The dead place bcadf-6

by Stephen Booth

  ‘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.

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  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 second 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 underage 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

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  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.’

  ‘I’m Nick Summers. My dad’s a friend of your brother Mart’s.’

  ‘Of course. Your father works for the agricultural merchant’s. You’ve been to the farm a few times with him, haven’t you? But I thought I heard that you’d gone away to university.’

  The young man looked up as the door opened. But it was only two customers leaving. He relaxed, and leaned on the counter.

  ‘I graduated in the summer. I got a BSc in Environment and Ecology from Leicester.’

  ‘ Congratulations.’

  Cooper watched the teenagers sitting at the corner table with their Cokes and large fries, and listened to the sound of laughter coming from the kitchen. Inside, he could see two more youths in red baseball caps opening packets of buns.

  ‘So - what are your plans now, Nick?’

  ‘Oh, I’m waiting for the right job to come up. In the meantime, I earn a living as a crew member here. It’s not so bad. They wanted to promote me, but I don’t really need that. Something will come up before long that suits my qualifications.’ There was a burst of noise as a group of customers came in, straight from the pub across the road. Nick straightened up and moved back to the till. Cooper’s food arrived and he moved towards a table.

  ‘Good luck, anyway,’ he said.

  While he ate his burger, Cooper watched Nick Summers serving customers. He seemed like a natural for the job. It didn’t matter what academic qualifications he had or didn’t have, provided he could wear the uniform and use the till.

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  Cooper remembered his own holiday job as a teenager, cleaning caravans with a bucket of soapy water and a long brush. He’d been studying hard at the time, determined to achieve his ambition of joining the police. But he’d still been grateful for the tips given him by the tourists, who’d treated him as if he were the village idiot. He’d never bothered to disabuse them of the idea.

  The fries had smelled better than they tasted. Cooper spread a bit of tomato ketchup on them to see if it helped. The sauce was thick and aromatic, and some of it stuck to his fingers.

  That was the trouble with preconceptions. They allowed people to pretend they were something else entirely, without even trying.

  The thought brought to Cooper’s mind an image of the preparation room at Hudson and Slack. He pictured a naked body on the table, the blood draining from a vein as corrosive fluid was pumped in to replace it. He thought of a corpse with formaldehyde flowing through its tissues, coagulating the proteins, fixing the cells of the muscles, soaking into the organs, halting the processes of death like a hand stopping a clock. And yet, in a way, it was still a human being on the table, someone who looked years younger than they did a few days ago. Years younger.

  Preparing a body for viewing, the embalmer moulded a face, much like the forensic artist had done to create the impression of Audrey Steele. Dead faces dropped and looked grim, so they had to be pushed into an appropriate shape to please the relatives. Tweak the mouth, brush the hair, apply cosmetics.

  Drained, stuffed and painted. That’s what Professor Robertson had said. Well, forget the draining and stuffing. A man who could make the dead look alive would surely be able to disguise his own appearance with cosmetics, at least well enough to fool a casual observer. A whole range of liquids, creams and powders had been in stock at Hudson and Slack.

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  A practised hand could easily change colouring, widen or narrow the cheeks, conceal a double chin, firm up the eyelids.

  Then Cooper remembered what Madeleine Chadwick had said about the man who’d turned up wanting to see the bones in the Alder Hall crypt, the man whose age she’d been so vague about. Mrs Chadwick ought to have been able to identify his smell. But it had been out of context, a scent that she wouldn’t have expected to notice on a man. She’d have associated it more with a session at the beauty parlour, perhaps. It might have been the blend of alcohol, oil, wax and glycerin that came from cosmetic creams and massage oils.

  Cooper waited until Nick Summers was free, and went back to the counter. ‘Environment and Ecology?’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose you happen to know a plant that looks like tenfoot high cow parsley with a purple stem?’

  When he got back to his flat, Cooper checked his answering machine again, then turned on his PC and did a Google search to see whether Nick Summers’ suggestion was a good one. Yes, it certainly appeared to be the plant he’d seen. Giant hogweed. A nasty-looking thing, too.

  The cheeseburger he’d eaten was stirring a bit in his stomach when he switched to one of the major online booksellers and looked up Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Mr Tod. So ‘Tod’ meant death in German, did it? No doubt Professor Robertson would have been able to tell him that, if he’d asked. He probably knew the word for death in thirty-five languages.

  But when the cover of the book came up on his screen, Cooper stared at it for a second or two, then slapped himself hard on the forehead.

  ‘What
an idiot,’ he said. ‘That’s what you get for trying to be too bloody clever.’

  The cover showed a classic Beatrix Potter illustration - a fox wearing a long scarf and a poacher’s jacket, climbing a stile over a stone wall.

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  ‘Wait until I tell Diane in the morning.’

  In the absence of anyone else, Cooper looked round for the cat to share his revelation with. ‘The German for death, indeed. Of course, it wouldn’t mean anything. But this …’

  He stopped, looked at the screen again, and remembered the call he’d tried to make to Freddy Robertson. The professor wasn’t at home tonight.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ said Cooper. ‘He’s gone there now.’

  Freddy Robertson’s BMW was missing from the drive in front of his house, and there was no answer to the door.

  ‘OK, let’s get it open,’ said Hitchens. ‘Not too much damage, if you can help it.’

  Fry watched the oak door being forced. She didn’t really mind if it was damaged. In fact, she rather hoped that the mosaic tiles in the hall might get cracked and the mahogany balustrades chipped. Accidentally, of course.

  She followed the team into the house as they checked the rooms to make sure no one was inside. She was looking for a cellar, which she felt sure must exist. An image of the crypt at Alder Hall was strong in her mind - the innocuous door off the hallway, the stone steps down into darkness, the smell of damp and earth.

  At first she could see nothing, and she began to think she was mistaken. But finally Fry realized she was looking for the wrong thing. She put Alder Hall out of her mind, walked into the kitchen and lifted the edge of a rug laid over the tiles. And there was the trap door.

  She called for assistance to roll back the rug, then unfolded the brass ring set into the wood. The hinges worked smoothly, though the door was solid and heavy. When it was fully open, wooden stairs were visible below floor level. She couldn’t quite identify the smell that rose from the opening. Not damp and earthy, as she’d been imagining, but something sweet. Sweet and slightly sickly.

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  Fry looked around. But this time she didn’t need to ask. Lights were already being brought. Plenty of lights.

  This time, Cooper found no one watching him from the doorway of Greenshaw Lodge. The place was in darkness, and when he drew up near the steps, his headlights showed that the back door stood open.

  Taking his torch from the glove compartment, he banged on the front door and rang the bell. Then he followed the path to the back door and knocked on the glass panel. He could see the gleam of white shapes in the kitchen - fridge, cooker, washing machine. But no glimmer of light any further into the house.

  ‘Hello? It’s Detective Constable Cooper. Anybody home? Mr Slack?’

  There was no response. The Slacks didn’t have a dog, so there wasn’t any barking, as there might have been at Tom Jarvis’s place.

  The open door was invitation enough for him to enter the house. Night time, an unsecured property and absent occupiers would justify investigation. But still Cooper hesitated. He groped at the wall inside the door and found two light switches. One of them brought on an outside light fixed to the stonework above his head. He turned quickly, convinced he’d seen a sudden movement behind him. But it was only the light chasing the shadows back into the trees.

  For a moment, he studied the garden and neighbouring field. He noticed motorcycle tracks passing through a gate and heading across the field towards the woods.

  Cooper turned back to the doorway and tried the other switch again, but nothing happened. The light didn’t work in the kitchen. He flicked his torch quickly round the room and caught the glitter of glass on the floor. When he pointed the beam at the ceiling, he saw that the light bulb had burst like a large, pale blister. The remains of its aluminium base were

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  still screwed into the fitting, but fragments of glass littered the tiles underneath. He couldn’t tell when it had happened, but surely no one had been in the house since. If the Slacks were here, they would have swept it up. No one left broken glass on the floor, did they?

  He still felt he was missing something. He swept his torch over the room again more slowly. And this time he saw it a rash of black marks on the ceiling and extending two feet down the wall in the corner nearest to the door. It was as if the kitchen had suddenly developed chicken pox. Beneath the marks, a shower of white plaster lay on the work surface and on the top of the fridge.

  Cooper pulled out his mobile phone and requested backup. While he gave the address, he let his torch beam move back across the kitchen. He traced an arc from the scatter of marks on the plaster, past the broken light bulb, and as far as the door leading into the hallway, where it touched the lower banister of the stairs. He let the beam rest there for a moment, imagining the jerky, panicked aim, the deafening roar inside the house, the stink of the powder charge. The foot of the stairs was just about where someone was standing when the shotgun had been fired.

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  It was the smell of wine and whisky. Sweet, sickly and pungent, like the scent of vinegar and stagnant water. Slippery pools of alcohol lay on the flagged floor of the cellar, a dark viscous red spreading to meet a trickle of gold. They were touching but not quite mingling, ruby globules gleaming in the lights. Three bottles of Bordeaux had shattered on the flags, and a fifteen-year-old Glenfiddich lay on its side, a film of whisky trembling on the lip of the neck, ready to spill.

  Fry saw that someone had trodden in the liquid before they found the light switch, and his boot had left two sticky red prints. Wine racks stood against one of the walls, but she was disappointed to realize that there wasn’t much room for anything else. Freddy Robertson’s cellar was tiny.

  She took out the photos printed from the Corpse of the Week website. No, they couldn’t have been taken in here. The wall in the background didn’t match, and the scale of the room was wrong.

  Hitchens came down the steps behind her. ‘What a mess.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He looked over her shoulder at the photos. ‘No luck?’

  ‘There could be another cellar somewhere, or an attic room. The garage, maybe.’

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  ‘Possibly. We’ll find it, if there is.’

  He touched the Glenfiddich bottle with the toe of his shoe. It spun slightly in the pool of liquid. The neck turned to point towards Fry, and another drop of golden fluid ran on to the floor.

  ‘What do you think has been going on down here?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose he was fuelling himself with liquid courage for some reason.’

  ‘We’d better put out a stop request for his car.’

  Half an hour later, Fry left the search still going on at the house in Totley and drove back to Edendale. She’d forgotten that she’d asked for Billy McGowan to be brought in for interview, and she was surprised to be told that he was waiting in an interview room. Waiting impatiently, too. But before she spoke to him, Fry had to spend a few minutes readjusting her mind, focusing on a different aspect of the enquiry.

  Finally, she faced him across the interview-room table. ‘Mr McGowan, you were involved in the funeral of a lady called Audrey Steele, which took place eighteen months ago, in March last year.’

  McGowan scratched his fingernails against the table, making a faint scrabbling sound that set Fry’s teeth on edge.

  ‘Was I?’

  ‘According to witnesses, you drove the hearse from the funeral service at St Mark’s Church to Eden Valley Crematorium. You were accompanied on this occasion by Vernon Slack. Do you remember?’

  ‘No. How would I? There are so many funerals.’

  ‘Oh, I think this one was quite special.’

  McGowan shrugged and scraped his fingers again. Fry thought of the mice in the skulls at Alder Hall, scuttling through the eye sockets, curling up inside the cranium, their claws scratching the inner surface of the bone, where the brain had once sat.
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  ‘Well, let’s see if this refreshes your memory,’ she said. ‘After this particular funeral, I believe you stopped on the way to the crematorium, and removed the body from the coffin.’

  ‘Wait a minute ‘

  Fry held up a hand. ‘There’s no point denying it. What I most want to know, Mr McGowan, is whose body you replaced it with.’

  McGowan laughed. ‘No one’s.’

  ‘It must have been someone’s. We have the computer records from the crematorium. They show that the cremation proceeded as normal - the right temperature during the burning, the right amount of residue left at the end. That means bone residue, Mr McGowan.’

  ‘It was no one.’

  Fry stared at him hard. ‘You must see that we can’t accept that.’

  ‘Whatever you say.’

  ‘Let’s talk about the body of Audrey Steele, then. You won’t claim that was no one.’

  McGowan dropped his hands from the table. He looked at Fry, then at the revolving tapes. ‘Look, it wasn’t really anything to do with me. I was doing as I was told, that’s all.’

  ‘Just obeying orders?’

  ‘That’s about the size of it.’

  ‘Whose orders?’

  ‘Mr Slack’s.’

  ‘Richard?’

  ‘Yes. He was quite a lad for a scheme, was Richard.’

  ‘And this was one of his schemes?’

  McGowan licked his lips nervously. Despite his appearance, he wasn’t such a tough nut. He seemed glad to be able to get the story off his chest.