06.The Dead Place
Page 21
Fry nodded, accepting the explanation. But Cooper looked again at his shredded stick and the size of the trap.
‘Unless, of course, it was intended for bigger prey than a fox.’
‘OK, when you’ve all finished messing around over there, you might want to see this –’
They turned to find Wayne Abbott regarding them with a sour expression. He was holding a couple of evidence bags containing what Cooper immediately recognized as sections of bone, stained brown and splintered at the ends.
‘Just as a non-expert opinion, I have to admit that these should put paid to the accidental fall theory,’ said Abbott.
‘What is it?’ asked Fry.
They gathered round him as he held up the bags. ‘Here, and here … Do you see the marks on the sheath of the bone? They’re quite clear. I’d say that it’s only the vegetation that was holding this body together at all. Not too long ago, someone dismantled it. And they were using a very sharp knife. They took the skin right off the bone.’
That evening, the news from Edendale crown court was that Micky Ellis had been given the mandatory life sentence, with a tariff of fifteen years. He’d be out in ten, or less. The CPS had called to say they were pleased with the result.
But Diane Fry didn’t feel like celebrating. Instead, she spent some time listening to the tapes before she went home. Soon, she’d know them by heart.
What she really wanted was to be able to recognize the caller’s voice if she heard it. Despite the distortion, there ought to be some characteristic feature of the phrasing or intonation that would identify him, if only she could produce a suspect for comparison. The application of intelligence should refine the primeval urge. The pretentiousness alone should be a giveaway. Who spoke like that, unless they’d been given a script to read? Inside every person, the evil Thanatos fights an endless battle with Eros. Who’d ever heard of Thanatos, for heaven’s sake?
Fry looked around the office and noticed Ben Cooper hadn’t left yet. He’d taken a personal call a few minutes ago, and he was looking a bit subdued.
‘Are you all right, Ben?’ she called. ‘Why haven’t you gone home?’
Cooper looked up, unable to hide an expression of surprise. Too absorbed in his own concerns to be aware of her as usual, she supposed.
‘I’m not in a hurry,’ he said. ‘I’m going to the hospital first to visit my mother, and visiting time doesn’t start for a while yet. Did I mention she was in hospital?’
‘Yes, I think so,’ said Fry vaguely. Maybe he had, but she wasn’t sure. ‘How is she?’
‘That was my brother on the phone. He says the doctors think it wasn’t just a fall. It looks as though she had a minor stroke.’
‘I’m sorry. But only a minor one?’
‘The trouble with one stroke is that another is often close behind.’
Fry could see he was worried, but she didn’t know what to say to him. Cooper wouldn’t welcome any interest from her in his personal life – especially after what she’d said to him about his interference in her life, when he’d secretly schemed to reunite her with her sister. Whatever she said now, he would only consider it intrusive and hypocritical.
She cast around for something neutral to say that wouldn’t make things worse.
‘Well, don’t hang around the office,’ she said. ‘We can manage without you for a while, you know. Go and get things sorted out, if you can.’
She didn’t think Cooper was going to respond. But then he got up slowly.
‘I’ll see you in the morning, Diane.’
Fry put her headphones back on and returned to her tapes. Half an hour had passed before it occurred to her to wonder what Cooper would do after he’d visited his sick mother.
It might happen in the next few hours. We could synchronize our watches and count down the minutes. What a chance to record the ticking away of a life, to follow it through to that last, perfect moment, when existence becomes nothing, when the spirit parts with the physical. The end is always so close … I can smell it right now, can’t you?
But Cooper had given himself a job to do that night. While he’d been waiting for visiting time to come round at the hospital, he’d driven to the big DIY store on the retail park and bought himself a flat-pack shelving unit. It was something he’d been meaning to do for months. Well, he certainly needed something to distract his mind, to prevent the phrase ‘recurrent stroke’ from slipping so often into his thoughts, spoken softly and accompanied by a meaningful look or a sympathetic nod at the unspoken implication.
Tonight, his mother had been conscious and lucid, though her right side was partially paralysed and her sight impaired. For some time now, she’d been losing her colour and she was paler than he could ever remember her. Looking at her in the hospital bed, it had seemed no surprise to Cooper that the blood had failed to reach the left side of her brain. Matt was right, of course, that she wasn’t all that old – still in her sixties, after all. But tonight she’d seemed much older.
Randy’s ear pricked up, and a second later the doorbell rang. At this time of the evening, Cooper always assumed that it was somebody ringing the wrong bell. They usually wanted his neighbour in the flat upstairs or his landlady next door.
But when he reluctantly got up and went to answer the bell, it was Gavin Murfin he found standing on his doorstep.
‘Ben, you know it’s mad,’ said Murfin fifteen minutes later. ‘They want to get rid of people like me using tenure, but at the same time they can’t get anybody else to come into CID. There’s no waiting list any more. When did we last have a new DC in this division?’
‘I can’t remember.’
They’d walked to Cooper’s local, the Hanging Gate, a pub sitting in its own little yard off High Street. At least Gavin had insisted on buying the drinks.
‘There are vacancies in every section station,’ said Murfin. ‘The only way we can get people into CID is if they transfer for the sake of promotion. They come straight in at senior level from uniform, and they have no idea what detective work is all about.’
‘Why don’t you take it up with the Federation?’ said Cooper.
‘Dogberry and his mates? What use are they?’
Cooper smiled at the reference to the Police Federation’s cartoon character. He knew Murfin was right, about some of it at least.
‘And that’s not to mention Dad’s Army,’ said Murfin. ‘Talk about short-term measures. The geriatric brigade won’t last for ever, and there’s no one to take their place. You can’t create an experienced detective out of thin air.’
Murfin drank silently for a while. ‘I was thinking about what you were saying, Ben. About Hell.’
‘It was nothing, Gavin.’
‘But it’s obvious, isn’t it? Hell is us. If there really is a Hell waiting for me when I kick the bucket, that’s what it’ll be. Just me. Me, messing myself up for the rest of eternity.’
Cooper stared at Murfin open-mouthed.
Murfin nodded. ‘You know, don’t you, Ben? Who needs a demon with a pitchfork, eh?’
‘Have you talked to Diane about how you feel?’
‘What? Why would I talk to her?’
‘She’s your DS.’
‘I’d rather talk to the Yorkshire Ripper. We’d have more empathy.’ Murfin suddenly looked tired. ‘Sorry, Ben. But sometimes I lose my sense of humour, like.’
‘I understand. Do you want another drink?’
But Murfin drained his glass. ‘No, thanks. I’m sorry to have bothered you, Ben. I’ll go home now.’
‘Will you be OK?’
‘I’m fine. Hey – what about that date of yours? What happened?’
‘I put it off. There’s too much happening this week.’
‘Pity. Won’t she mind?’
‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘She’ll understand.’
He waited with Murfin until a taxi came to take him home, and then walked back to his flat. Once away from the town centre, the streets were very quiet. Coo
per knew that he’d have to face up to his own death some time. Like most people, he’d always thought he could avoid it for ever. And perhaps he’d read too many stories in which people didn’t actually die. Instead, they passed away, breathed their last, or were no more. In polite conversation, death was skated over rapidly, like thin ice.
Sometimes, he could sense that thin ice beneath his feet, and he didn’t want to look down. There was too much dark water lying just below the surface.
MY JOURNAL OF THE DEAD, PHASE THREE
So here is the reality. People change shape when they die. The muscles go slack, and gravity drags down the skin. It sinks into the cheeks and pools in the eye sockets. Our flesh forms new contours, like a tide going out and exposing submerged islands. The body cools, our extremities shrivel. Blood settles towards to the ground as the earth begins to draw us closer. Then the skin discolours from red to purple, from green to black. Our final transformation is a Technicolor performance.
When the heart stops pumping blood and the cells have no oxygen, we say a person is dead. Well, the brain might die, but the body doesn’t – not really. Our intestines are packed with micro-organisms, digestive enzymes and bacteria, and they don’t die with the cells. When there’s nothing left for those enzymes to digest, what do our organs do? They start to digest themselves. In the end, we are our own flesh eaters.
Ah, decomposition. The classic two-act play. But the final act is drawn out too long. There’s a weathering away of the flesh from the bones, bit by bit, shred by shred. A peck of a beak, the nibble of an insect, a slow disintegration. There’s no grand finale, no great denouement. There’s no bang in our ending, you see; there’s barely a whimper. Only a cry in the night that goes unheard.
19
On the way into Cressbrook next morning, Ben Cooper caught a glint of sun on the cupola of the old mill, where a bell had once summoned labourers to work from their cottages in Apprentice Row. But that was the last glimpse of the sun he would get this morning. Before he reached the mill, the clouds had closed again, and the rain was back.
The roads down here were single track, with passing places cut into the bank where two cars could just get by with care. It called for a good deal of courtesy between drivers, of course. But as long as tourists didn’t park in the passing places to take photographs, the system worked fine.
Cooper was pleased to see that both the former cotton mills in this part of the Wye Valley had been converted into fashionable apartments after years of dereliction. The distance between the two mills was only about three-quarters of a mile, a little more if you followed the loops and weirs of the Wye. Upstream, Litton Mill had been notorious for child exploitation in the nineteenth century, when it was owned by the Needham family. Orphans had been brought from London to work in the mill, and beatings and abuse were rife. In fact, so many children had died that the Needhams sent their bodies to other parishes for burial, to conceal the scale of abuse from the authorities.
Yet Cressbrook had been entirely the opposite, a testament to the enlightenment of a self-educated carpenter. William Newton had built his mill like a grand Georgian mansion, with a village school and rows of pretty lattice-windowed cottages for his workers. But could Newton’s tenants see the blood of his rival’s child apprentices flowing downstream and over the weir? For the sake of residents in the new apartments at Litton Mill, Cooper hoped that the dead slept easy.
There was a hairpin bend above Cressbrook, quite a tricky turning on the way up the steep hill. And a few yards below the bend was the road into Ravensdale. It was tarmacked for part of the way, but only as far as Ravensdale Cottages, the old mill workers’ houses known locally as The Wick. The cottages were tiny, twelve of them in two rows facing each other across a sloping strip of earth. They were built of random limestone, with steps up to the front doors, arched leaded patterns in the windows and Russian vine covering the walls.
The road through Ravensdale was still wet, though the rain had stopped hours ago and the sun was out on the higher slopes. The upper end of the dale was so quiet that Cooper could hear the voices of two rock climbers calling instructions to each other as they clung to the face of Ravenscliffe Crag.
Beyond the cottages, a muddy footpath wound its way further north, heading up into Cressbrook Dale as far as Peter’s Stone, and over to Wardlow. But on the right a track forked off through the fields and followed the stream. Last year’s leaf litter lay in decomposing heaps at the sides of the track, churned into brown sludge by the wheels of passing vehicles.
A group of walkers went by, rustling in their cagoules and waterproof leggings, their boots crunching on the damp stones and splashing in the puddles. All four had their heads down, watching their feet. There was no talking on this stretch. Perhaps they were saving their breath for the climb up the other side of the dale, where the path would be muddy and dangerous.
As Cooper descended the track, the valley sides became lower, the crags disappeared, and the voices of the climbers faded into the background.
In the woods below Litton Foot, the search had resumed. Fry was already there, talking to the anthropologist, but DI Hitchens looked as though he’d arrived only seconds earlier. Swathes of mist hung high in the trees, and water cascaded continuously through the foliage. Before he’d been out of the car long, Cooper’s face was cool with moisture.
‘What’s going on?’ said Hitchens, as Fry picked her way towards them over the uneven ground.
‘The university team are worried about being able to remove the remains intact, because of the way the vegetation has grown through the bones. They say the roots are too strong, and the bones will come apart if they try to move them.’
‘So what are they proposing?’
‘They want to dig down a couple of feet and take the whole thing – top soil and surface vegetation all in one lump – so they can take it apart in the lab without damaging any of the bones.’
‘Can that be done?’
‘They say so. At most, they might have to cut the body in half somewhere along the spine and take it to the lab in two pieces. They’re saying they need to distinguish between any injuries to the bones at the time of death and damage caused by postmortem root growth.’
‘Which do you think is the least costly option?’ said Hitchens.
‘Probably the lab will be cheaper, rather than keeping all these people on site.’
‘We’ll get better results, too,’ called the anthropologist, eavesdropping. ‘If you’re interested in that, at all.’
Hitchens turned away. ‘As long as it’s in their lab,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t like to ask the mortuary to take that sort of mess.’
‘I think we’re going to have to go along with them if we want any results,’ said Fry.
‘Forensic scientists – don’t you think they’re sometimes more trouble than they’re worth? They play hell with our budgets.’
‘Yes, sir. But, unfortunately, they’re the people juries believe these days, not us.’
Cooper discovered that a neighbouring force had loaned a special support dog for the search, one that was trained to find human remains. According to rumour, these dogs practised somewhere in the west of Scotland by locating the corpses of pigs buried in police uniforms. The aroma of decomposing pig flesh was said to be the nearest thing to the smell of human decomposition. But the bit about police uniforms was a joke, surely?
He took a chance to get into conversation with the dog handler. Cooper liked to hear about other people’s specializations. One day he’d probably have to choose one himself. A year or so ago, he’d been assigned to the Rural Crime Unit, and he’d expected it to be the first step towards a transfer. But the subject hadn’t arisen since, and it didn’t do to make enquiries, in case it tempted fate.
‘The dog’s brilliant,’ said the handler. ‘Nose like a radar. She can detect a decomposing body at the bottom of a lake, just by sniffing the bubbles on the surface.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘But it’s not just managing the dog,’ said the handler. ‘Archaeological field techniques can be useful in this job. We’re trained to analyse vegetation and changes to the landscape caused by burials.’
‘How do you do that?’
‘Well, above a grave the vegetation is poisoned at first by too much raw nutrient in the soil. From the corpse, you know.’
‘Yes.’
‘But as time passes, the nutrients break down, and plant growth gets unusually lush. So a very green patch in an area of sparse vegetation can be a clue to the site of a grave.’
Cooper studied the dog handler. The man had a Scots accent, but that didn’t necessarily give credence to the pig rumour. He wasn’t even in uniform, but was wearing a blue boiler suit.
‘That makes sense.’
‘It doesn’t always work, though. We’ve been out to sites where the corpse has only been in place a few weeks, but the soil and vegetation has settled back into place. It’s incredible how quickly that can happen. Then you’ve got a real problem.’
They both gazed down into the woods, where the university team and the SOCOs were still working.
‘Sometimes, you know,’ said the handler, ‘it’s as if the landscape just accepts a body and digests it completely, given time.’
Fry walked across and drew Cooper away from the dog handler. ‘The opinion of the experts is that any missing bones could simply be a natural result of a body being reduced to a skeleton,’ she said, as if he’d asked her the question. ‘No skin and muscle to hold it together. But I still think you’d need to physically separate some of them from the skeleton. Don’t you?’
‘You think someone might have come across the skeleton and decided to take a few trophies instead of reporting it?’
‘It’s a possibility. But you know perfectly well it could also have been somebody who knew the remains were there, and simply waited until the time was right.’