06.The Dead Place

by Stephen Booth

  On an impulse, Cooper pulled into the parking area. There were a couple of visitors’ cars under the trees, but no one in sight. The rain was keeping people at home. He collected his waterproof from the back seat and locked the Toyota.

  At intervals along the trail were big, deeply-carved figures made from some reddish-brown wood – a sinister-looking owl, a reclining sheep. At the top of the slope, where an abandoned quarry had been converted into a picnic area, he came across a larger-than-life carving of a sleeping lead miner in his boots, muffler and flat cap. The miner’s eyes were closed, his right arm rested on his hammer, and his hand clutched a beer mug.

  The carving overlooked the road. But when he moved a little higher up the slope, Cooper could see across the fields to the east – a vista of enclosed pasture land with sheep scattered across the landscape like snow. Some of the stone walls looked much too close together. Like the land at Wardlow, these fields retained their medieval shapes, the long narrow strips that were so impractical for modern farming methods. Beyond the Litton road, Alder Hall itself wasn’t visible. But its boundaries were clearly marked by the woods, those plantations created by generations of Saxtons.

  Cooper remembered one chore he hadn’t done yet, and he looked up Madeleine Chadwick’s number on his mobile.

  ‘Detective Constable Cooper, Mrs Chadwick. I visited you on Saturday to talk about –’

  ‘Yes, I remember you.’

  ‘Oh, you do? Thank you. Well, I’m sorry to bother you, but there’s just one thing I wanted to ask you, about the bones in the crypt …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I realize it was before your time, but I wonder if you know where exactly on the estate the bones were found?’

  ‘Oh, it was some distance from the hall, beyond the parkland. I believe one of the tenant farms had become vacant, and it was decided to plant trees on the land. One of my ancestors wanted to take advantage of the demand for timber, I suppose.’

  ‘Would that have been Corunna Wood?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Chadwick. And I don’t suppose you’ve remembered anything about the man who came asking about the crypt? No? Well, never mind. Thank you for your help.’

  Cooper finished the call. The geography and the lack of direct roads in this area were very deceptive. Everything was so close together really, when you could see it – Ravensdale and Tom Jarvis’s place at Litton Foot; Alder Hall and the dense woods on this side of the water; and the austere house where Vernon and Abraham Slack lived, down by the river in Miller’s Dale. There was no distance between them at all.

  On his way back to the parking area, he caught sight of a sign below the trail: Stream polluted, don’t drink or paddle. Curious, he made his way down to the edge of the water. He found huge plants growing in the boggy ground, almost choking the stream. Some of them seemed to be a sort of giant rhubarb, but others were the same purple-stemmed monsters he’d seen growing at Litton Foot, the stuff like ten-foot-high cow parsley. He made a mental note to find out what they were some time.

  Cooper got his OS map out of the car. It didn’t have Fry’s six-mile zone on it, but he could remember pretty much where it ran. Did the clues in the phone calls really mean anything? Why had the caller led them to Peter’s Stone? Was he trying to mislead them, just having a joke at their expense? Or had they misunderstood his meaning completely?

  Fry’s interpretation of the second message suggested Wardlow as a starting point, moving west towards the Gibbet Rock and Litton Foot, where Audrey Steele’s remains had been found. But the line about the flesh eater remained unexplained.

  Moving west? Cooper recalled his first visit to Freddy Robertson’s house. The professor had described the traditional funeral procession entering a churchyard from the eastern gate and following the direction of the sun to the grave.

  He dialled Fry’s number, hoping she was there for once.

  ‘Diane, that Beatrix Potter book,’ he said when she answered. ‘Did you have scenes of crime check it for fingerprints?’

  ‘Yes, but there’s nothing.’

  ‘Shame.’

  ‘One thing I found out, though, and quite by accident. One of the SOCOs speaks a bit of German.’

  ‘German? Are they all doing Open University courses down there, or what?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. But you know the Beatrix Potter book is called The Tale of Mr Tod?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Our educated SOCO pointed out that “Tod” is the German word for death.’

  Cooper stared at the carved owl at the entrance to the car park. ‘Amazing,’ he said. ‘It fits, though.’

  ‘Unfortunately, it doesn’t get us anywhere. As a clue, it’s a dead end. So to speak.’

  ‘By the way, I ran into Maurice Goodwin,’ said Cooper. ‘Remember him, Diane? He’s the man who was supposed to have been keeping an eye on Alder Hall until he fell out with John Casey. He turns out to be Tom Jarvis’s brother-in-law. It makes sense – he lives nearby, so he was on hand if there were any problems.’

  ‘And were there?’

  ‘Well, Mr Goodwin knows about the lampers. He says he spotted them on the estate a couple of times. He wanted to report it, but Casey wouldn’t let him.’

  ‘Is that what they fell out about?’

  ‘I think it started from there. There used to be an ATV kept in one of the outbuildings up there for Mr Goodwin to use, so he could get round the whole estate. But Casey took it off him, so he was pretty much restricted to keeping an eye on the house after that.’

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘I think Mr Goodwin had his suspicions about Casey,’ said Cooper. ‘And if he’s anything like his brother-in-law, he won’t have hesitated to express his opinion. I don’t think Casey would have liked that.’

  ‘The old personality clash.’

  ‘Mmm. I wonder whether John Casey is involved in something more than just providing access to a gang of professional lampers.’

  ‘Ben, where exactly are you?’ asked Fry suddenly.

  ‘Near Tideswell.’

  ‘Isn’t that close to where the Slacks live? What are you doing in that area?’

  ‘I was thinking of visiting the Slacks again. Look, I think Vernon is very frightened. I think Hudson and McGowan have systematically terrorized him until he’s terrified of talking to anybody. That suggests Vernon knows something, doesn’t it? Something of interest to us.’

  ‘I agree with the last part at least.’

  ‘I wonder if he thinks they’re going to kill him. It could have been Vernon who made the phone calls.’

  ‘It doesn’t work, does it? If he wanted us to know he was in danger, why not just come forward and tell us? What’s the point of making a mystery of it? Besides, the caller seems to be suggesting he’s the killer, not the victim.’

  Cooper bit his lip in frustration. ‘Vernon hasn’t been in work today, you know. McGowan told me he called in sick.’

  ‘Yes, I got your message.’

  Then he caught the worried tone in her voice. ‘Diane, do you think Vernon’s at risk?’

  ‘Yes, Ben. But I don’t think the risk to him is from Hudson or McGowan. I think it’s from your friend Professor Robertson.’

  Cooper listened as Fry told him about Lucy Somerville. Then he finished the call and unlocked the car. He was thinking there were too many dead ends in this enquiry, and not just The Tale of Mr Tod. Too many dead people, too, for that matter. Audrey Steele, Sandra Birley, Richard Slack, a set of unidentified remains. Death from natural causes, death by accident. Dead and gone. Dead, and never called me mother.

  It was only then that Cooper remembered the sparseness of the rooms in the Slacks’ house, and the reason struck him. There wasn’t a thing in the place that could have been identified as belonging to Vernon’s parents. Someone had removed all traces of Richard Slack from his old home.

  33

  ‘You want a search warrant for Professor Robertson’s hous
e?’ said DI Hitchens, squeaking his swivel chair anxiously. ‘What are your grounds?’

  Fry reported her interview with Lucy Somerville, while the DI listened with increasing concern, a frown creasing his forehead deeper and deeper. She’d brought Gavin Murfin in with her, too, but he listened without surprise as she related the worries expressed by the professor’s daughter.

  ‘And then I got one of the support officers to see if he could find these websites and any indication of Robertson’s activities on them,’ said Fry.

  ‘What were you hoping for, Diane?’

  ‘I wondered how far Professor Robertson’s interest in death goes exactly. How close does he want to get to the real thing?’

  Fry remembered Freddy Robertson standing in the churchyard at Edendale, admiring the memorials and telling Ben Cooper that body snatchers had never operated in Derbyshire. It had seemed to mean nothing at the time. But Fry knew the stories about body snatchers, just as everyone did. They’d existed only because they had customers willing to pay for illicitly obtained corpses.

  ‘What are you saying?’ asked Hitchens.

  ‘It’s incredible, the things you can find on the internet these days.’ She looked down the list she’d been given. ‘Death Online, The Death Clock, The Charnel House, oh, and something called Corpse of the Week.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  Fry grimaced. ‘I took a look at that last one. You need a strong stomach, believe me. It’s an archive of photographs – mostly stuff taken from mortuaries, crime scenes, that sort of thing. No details spared.’

  ‘This is a UK site?’

  ‘Yes. But the contributions are from around the world – pictures of Polish autopsies, executions in Afghanistan, the remains of Chechen suicide bombers.’

  ‘Is it legal?’

  ‘I think so. It’s not as if you could stumble on something by accident. You have to choose which pictures you want to see. But it depends how the photos have been obtained, I suppose. To me, a lot of them look like scans from official files. Mortuary assistants and crime scene photographers sharing their best work with the world.’

  ‘What’s “The Death Clock”?’ asked Murfin.

  ‘It’s a site that lets you enter your personal details – age, height, weight, whether you’re a smoker or not. And then it predicts the date you’ll die.’

  ‘Oh, great.’

  Hitchens looked at Fry with interest. ‘Did you try it out?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And …?’

  ‘The eighteenth of April 2040.’

  She could see them both working it out, just as she’d done herself. How long she had left, what age she would be when she died. And how many years she’d be able to enjoy her police pension, if she ever made it to her thirty.

  ‘The Death Clock gives you your remaining time in seconds,’ she said. ‘It counts them down as you watch.’

  ‘It’s rubbish, though, isn’t it?’ said Murfin.

  ‘I suppose you might say it’s a bit of fun.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Anyway, look at these photographs Robertson submitted to Corpse of the Week.’

  ‘Hold on, how do you know he submitted them?’ said Hitchens.

  ‘The email address of the contributor is given. The professor left us his card with his contact details on, including his email address. He calls himself thanatos, of course.’

  Hitchens studied the photos carefully. ‘Pretty gruesome.’

  ‘Where would you say they were taken, sir?’ said Fry.

  ‘Well, this one is in a mortuary somewhere – not ours, but it could be the Medico Legal Centre in Sheffield. And the next one is certainly a crime scene. The victim has gunshot wounds.’

  ‘Suicide, according to the caption. What about the other two?’

  ‘I can’t tell. Not a mortuary, anyway. The lighting’s all wrong.’

  ‘I agree. But the body has been carefully laid out, so they’re not scene photos either.’

  ‘What do the captions to these say?’ asked Hitchens.

  ‘One for the necros.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘As you can see, they show a female corpse, but with no signs of violence. It isn’t Audrey Steele, thank God.’

  The DI looked at her sharply. ‘You think that’s something to be grateful for?’

  Fry looked down, but said nothing.

  ‘A funeral director’s preparation room,’ said Hitchens. ‘It’s got to be.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘We ought to find out whether Robertson has any connection with Hudson and Slack.’

  ‘We can do that.’ Fry took the photographs back. ‘Yes, they might have been taken in the preparation room at a funeral director’s, but I’m not convinced. I’m wondering if there might be a similar room in the basement of an Edwardian gentleman’s residence.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Professor Robertson’s home at Totley.’

  ‘I see.’ Hitchens began to spin his chair again. ‘Diane, this isn’t evidence. It’s speculation. You need something more substantial.’

  ‘Well, we also came up with this –’ Fry handed him two pages of closely printed text. ‘It’s an article written by Professor Robertson and published on one of the thanatology websites.’

  Hitchens ran his eye over the pages. ‘It looks deadly stuff to me.’

  ‘I’ve highlighted the relevant paragraphs for you, sir.’

  ‘So you have.’

  Fry watched Hitchens read, and saw the recognition dawn on his face. She hadn’t been sure whether he’d make the connection immediately. He hadn’t listened to the tapes of the phone calls as often as she had. He didn’t know the phrases by heart, the way she did.

  But, as she watched him, she knew exactly the words that her DI was reading from Freddy Robertson’s website article.

  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 well we do it. Without a purpose, the act of death has no significance.

  For once, the flashing green light on the answering machine gave Cooper a little surge of pleasure as he walked into his flat. He pressed the button and listened to the recording before he even took his jacket off or paid attention to the cat.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said the voice. ‘It’s Robertson here.’

  Cooper stopped quite still in the middle of the room. Robertson? Professor Robertson? It must be, yet his voice sounded quite different. He’d lost the heartiness completely. Complacency and smugness had gone. Instead, he sounded weary and dejected. And, somehow, very small.

  ‘I, er … that is, I have something I need to tell you,’ said Robertson. ‘I hope you don’t mind my calling you at home, but you gave me your number. And, well, there is something …’

  There was a pause on the recording. Cooper found himself listening for background noises, the way he’d listened to the tapes of the mystery caller. But there was nothing. No traffic, no voices raised in the opening verse of ‘Abide With Me’. Only the faint whisper of the professor’s breathing, slow and uncertain.

  ‘Strangely, it’s the one thing we never discussed,’ said Robertson. And now there was a hint of his old self again, the man Cooper had spent so much time listening to. Just a suggestion, but it was there – a sly, ironic taunting that had become all too familiar.

  He moved towards the answering machine, thinking the message had ended. But not quite. There was one more thing the professor had to say.

  ‘You don’t even have to ask me the right question,’ he said. ‘This information is gratis. I owe you this.’

  Cooper played the recording again. The professor sounded in a bad way. Not just eccentric or strange any more, but disturbed. He had seemed a little too close to the edge.

  The call
had been made well over an hour ago, when Cooper had been talking to Tom Jarvis. But Robertson hadn’t left his phone number. Probably he’d just forgotten, since he seemed so distracted. Cooper dialled 1471 for Caller ID, but a recorded message told him the caller had withheld his number. It was almost as though the professor was still taunting him. I’ve got something to tell you. But you’re never going to be able to ask me what it is. Ah, what a lark. He wondered whether Robertson had permanent number withhold on his phone, or if he’d prefixed his call with 141 specially to make life difficult for Cooper.

  Never mind. He had the professor’s number in his book. It wasn’t a problem. But before he rang, Cooper played the message a third time, listening carefully to the voice, trying to judge whether it was sincere, what the underlying emotion was, how unstable the professor might have become. Shaking his head, he dialled the number.

  Twenty miles away, in a refurbished Edwardian house on the outskirts of Sheffield, Professor Robertson’s phone began to ring. But the oak front door had already closed, a key had turned in the lock, a car started up in the drive. The house was empty.

  And now it was Ben Cooper’s turn to leave his voice on a machine. He was talking into a void.

  Most of the restaurants in the High Street were closed on Monday night. The pubs were open, but full of under-age drinkers. At this time, there was nowhere he could comfortably find something to eat except McDonald’s. Oh, well. One Happy Meal wouldn’t ruin his arteries, would it?

  Cooper didn’t immediately recognize the staff member serving behind the counter. Perhaps it was the uniform and baseball cap, the cloak of corporate anonymity, that fooled him.

  ‘You’re Ben Cooper, aren’t you?’ said the young man, after putting through the order and taking his money.

  ‘That’s right.’

  Cooper looked more closely. He didn’t forget faces easily, and this one did look vaguely familiar. Gelled hair with blond streaks, a stubble of beard, a nose that had perhaps been broken once, but mended well. There was something about the eyes, now that he took the trouble to look the young man in the face. Perhaps it was an arrest he’d made some time in the past?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Cooper. ‘I know I’ve met you, but I can’t remember where.’