06.The Dead Place Page 28

  ‘It must have been a very difficult time,’ said Cooper. It was a phrase he’d heard people say in these circumstances. He’d never thought it meant very much. And it didn’t now, when he said it himself.

  ‘My wife taught me that there are two stages of dying to go through,’ said Robertson. ‘First, you’re afraid that you’ll die. And then you’re afraid that you won’t. There’s a point when death becomes a thing to be welcomed, the event you desire most in the world. Some of us reach that point before others.’

  Cooper began to button his coat. He knew when it was time to leave.

  ‘One in three,’ said Robertson. ‘Why should we be surprised when it affects us, or our loved ones? Yet still we ask the question.’

  ‘What question is that, sir?’

  ‘“By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?”’ Robertson smiled sadly. ‘We never expect it to be us, do we?’

  Cooper didn’t know what to say. He was starting to feel very uncomfortable, and slightly queasy. He wasn’t sure if it was the tea or all the talk of decomposition.

  ‘Thank you for your help, Professor,’ he said. ‘I have to go now.’

  ‘A shame. You never did explain your interest in the sarcophagus. Does it relate to your enquiry into the human remains found at Litton Foot?’

  ‘No, it was something in one of the messages.’

  Robertson had his back to him at that moment, pouring himself another drink. But Cooper saw his shoulders stiffen, his head come up with sudden interest. For a second, their eyes met in the mirror over the TV set. Cooper felt himself being probed again, as if the professor had found more depths in him than he’d anticipated.

  ‘Messages?’ he said.

  Robertson turned, raising the glass of whisky to his face, but not drinking – an old trick to hide the expression, or to distract attention from the eyes.

  ‘I probably shouldn’t have mentioned them,’ said Cooper.

  ‘That sounds intriguing. Do tell.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, I can’t. It’s not really relevant to my present enquiry.’

  ‘Oh, a different enquiry altogether? Something I can help you with, though?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Professor. Thank you.’

  For the first time, Robertson had lost his affability. He couldn’t hold the glass to his lips any longer without taking a drink, or it would have looked odd. He gulped a half-inch of whisky, and put the glass down. Cooper caught an irritable gleam in his eyes, a downwards curve of his mouth, as if the malt had turned sour in its bottle.

  ‘Well, I really must be going,’ said Cooper.

  Robertson was still thoughtful as he accompanied him to the door and on to the gravel drive.

  ‘Tell me, those questions about Alder Hall – were those related to your messages? And decomposition. Why did you ask me about decomposition?’

  ‘Professor, I’m sorry –’

  ‘You haven’t been entirely honest with me, have you?’

  ‘I wish I could share everything with you, Professor, but I’m working under certain limitations.’

  ‘Limitations, yes,’ said Robertson. ‘We all work under limitations, don’t we?’

  25

  On his way home, Cooper called at the old cemetery in Edendale. The rain had stopped, but a cold wind was blowing across the grass and funnelling through the avenues of stone memorials. The gates were kept padlocked at night, but on the darkest edge of the cemetery there were gaps where the iron railings had been pulled apart. The damage had been done by someone going in, rather than coming out. Or so he hoped.

  It was six forty-five and there was still half an hour to go before the cemetery closed. But Cooper could see no one in the grounds, except a woman walking a cocker spaniel on a lead. The dog’s ears were blowing backwards in the wind, like the ragged ends of a woollen scarf. As he watched, the dog began casting from side to side with its nose to the ground, sniffing for interesting odours among the lines of gravestones.

  The sight made Cooper think of one of the traditional beliefs that still clung to rural burial grounds – the deadly graveyard miasma. Buried, decomposing bodies were supposed to give off a noxious gas that made its way up through the soil and formed an invisible fog. It hung over the graveyard and tainted the air, poisoning anyone who came near. But surely that was just another superstition to justify keeping away from graveyards and avoiding the presence of death.

  Cooper shook himself to dismiss the morbid thoughts. These occasional quiet moments at the end of a shift were usually the time when events of the day ran continually through his head. All the most uncomfortable moments would repeat themselves, nudging him into worrying whether he could have done things better. Today, there had been several such moments. He thought he understood Tom Jarvis pretty well, at least. But he couldn’t help wondering whether Fry would have handled Madeleine Chadwick better, or if she’d have been able to deal with the steamroller technique of Freddy Robertson.

  He could clearly remember the first time he’d met Diane Fry. He could see her now, walking into the CID room at West Street. She hadn’t met his eye at first, but had glanced from side to side as if searching for evidence of his faults, traces of any weakness she could exploit. Though she’d been leaner than Cooper had grown up expecting women to be, it was clear from the start that Fry was no weakling.

  He only wished she would smile sometimes. A smile would relax her face and erase those dark shadows that always lurked in her eyes. Even in life, people could transform the look of their faces.

  Earlier today, Melvyn Hudson had talked about performing miracles in a funeral parlour. And, in a way, it was true. They took in a dead body, with its sunken face and wrinkled fingers, and they pumped in a pink liquid that mixed with the remaining body fluids, like a shot of champagne in a cocktail. And gradually they transformed a shrivelled corpse back into someone’s granny. A miracle.

  In the mortuary, too, the pathologist could restore the fingertips of corpses by injecting tissue builder, allowing the dead to be fingerprinted. You could even buy a ready-made kit for the job, complete with syringes, needles and tissue builder. Who said the dead couldn’t communicate from beyond the grave?

  Then Cooper thought of Audrey Steele. Audrey had surely been trying to communicate from beyond the grave. Somewhere, she’d be getting annoyed that he still wasn’t listening.

  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.

  Diane Fry looked up at the sudden noise. She’d hardly been listening to the recording, had been miles away, carried by her memories, out of Edendale and way beyond Derbyshire. She realized that the room had gone dark. There was just a desk lamp still burning as the voice played over and over. Killing is our natural impulse. Fry hit the ‘pause’ button, and the voice died.

  ‘Diane, are you OK?’

  It was Liz Petty, passing CID on her way out of the building from the scenes of crime department. It was an odd direction to take. But Fry did that herself at night sometimes, choosing the route that felt safe rather than the logical one.

  ‘I’m just on my way home,’ said Petty.

  ‘Working late?’

  ‘I couldn’t leave the evidence until morning. But it’s all logged in and securely stored now.’

  ‘Good.’

  Petty looked at the single lamp and the tape player.

  ‘You’re working a bit late, aren’t you?’

  ‘Like you, there were just a few things I had to do.’

  She hoped the SOCO would leave, but instead she came closer, letting her bag rest on the floor.

  ‘You were listening to the recordings of his phone calls again, weren’t you? I recognized the sound of the voice changer.’

  ‘So?’


  Petty didn’t seem to notice her tone, but kept moving closer. Fry felt herself being observed. Too close, she was. Too close.

  ‘Diane, why do these calls upset you so much?’ asked Petty.

  ‘Upset me? They don’t upset me. What do you mean?’

  ‘Well… disturb you, then. They disturb you, don’t they? More than they do anybody else here.’

  Fry couldn’t meet her eye. She was fighting the urge to confide in Petty. She had never talked to anyone about it before, had never found anyone she thought she could talk to, or who would understand.

  ‘It’s what he says in his calls. It makes me think of a child,’ she said.

  Petty frowned. ‘He doesn’t mention a child, does he?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘Children are always the worst …’ But Fry could tell from her voice that she hadn’t understood.

  ‘Not children – a child,’ she said. ‘It was my first murder case, back when I was serving in Birmingham. I was still in uniform, only twenty-three years old. But that doesn’t protect you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She was eight years old, and she’d been reported missing. It was the summer, during the school holidays. We were told she’d been playing outside and had disappeared. I was sent to the house with CID and some other uniforms. The parents were absolutely distraught. But the DI insisted on searching the property. I kept thinking, “Why are you treating the parents like this when their child has been taken from them?”’

  Petty pulled up a chair and sat next to her. She was too close, but Fry didn’t care right now.

  ‘You found the little girl?’

  Fry nodded. ‘She was in a shed, covered over with some old sacking tied up with garden twine. Her skin was already turning black, and her face was covered in maggots. The pathologist said she’d been dead for at least three weeks. Her parents had killed the child and left her to rot. Then they panicked when a social worker rang to make an appointment to check on her. The child was on the “at risk” register.’

  ‘Jesus, how awful.’

  ‘And you know what? Forensics said that the body had been disturbed several times.’

  ‘Disturbed?’

  ‘Someone had been going back to take a look on a regular basis. They could tell by the pattern of staining from her body fluids on the sacking, and from the fact that the twine had been retied several times. We weren’t able to use it in court, because we had no way of telling which member of the family had been doing it. It could have been the father or the mother – or maybe even the twelve-year-old son.’

  ‘And that was your first one?’ said Petty.

  ‘That’s why I remember it so well. I remember the sound that the maggots made as they moved on her face. And I remember the smell in that shed. Stagnant water and vinegar. Sweet, but not like the scent of flowers. Sweet like rotting meat.’

  ‘So when this guy talks about decomposition …?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what it means to me: an eight-year-old child decomposing in a shed in her parents’ back garden in Balsall Heath, with someone gloating over her corpse every day, as if it were some sordid little game. And you don’t know how much that makes me want to kill him.’

  Cooper woke in the middle of the night, convinced he could hear the sound of bones breaking, a skull crunching under pressure. With his heart thumping from the sudden wrench out of sleep, he rolled over on to his side and opened his eyes. Two green spots glowed in the darkness of his bedroom.

  ‘Oh God, Randy, that’s disgusting. Take your mouse somewhere else, if you’re going to eat it.’

  The cat blinked at him inscrutably and swallowed the remains of the rodent’s back legs in one gulp. There would be a small patch of blood left on the carpet, and the mouse’s tiny internal organs, shiny and green, cleanly separated from its body by the cat’s teeth.

  All his life, Cooper had been used to cats bringing their prey indoors. They’d done it at the farm, too – rabbits and small rodents, sometimes unharmed ones they turned loose in the house. He supposed it was only nature. But it could take days to get nature out of the house, once it was in. Sometimes, the only clue that something had got into the house was the smell it caused when it died.

  He blinked at a couple of memories from his childhood at Bridge End – a barn owl breaking its neck by flying into their sitting-room window one night, a vole that fell down the chimney while the fire was lit, dying in seconds as it twisted silently in the flames.

  And then there was that problem with the rats.

  Cooper’s bedroom suddenly seemed to fill with the smell as the details of the incident rushed back to him, vivid and overpowering. There had been a particularly bad year when guns and dogs had failed to control the rats on the farm, and his grandfather had resorted to putting poison down in the outbuildings. Matt and Ben were given the job of checking the bait sites each morning and disposing of the corpses.

  But one morning they had been late and in too much of a hurry. Matt had put two dead rats into the airtight plastic bucket that the poison came in, intending to dispose of them later. Two weeks had passed before they noticed the bucket and remembered what it contained. Holding their breath, the boys had prised off the lid. Inside, the two corpses had been black and glistening, sunken in on themselves, like slowly deflating furry toys. Slopping around in the bottom of the bucket had been a quarter of an inch of dark, evil-smelling liquid that hadn’t been there before. Where had it come from? Matt had wanted to look more closely, but the smell had been unbearable and Ben had felt sick, so they’d slapped the lid shut again.

  After that, the stink had hung around the shed for weeks. Every time he went past the door, it had reminded Ben of the rats they’d killed but failed to dispose of properly. Their resentment still haunted the place, as thick and nauseous as the muddy liquid that had drained from their bodies.

  Even now, Cooper felt sick as the smell seeped out of his memory. He closed his eyes, but soon realized there would be no more sleep tonight. He sighed, rolled out of bed and fetched a cloth from the kitchen to clean up the blood.

  MY JOURNAL OF THE DEAD, PHASE FOUR

  But it doesn’t have to be like that. The Aztecs believe that life is a dream from which death awakens us. Mexicans celebrate and honour their dead on All Souls Day. The Tibetans believe a dead body mustn’t be buried, as the spirit goes to Hell. So they take corpses on to a mountainside and feed them to the birds. Everything must go, including the bones. Sometimes priests have to mutilate a corpse to make the job quicker and easier for the vultures.

  The Jews waited for putrefaction to start before they disposed of their bodies. At least that way they could be sure of death. They kept their bodies in unsealed sepulchres, and went to check on them every day. That was what the followers of Jesus were doing when they found him alive. They were observing the progress of his decomposition. They knew he wasn’t really dead until the last of his flesh was gone.

  The bones had to be perfectly clean, purified of all traces of our earthly corruption. And there is something pure about bones, isn’t there? Yet we recoil in horror at the thought of the slightest scrap of decomposing flesh. Consider the skull beneath the skin – the ultimate symbol of inner perfection.

  26

  ‘Groundspeak run a sport called geocaching,’ said Cooper next morning. ‘It seems to be a high-tech form of treasure-hunting.’

  ‘Full marks, Ben. That’s what you predicted, wasn’t it?’

  He looked at Fry in surprise. ‘Yes. Well, the way it works is this: somebody places a cache of items in a hidden location, and other geocachers set out to find it, using handheld GPS units and the location’s co-ordinates, which are on the website. They get a few clues, too, if they need them.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘People put all kinds of things in caches – maps, books, software, CDs, videos, pictures, money, jewellery, tickets, tools, games…’

  They looked at the inventory provided by scenes of crime. Many
of the items from Peter’s Stone had been in plastic bags, or in clear zipped plastic envelopes of the type used in offices. Cooper watched Fry run her pen down the list, looking for some kind of meaning. Crayons, sunglasses, and a Beatrix Potter book, The Tale of Mr Tod. Her pen stopped at the skeleton key-ring.

  ‘There are scores of other caches,’ said Cooper. ‘Some of them quite close to Petrus Two.’

  ‘I’m not interested in the others, Ben, just who might have been at this one.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Hold on, though. Did you say there’s a website with the GPS co-ordinates of all these caches? They give clues how to find them?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And do these locations have names?’

  ‘Yes. The person who sets up a cache gives it a name,’ said Cooper. He pointed at the contents of the cache from Peter’s Stone. ‘This one is called Petrus Two – “Petrus” is the Latin form of Peter, I suppose.’

  ‘Latin again?’

  ‘It may mean nothing. Nearby there are locations called Tunnel’s Mouth, Tidza Treat, Magic of Monsal, Jonah’s Journey. I counted twenty caches within five miles of Peter’s Stone.’

  ‘It’s the names I’m interested in,’ said Fry.

  ‘The names? Why?’

  ‘Look, people choose whatever name they like for a location, then they give clues how to get there. It’s all a big game. They like to set each other a challenge. Is that right?’

  ‘That’s what I said, Diane.’

  ‘You still don’t get it, do you?’ Fry leaned a little closer and recited a line that she didn’t need to read from any notes. ‘And all we have to do,’ she said, ‘is look for “the dead place”.’

  Cooper shifted uneasily. In the past, he’d been accused of developing obsessions. And he had to admit that it was true. Sometimes he got an idea into his head and couldn’t get rid of it, yet found it difficult to explain the rationale to anyone else. He was aware of the danger. But in this case, it seemed to be Fry who was developing the obsession, not him.

  ‘What have you got planned for us this morning?’ he said, fearing some chase around the countryside looking at graveyards.