06.The Dead Place

by Stephen Booth

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, treat her with kid gloves and don’t upset her too much. See if you can find some other members of the family who might be easier to talk to. You know what I mean?’

  Cooper nodded. ‘I know what you mean.’

  ‘Diane,’ said Cooper when they’d left the DI’s office, ‘I don’t think you’re doing yourself any favours with the DI, or with Mr Kessen either. You didn’t seem to give Dr Kane’s views any respect.’

  Fry slapped her notebook down on her desk. ‘Have you ever killed anyone, Ben?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Nor me,’ said Murfin from the next desk. ‘I’ve thought about it a few times, obviously.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you, Gavin.’

  ‘What’s your point?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘My point is, if none of us have ever killed anyone, how can we possibly know what it feels like?’

  ‘We can’t. Not really.’

  ‘And Dr Rosa Kane? Do you think she’s ever killed anybody?’

  ‘I’ll run a check on the PNC, if you like, and see how many murder convictions she has.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Ben. It was a hypothetical question.’

  Murfin laughed. ‘Please dispose of your hypotheticals safely, in the interests of the staff.’

  Fry glared at him, but he kept his head down. Cooper thought of the legend of the Gorgon, whose gaze could turn you to stone if you looked at her face. Gavin must have read that story. He rarely met Fry’s eye these days.

  ‘The point is,’ she repeated, ‘even the precious Rosa doesn’t know what it’s like to kill someone. Despite all her theories, she can’t actually tell us what goes on in a killer’s head, how he feels before and after the act. Let alone during.’

  ‘She must have talked to a lot of convicted murderers,’ said Cooper.

  ‘And do you think any of them told her the truth about their crimes? The clever ones will have told her what they thought she wanted to hear. The less clever ones couldn’t articulate a complex emotion if their lives depended on it.’

  ‘Which sometimes it does,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Fry. ‘Sometimes it does.’

  ‘And in the meantime, all we can do is rely on the expertise of someone like Dr Kane. Theories may be all we have.’

  ‘But we don’t have to take them as gospel,’ said Fry. ‘Just because somebody once wrote a thesis for their doctorate expounding their own theories, everyone takes that as proof. It may be all we have, but we don’t have to assume it’s all there is.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There may be reasons for killing that no psychiatrist has ever thought of.’

  Cooper threw his hands in the air and let his pen fall on the desk. ‘Well, if that’s the case, we’re in the shit, aren’t we? A killer we can’t identify planning the death of a victim we don’t know for reasons we can’t imagine. That’s just great.’

  Fry didn’t answer. But Murfin’s response was to raise his hand and drop his own pen on his desk with a loud clatter.

  ‘Hey, are we giving up?’ he said. ‘Throwing in the towel? Does this mean I can go to the pub?’

  Fry stood up, her body tense. ‘What I’m trying to do here is encourage a bit of independent thinking. It would be nice to hear a few ideas that haven’t been borrowed from some so-called expert. I’d like to see open minds from my team, not a ragbag of second-hand psychoanalysis and sociological mumbo-jumbo. Is that so difficult to understand?’

  Cooper and Murfin tried to look suitably chastened. ‘OK, Diane,’ said Cooper.

  He watched her leave the room. It wasn’t clear where she was going. Probably just to stamp up and down the corridor swearing under her breath.

  ‘There were some big words in that last bit,’ said Murfin.

  Cooper picked up his pen. ‘She’s right, though, Gavin.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But it’s like telling jokes, isn’t it? Some people know how to be right. And others don’t.’

  Then Fry came back into the room to answer her phone. Her face changed as she listened, and she looked at Cooper.

  ‘That was your idea, too – the new search at Litton Foot,’ she said.

  ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘I don’t know whether you’d call it a problem or not. They’ve just found some more bones.’

  18

  Fry had expected dense undergrowth, a thick covering of trees on a steep slope, to make the location inaccessible. But the new site was just above the tree line. There were plenty of rocks, though – thousands of them scattered across the hillside in both directions, clustering downwards as far as she could see. There was no pattern to the rocks, no logic to the way they’d tumbled and come to rest. Many had weathered over the years into smooth, hunched shapes. They covered the hillside like a vast flock of deformed sheep lying asleep or dead in the cold shadows of the north-facing slope.

  Yes, there were certainly a lot of rocks. Even so, it seemed incredible that a body could have lain here unnoticed for so long.

  She looked around for the crime scene manager. Wayne Abbott was there, already watching her. When Fry gestured, he came towards her slowly, picking his way among the stones.

  ‘Yes, it’s north-facing,’ he said, as if reading her thoughts. ‘There will never be enough sun on this slope to show details from a distance. If you were standing across the other side of the valley there, you could look for as long as you like, but see nothing unless it moved. These rocks must create all kinds of deceptive shapes, and a lot of interplay of shadows. Very misleading to the eye.’

  ‘And would nobody ever walk across the slope itself?’

  ‘Not unless you had a particular reason to. It’s difficult going, as you can see. You’d break an ankle very easily.’

  ‘So how the hell did the killer get the body down here?’

  ‘He didn’t carry it, that’s for sure.’

  Abbott was sweating inside his scene suit, though the weather was cool. Fry could see two trickles of perspiration starting at his temples and clinging to the black bristles on his jawline. She wasn’t sure why she disliked him so much. She could only explain it as an instinctive reaction. Wayne Abbott certainly wouldn’t have been her choice for a supervisor. But he had the qualifications and experience, so here he was.

  The CSM pointed up the slope to where the rocks formed a fissured cliff.

  ‘I’d imagine there are two possibilities. One, the victim fell from the cliff up there. Or was pushed, as I’m sure you were about to suggest. If that was the case, we should find structural damage to the bones. But the second possibility is that the victim might have come to this spot – voluntarily or otherwise – while still alive.’

  ‘And died right here?’

  Abbott laughed. ‘In either scenario, the victim died right here. The question is how they died, and why.’

  ‘That’s two questions,’ said Fry.

  But he took no notice. ‘Did they die suddenly, or slowly?’ he said. ‘Accidentally or deliberately? By misadventure, or … with assistance?’

  ‘Are you planning to give us the answers, Wayne? Or do you just like asking rhetorical questions?’

  ‘I suppose you think you know all the answers yourself, Sergeant?’

  ‘No,’ said Fry. ‘But I do know what the questions are, thanks all the same. By the way, the smallest trace evidence from this location might be crucial, so …’

  ‘No, don’t tell me – you want us to go over the scene with a fine tooth-comb.’ Abbott wiped the sweat from his face. ‘Well, I’ve got news for you lot in CID. We don’t get issued with tooth-combs any more, fine or otherwise.’

  ‘OK, OK. Just do your best, will you?’

  Abbott began to walk away. ‘Do our best? Gosh, I’d never have thought of that.’

  Ben Cooper was crouching among the weathered stones, staring at a damp patch of soil. He was out of sight, and he wasn’t sorry. He couldn’t hear details of the co
nversation between Fry and Abbott, but he recognized Fry’s tone of voice even at this distance. Her rising irritation wasn’t directed at him for once, and he was happy to keep it that way for a while.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t take Fry long to find him.

  ‘Jesus, everybody thinks they’re an expert, don’t they?’ she said.

  ‘Well, that’s what they are, Diane. PhDs with specializations in skeletal biology or human genetics. You’ve got to respect their knowledge.’

  ‘I don’t mean the scientists, Ben. I mean the bloody SOCOs.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Fry looked around, breathing deeply. ‘What are those buildings across the valley?’

  Cooper had already checked. But perhaps it wouldn’t do for him to look too much like an expert.

  ‘According to the map, the nearest place to us is Fox House Farm, and the one further over is Hunger House. But it doesn’t look as though either of them has been used as a farm for a long time. Most of the buildings have been demolished, and the land around them is planted with mature trees.’

  ‘Hunger House? What sort of name is that?’

  ‘A hunger house was a building where cattle were kept before slaughter. The old custom was to starve animals for a while before they were killed.’

  Fry said nothing to that. She didn’t need to. Her views on the barbarities of rural life were well known.

  ‘They’re on the Alder Hall estate,’ said Cooper. ‘I suppose they were tenant farms at some time, but the landowner must have decided to evict his tenants and plant woodland. Timber was more profitable, I expect. That plantation is marked on the map as Corunna Wood.’

  ‘Corunna? Who was he? Another local hobgoblin?’

  ‘I think it’s a town in Spain where there was a famous battle.’

  Fry’s expression told him he might be showing off too much knowledge again. But she steered rapidly away from history as a topic.

  ‘What are you looking at down there, anyway?’

  ‘This stone,’ said Cooper. ‘It hasn’t been in this position long.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘The grass is still green underneath. It bleaches and dies after a few days if it’s covered over like this.’

  ‘How many days?’

  ‘I couldn’t say.’

  ‘You’re good on observation, Ben, but you always seem to fall down on details.’

  ‘I’m not Sherlock Holmes,’ said Cooper. ‘We need to ask an expert.’

  ‘An expert in dead grass – why not?’ Then Fry sighed. ‘A hunger house. God, what next?’

  A team from Sheffield University were unloading equipment – shovels and trowels, wire mesh screens for sifting bone fragments from the soil, evidence bags, tape measures and orange markers. One of the students had already used a video camera to record the position of the remains from every angle before the team approached it.

  The forensic anthropology group from the university provided services to many police forces in excavating and analysing skeletal remains. Some of the team had even worked for the United Nations, investigating mass graves.

  Under the supervision of the forensic anthropologist, the team began sieving soil from around the remains. They would be trying to locate fragments of bone, personal items, anything that had been dropped or didn’t belong in the area.

  Cooper stood looking down at the tangle of bone and vegetation, half concealed under the edge of a rock. There was no skull visible, but it could be further down, of course. Until the remains were separated from the earth and plant growth, it was impossible to judge the position of the body, or whether it was intact. Some items had already been photographed, bagged and tagged, and he picked up a bag containing a bone. It felt strangely light in his hand.

  ‘Ben, what do you think the “flesh eater” is?’ said Fry, breaking into his thoughts.

  Cooper waved a hand around the dale. ‘Perhaps Professor Robertson was right when he talked about limestone, Diane. This whole area is limestone. The entire landscape could be the flesh eater.’

  Fry nodded. ‘It’s a possibility.’

  ‘What do you bet some of the bones are missing from this body, too?’ said Cooper.

  ‘You think the killer might have taken trophies?’

  ‘I don’t know. But if we find them in his possession, it’s fairly conclusive evidence, isn’t it? He does seem to be a very careful killer. Meticulous, even. My feeling is that he won’t have made many mistakes, if any.’

  Around the place where the body had lain and decomposed were patches of earth stained different shades. They marked where the victim’s body fluids had drained out.

  Cooper felt a surge of anger, thinking of Audrey Steele lying out in the open in just this way, abandoned to the elements. And now here was another body waiting for a face and a name, another identity to be reconstructed from almost nothing.

  But there wouldn’t be much more achieved tonight. It would soon be dark, and the activity around him was aimed at securing the scene for the night, ready for an early start in the morning. A vehicle manoeuvring in the woods already had its headlights on.

  Then Cooper saw a movement on the opposite hillside. A figure was walking along the skyline, dark and indistinct against the grey cloud. Maybe there was a public footpath up there, he wasn’t sure. The figure kept moving, but Cooper was certain the eyes were turned towards Litton Foot and the unusual activity below. That would be natural, of course. Any passer-by would be curious. But wouldn’t it be more natural to stop and look, to puzzle for a while over the white scene suits and the police Land Rover reversing over the ridge? This walker did none of those things, but scanned the area efficiently in a few seconds, before vanishing behind a rocky outcrop.

  Fry had seen the figure, too. ‘He’d be miles away before we could get to him,’ she said. ‘If that’s what you were thinking.’

  ‘When I saw him, I was wondering if the killer came back here to check on progress,’ said Cooper. ‘And what about the smell?’

  ‘There was no one here to smell it, Ben.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  He studied the hillside again. In an open location like this, the scent would have travelled. What were those gases produced by decomposition? Hydrogen sulphide and methane? They’d have drifted away from their source on any available air currents, forming cones and pools of scent, like invisible markers of death in the landscape. Depending on the weather, the smell might have lingered for days, or weeks. But wind and rain would have dissipated it quickly, so that anyone passing within a few yards of the remains might have noticed nothing. What a pity this wasn’t dog-walking country.

  Then Cooper frowned and looked back down the hill towards Litton Foot. Tom Jarvis’s house wasn’t visible from here. It was in the bottom of the dale, and the woods were thick in between. But Jarvis’s dogs had run in those woods before the new fence had gone up, hadn’t they?

  Or rather, one of his dogs had.

  Then one of the SOCOs called Cooper over to the edge of a patch of bracken a few feet from the location of the remains. ‘Look at this –’

  ‘What have you found?’

  ‘See for yourself. But don’t get too close.’

  Cooper moved a little nearer. ‘It’s a gin trap,’ he said.

  ‘It looks a bit rusty. I don’t suppose it’s in working order.’

  ‘It’s meant to look like that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re supposed to let a trap develop a coating of rust to disguise it. It gives the steel a neutral smell, so as not to put animals on the alert.’

  The trap was fixed into position with a chain and metal stake, and a band of spring steel was anchored to the base at one end. Fry walked over to see what was happening as Cooper pointed to the steel plate at the other end.

  ‘See, only the trigger plate is galvanized,’ he said. ‘That needs to be thin to keep its weight down. And the catch is made from brass to prevent it rusting to the foot p
late. But everything else is rusted over. That’s just the way you want it.’

  ‘How do you know so much about traps?’ asked Fry. ‘They’re illegal, aren’t they?’

  Cooper shrugged. ‘You learn this kind of thing by osmosis when you grow up in the countryside.’

  ‘So you understand how it works?’

  ‘It’s very simple. To set the trap, you compress this spring, which allows the jaws to open, and a catch closes over them. When you release the spring again, the upward pressure of the jaws holds the trigger plate in position, see? An animal comes along and steps on the plate, releasing the catch. The spring snaps the jaws shut on its leg. The whole thing happens in about a twentieth of a second.’

  Fry flinched. ‘It’s barbaric.’

  ‘That’s why it’s illegal.’

  ‘Obviously, that doesn’t stop people using them. How does an animal get out of the trap?’

  ‘It doesn’t. Once the jaws close, they’re locked in position by the collar. They can’t just be forced open – you have to depress the spring again. Animals don’t know that, and they’re not physically capable of it anyway. That’s why they sometimes end up chewing their own legs off to escape.’

  ‘I don’t suppose there’s any way of identifying the owner of this thing?’

  But Cooper shook his head. ‘There might be fingerprints, I suppose. But this is quite an old trap. See – it has a bow spring. That type tends to lose its springiness when it’s left set for long periods, or if it gets too corroded. Trap manufacturers dropped it years ago in favour of coil springs.’

  He hunted on the ground until he found a stick.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Fry.

  ‘Setting the trap off. It’ll be safer. Somebody is bound to get their hand in it, otherwise.’

  Cooper pressed on the trigger plate with the end of the stick. Instantly the jaws snapped shut, biting deep into the wood and shredding the bark.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Fry.

  Though Cooper tugged on the stick again, the trap stayed firmly attached to the ground.

  ‘Nice, isn’t it? And now your prey is helpless, all you have to do is come along at your convenience and finish it off. The trap was probably left by a farmer or gamekeeper with a fox problem.’