The dead place bcadf-6

by Stephen Booth

  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 openmouthed.

  Murfin nodded. ‘You know, don’t you, Ben? Who needs a demon with a pitchfork, eh?’

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  ‘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. Cooper 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

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  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 microorganisms, 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.

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  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

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  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

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  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.’

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  ‘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.’

  Cooper looked at the German Shepherd sitting quietly by its handler’s side. He thought what the dog did with its nose was better than radar, actually - but he couldn’t think what else to compare it to.

  ‘But it’s not just managing the dog,’ said the handler.

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  ‘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

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  have been somebody who knew the remains were there, and simply waited until the time was right.’

  ‘Who would do that?’

  ‘It would have to be someone fascinated by the process of death.’

  ‘You’re thinking that he might have strangled Audrey Steele after she was dead?’

  ‘Why else would he take the hyoid bone?’

  ‘We don’t know that he took it. We know that it’s missing, that’s all. The anthropologist’s report said it could have been carried away by an animal. A rat or a fox. Or a bird - he said it might have been a bird, too. Diane, that bone could be anywhere by now.’

  ‘He’s been coming back to the body,’ said Fry firmly. ‘If anyone or anything took that bone, it was him.’

  ‘How many people would recognize a hyoid bone if they saw one? How many would even know it exists?’

  But Fry wasn’t going to give in. ‘Anyone with some training in anatomy. In fact, anyone with experience of bodies.’

  For a moment, they watched the university team getting back to work with their spades and the dog quartering the ground lower down the slope.

  ‘Diane, I’ve been thinking abut Tom Jarvis,’ said Cooper. ‘He has four dogs running loose on his property down at Litton Foot. Well, three now. He’s had them a while, too since they were puppies.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘How come none of them alerted him to the presence of a decomposing body a few yards from the edge of his property? Surely the dogs couldn’t have missed the smell, even if he didn’t notice it himself?’

  ‘Was the body exposed to the air during decomposition?’

  Cooper hesitated. ‘When it was found, it was.’

  ‘But it was already skeletonized by then.’

  ‘Yes. The thing is, we’ve been assuming it was exposed to

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  the air the whole time. That would fit in with the time scale, the rapid rate of skeletonization. But in some of the earlier stages, the smell must have been pretty bad. It would have spread over a wide area, especially if it had been carried on the wind. You wouldn’t need a dog trained in locating human remains. Any mutt with a functioning sense of smell would have noticed it.’

  They walked on a few steps, Fry silent as she let Cooper think it through. He stopped and turned towards her.

  ‘On the other hand, if the body was originally covered or wrapped in something, the smell would have been confined, but the rate of decomposition would have been slower.’

  ‘There’s another implication to that,’ said Fry.

  ‘Yes, I know. It would definitely mean that someone returned to the scene - and exposed the body. But the lab didn’t report any indication of postmortem interference with the remains. None that might have been of human origin.’

  ‘We could get the SOCOs to go over the scene again.’

  ‘With a fine tooth-comb this time?’

  Fry put a hand on his arm. ‘With an eye to more recent physical traces, Ben. Last time, they were approaching it as a historic site. They probably thought we were asking them to be archaeologists.’

  ‘Sometimes I reckon they ought to bring back hanging for certain folk,’ said Tom Jarvis when Cooper called at Litton Foot. ‘Or something worse than hanging.’

  Jarvis had been working in a shed at the side of his house. Among the tools inside, Cooper could see a vice and a lathe. The aromatic scent of fresh wood shavings seeped out of the open door.

  ‘Worse, sir?’

  ‘There’s other things they used to do round here, so they say. There was a time when they didn’t mess around with murderers and criminals.’

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  That was a long time ago, Mr Jarvis.’

  Jarvis snorted and beat his hands together to dislodge some curls of pale wood from his work gloves.

  ‘Do you know that big rock on the eastern ridge, near the head of Cressbrook Dale?’

  He pointed up the dale. Just visible in the distance was the isolated limestone outcrop that Cooper had noticed a few days before. From here, it looked almost square, like a broken molar, the last tooth in a mouth crumbling from decay.

  ‘Yes, I’ve noticed it. That’s Peter’s Stone, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, that’s the name it says on the maps,’ said Jarvis. ‘But Gibbet Rock is what it was always call
ed round here.’

  Cooper stared at him as the unexpected words sank in. ‘Did you say “gibbet”? It was called Gibbet Rock?’

  ‘And still is, for those who remember.’

  Jarvis turned back into the shed, starting to pull off his gloves. He looked up in surprise when Cooper took hold of his arm.

  ‘Remember what, Mr Jarvis?’

  ‘Well, they reckon that’s where the last gibbeting took place. That’s what.’

  Cooper dropped his hand, embarrassed by his own response. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Anthony Lingard - that’s what the young chap was called. They hanged him for the murder of the toll-house keeper at Wardlow Mires. Then he was gibbeted at the rock, fastened up in an iron cage where everyone could see him.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘The year of the Battle of Waterloo, they reckon.’

  ‘That was 1815, surely.’

  Jarvis shrugged. The details weren’t important, he seemed to say. It might have happened yesterday.

  ‘Well, something like a gibbeting was a bit of a treat in those days,’ said Jarvis. ‘No telly, you know. So many folk turned out to see Lingard that the local fly-boys set up stalls

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  near the rock. Hotdogs and souvenir postcards, or whatever they had then. It didn’t last, of course.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘When his corpse started to rot, the spectacle lost its novelty.’

  Cooper nodded. In Derbyshire, such pieces of history lived on in the landscape, memorialized in features like Gibbet Rock. The execution of Anthony Lingard could almost have been yesterday. For those who remembered.

  ‘Anyway, you came here for something,’ said Jarvis. ‘I expect you’re busy with more important things than me.’

  ‘Mr Jarvis, you told me that you used to let the dogs run in the woods at one time. Why did you stop them doing that?’