation for the moment. It’s convenient, after all. And when I’m a bit more familiar with the surroundings, I can start looking again.’

  ‘You sure?’ asked Mariner, trying not to sound too relieved.

  ‘Absolutely.’

  He allowed a respectable pause before saying: ‘It’s just a shame I don’t live a bit nearer.’

  She shrugged again. ‘Not much we can do about that.’

  But they both knew that as a rationale, the distance alone was a poor one. In many ways it would have made the most sense for Suzy to move into Mariner’s south Birmingham home, if only as a temporary measure. It would only in effect be an extension of the regular weekends she s
tayed over anyway. True, on a good day the arrangement would mean a ninety-minute round commute to work on a motorway that was subject to regular accidents and other hold-ups, particularly in the winter weather. Nor would that level of fuel consumption sit well with Suzy’s environmentalist philosophy. But neither of those factors in themselves were insurmountable. What remained unsaid was what had become obvious to them both: that much as they enjoyed each other’s company, after about forty-eight hours together they were both ready to retreat back to their own space. In the interim the university had provided Suzy with a flat in postgrad accommodation, which would tide her over until she found somewhere more permanent.

  ‘What time are we meant to be there this afternoon?’ she said idly.

  Mariner looked at his watch. ‘Shit! We need to get going. I’d forgotten.’

  ‘Really? Dressed like this?’ Suzy grabbed her bag as Mariner swallowed the remains of his half-pint. ‘Do you know where it is?’

  ‘Roughly,’ Mariner hedged.

  ‘So that’s a no then,’ said Suzy astutely.

  Mariner had no idea why Charlie Glover had asked him to be best man at the renewal of his wedding vows to Helen, his wife of thirty years. But as Suzy had pointed out with her usual clarity, it was no great effort to fulfil the responsibility and obviously meant a lot to Charlie. Having agreed therefore to play a key role, it would be polite to at least get there on time.

  Mariner did have a vague idea of the church’s locality, in the unlikely situation of a late 1980s factory unit development, but the complex was a warren of ultimate dead ends and he had to manoeuvre a number of three-point turns before Suzy finally spotted the angular concrete spire of the Christian Evangelical church. They arrived with minutes to spare.