06.The Dead Place

by Stephen Booth

  ‘You have no other brothers or sisters?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then presumably you’ll inherit your father’s share of the business some day.’

  Natalie laughed. ‘Will I? I doubt it somehow. I don’t know if my father has made a will or not, or who he intends to leave his half of Hudson and Slack to when he dies. Probably my mother will take over the reins herself. Female funeral directors are becoming quite fashionable these days. I don’t know what will happen when the old man dies, either.’

  ‘Abraham Slack?’

  ‘Yes. There’s Vernon, of course. But Dad doesn’t think much of Vernon, as you might have noticed.’

  ‘I got the impression that he doesn’t regard Vernon as a potential business partner,’ said Cooper.

  Natalie laughed. ‘You have a way with understatement, don’t you? It’s quite sweet.’

  Cooper felt himself starting to blush. He’d never hear the last of this from Fry.

  ‘I must try to get the chance to talk to Vernon himself some time,’ he said, as he began to put his notebook away.

  ‘Good luck. He isn’t very communicative.’

  ‘He fits in OK at the firm, though, doesn’t he?’

  Natalie shrugged. ‘On his own terms. Nobody goes out of their way to make Vernon feel as though he belongs. Especially not my dad. If Vernon ever had the idea that he might become a sort of substitute son to my dad, then he soon got a rude awakening. Dad didn’t see things that way. Once David was gone, he was gone, and nobody else has ever mattered to Dad. Yet you ought to hear him sometimes, when he’s talking to bereaved families. All the stuff he spouts about families turning to each other for support in their time of need. Oh, he’s full of advice then, all right. It’s enough to make you feel sick.’

  As if on cue, the door opened and Melvyn Hudson came back into the room. He looked surprised to see his daughter still there, and then surprise gave way to anger, which was rapidly controlled and disappeared from his expression.

  ‘I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,’ he said. ‘Death happens at the most inconvenient times, as I’m sure you know. Has my daughter been keeping you entertained?’

  ‘Yes, we’ve had a very interesting conversation,’ said Fry.

  ‘Oh? Well, Natalie probably has other things to do. So if there’s anything else I can help you with, I do have a few minutes.’

  Fry stood up. ‘Actually, I think we have all that we need for now, Mr Hudson,’ she said.

  Cooper was caught off guard and was a bit slow getting to his feet.

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Hudson.

  ‘We’ll be in touch, if necessary. But there are quite a number of other enquiries to make.’

  Hudson followed them to the door. Cooper had a sudden, irrational urge to walk past the big ornate mirror in the hallway with him, to see if Hudson was reflected in the glass.

  ‘Just one thing, Mr Hudson,’ he said. ‘Have you ever been to Alder Hall?’

  ‘No, I don’t believe so.’

  ‘Or visited the grounds for any reason?’

  ‘Not that I can recall.’

  When they got to the car, Cooper turned to Fry. ‘Why did you do that?’ he said. ‘Hudson hadn’t told us anything at all. We never got round to asking him the important questions.’

  ‘Do you think he would have told us the truth?’

  ‘Well, no.’

  ‘So what was the point? Now we’ve left Mr Hudson with the impression that his daughter may already have told us what it was we wanted to know. It’s obvious they don’t trust each other an inch. I’m going to leave him worrying about that for a while, and he might be more forthcoming when we tackle him again.’

  ‘That’s sneaky.’

  Cooper started the car and they drove back towards West Street.

  ‘How does inheritance law stand?’ he asked. ‘What if Melvyn Hudson hasn’t made a will – who would actually inherit?’

  ‘I think it would have to go to probate,’ said Fry. ‘There’s some complicated formula the courts use to share out any part of the estate that isn’t willed to a specific individual. There are probably other beneficiaries entitled to a share.’

  ‘But Natalie Hudson would be a principal beneficiary, wouldn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure she would. But she doesn’t want the business. She has no interest in it.’

  ‘She might want the money,’ said Cooper. ‘If there’s one of the big American corporations lurking in the wings to snap up Hudson and Slack, Natalie could find herself suddenly very well-off.’

  ‘Mmm. Especially if Abraham Slack could be tempted to part with his share, too.’

  ‘Well, his beneficiary would be Vernon, surely? I wouldn’t fancy the idea of Vernon Slack running my business, would you?’

  ‘No.’ Fry looked thoughtful. ‘I wonder if that’s what it says in Abraham’s will.’

  ‘These family-owned businesses do produce a lot of problems. It’s the way feuds start. Bad enough when it’s all within the same family, must be worse when there are two families involved. The founders may have got on together perfectly well, but it doesn’t mean subsequent generations will.’

  Ben Cooper’s phone was ringing as he walked into the office. He snatched it up, his head still full of images of furtive funeral directors and unidentified coffins slipping into the flames.

  ‘At last,’ said a voice. ‘I didn’t think anybody was going to answer. I thought you must all be out fighting crime.’

  ‘Who am I speaking to?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘My name’s Mead. David Mead.’

  ‘What can I help you with, Mr Mead?’

  ‘I thought it was you lot that wanted help from me.’

  ‘Was it?’ Cooper frowned. A lot of names had accumulated in the enquiry already, but he was sure he hadn’t heard this one before. He wrote it down on his desk pad, but it didn’t look any more familiar. ‘David Mead, did you say?’

  ‘That’s right. But you might know me better as Dangerous Dave.’

  27

  ‘Petrus Two isn’t actually my cache, you understand,’ said David Mead. ‘But I know it well. And I’ve got a few of my own in this area. Some of the best, if I say so myself.’

  Dangerous Dave wasn’t quite what Cooper would have expected. He was a tall, athletic man in his thirties, with his hair cropped very short. He could have been a police officer, but he explained that he was a fireman based in a station on the outskirts of Sheffield. He liked to spend his off-duty time walking in the Peak District, and had been fascinated to hear from a friend that there was a sport where he could use his GPS unit as well.

  ‘But you do know the person who left this particular cache, Mr Mead?’ asked Fry.

  ‘Oh, yes. He’s OK. He’s been a geocacher for years. I’ve met him a few times, but I think he’s on holiday at the moment.’

  ‘All right. And what about these other people?’

  She passed Mead a list of names transcribed from the log book left in the cache. He looked through it, nodding occasionally. ‘They’re all familiar names. Some of them I’ve met. The rest I’ve seen posting their reports on the website, or signing in other log books.’

  ‘You’d say they were all genuine, er … geocachers, then?’

  ‘Yes, I would. It’s quite a small community in the sport. We tend to know each other.’

  ‘What about the items that people put into a cache? What’s the protocol?’

  ‘We do have some rules. Common sense, really. No explosives, ammunition, knives, drugs or alcohol. Nothing illegal. Oh, and food items are always a bad idea – animals will chew through the box and destroy the cache. So most people leave small toys, novelty items, perhaps a CD or a book, stuff like that.’

  ‘And what is this exactly?’ asked Fry, holding up the bag containing the purple grasshopper with its metal tag.

  ‘A hitchhiker.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Or, if it has a Groundspeak tag, a Travel Bug.�
�

  ‘Yes, it does.’

  ‘Well, a hitchhiker is an item that you can move from cache to cache,’ said Mead. ‘There’s a candle that has travelled from Australia to Arizona, and a Mr Potato Head that hops from cache to cache all over the place. With a Travel Bug, you can track your hitchhiker’s travels through the website.’

  ‘And all this is done with the help of GPS?’

  ‘A good GPS unit can give you an approximate location within around six to twenty feet, as long as it isn’t located somewhere really inaccessible where you need specialist equipment. But you don’t need to know all the technical jargon. All you need to be able to do is to enter a waypoint.’

  ‘And when you reach the co-ordinates and locate a cache, you open it up to make an entry in the log book?’

  ‘Sometimes you have to wait for muggles to get clear of the area,’ said Mead.

  ‘Muggles?’

  ‘Members of the public. Non geocachers. Usually hikers or mountain bikers, just passing by on a footpath or trail. But now and then they can do something infuriating, like settling down near a cache site to have their lunch. You can’t open a cache while they’re there, because it gives the location away to muggles. You either have to sit it out and wait for them to go, or move on to another site.’

  ‘Aren’t muggles the non-wizards in the Harry Potter books?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘It’s the same sort of thing, really.’

  ‘People who aren’t in the know and have to be kept out of the secret?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Fry sighed. ‘And in addition to making an entry in the log book, do I understand that the normal practice would be to take an item from the cache?’

  ‘Only if you put something else in to replace it,’ said Mead. ‘That’s the rule. Otherwise it’s TNLN.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, you’ll have to explain that.’

  ‘TNLN: Take Nothing, Leave Nothing.’

  TNLN. Cooper liked that idea. It was a good motto for anyone visiting the national park, where the number of wild flowers picked illegally was exceeded only by the amount of litter left behind. Visitors were constantly urged to take only photos and leave nothing but footprints. If only it were so simple.

  ‘Would you be able to find out for us who left these items?’ asked Fry.

  Mead pulled a face. ‘Some of them. Maybe not all.’

  ‘If you could try …?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Particularly this, sir,’ she said, holding up one of the bags.

  ‘A skeleton key-ring. Glow in the dark, is it?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yes, we’d like a list of caches in the area. Their names particularly.’

  ‘Well, that’s easier. But what area? There must be sixty caches within ten miles of Petrus Two.’

  ‘Within three miles,’ said Fry, ‘will be fine.’

  *

  ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about this body-swap scenario,’ said Cooper, after David Mead had left. ‘It doesn’t make any practical sense, does it?’

  ‘What do you mean, Ben?’

  ‘Well, think about it. Put yourself in the position of an individual who’s ended up with a body on his hands, for whatever reason.’

  ‘A murderer, you mean?’

  ‘Not necessarily. It could have been an accident.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘Well, whatever. But you have a dead body on your hands, right? You have to find some way of disposing of it.’

  ‘And your friend the manager of the crematorium won’t play ball?’ said Fry. ‘If we believe what Christopher Lloyd told us, that conversation with Richard Slack could well have been the first attempt at disposing of the body. But when Lloyd said “no”, some other means had to be found.’

  ‘Exactly. And you’re someone who has access to the chapel of rest at the funeral director’s, where you know there’s another body already casketed up, ready to be cremated next morning.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘So you take your body back to the shop and you do the changeover. On your own, that would be a difficult thing to achieve, but perhaps not impossible. I guess they have trolleys and so on. It would take time, though, and a lot of physical effort. You’d have to tidy up and make sure everything looked in order for the funeral next morning. And then you’d have to put the legitimate body back into your vehicle, wouldn’t you?’

  Fry frowned. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, what have you achieved with all that work and effort? Not to mention the risk? The fact is, you still have a dead body to dispose of. In practical terms, you’re back to square one.’

  ‘You think he went to all that trouble for nothing?’

  ‘It seems like it, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I think he’s far too clever to have done something like that for no good reason.’

  ‘Well, he had a different body, that’s all. Why didn’t he just dispose of his original victim in the woods instead of poor old Audrey Steele?’

  ‘One good reason – there was something about the other body he needed to conceal. Probably some evidence of the way the victim died, a clue that would lead directly back to him. He put that evidence permanently beyond retrieval, by means of cremation. On the other hand, Audrey Steele’s body bore no evidence that could incriminate him.’

  ‘But surely he must have known that once we identified her remains, it would take us straight to the doors of Hudson and Slack?’

  Fry nodded. ‘I think he was relying on two things. Firstly, that we might never be able to identify her, even if she was found. The longer she remained undiscovered, the more remote our chances. If it hadn’t been for the accuracy of the facial reconstruction –’

  ‘And a bit of persistence,’ said Cooper.

  ‘OK, OK – and your persistence.’

  ‘What’s the second thing?’

  ‘Well, we might have been led to the doors of Hudson and Slack, but after all this time, how can we possibly hope to prove which member of staff was responsible for swapping the bodies? Any forensic evidence is long gone or contaminated beyond recovery. And the more time passes, the fainter the memories of potential witnesses.’

  ‘And some of them might have left in the meantime. We’re going to have to track them all down,’ said Cooper.

  ‘It’ll be difficult to justify the time and resources for an exercise like that, Ben, when there are more pressing cases to be dealt with.’

  ‘I was afraid you might say that.’

  ‘If we had an easier, quicker lead to follow up, it would be different. Possibly our only real hope is that a member of staff noticed something wrong at the time. Or had their suspicions, at least.’

  ‘And that they’re willing to share what they know with us,’ said Cooper. ‘Which isn’t exactly a given.’

  ‘No. But without that, he might well get away with it. Suspicions are nothing without evidence. And in this case, we have no evidence at all. You know, sometimes you hear of a murder enquiry with no body. This is the first case I’ve ever known where we have a body – but it’s the wrong one.’

  ‘It’s got to be that way, hasn’t it? Too many people would notice if there was no corpse in a coffin sent for cremation.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So someone removed Audrey Steele’s body and put another in its place. Dangerous Dave would approve of that.’

  Fry stared at him. ‘What?’

  ‘If you’re going to take an item from a cache, you must leave something to replace it. Those are the rules of the game.’

  ‘The rules of the game. Right.’

  Cooper thought of the mourners standing round the green burial site the day before to say farewell to the remains of Audrey Steele. Many of them had looked baffled to be attending another funeral for the same person, as if they’d just discovered that a human being could die twice over and everything could be even worse the second time round.

  ‘Some game, thoug
h,’ he said.

  The Slacks lived in Miller’s Dale, among the winding loops of the River Wye. Cooper knew that these middle stretches of the Wye could be surprisingly remote. From Lees Bottom, the route of the main A6 swung away from the river for a few miles before the roads converged again near Topley Pike. In between, the limestone dales were accessible only by narrow back roads or by hiking through the woods on riverside paths.

  A railway line had once skirted the valley sides, in the days when the mills had been working. Now, apart from some disused tunnels, all that was left of the line in Miller’s Dale was a double viaduct rising high above the road. It came as a surprise to Cooper every time he saw it. The bridge and its massive iron supports seemed to leap suddenly out of the trees cloaking the narrow valley.

  A sharp turn opposite the church took him past the back of the Angler’s Rest and into a dark lane alongside the Wye. Cooper drove beneath limestone cliffs and negotiated a flooded stretch of road to reach the hamlet of Litton Mill, where he found Greenshaw Lodge. It had been an engine house once, part of the mill complex. But progressive demolition of the older mill buildings had left the house isolated on the lower slopes among the trees.

  As Cooper pulled up in front of the Slacks’ house, he saw a man standing on the doorstep. He was in his seventies probably, tall and lean, with the same slightly ungainly look that Vernon had. The old man didn’t seem to be waiting for anybody, just standing looking at nothing in particular. When he heard the engine, he turned to stare at Cooper’s car with a bemused expression.

  ‘Mr Abraham Slack?’

  ‘Come in,’ said the old man without even asking who he was. Cooper thought of giving him some security advice about identifying visitors before he let them into the house, but decided it wasn’t the time.

  One wall of the sitting room was exposed stonework. Two arches led to the dining room and a breakfast kitchen with Shaker-style wall units. Outside, three steps led to a gravel path which went all the way down the garden. A neatly mowed lawn was broken by recently clipped hedges.

  ‘I sold my own house and moved here to be with Vernon,’ said Abraham, putting the kettle on to make tea in the automatic way of local people. ‘He looks after me now.’