06.The Dead Place

by Stephen Booth

  He’d been right about the weather getting in. A rotten timber cracked as soon as it took his weight, and part of the remaining roof tilted inwards. Tiles slithered and cascaded on to the ground, taking Cooper with them. He managed to cling to the branch just long enough to gain some control of his fall, then he landed in a crash of broken stone.

  He sat up, patted his pockets to find his torch and shone it around the interior of the building as he brushed the dust off his clothes. Cooper ran the beam along one wall, then the next. He stopped near the opening into the larger room and moved the torch back a few inches, not quite sure of what he’d seen the first time.

  ‘Oh God, how do I get out of here again?’

  Inside the abandoned building, the roots of an oak tree had burst through the broken floor like a tangle of snakes. Brambles lay thick on the stones. And blades of grass grew sick and pale through the eyes of the skull.

  ‘McGowan is saying nothing, except he’s blaming Richard Slack,’ said Fry when she broke off the interview to brief the DI. ‘Crucially, he won’t reveal where Audrey Steele’s body was delivered to. His evidence will be critical in that respect.’

  Hitchens had rolled back his shirt cuffs to wipe the condensation off his window. The outside was just as wet, as the rain had been falling again for the past three hours.

  ‘On the basis of the toxicology report, it looks as though the body had been partially embalmed,’ he said.

  ‘That might have been done to keep the body fresh. On the other hand, I understand it’s becoming more and more common for funeral directors to carry out some cosmetic embalming as routine.’

  ‘So it might not be significant?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you think the body went to Professor Robertson, I suppose?’ said Hitchens.

  ‘I’m sure of it. Who else could it be?’

  The DI squeaked his chair anxiously, seemed about to answer, then changed his mind.

  ‘What’s your strategy, Diane?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m going to leave McGowan to stew for a bit, then I’m going to let him see that I know he’s lying.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘The body they put in the coffin in place of Audrey Steele’s. We know it wasn’t human.’

  ‘Not human?’

  Fry realized she hadn’t told Hitchens about the anthropologist’s findings, so she brought him up to date.

  ‘Unbelievable,’ he said.

  ‘It seems all too believable in the present enquiry. It’s almost as if these experts create problems for us, instead of helping us solve them.’

  ‘No indication what kind of animal?’

  ‘Not yet. They need the opinion of another expert for that, apparently. A different discipline. And more delay while they find someone who’s available and the evidence is shuttled around the country.’

  ‘A pity.’ Hitchens squeaked again, and Fry decided she’d bring in a can of Three-in-One for him tomorrow, if she could remember.

  Then the DI sifted among the papers on his desk for a report.

  ‘What’s this?’ said Fry.

  ‘The second set of remains from the hillside near Ravensdale. All that fuss about lifting the skeleton and getting it to the lab intact, and it turned out it wasn’t intact in the first place.’

  Fry held the report in her hand, reluctant even to look at it. ‘What do they say?’

  ‘The remains are mostly non-human. Apart from a few small bones, the majority are porcine in origin.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was part of a pig, Diane.’

  She put the report back on the desk, placing it carefully among the other papers, as if she wanted to hide it, or pretend that she’d never heard of its existence.

  ‘What about Geoff Birley?’ she said.

  ‘We’re going to let him wait a bit longer, too.’ Hitchens hesitated. ‘Diane, we can’t place Birley anywhere near the locations where those phone calls were made. He can produce witnesses to his whereabouts on all three occasions.’

  Fry sighed. ‘It doesn’t really surprise me. He never struck me as the type.’

  ‘Don’t forget to let DC Cooper know about any progress with McGowan, will you?’ said Hitchens.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Where is Cooper, by the way?’

  ‘He’s off duty.’

  But Fry realized that it wasn’t actually an answer. On or off duty, Ben Cooper could still be working the case.

  ‘Fox House Farm,’ said Cooper when he got through to Fry on his mobile. ‘Remember it?’

  ‘In the plantation across the valley. What was it called?’

  ‘Corunna Wood. The Beatrix Potter book was a clue.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Tale of Mr Tod. “Tod” might mean death in German, but look at the cover of the book, Diane. I don’t know how I could have forgotten.’

  ‘Forgotten what?’

  ‘“Tod” is also the country word for a fox. That’s what Beatrix Potter’s Mr Tod is – a fox. And this is where he lives, at Fox House. Or rather, this is where he dies.’

  ‘Ben, I don’t really know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Never mind. But I think I’ve found your dead place.’

  ‘You have? Is there any sign of Freddy Robertson?’

  ‘His BMW is parked near the Slacks’ house.’

  ‘And the Slacks themselves?’

  ‘Nowhere to be seen. You’ve been to Robertson’s place, Diane – have you seen any sign that he possesses a firearm? Maybe a shotgun?’

  ‘No. But, Ben – you say you’ve found the dead place?’

  Cooper looked at the skull. The skeleton lay inside a limestone building, exposed to the air, not so much as a shred of desiccated flesh left on its gleaming bones. Something had picked it perfectly clean. Something that might be called a flesh eater.

  ‘Yes, Diane. I think this is it.’

  35

  When Fry arrived at Greenshaw Lodge, four uniformed officers had gathered on the steps near the back of the house, their torches playing across the ground. They were wearing yellow jackets with white glowing strips, like figures from a ghost train. One of them was talking into his radio, calling for the medical examiner and specialist support.

  ‘What have you found?’ she said.

  ‘A body, Sergeant. Quite a fresh one. Dead no more than an hour or two, we reckon. The clothes are barely wet.’

  ‘Any ID?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  Fry stepped to the edge of the pool of light created by the officers’ torches. The body lay on its side, the left cheek pressed into the grass, hanks of grey hair tangled and damp on the neck. Life had gone from the face, the eyes were open and staring. But she could see as much as she needed to.

  ‘I know who it is. It looks as though death came a bit closer than he expected, after all.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The victim is known to us,’ she said. ‘His name is Professor Frederick Robertson.’

  ‘Are you sure, Sarge?’

  ‘Certain.’

  While the officer using his radio relayed the information to Control, Fry looked at one of the other men behind the torchlight.

  ‘Do we have any idea how he died?’

  ‘It looks as though he was shot.’

  He directed the beam of his torch on to the ground near the professor’s shoulder. Fry saw the oily gleam of congealing blood, the dark stains of a man’s life draining into the earth. For a moment, she didn’t know what to say. Then a phrase came into her mind, a phrase so appropriate that it could almost have been spoken in Robertson’s own voice.

  She turned away from the officer’s puzzled face and gazed into the darkness.

  ‘Caro data vermibus,’ she said. ‘Flesh given to the worms.’

  Ben Cooper thought of the old Datsun in Tom Jarvis’s damp paddock, the clumps of grass pushing through its corroded floor. The paddock and this building in the woods seemed to be worlds apart at firs
t glance. But they had a similar atmosphere, forsaken and lifeless, the result of their human use. Both places had the feeling of somewhere that had been turned into a graveyard.

  Then Cooper shook his head. No, not a graveyard. That wasn’t right. There had been no attempt at burial here, only prolonged exposure of the corpse to the air, a sacrifice to the destructive effects of the Peak District climate. This building couldn’t be considered a graveyard. But it might be called a charnel house. A dead place.

  Near the skull lay a large stone, which he’d dislodged when he fell. Cooper remembered the stone on the hillside at Ravensdale. The grass had been pale green underneath it, recently covered over. But the underside of this stone and the ground it had been lying on were swarming with wood lice. Their grey shapes scurried in all directions when he turned it over.

  As a child, Cooper had known the tiny crustaceans as coffin cutters. He imagined the name must have originated in one of those rural beliefs around death. Wood lice liked the dark and the damp, they were associated with dead and rotting vegetation. They were like flat little tanks, with legs that protruded from overlapping armoured plates. But he’d been told that the reason wood lice sought the dark and damp was because their bodies weren’t watertight. They dried up and died when they were exposed to the air.

  Straightening up, Cooper backed away from the skeleton towards the wall. With some difficulty, he located a couple of toe holds where the crumbling mortar had left gaps between the limestone blocks. Stone dust and fragments of mortar cascaded down the wall, dislodged by his boots. He winced, hoping he wasn’t doing too much damage to the scene. He’d never hear the end of it, if he was.

  Finally he saw the tree branch close above his head and was able to reach it to help himself up to the top of the wall. He scrambled over the edge and slid back down into the undergrowth. Beyond the woods, he could hear the occasional sound of an engine. For a moment, one of them seemed very close, but it stopped and he wasn’t sure. Distances could be very deceptive.

  Cooper took a few steps away from the building into the overgrown weeds, intending to wait under the trees. But before he’d gone three yards, he felt something give way beneath his foot with a metallic snap. For a split second, he felt only the instinctive fear of an unseen danger. There was no time for his muscles to respond.

  Then steel jaws slammed shut on his ankle, biting hard from both sides, their teeth sinking in deep. He staggered, thrown off balance by the sudden loss of use of his right foot. Then the impact was followed by pain, and he could feel the jaws gnawing deeper with the slightest movement. Driven by its powerful spring, the trap had caught him just above the top of his boot, penetrating his trousers and socks and puncturing the soft flesh with vicious ease.

  Cooper collapsed in the grass, gasping at the jolt of agony as the metal teeth moved sideways, tearing at him like the blades of a saw. He fumbled desperately at his foot, found the jaws of the trap and felt the rusted metal, already slick with his blood. It was an old-fashioned animal trap, shaped like a clamshell and sprung by his weight on a strip of steel lying in the grass.

  After a few minutes of fruitlessly trying to prise the teeth from his ankle, Cooper felt his fingers slipping on the metal, and knew that his hands must be covered in his own blood. He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself so he could think clearly. If he was right about what type of trap he was caught in, it would be impossible to open the jaws without depressing the spring that powered them. Somewhere, there ought to be a chain and metal stake holding the trap to the ground, and a spring lever to force back the jaws.

  He wiped his hands on the grass, thinking too late of the possibility that there might be another trap nearby. Then he tried to roll over to bring his arms nearer to the trap, only to be driven back by the agony that shot through his leg. He could feel his foot starting to swell, his boot growing tighter and tighter against the damaged flesh.

  After a brief rest, he tried again, but more slowly this time. He edged over on to his side and inched bit by bit across the ground until he could reach the base of the trap. He was sweating by now. When he wiped a hand across his forehead, he wasn’t sure whether the slipperiness he felt was perspiration or blood, or a mixture of both.

  His mobile phone had fallen in the grass a few feet to the right. He could reach it. It would hurt, but he could reach it. He’d charged the phone up in the car, as he always did. And it had only fallen in grass, so it wouldn’t be damaged. He thought he could even see the faint glow of the display.

  Cooper nearly blacked out from the pain, but he knew his fingers were almost touching the phone. He breathed deeply, trying to clear his vision of the swarms of black specks, and the dark tide that was creeping in from the edges.

  But maybe he’d lost too much blood and he was hallucinating. A slow rumble that he’d been hearing for a few seconds came closer, and stopped. A motorbike? It was followed by a rattle and the creak of a hinge. But then came a long silence, and he almost decided that it was an illusion – until he saw movement in the long grass, and heard a faint swish coming towards him, steadily getting nearer.

  Two dark shapes appeared at the edge of his vision, and he blinked to try to make them go away. But that only made the specks swarm more quickly. If they were a pair of feet in black boots, he’d have heard more than their swish through the grass, more than the distant whisper of breath far above him. He’d have heard reassuring words, a call for help, or someone speaking his name. There would have been something.

  Consciously trying to ignore the dark shapes, Cooper began to edge his fingers further across the grass. He had almost touched the phone, when suddenly it was gone. A movement came down out of the sky, and the phone was gone.

  Cooper groaned. And then he lay listening to the swish of someone passing back through the grass towards the trees, gradually moving further away from him, further away with his only means of summoning help.

  After all the photographs had been taken, Diane Fry bent over Robertson’s body and went through his pockets. She took out his wallet, an address book, an opened letter, car keys and a mobile phone. Finally, she pulled out a blue plastic card with lettering superimposed over a red heart. She showed it to DI Hitchens, who had just ducked under the tape of the inner cordon.

  ‘An organ-donor card. Why did he have this on him, I wonder?’

  ‘You’re supposed to carry those things with you,’ said Hitchens. ‘Otherwise, they’re not much use. Who does he give as his next of kin? His daughter?’

  Fry turned the card over. ‘Well, well. It says: “In the event of my death, contact Mr Vernon Slack.” Full name and signature. And it says he wanted his organs to be used for the treatment of others.’

  Hitchens studied the body. ‘It’s a bit late for that. He’s beyond being any use to anybody.’

  ‘But surely he wasn’t related to Vernon Slack?’

  ‘You don’t have to give the name of a family member. It can be a friend, or a colleague.’

  ‘Just a friend. OK.’

  ‘Bag the card with the rest of the stuff, though. There might have been more to the relationship between them than we think.’

  Fry nodded. As she slid the organ-donor card into an evidence bag, she read the slogan in white lettering across a bright red heart: I want to help others to live in the event of my death. Well, you couldn’t really wish for more than that from your death. No matter what you’d done during your life.

  Cooper looked up and saw Vernon Slack standing over him with a rifle. Staring at the end of the barrel, he thought of the bullet wound in Tam Jarvis’s dog, Graceless. Tears were running down Vernon’s face.

  ‘Who have you killed, Vernon?’ said Cooper.

  Something moved and glittered in Vernon’s eyes. Then it was gone again instantly. It was as if two black beads had rolled over, revealing their glistening cores for a second.

  ‘It doesn’t matter now,’ he said. ‘I might have killed someone, I might not. It’s all the same in the
end.’

  Cooper thought of Abraham Slack. The old man had moved to Greenshaw Lodge so that Vernon could take care of him. But the phrase ‘take care of’ was open to a different meaning. The house hadn’t seemed a welcoming place, not the sort of home you’d expect to rest in and be looked after. Instead, it had felt sparse and cold, more like a house that someone was preparing to leave.

  He tried to sit up, forgetting the rifle, or the fact that it might be more sensible to keep still.

  ‘Where’s your grandfather?’ he said.

  But Vernon only stared at him ‘You aren’t very clever. You’re not clever enough, and you’re too slow. If you’re stupid, you’ll get beaten.’

  Cooper closed his eyes, trying to make sense of what was being said. There was something surreal about the situation. Maybe it was the pain in his foot or the loss of blood that was making him light-headed and strangely unafraid. But he didn’t feel threatened by Vernon, despite the firearm in his hands.

  ‘You told us to look for “the dead place”, didn’t you?’ he said.

  At first, Vernon seemed not to hear him. His attention was focused on the building where the white bones lay gleaming in the darkness with a curious fluorescence. He shifted the rifle under his arm until the barrel was pointing at the skull. It was as if he feared the dead more than he did Cooper.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But, like everyone else, you were looking in the wrong direction.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Vernon coughed, and turned weary eyes back to Cooper.

  ‘You’re still being stupid. The dead place isn’t a building, or a location in the landscape. It isn’t in the physical world at all.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘The dead place …’ said Vernon, a sudden blockage choking his throat, ‘the dead place is in other people’s hearts.’

  Then the barrel of the gun swung upwards and Vernon turned quickly, his heels squealing in the wet grass.

  That was the sound Cooper would remember most clearly for weeks afterwards. It seemed to be the only thing that made sense for a while. In his memory, the squeal went on for a long time, rising to a shrill scream, high-pitched and inhuman. Then there was a loud roar and a flash, and Vernon had disappeared.