The dead place bcadf-6

by Stephen Booth

  ‘It wasn’t me that stopped them. The estate put new fences up. That was what stopped the dogs going into the woods.’

  ‘And when was this exactly?’

  ‘Oh, I dunno. The year before last, I suppose.’

  ‘Can we take a look at the new fence?’

  ‘If you like. There’s not much to see. It’s only a fence.’

  Jarvis led him down the path through the garden and entered the paddock by a side gate. Two of the dogs ran up to them immediately, their tongues lolling and their eyes rolling with excitement. Jarvis held out his hand, though he still wore his work gloves.

  ‘Now then, Feckless,’ he said, rubbing one dog’s ears. ‘That’s Aimless you’ve got there.’

  Aimless had his nose practically glued to Cooper’s boots. The dog sniffed like a bloodhound, almost inhaling the trailing ends of his laces. Cooper hardly dared to lift his feet, for fear of kicking the dog in its inquisitive muzzle.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Jarvis, noticing his hesitation. ‘Where there’s no sense, there’s no feeling.’

  The old fencing on the eastern side of the stream was broken in several places and full of holes, more than big enough for one of Tom Jarvis’s dogs to get through, or even Jarvis himself.

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  But a hundred feet above it, near the crest of the slope, was a new fence made of stout timber posts and weldmesh, topped by a strand of barbed wire. It was as if the estate had drawn in its boundaries, abandoning the new access land. In other areas, the national park had been busy putting in new stiles to provide access, but it hadn’t been necessary here.

  ‘No way through there,’ said Cooper.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to try climbing it either,’ said Jarvis.

  ‘When they put this up, did they refence the whole estate?’

  ‘No. Where the grounds of the hall border on to roads, there are stone walls. Ten feet high, those are. They were built a long time ago, to keep the common folk out. In other spots, there’s stock fencing, and the farmers make sure that’s in good nick. No, it seemed to be the woods they were bothered about. Didn’t like the idea of anybody wandering in and enjoying themselves, I reckon.’

  ‘Did people used to go into the woods?’

  ‘Oh, aye. There’s a public footpath runs at the top of my land. It goes over the top and back down into Miller’s Dale. But if you knew where the fence was down, you could go off into the woods. I saw them now and then. At night time, you know.’

  ‘Poachers?’

  ‘Most likely. I’ve never asked them any questions. I’m not daft enough for that.’

  ‘Has the new fence kept them out?’

  Jarvis snorted again. ‘You don’t keep poachers out so easily, not these days. They’re professionals. They work in teams, and they come kitted up. No gamekeeper would tackle a poacher on his own these days. He’d likely get his head beaten in.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  The presence of poaching gangs might explain everything. They’d most likely be from out of the area, so no one would recognize them. They’d be armed, and not happy about someone

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  else’s overly boisterous dog interfering with their business. If the estate had noticed poaching going on, it would explain the new fence, too. But what game was available in these woods that would be worth poaching? No more than a few rabbits, surely?

  Cooper looked around. Down here, the moss was so thick on the wall that it looked as though someone had knitted a bright green sweater for it, draping it in folds of Arran wool. A hollow in the rocks above the track was completely covered in moss and hung with ferns, like a waterfall without the water - except for the continual dampness seeping through the surface. He wondered if some of these fungi were the kind that excreted acids to dissolve rocks and reduce them to soil. Everything decomposed, in the end.

  They began to climb back towards the house. Seen from below, the heavy porch seemed to have pulled the house into an awkward shape. It looked hunched and low, like an animal waiting to spring. Cooper remembered the other thing he’d come here to ask Tom Jarvis.

  ‘Mr Jarvis, you have several dogs on the premises,’ he said.

  Jarvis looked at the dogs, then back at Cooper. Why did he need to waste words? Cooper had already wasted an entire sentence.

  ‘I’ve just been watching a special support dog in action.’

  Jarvis tugged off one of his gloves with his teeth, then removed the other and put them both into his pocket, like someone preparing for action, or a man who was finding the conversation boring. Cooper felt he was about to lose his attention altogether.

  ‘The thing I’m wondering, sir,’ he said, ‘is why none of your dogs detected the smell of a decomposing body that lay on the edge of your property for months.’

  ‘I don’t know. You’d better ask them.’

  ‘Most dogs would detect something like that. The odour is very strong for a while. In some stages of decomposition, it’s quite unmistakable.’

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  ‘I don’t let them go into those woods,’ said Jarvis impatiently. ‘I told you, they never go in there. Well, except for the old lass, and look what happened to her.’

  ‘Even so …’

  ‘Look, I don’t know. Maybe the smell of cack threw them off the scent.’

  ‘The body was lying there for eighteen months,’ said Cooper. ‘But that bag was left only a few days ago.’

  Jarvis scowled across the valley. ‘There’s a lot of shit in the countryside.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Cooper realized he wasn’t going to get any further without antagonizing Jarvis. ‘By the way, what did you do with the excreta you found?’

  ‘What did I do with it?’ said Jarvis in amazement. ‘What do you think I did with it?’

  ‘I can’t imagine.’

  ‘I chucked it on the compost heap. There’s no point in wasting good cack.’

  ‘And it’s still there?’

  ‘Of course it is. Unless some bugger snuck in during the night and nicked it. You never know these days.’

  ‘I wonder if I could ask you to leave it where it is for a while, sir.’

  Jarvis stared at him. ‘It’ll just rot down,’ he said. ‘That’s the point of a compost heap.’

  ‘I’d like to get someone to take a sample. Just in case we get the chance to do a DNA profile for comparison.’

  ‘A DNA profile?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  But Jarvis continued to look sceptical. Cooper couldn’t blame him. He didn’t rate his own chances too highly, either of getting it approved or of persuading a SOCO that it was high priority. Somebody was bound to list the request under ‘shit jobs’.

  ‘I don’t know much about DNA,’ said Jarvis finally, ‘but it has to be taken from cells in the body, doesn’t it?’

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  ‘Any cells with a nucleus,’ said Cooper. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, cack …’ Then Jarvis paused, as if amazed that he was having to explain it, even to Cooper. ‘Cack is waste stuff, undigested food. It’s from whatever rubbish you’ve been eating. If you tested that crap, you’d likely get the DNA profile of a Big Mac and large fries with chicken nuggets. Not that there aren’t plenty of those walking around the streets of Edendale on two legs, but what good would it do you?’

  ‘We’d be hoping for some cells that might have sloughed off the gut lining as the material was passing through the intestine,’ said Cooper patiently.

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘But we’d have to get to it pretty quickly. I’m not a hundred per cent sure, but I think the DNA in excreta will degrade within a couple of weeks. In this case, it hasn’t been exposed to the sun, which is a good thing. Ultra violet degrades DNA faster than anything.’

  ‘Bugger all this,’ said Jarvis. ‘What are you doing about the bastard who shot my dog?’

  Cooper looked across at the woods. ‘We’re visiting Alder Hall this afternoon to see what’s going on over there.’
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  ‘Bloody hell, action. Well, I’ve got more spare timber - I’ll start setting up the gibbet, shall I?’

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  20

  Vivien Gill wasn’t alone this time. The first hint Cooper had of company was the number of cars parked in the street near her house, not to mention the cluster of motorbikes. He had to leave his Toyota almost at the corner and walk down, wondering if there was a wedding taking place somewhere. Or a funeral, of course.

  The door was opened by a big man in his late thirties, with a beer belly and the shoulders of an ex-boxer. Cooper was unavoidably reminded of Billy McGowan. It was that sense of a man who was out of place in his occupation, a man who ought to be doing something more physical than opening the door to visitors. Preferably a job that involved hitting things.

  ‘Are you the bloke from the police?’ the man asked, with instinctive suspicion.

  Cooper produced his warrant card. ‘Detective Constable Cooper, sir. I’m here to see Mrs Gill.’

  ‘She’s waiting.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. And you are?’

  ‘Family.’

  The word was barely a grunt, delivered as though he was imparting more information than he normally gave to the police. Cooper’s instincts began to prickle. He felt sure that

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  if the man were to give his name, it would be one he recognized from a charge sheet or a magistrates’ court list.

  He held the door open, and Cooper squeezed past him into the hall. Maybe death and funerals were too much on his mind at the moment, but this person smelled as though he’d already died. Some time around last Monday, probably. Perhaps they hadn’t been able to schedule his funeral yet, and he was returning to the earth bit by bit as his body sloughed away.

  ‘Do I know you?’ said Cooper.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think I might have seen you around. Where do you work?’

  The man shut the front door and stared at him. He was only an inch or so taller than Cooper, but he carried a few extra stone in weight and most of it was in his belly and shoulders.

  ‘At the sewage works,’ he said. ‘I’m a shit stirrer.’

  Cooper turned as the door of the sitting room opened behind him. A woman he didn’t recognize was studying him. She had hair dyed deep red, and she squinted her eyes against a trickle of smoke from the cigarette in her mouth.

  ‘Is he the bloke from the police?’ she said to the man.

  ‘So he reckons.’

  Cooper showed his ID again. ‘Detective Constable Cooper.’

  ‘All right,’ said the woman. ‘She’s in here.’

  He could tell from the rumble of noise that the sitting room was full of people. The furniture had been pushed back against the walls, leaving a space in the middle of the carpet, as if in readiness for a performance. For a few moments, Cooper could hardly breathe from the smoke and the heat of so many bodies crammed into a small room.

  When he entered the room and was pointed towards a seat in front of a small forest of hostile stares, he realized exactly who was being expected to give a performance.

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  Gavin Murfin offered the DI a miniature chocolate bar from a box of Cadbury’s Heroes, rattling it temptingly. Hitchens shook his head abruptly.

  ‘Sir, DC Murfin has been checking on Melvyn Hudson’s former business partner, Richard Slack,’ said Fry.

  ‘This is old Abraham’s son,’ said Murfin. ‘And father to Vernon. Richard was the second generation of the family on the Slack side of the business, so to speak.’

  ‘He and Melvyn Hudson were contemporaries?’ said Hitchens.

  ‘If you like. Their fathers set up the firm, but both retired and left their interests in the business to their sons. Old Mr Hudson died, but Abraham Slack is hanging on - he just doesn’t play an active part in Hudson and Slack any more.’

  ‘So what happened to Richard?’ said Hitchens.

  ‘He was killed in a car crash last year.’

  ‘You know, I remember it,’ said the DI, leaning forward in his chair. ‘There was a lot of stuff in the local paper about him. But it didn’t happen on our patch, did it?’

  ‘In C Division,’ said Murfin. ‘It was a bit ironic, actually. He was on a late-night call at the time, collecting a body from a house near Holymoorside. He was driving one of those unmarked vans with blacked-out windows.’

  ‘Was this before or after Audrey Steele’s funeral?’

  ‘After, by nearly two months.’

  ‘Well, I suppose funeral directors have to meet their end the same as the rest of us,’ said Hitchens.

  Murfin shrugged. ‘Also, Dad’s Army have been helping me make some enquiries into the state of business at Hudson and Slack. It seems they’re almost the last family-owned funeral directors in the valley. All the other independents have gone. Most of them belong to the big chains now, though they often keep the old names to make people think they’re still locally owned, like. A couple of them are run by American companies.’

  ‘Has this affected Hudson and Slack?’

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  ‘The word is that they’ve been struggling for a while,’ said Fry. ‘Apparently, they’ve lost a lot of business over the last few years to the big boys. I suppose it’s a question of advantages of scale, like any other business.’

  ‘The larger players will always push out the small men, if they’re allowed to,’ said Hitchens. ‘That’s the way it goes.’

  ‘From what we hear, they can be pretty ruthless. They put the word about that a small funeral director is likely to turn up for a funeral with vehicles that don’t match, or a bunch of staff in badly fitting suits who’ve never been nearer to a funeral than the bar of the Cemetery Inn. Everybody wants a funeral to go off without a hitch, and they’re making decisions under stress anyway.’

  Hitchens looked from one to the other. ‘Hudson told us that business was good, didn’t he?’

  Fry shook her head. ‘What he told us was that there’s an increasing demand. Changing demographics, and all that. That doesn’t mean all the new business is coming his way, does it? It depends what inroads the competition are making in this area. I wonder how his partner fitted in? Was Richard Slack a modernizer or a traditionalist? Which of them was the real driving force behind the business? It would be interesting to know the relationship between them.’

  Fry tapped her teeth with a pen for a moment, then stopped suddenly and looked at the end of the pen in horror.

  ‘There’s one other thing of interest,’ said Murfin, sounding a bit smug.

  ‘Have you been saving the best for last?’ said Hitchens.

  Murfin smiled. ‘A few months ago, Hudson and Slack reported a breakin at their premises in Manvers Street. Among other items, the thieves took a plastic drum containing twenty-five litres of embalming fluid - some stuff called Chromotech.’

  ‘What use is that to anybody?’ asked Hitchens.

  ‘It provides a new drug experience, if you’re into that kind

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  of thing. Apparently, the latest trend is to mix embalming fluid with cannabis for a special high. Another idea imported from the USA.’

  That sounds ridiculously dangerous.’

  ‘You’re not kidding.’

  Fry leaned forward across the DI’s desk. ‘The medical advice is that this stuff is highly corrosive if exposed to skin or taken orally. Mixed with cannabis, it makes users violent and psychotic. It causes hallucinations, euphoria, increased pain tolerance, and produces feelings of anger, forgetfulness and paranoia. In extreme cases, it can result in blindness or even death.’

  Hitchens raised an eyebrow. ‘Interesting. Were drug users blamed for the breakin? Was anyone charged?’

  ‘There were no charges,’ said Murfin. ‘But the theory was that someone read about the idea on the internet and decided to experiment. They took some other stuff at the same time, property worth about ten thousand pounds in total. Anything small and easy to dispose of for a few quid.�
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  ‘What sort of stuff?’

  Murfin looked at the incident report again. ‘Oh, you know scalpels, hypodermic needles, medical supplies. Anything that looked like pharmaceuticals, I suppose. There’s a whole list of items. Including a set of trocars, whatever they are. And don’t tell me - I don’t think I want to know.’

  ‘Hold on,’ said Fry. ‘Let’s have a look at that list.’

  She took the report and scanned through. Gavin was right, the list was a long one. Many of the items were things she’d never heard of and couldn’t imagine a use for. Eye caps, canulas, a mouth former …

  ‘What is it?’ asked Hitchens.

  ‘It was just a breakin, Diane,’ said Murfin. ‘All right, it’s never been cleared up, but it seems obvious it was addicts looking for kicks and some quick money to pay for their next fix.’

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  ‘It was just a thought,’ said Fry. ‘I was wondering if there’s enough stolen equipment on this list for somebody to perform their own private embalming.’

  When Cooper returned to the office, he found an urn had been left on his desk for return to Susan Dakin. According to the report, the cremains had been weighed in by the lab at eight pounds five ounces. It was strange to think that Mr Dakin probably weighed about the same reduced to ashes as he did when he was born.

  But the urn would have to wait a little while yet before it was returned to its shelf. He and Diane Fry had an appointment with a property agent later this afternoon at Alder Hall. And later he hoped to attend Audrey Steele’s second funeral.

  ‘Gibbet?’ said Fry when he reported his visit to Tom Jarvis. ‘Are you saying there’s a place called Gibbet Rock near Wardlow and Litton Foot?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cooper. Fry was starting to look flushed with excitement.

  ‘This is it, Ben. “Follow the signs at the gibbet and the rock, and you can meet my flesh eater.” This rock will be limestone, right?’