06.The Dead Place

by Stephen Booth

  Cooper nodded. A reconstruction couldn’t be used as proof of identification, but it did act as a stimulus for recollection. The accuracy of the image might not be as important as its power to attract media attention and get the eye of the public. Any ID would have to be confirmed from dental records or DNA.

  ‘There’s a fifty per cent success rate,’ said Lee. ‘You might be lucky.’

  Cooper accepted a set of photographs from her and added them to the file. It immediately felt thicker and more substantial. Reference DE05092005, also known as Jane Raven Lee, five feet seven, with shoulders like a swimmer. A bonny lass.

  ‘Thank you, you’ve been a big help,’ he said.

  Lee smiled at him again. ‘Good luck.’

  But as he left the laboratory and went out into the Sheffield drizzle, Cooper wondered if he was imagining too much flesh on the unidentified woman now. It could be an emotional reaction to compensate for what he had actually seen of her, those last few shreds of skin on the faded bones.

  Her biological identity had been established, at least. Now the anthropologist and the forensic artist were passing the responsibility back to him. He had to find out who Jane Raven really was.

  Twenty-five miles away, in the centre of Edendale, Sandra Birley had stopped to listen. Were those footsteps she could hear? And if so, how close?

  She turned her head slowly. Echoey spaces, oil-stained concrete. A line of pillars, and steel mesh covering the gaps where she might hurl herself into space. A glimpse of light in the window of an office building across the road. But no movement, not on this level.

  Sandra clutched her bag closer to her hip and followed the stairs to the next level. At night, multistorey car parks were the scariest places she knew. During the day, they were made tolerable by the movement of people busy with their shopping bags and pushchairs, fumbling for change, jockeying for spaces amid the rumble of engines and the hot gust of exhaust on their legs. But after they’d gone home, a place like this was soulless and empty. Drained of humanity, even its structure became menacing.

  She pushed at the door to Level 8, then held it open for a moment before stepping through, her senses alert. Not for the first time, Sandra wondered whether she ought to have worn shoes with flatter heels, so she could run better. She fumbled her mobile phone out of her bag and held it in her hand, gaining some reassurance from its familiar feel and the faint glow of its screen.

  This was a night she hadn’t intended to be late. A last-minute meeting had gone on and on, thanks to endless grandstanding from colleagues who wanted to show off, middle managers who didn’t want to be seen to be the first going home. She’d been trapped for hours. And when it was finally over, the Divisional MD had taken her by the elbow and asked if she had a couple of minutes to go over her report. Why hadn’t he taken the trouble to read it before the meeting? But then, why should he, when he could eat into her personal time, knowing that she wouldn’t say no?

  Her blue Skoda was parked at the far end of Level 8. It stood alone, the colour of its paintwork barely visible in the fluorescent lights. As she walked across the concrete, listening to the sound of her own heels, Sandra shivered inside the black jacket she wore for the office. She hated all these ramps and pillars. They were designed for machines, not for humans. The scale of the place was all wrong – the walls too thick, the roof too low, the slopes too steep for walking on. It made her feel like a child who’d wandered into an alien city. The mass of concrete threatened to crush her completely, to swallow her into its depths with a belch of exhaust fumes.

  And there they were, the footsteps again.

  Sandra knew the car park well, even remembered it being built in the eighties. Some feature of its design caused the slightest noise to travel all the way up through the levels, so that footsteps several floors below seemed to be right behind her as she walked to her car.

  She’d experienced the effect many times before, yet it still deceived her. When it happened again tonight, Sandra couldn’t help turning round to see who was behind her. And, of course, there wasn’t anyone.

  Every time she heard the sound of those footsteps, she turned round to look.

  And every time she looked, there was no one there.

  Every time, except the last.

  Wasn’t it Sigmund Freud who said that every human being has a death instinct? Inside every person, the evil Thanatos fights an endless battle with Eros, the life instinct. And, according to Freud, evil is always dominant. In life, there has to be death. Killing is our natural impulse. The question isn’t whether we kill, but how we do it. The application of intelligence should refine the primeval urge, enrich it with reason and purpose.

  Without a purpose, the act of death has no significance. It becomes a waste of time, a killing of no importance, half-hearted and incomplete. Too often, we fail at the final stage. We turn away and close our eyes as the gates swing open on a whole new world – the scented, carnal gardens of decomposition. We refuse to admire those flowing juices, the flowering bacteria, the dark, bloated blooms of putrefaction. This is the true nature of death. We should open our eyes and learn.

  But in this case, everything will be perfect. Because this will be a real killing.

  And it could be tonight, or maybe next week.

  But it will be soon. I promise.

  2

  Melvyn Hudson had decided to do this evening’s removal himself. He liked a fresh body in the freezer at the end of the day – it meant there was work to do tomorrow. So he called Vernon out of the workshop and made him fetch the van. Vernon was useless with the grievers, of course. He always had been, ever since the old man had made them take him on. But at least he’d be where Hudson could keep an eye on him.

  The vehicle they called the van was actually a modified Renault Espace with black paintwork, darkened windows and an HS number plate. Like the hearses and limousines, the van’s registration number told everyone it was from Hudson and Slack. Your dependable local firm.

  They were dependable, all right. Bring out your dead – that might be a better slogan. Sometimes Melvyn felt like the council refuse man arriving to pick up an old fridge left on the back doorstep. Nobody worried about what happened to their unwanted rubbish. Their disused fridges could pile up in mouldering mountains on a landfill site somewhere and no one would be bothered, as long as they didn’t have to look at them. Most people were even more anxious to get a corpse off the premises.

  A few minutes later, Vernon drove out on to Fargate, hunched over the steering wheel awkwardly, the way he did everything. Hudson had sworn to himself he’d get rid of Vernon if he messed up one more thing, no matter what old man Slack said. The lad was a liability, and this firm couldn’t afford liabilities any more.

  Hudson snorted to himself as they drove through the centre of Edendale. Lad? Vernon was twenty-five, for heaven’s sake. He ought to be learning the business side of things, ready to take over when the time came. Some chance of that, though. Vernon was nowhere near the man his father had been. It had to be said that Richard had done a poor job of shaping his son. Not that there’d be a business much longer for anyone to run.

  When they reached the house in Southwoods, Hudson asked the relatives to wait downstairs. There was nothing worse than having distressed grievers watching the deceased being manhandled into a body bag. If full rigor hadn’t set in, the corpse tended to flop around a bit. Sometimes, you’d almost think they were coming back to life.

  This corpse was an old man, shrunken and smelly, with a bubble of grey froth on his lips. He wasn’t quite cold yet, but his skin felt like putty, flat and unresisting. Hudson thought that if he poked a finger hard enough into the man’s stomach, it would sink right in until it touched his spine.

  Vernon was standing by the bed like an idiot, his arms hanging at his sides, his mind on anything but the job.

  ‘What’s up with you?’ said Hudson.

  ‘Melvyn, when you do a removal like this one, don’t you ever notice the
little things in a person’s bedroom?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Just the little things. Look, there’s a glass of water he’s only half drunk. There’s a razor here that somebody used to shave him with this morning. It’s still got some of his hairs on it, even though he’s dead.’

  ‘Of course he’s bloody dead,’ said Hudson, struggling to keep his voice down. ‘What do you think we’re doing here?’

  ‘Don’t you look at those things, Melvyn?’

  ‘No. It’s just a job. We’re professionals.’

  ‘But don’t you sometimes think … Well, while all this stuff is lying around, it’s as if he’s not really dead at all. He’s still here in the room.’

  ‘For God’s sake, leave off the thinking, Vernon, and get a grip on this stiff.’

  Hudson took the knees of the corpse, while Vernon grasped the shoulders. An arm lifted and a hand flapped, as though waving goodbye.

  ‘Watch it, or he’ll end up on the floor,’ said Hudson. ‘The family down there are doing their best to pretend they don’t know what’s happening. An almighty thump on the ceiling will ruin the illusion.’

  They got the body on to the stretcher and began to negotiate the stairs. These old cottages were always a problem. The doorways were too narrow, the stairs too steep, the corner at the bottom almost impossible. Hudson often thought that people must have been a lot smaller when they built these houses – unless they lowered corpses out of the window on the end of a rope in those days.

  They loaded the stretcher into the van, then Hudson went back into the house, smoothing the sleeves of his jacket. It wasn’t his funeral suit, of course, just his old one for removals. But appearances mattered, all the same.

  ‘Now, don’t worry about a thing,’ he told the daughter of the deceased. ‘I know your father was ill for some time, but it always comes as a shock when a loved one passes over. That’s what we’re here for – to ease the burden and make sure everything goes smoothly at a very difficult time.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Hudson.’

  ‘There’s only one thing that I have to ask you to do. You know you need to collect a medical certificate from the doctor and register your father’s death? The registrar will issue you with a death certificate and a disposal certificate. The disposal certificate is the one you give to me.’

  ‘Disposal?’ said the daughter uncertainly.

  ‘I know it seems like a lot of paperwork, but it has to be done, I’m afraid.’ Hudson saw she was starting to get flustered, and gave her his reassuring smile. ‘Sometimes it’s best to have lots to do at a time like this, so you don’t have time to dwell on things too much. We’ll give your father a beautiful funeral, and make sure your last memories of him are good ones.’

  The daughter began to cry, and Hudson took her hand for a moment before leaving the house.

  Back in the van, Vernon reached for the pad of forms under the dashboard.

  ‘Leave the paperwork,’ said Hudson. ‘I’ll do it myself.’

  ‘I know how to do it, Melvyn.’

  ‘I said leave it. You just concentrate on driving.’

  ‘Why won’t you let me do the forms?’

  ‘Oh, shut up about it, Vernon, will you? You get the best jobs, don’t you? I let you drive the van. I even let you drive the lims.’

  ‘I’m a good driver.’

  Hudson had to admit that Vernon was quite a decent driver. But everyone liked driving the limousines. You got to hear some interesting stuff from the grievers in the back. They didn’t care what they said on the way to a funeral, and especially coming back. They gave you a different view of the deceased from what the vicar said in his eulogy. Vernon was the same as everyone else – he liked to earwig on the grievers. But if he was going to go all moody and yonderly on a removal, it was the last straw.

  A few minutes later, they drew up to the back door of their own premises, got the body into the mortuary and slid it into one of the lower slots of the refrigerator. Even Vernon would have to admit a corpse was just a thing once it was removed from the house, away from the half-drunk glass of water and the hair on the razor. There was no other way to think about it, not when you did the things you had to do to prepare a body – putting in the dentures, stitching up the lips, pushing the face back into shape. It never bothered Hudson any more. Unless it was a child, of course.

  ‘Watch it, don’t let that tray slide out.’

  Vernon jerked back into life. His attention had been drifting, but so had Hudson’s. Even at this stage, it wouldn’t do to spill the body on to the floor.

  Vicky, the receptionist, was in the front office working on the computer, but there were no prospects in, no potential customers. The last funeral was over for the day, though the next casket was waiting to go in the morning, and one of the team was already attaching the strips of non-slip webbing to hold wreaths in place.

  Hudson knew that some of the staff thought he fussed too much. They sniggered at him behind his back because he got obsessed about timing, and was always worrying about roadworks or traffic jams. But he wanted things to be just right for every funeral. It was the same reason he spent his evenings on the phone to customers, advising them on what to do with their ashes, getting feedback on funerals, hearing how the family were coping.

  It was all part of the personal service. And personal service was Hudson and Slack’s main asset. Probably its last remaining asset.

  Ben Cooper drove his Toyota out on to the Sheffield ring road, just beating a Supertram rattling towards the city centre from Shalesmoor. Technically, he was off duty now, but he plugged his mobile into the hands-free kit and called the CID room at E Division to check that he wasn’t needed. He didn’t expect anything, though. In fact, it would have to be really urgent for somebody to justify his overtime.

  ‘Miss is in some kind of meeting with the DI,’ said DC Gavin Murfin. ‘But she didn’t leave any messages for you, Ben. I’ll tell her you checked in. But I’m just about to go home myself, so I wouldn’t worry about a thing.’

  ‘OK, Gavin. I’ve hit rush hour, so it’ll take me about forty minutes to get back to Edendale anyway.’

  Brake lights had come on in front of him as scores of cars bunched at the A57 junction. A few drivers were trying to take a right turn towards the western suburbs of Sheffield. But most seemed intent on crawling round the ring road, probably heading for homes in the sprawling southern townships, Mosborough and Hackenthorpe, Beighton and Ridgeway. Some of those places had been in Derbyshire once, but the city had swallowed them thirty years ago.

  ‘Gavin, what’s the meeting about?’ said Cooper, worried that he might be missing something important. Everything of any significance seemed to happen when he was out of the office. Sometimes he wondered if Diane Fry planned it that way. As his supervising officer, she wasn’t always quick to keep him informed.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ said Murfin. ‘She didn’t tell me. I’ve got some files to give her, then I’m hoping to sneak away before she finds another job for me to do.’

  ‘There’s no overtime, Gavin.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  Cooper had come to a halt again. Clusters of students were standing near him, waiting for the tram to re-emerge from its tunnel under the roundabout. They all wore personal stereos or had mobile phones pressed to their ears. The main university campus was right across the road, and he could make out the hospital complexes in Western Bank. The one-way system in central Sheffield always baffled him, so he was glad to be on the ring road. He didn’t want to stay in the city any longer than necessary.

  ‘I don’t suppose you fancy going for a drink tomorrow night?’ said Murfin.

  ‘Don’t you have to be at home with the family, Gavin?’

  ‘Jean’s taking the kids out ice skating. I’ll be on my own.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry. Not tomorrow.’

  ‘You’re turning down beer? Well, I could offer food as well. We could have pie and chips at the pub, or go
for an Indian. The Raj Mahal is open Wednesdays.’

  ‘No, I can’t, Gavin,’ said Cooper. ‘I’ve got a date.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A date.’

  ‘With a woman?’

  ‘Could be.’

  At last, Cooper was able to take his exit, turning right by the Safeway supermarket and the old brewery into Ecclesall Road. Ahead of him lay a land of espresso bars, Aga shops and the offices of independent financial advisors. In the leafy outer suburbs of Whirlow and Dore, the houses would get bigger and further away from the road as he drove into AB country.

  ‘Are you still there, Gavin?’

  Murfin’s voice was quieter when he came back on the phone.

  ‘I’m going to have to go. Miss has come out of her meeting, and she doesn’t look happy. Her nose has gone all tight. You know what I mean? As though she’s just smelled something really bad.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  ‘So it looks as though I’ve blown it. I just wasn’t quick enough.’

  ‘Good luck, then. Speak to you in the morning.’

  Cooper smiled as he ended the call. Murfin’s comment about Diane Fry had reminded him of the forensic anthropologist’s report on the human remains from Ravensdale. The details in the document had been sparse. Like so many experts’ reports, it had seemed to raise more questions than it answered. But he’d made a call to Dr Jamieson anyway, mostly out of optimism. In the end, there was only one person whose job it was to find the answers.

  ‘The nasal opening is narrow, the bridge steepled, and the cheekbones tight to the face. Caucasian, probably European. An adult.’

  ‘Yes, you said that in your report, sir.’

  ‘Beyond that, it’s a bit more difficult. We have to look for alterations in the skeleton that occur at a predictable rate – changes in the ribs where they attach to the sternum, or the parts of the pelvis where they meet in front. We can age adults to within five years if we’re lucky, or maybe ten. So you’ll have to take the age of forty to forty-five as a best guess.’