06.The Dead Place

by Stephen Booth

  ‘Roman?’ he said. ‘They’d be about two thousand years old, I suppose.’

  ‘Oh, perhaps of that era,’ said the professor. ‘It’s impossible to date them with any accuracy. Their design never really changed. It was so simple and functional that there wasn’t much you could do to tinker with it.’

  ‘But they’re just stone coffins, aren’t they? Old churches often have them in their graveyards.’

  Robertson shook his head. ‘Most people think of them as stone coffins. And I can understand how they might give that impression, at first glance.’

  The sarcophagus nearest to Cooper was one of the bigger examples, its upper end at eye level against the church wall. It tapered towards the foot, and the mason had hacked a vaguely human shape out of the stone, including the outline of a head and shoulders.

  ‘There’s no mistaking that they’re designed to contain a body.’

  ‘Ah, but there are differences. For a start, these sarcophagi never possessed lids. They were always open to the air like this.’

  For some reason, Cooper felt reluctant to examine the smallest sarcophagus, so he concentrated on the bigger ones instead.

  ‘Of course, the distinctive feature is the hole in the bottom. I wouldn’t expect that in my coffin.’

  Robertson nodded encouragingly, as if to a student who was none too bright but was making an effort. ‘Exactly.’

  Moving closer, Cooper tilted his head. The base had been shaped more carefully from the stone than at first appeared. Despite the crudeness of its construction, the surface showed a distinct dip towards the centre, where a hole a couple of inches across had been drilled through the stone.

  ‘The hole must be there for drainage. If these things didn’t possess lids, there had to be some way of letting the rain run out, or they’d be full of water.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Robertson. ‘Sarcophagi were kept under cover. They had to remain dry. It was essential to the process.’

  ‘But …?’

  ‘Well, you’re partly right, DC Cooper. However, rainwater wasn’t involved. Yes, sarcophagi were designed to provide drainage – but it was the drainage of body fluids.’

  ‘Ah.’

  The professor flapped his coat like the wings of a bird as he stood back and looked up at the church. Underneath the coat, he was still wearing the baggy pinstripe suit. ‘You see, the sarcophagus dates from a time before the practice of shutting up a corpse in a box and burying it. At that time, there was the charnel house and the sarcophagus. A charnel house was known as the “dead place”, or the “place of the dead”.’

  Fry stirred for the first time at the mention of the phrase, and Robertson saw that he’d finally got her interest.

  ‘It was your mention of the dead place that put the idea of a sarcophagus into my mind,’ he explained. ‘But I wasn’t aware at the time of the significance. There could be other interpretations, of course.’

  ‘What happened in this dead place, Professor?’ asked Fry.

  ‘A corpse was left exposed to the air until decay had done its work, the flesh had dried and the bones were clean enough for disposal. Periodically, a priest would enter the charnel house to check if the corpse was ready.’

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘Our ancestors considered decomposition a perfectly natural stage of the body’s evolution,’ said Robertson. ‘It marked the passage from earthbound spirit to a soul free to ascend to Heaven. They thought it was only the flesh that kept the soul trapped in the body. The soul had to be released to achieve real death. Looked at in that way, decomposition was a positive development. I imagine they might have wanted to observe this process taking place, much as we watch our children growing up.’

  As they walked back down the flagged path through the churchyard, Cooper heard the professor muttering to himself. He caught the sound of a familiar phrase and realized the historian was quoting Shakespeare. Hamlet, if he wasn’t mistaken.

  ‘“Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt,

  Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.”’

  Robertson caught Cooper’s eye and smiled.

  ‘Appropriate, I think. More so than “dust to dust” and all that. Trust the Bard. He always had the right phrase for the occasion.’

  ‘But that word – sarcophagus,’ said Cooper. ‘Where does it come from?’

  ‘It’s derived from the Greek. A compound of two words – sark and phagos. We doctors do so love our Latin and Greek.’

  Cooper looked at the professor and raised his eyebrows to indicate that he was none the wiser. Robertson beamed with satisfaction and allowed himself a small dramatic pause before he explained.

  ‘Loosely translated,’ he said, ‘the name means “flesh eater”.’

  Before either of the detectives could react, Robertson began to amble around the flagged paths, casting backwards and forwards as if trying to pick up a scent.

  ‘If you’re interested in old graveyards, you’d like those in Perthshire, where I hail from,’ he said. ‘Near Pitlochry, there’s a churchyard where some of the graves were protected by mortsafes – a kind of iron cage over the grave, to prevent body snatching. A pernicious activity, which we Scots were particularly good at, it seems.’

  Cooper looked at him in surprise. ‘Body snatching? Yes, a particularly unpleasant crime.’

  ‘Ah, that’s where you’re wrong. I’m surprised to find myself putting you right on a matter of law, Detective Constable.’

  ‘What do you mean, sir?’

  ‘Body snatching wasn’t an offence. Once you were deceased, your physical remains couldn’t be owned by anyone, and therefore couldn’t be stolen. A body snatcher was only committing a crime if he stole other items with the body, even the shroud. It was popular opinion that turned against the resurrection men, not the law.’

  ‘But Burke and Hare …?’

  ‘A different case altogether. They weren’t content to wait for a supply of dead bodies to become available, so they decided to procure their own from among the living. Murder was their crime. It was all a question of market forces at work. The demand for bodies for dissection was enormous.’

  ‘There are probably other reasons people might want to obtain a dead body,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Undoubtedly.’

  Robertson followed Cooper’s gaze as he looked around the graves in the churchyard.

  ‘Oh, there are no records of body snatching taking place in Derbyshire,’ he said. ‘People feared it, nevertheless. They had a superstitious dread of the body being removed from its last resting place. It meant they wouldn’t be able to rise from the grave on Judgement Day.’

  ‘So I believe.’

  Robertson glanced up at him. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have called it superstition. I don’t want to be offensive.’

  It sounded almost like an apology. Cooper waved it away. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  The professor straightened up with a sigh. ‘Nobody can be sure when society developed its distaste for death. But for centuries it’s been kept out of sight. Few people ever see the process of decomposition now. Only those whose profession is death have that privilege.’

  ‘Pathologists, funeral directors?’ said Cooper. ‘Police officers?’

  ‘All our good friends,’ agreed Robertson. ‘God bless them.’

  Cooper looked at Fry, and knew it was time to leave. Dusk was falling, and the churchyard was filling up with shadows. They softened the edges of the tombs, obscured the inscriptions, and made the stone slabs look a little less cold. Too much daylight didn’t suit the dead.

  ‘The “flesh eater”, Professor,’ he said. ‘What did the Greeks mean by that name?’

  ‘Well, the original phrase was lithos sarkophagos: “flesh-eating stone”. It reflected a belief that a certain type of limestone consumed the flesh from the body, and was therefore the perfect material to be used as a receptacle for the dead.’

  Cooper laughed, and gestured at the hills on all sides. ‘Limestone? Thi
s is the White Peak. Everything is limestone here.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Robertson doubtfully. ‘Of course, we only have the word of Pliny the Elder. Pliny said limestone could consume a body in forty days. Personally, I wouldn’t rely on it too much as a forensic theory.’

  As Fry lifted the latch on the churchyard gate, she turned towards them, and Cooper saw that her face was set into an expression of impatience and scorn.

  ‘Thank you for the history lesson, Professor,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you’ve improved DC Cooper’s education immensely. He’ll be a much better detective from now on.’

  Fry moved off towards the car, but Robertson touched Cooper’s sleeve to hold him back as they reached the gate.

  ‘There’s one more word that I’m sure you know,’ said the professor.

  ‘What’s that, sir?’

  ‘Sarcasm. Another figurative expression handed down to us from the Greek. It means tearing or biting at the skin, like an animal. The Greeks didn’t like sarcasm very much.’

  Fry was waiting by the Toyota, tapping her fingers on the roof as she watched people walking by on the street. Cooper unlocked the car, and she slid quickly into the passenger seat.

  ‘Oh yes, we doctors do so love our Latin and Greek,’ she said, fastening her seat belt. ‘It’s so, so fascinating – but only for those with a little knowledge of the classical world. Not for the ignorant plebs who studied useful subjects, instead of some ancient dead language.’

  ‘Diane …’

  She looked at him with irritation. ‘A real bloody Aristotle we’ve got there, haven’t we? I bet he can’t get in the bath without jumping out again and shouting “Eureka!”’

  ‘I think that was Archimedes,’ said Cooper, waving to Freddy Robertson as they pulled away from the church. Standing by his BMW, the professor gave a little bow.

  Fry stared out of the window at the streets of Edendale.

  ‘Lawyers are just the same. Why do these people have to make their jobs sound like some kind of arcane mystery the rest of us couldn’t possibly understand?’

  ‘Maybe it’s insecurity …’ Cooper paused. ‘Why didn’t you let me listen to the tape of the phone calls before I went to see the professor?’

  ‘You never asked.’

  ‘It would have helped a lot. As it was, I only had partial information.’

  ‘Yes, OK, Ben.’

  The BMW closed up behind them as they stopped at the traffic lights before the relief road.

  ‘Those sarcophagi he showed us,’ said Fry. ‘They’re not even in our target area.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cooper. ‘I know.’

  Robertson was right about one thing, though. Cooper had seen the watch house built at Bradfield to guard against men who might come by night to dig up freshly buried bodies from the churchyard. And here in Edendale was that massive block of sandstone carved in the shape of a coffin. There was no logical reason for its size and weight, except to prevent access to the grave beneath. And yet the body snatchers had never come to Edendale, or to anywhere else in Derbyshire.

  Then Cooper remembered Audrey Steele, and corrected himself. Body snatchers had never come to Derbyshire – until now.

  MY JOURNAL OF THE DEAD, PHASE TWO

  And the biggest unknown is death. We’d rather not think about death at all. We fear our own dead, we believe that corpses pollute the living. To acknowledge death is to accept our own mortality, so the dead have to be hidden away, shielded by rites, prayers and superstitions. Even in death, we fear the final battle with evil. We’re afraid to face our angry gods.

  That’s why we’ve produced all our myths and folklore, all our rituals and deceptions. It means the thing we have to face is only a fiction of our own creation, and not the inconceivable reality. We’re like a flock of chickens running around a yard until the day the axe falls on their necks. The only difference between us and the chickens is that we know the axe is there from the start. If you think about that too much, you might start to envy the chickens.

  What happens after death is unspoken, and sometimes unspeakable. But we have to see the truth. We can close our mouths and ears, but we can’t avert our eyes. Remember those visions of death that cross your mind as you enter into sleep? Your subconscious is trying to share the knowledge that you deny.

  From the Buddhist Sutra on Mindfulness – Nine Cemetery Contemplations:

  And further, a bhikkhu sees a body thrown on to the cemetery reduced to disconnected bones, scattered in all directions – here a bone of the hand, there a bone of the foot, a shin bone, a thigh bone, the pelvis, spine and skull. So he applies this perception to his own body thus: ‘Verily, my own body, too, is of the same nature. Such it will become, and will not escape it.’

  13

  A manila envelope lay on Ben Cooper’s desk on Friday morning. At first, he didn’t want to touch it. It reminded him too much of the envelopes he saw at the hospital. There were always stacks of them behind the nurses’ station, full of medical records and test results. A manila envelope would contain a patient’s diagnosis and prognosis, a plan for their discharge or their disposal after death, the discreet arrangement of their living and dying, all wrapped up in brown paper.

  He got himself a coffee from the machine in the corridor and finally felt able to rip open the sealed flap. The contents slid out on to his desk. Dental records, and it was good news. Or at least, he supposed he ought to consider it good news. He had a confirmed ID for his human remains.

  Cooper tried to feel elated as he looked at the photographs of Audrey Steele again. But it seemed very tough on Audrey that she should have ended up like this.

  There was a lot of talk these days about the dead speaking from beyond the grave. People usually meant the remarkable amount of forensic evidence that could be collected from a dead body. It was a way that murder victims could help investigators to achieve justice against their killers. But in Audrey’s case, her voice was silent. The examination of her remains had revealed nothing useful, as far as he could tell. And how could it, when she’d died of natural causes? Audrey’s mother had the death certificate. Brain haemorrhage, confirmed by a second doctor prior to disposal by cremation.

  But that didn’t feel right to Cooper. From the moment he’d seen Suzi Lee’s reconstruction in the Sheffield laboratory, he felt as though he’d been able to hear Audrey Steele speaking to him from the woods at Ravensdale. The fact that she hadn’t told him anything crucial to the enquiry seemed to be his fault, not hers. From now on, he ought to listen a bit more carefully.

  A few minutes later, DI Hitchens was rubbing his fingers together thoughtfully as he listened to Cooper run through the available facts.

  ‘This woman was supposed to have been cremated eighteen months ago?’ he said. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Yes, sir. As far as her family are concerned, she was cremated.’

  ‘And yet her remains turn up in the woods ten miles from the crematorium. I’ve never heard anything like it, Ben.’

  ‘There seems to be no doubt she died of natural causes. I’ve got copies of the certificates.’

  ‘All done properly? Signed by two doctors?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK. Then we’re looking at an offence of unauthorized interference with a body. God knows what the penalty is for that. I’ve never come across a case of this kind before.’

  ‘I’ll get some checks done and see if similar incidents have been recorded anywhere.’

  ‘Yes, that’s a good first step. And you’ll be talking to the family again, I suppose?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Hitchens swivelled his chair away from Cooper, a sign that something was worrying him.

  ‘And then there’s the question of when and where the theft of the body took place. You said that Audrey Steele was in hospital when she died?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Identified by the family, and all that?’

  ‘I think so, but I’ll get a statement from
her mother, or whoever saw her in hospital last.’

  ‘Right. Then the obvious places where the opportunity might have arisen would be the funeral director’s premises, and the crematorium itself.’

  ‘I’d have thought those were the only places,’ said Cooper. ‘The family didn’t take her body home for a wake. The funeral director’s preparation room and chapel of rest seem most likely, as regards an opportunity for interfering with the body.’

  ‘And the funeral directors in this case are …?’

  ‘Hudson and Slack.’

  The DI nodded. ‘Tread carefully, Ben. Be discreet. We don’t want a scare on our hands, with bereaved relatives panicking about the fate of their dearly departed. Nor do we want to wreck the good name of a reputable company without cause.’

  ‘I’ll be careful, sir. In fact, I thought I might start with the crematorium and work backwards.’

  ‘From the point of departure, so to speak? OK, that sounds like a plan.’

  ‘Meanwhile, I wondered … well, what about a new search at Litton Foot?’

  ‘In case we missed something the first time?’

  ‘For one thing, there are some bones missing from Audrey Steele’s remains,’ said Cooper. ‘There might be other evidence lying around the scene, too. Now that we have an angle on how she got there, I think we ought to take a fresh look, perhaps extend the area of the search.’

  ‘It would only be on a limited scale, Ben.’

  ‘I understand that, sir.’

  Hitchens made a note. ‘I’ll get something set up.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The DI turned back towards the window, as if he believed the meeting was over. ‘At least Mrs Steele died of natural causes,’ he said. ‘So we’re not looking at a murder enquiry here.’

  Cooper thought of Vivien Gill at home on the Devonshire Estate, sitting in her smelly kitchen with her Doidy Cup and Bickiepegs.

  ‘Well …’ he said.

  Hitchens spun round on his chair to face him. ‘What? What?’

  ‘It’s just …’ Cooper hesitated a moment under the DI’s gaze. ‘Well, sir, there is another question to be answered. If Audrey Steele’s remains ended up in the woods in Ravensdale, then who was cremated in her place?’