The Dead Place

11

Professor Freddy Robertson’s home stood on rising ground in a cluster of newer houses on the outskirts of Totley. It had a flat, brick face broken by bay windows and an oak front door. Its gardens were reached from a broad gravelled driveway that ran past a detached garage with a dark blue BMW drawn up outside.

Cooper had been given the impression that the professor had retired to Derbyshire, but this wasn’t strictly true. Totley was an outer suburb of Sheffield, and it lay in South Yorkshire. But the county boundary was only a stone’s throw away across the fields, and the national park a few hundred yards further on. The rural setting was one of the attractions for those who could afford to live here.

Cooper had spent the drive to Totley listening to a Runrig CD. ‘The Edge of the World’ didn’t quite describe his journey across Froggatt Edge and the eastern moors, but it came close.

‘This is an Edwardian gentleman’s residence,’ said Robertson, meeting Cooper at his car. ‘As you can see, we had it refurbished in a manner sympathetic to the Arts and Crafts movement. Four bedrooms on a galleried landing, original beams, a wine cellar. And look at these gardens — ’

The professor was a big man in his early sixties, his hair greying and rather too long at the sides to compensate for the bald patch at the front. He wore a rather baggy pinstripe suit like a lawyer’s, and moved a little stiffly, as if suffering from the first symptoms of arthritis.

They entered an L-shaped reception hall with mosaic tiles on the floor and a staircase with mahogany balustrades. On the wall was the ugliest coat rack Cooper had ever seen. It was covered in imitation deer hide, and had four real hooves turned upside down to act as hooks.

Robertson took him through into a study lined with books, the floor space almost filled by an oak desk and a set of deep leather armchairs. The professor sat at his desk, with his back to a window looking out on to the garden. He offered Cooper a drink, which he refused, but poured himself a whisky from a bottle of Glenfiddich he took from a cupboard. Then he linked his fingers, like a headmaster with an errant pupil on the carpet.

‘I’m sorry to have messed you around, sir,’ said Cooper. ‘I hope I haven’t disrupted your afternoon too much.’

‘Oh, I’m glad you could make it. I was worried that you’d decided you didn’t need to call on my services after all. But I suppose you were detained on urgent police business?’

‘You might say I had to speak to a man about a dog.’

‘Oh, dogs,’ said Robertson. He sniffed suspiciously, as if Cooper might have smuggled one into the house, or at least brought in the smell and a few stray hairs. ‘Now I’m really wounded, Detective Constable. I’d have been happy to come in second to anybody or anything, except a dog.’

Cooper smiled hesitantly, not sure whether the professor was joking.

‘You don’t like dogs, sir?’

‘I find their form of domestication offensive, on an ethical basis.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Well, dogs are basically animal slaves, aren’t they? People find them useful for certain menial tasks, or for massaging their egos. Dogs fawn on their owners shamelessly. Don’t you find it so? No, I expect you disagree with me.’

‘Many people would value dogs for their loyalty,’ said Cooper.

‘Oh, you’re thinking of the dog that will dive into the river to save its master when he’s drowning? Well, the fact is that nine dogs out of ten would sit on the bank and watch you drown. And then they’d go off to see where their next meal was coming from. Loyalty is skin deep, you know.’

Cooper shifted uneasily under the professor’s gaze, but didn’t argue.

Robertson smiled. ‘Now, I presume there was something you wanted to ask me about. Which case is it, now? Somebody mentioned skeletonized remains …?’

‘That’s correct, sir.’

Briefly, Cooper explained the background to his enquiry and showed Robertson photographs of the scene at Litton Foot.

‘You see, sir, the feet were pointing to the east and the head to the west. For a start, I wondered if that might have any significance.’

‘That was very observant of you,’ said Robertson. ‘Well, it certainly reflects the Christian cemetery tradition. The practice was based on the belief that the Lord’s Second Coming would be from the east. When you rise from your grave on Judgement Day, you want to be facing your God, not turning your backside to him.’

‘I see.’

‘Burials in Roman Britain were already east-west oriented by the end of the second century AD, so the tradition lasted a long time. But this isn’t an ancient burial, or you wouldn’t be here, surely?’

‘That’s correct, sir.’

Robertson waved a hand. ‘It’s all right — you don’t have to tell me more than you want to. I can see you’re not sure whether you can trust me.’

‘It isn’t that, sir. We don’t know a great deal at the moment.’

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like a drink? Something non-alcoholic, of course, since you’re so very much on duty.’

‘No thank you, sir.’

Robertson took a gulp of his whisky. ‘There are other practices you may be familiar with. In some of our older churchyards, it’s still possible to see the traditional pattern of burials. At one time, a person’s place in the social hierarchy was preserved for posterity by the location of their grave. The better class of people were buried on the south side of the church, in the sunniest position. The poor were planted on the west, and the clergy on the east.’

‘And the north?’

‘Ah, the fourth side of the church was known as the Black North because it was always out of the sun. It was reserved for suicides and murderers, who were denied Christian burial rites. Those poor souls were condemned to the darkness, both literally and spiritually.’ The professor pursed his lips as he looked at Cooper. ‘Normally, a funeral procession would enter the churchyard from the eastern gate and follow the direction of the sun to the newly dug grave. On the other hand, a murderer or suicide would be brought in at the west gate and carried against the sun.’

Robertson lifted his shoulders and let them drop again, as if shrugging off any personal responsibility for such practices. But Cooper was thinking of the dark woods in Ravensdale, the dripping canopy of ash trees, the dank moss coating everything, never drying out because it was hidden from the sun.

‘Do you have a complete skeleton?’ asked the professor suddenly.

Cooper was startled. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘It could be significant.’ Robertson smiled. ‘That’s what detectives say when they’re interviewing a witness, isn’t it?’

‘On TV it is, anyway.’

Robertson’s face changed, but he hid his expression behind his whisky glass.

‘There are some bones missing,’ said Cooper. ‘It may mean nothing, though. The forensic anthropologist’s report suggests the activity of scavengers.’

‘It’s quite possible. But if you’re thinking along ritual lines, you should bear in mind that there have been many different attitudes to death, and some of our ancestors’ practices have caused problems for archaeologists.’

‘Problems?’

‘Animals and birds do tend to carry off the smaller skeletal parts, so it was usually only the larger bones that survived excarnation — that’s the technical term for leaving the corpse out in the open air. But after the animals and birds had taken their pick, the long bones and skull were often taken for use in ceremonies.’

Robertson looked at him expectantly. When Cooper asked the next question he felt as though he was responding to a cue, like one of Pavlov’s dogs.

‘What kind of ceremonies?’

‘Any ceremony in which it was useful to have the assistance of one’s dead ancestors. Skulls are considered particularly powerful. But other bones have their significance, too. They relate to the continuing influence of ancestral spirits.’

Robertson stood up and walked to the window, clasping his hands behind his back and staring at the ground like an Oxford don in his college quad.

‘You must think about death quite a bit, sir?’ said Cooper.

But the professor just laughed, his mouth opening wide to show strong teeth and a glimpse of a moist tongue.

‘Try reading Ecclesiastes.’

‘Sir?’

‘Old Testament, dear boy. “As one dies, so does the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts. All are from the dust, and all to dust turn again.”’

Cooper was starting to feel much the way he had at school during lessons from one of his more pedantic history teachers.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Robertson, studying his expression. ‘I’m afraid I miss my little group of students, and I can’t resist an opportunity to lecture.’

‘That’s all right, sir.’

‘Anything else?’

Cooper still hadn’t been given a chance to hear the tapes of the phone calls that Fry was so worried about. But her hunt through the area for locations had left him turning over in his mind the possible meanings of the phrase the caller had used.

‘Yes. What does “the dead place” mean to you?’

Robertson gazed out of the window thoughtfully, took a sip of his Glenfiddich, and shook his head, stirring the wings of grey hair over his temples. He repeated the phrase silently to himself a couple of times, his lips glittering with drops of whisky as they moved.

‘It could mean anything, couldn’t it?’ said Cooper finally.

The professor jerked as if woken from a daze. ‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’

Cooper closed his notebook. ‘Well, I think that’s about it for now, sir.’

‘Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you need to talk again. It all sounds most intriguing.’

As he made his way back through the tiled hallway, Cooper passed under the coat rack. He wondered if the professor had shot the deer himself and taken its feet instead of its antlers as a trophy.

‘Fashions change,’ said Robertson, his voice echoing in the hallway. ‘But our deepest instincts don’t, I’m afraid. We’re fascinated by death, yet afraid of it. The enclosed coffin is a symptom of our refusal to accept the reality. Did you know the word “burial” derives from the Anglo-Saxon birgan, meaning to conceal. Personally, I’ve always felt the sarcophagus was a rather more civilized option.’

‘A sarcophagus?’ Cooper’s head was suddenly filled with images of Egyptian mummies, and a half-remembered kaleidoscope of pyramids, pharaohs and golden effigies of Tutankhamen.

‘At least we’d enjoy a bit of light and air,’ said Robertson as he opened his front door.

And Cooper was still shaking his head at the professor’s non-sequitur as he drove past the new houses, out of Totley, and back towards the Derbyshire border.

It was Graceless who lay dead on the boards of Mr Jarvis’s porch. As Ben Cooper walked up the steps, the first thing he noticed was the bloodstained patch of hair on the dog’s side, just behind her front leg.

‘Did you see anybody, Mr Jarvis?’

‘No. They were off in the woods somewhere. But I heard the shot.’

It was immediately obvious to Cooper that the dog had been killed by a rifle bullet, not by a discharge from a shotgun, as he’d expected. He’d seen dogs killed by shotgun pellets before. In fact, a few weeks ago, Matt had shot a stray Doberman that had been worrying his sheep. A cartridge full of pellets caused a very visible mess. But in this case, the blood seemed to have come from a single wound, close enough to the heart and other vital organs to be instantly fatal.

When he bent to examine the injury, Cooper saw that the blood had already darkened and begun to dry. It had matted the hair even more and made it difficult to find the exact entry point of the bullet. He forced apart two hanks of sticky fur and glimpsed a neat black hole in the dog’s skin.

‘Only one shot?’

‘That’s all I heard. I thought there must be folk out rabbiting.’

‘Maybe there were. And a stray shot …’

‘Oh, aye. A stray shot that hit the old lass right in the heart. That’d be what it was, no doubt.’

Jarvis threw a blanket over the dog and turned away.

‘Where are the other dogs?’ said Cooper.

‘Down in the paddock.’

Everything was soaking wet, including the boards and the dog. Jarvis took off his cap, revealing a patch of white scalp where his hair had receded but the sun had never reached his skin.

‘You’d best get moving if you’re going to stand a chance of catching them,’ he said.

‘We’ll be following the incident up, sir.’

‘Bloody amazing.’

He reached down to the dog’s neck and unfastened the collar. When Cooper followed him to the door of the house, he saw Jarvis drop the strip of worn leather into a drawer of the kitchen dresser. He thought he glimpsed other collars in there, perhaps mementos of previous dogs he’d owned. A little private collection of memories.

‘If you could just show me exactly where you found the dog, sir?’ said Cooper.

They walked through the overgrown paddock and down towards the stream. The three remaining dogs were pacing restlessly backwards and forwards in the grass. One of them crept behind the abandoned trailer and waited out of sight for Cooper to pass. But it only wanted to sidle up to him and push its wet muzzle into his hand. He patted the dog’s head and rubbed its ears.

‘Why did you come down here in the first place?’ asked Cooper as he stood looking at the stream running through the damp shade of the ash trees.

‘I heard a noise in the woods during the night.’

‘What sort of noise? Voices?’

Jarvis frowned. ‘No, not that. A metallic thump, like they’d walked into something in the dark.’

Cooper glanced up at the paddock, with its lumps of rusting metal hidden by the long grass.

‘More than likely,’ he said. ‘And what did you do, Mr Jarvis?’

‘I went out to have a look, of course.’

‘What time was this?’

‘It must have been about midnight, and it were siling down.’

‘Not a good time for someone to be taking a midnight stroll, then.’

Jarvis gave him a sour look, but didn’t bother to reply.

‘When you went outside, did you see anybody?’ asked Cooper.

‘No. There was just a bag on the ground near the porch. A game bag — like shooters and poachers use sometimes, you know what I mean? So I picked it up. I thought maybe somebody had left me a bit of a present.’

‘Has that happened before?’

‘I know a few lads who go shooting,’ said Jarvis evasively.

‘OK. So what was in the bag?’

‘Cack. It were full of cack.’

For a moment, Cooper didn’t understand. ‘You mean dung? It was full of animal excreta?’

Jarvis shook his head and screwed up his face, as if remembering all too clearly the distinctive smell as he opened the bag.

‘Human,’ he said.

‘Are you sure?’

Jarvis gave him a derisive look, but didn’t answer. Some questions were too stupid to waste breath on.

‘Do you have any idea who might have a reason to do that?’

‘Somebody I’ve pissed off, I suppose. That doesn’t take much working out.’

‘And have you pissed off many people? Have you had a dispute with someone recently?’

‘Ramblers, now and then. They’re a bloody nuisance, some of them.’

‘Have you still got the bag?’

‘I burned it.’

Cooper sighed. ‘I don’t suppose Mrs Jarvis saw anything?’

‘She was fast asleep. She sleeps through anything.’

The three dogs sprawled on the porch steps now, their huge heads hanging over the edge as they watched the men walk towards the gate. Cooper recalled the motorbike he’d seen outside the house the first time he’d visited. It wasn’t here now, and he wondered who rode it. Probably one of Mr Jarvis’s sons. Or maybe even the mysterious Mrs Jarvis herself. Perhaps he should have taken more notice of the bike at the time, but he’d been too intrigued by the abandoned hulks in the paddock, and too keen to get out of the rain.

‘Oh, the bag of cack,’ said Jarvis.

‘Yes.’

‘She doesn’t know anything about it. The wife, I mean.’

‘I see.’

‘She gets upset about stuff. No point in telling her.’

‘I don’t think that’ll be a problem, sir.’

Cooper coasted to the corner of the track and stopped the car. He turned towards the driver’s window, as if having difficulty adjusting his seat belt. From here, the roof and upper storey of the Jarvis house were still visible through the trees. But the movement he’d seen in an upstairs window failed to resolve itself into more than a pale blur. It was the face of a person standing too far back from the window to be recognizable in the shadows. Was it Mrs Jarvis? Or just her husband, anxious to see whether Cooper had left the premises? Of course, it could be someone else entirely. There was no way of telling.

Cooper closed the window, pressed the accelerator and bumped the Toyota back up the track from Litton Foot. When he was fifty yards from the house, he pushed a CD into the player and filled the car with the sound of Runrig’s ‘Hearthammer’.

As a result, he just missed hearing the grumble of a motorcycle engine as it moved hesitantly through the damp woods of Ravensdale.

When Cooper walked back into the CID room, Fry was listening to the tapes again, with her headphones over her ears and an expression of concentrated loathing on her face.

‘What’s that, Diane?’ Cooper asked as he took off his coat, shaking a few drops of water on to the carpet.

She paused the tape and slipped off her headphones. ‘Our talkative psycho. These clues he’s given us in his second call have got to be his big mistake.’

‘Is he a man who makes mistakes, do you think?’

‘No,’ said Fry. ‘Bastard.’

She began to put the headphones back on, but Cooper stopped her.

‘Hold on. Can I listen? I haven’t had a chance to hear it yet.’

Fry nodded. She unplugged the headphones and started the tape again. Cooper listened to it for a few moments, trying to filter out the words from the distortion that robbed them of any recognizable humanity. Then he remembered Audrey Steele’s dental records. If they hadn’t arrived, he’d have to make another call to Moorhouse’s. He checked the fax machine, and gave a murmur of satisfaction.

‘Diane, I’ve got the dental records for Audrey Steele.’

‘Are you going to send them to Sheffield?’

‘It’s already done. I got the dentist to send them direct, and this is just a copy. Trouble is, all this stuff doesn’t mean anything to me.’

‘You’ll have to wait until we hear what the experts have to say.’

Cooper was looking at the fax when the voice coming from the tape machine penetrated his concentration.

‘What was that bit?’ he said.

Fry looked up in surprise. ‘What?’

‘What did he say just then?’

The tape was still running, and Cooper waved his hand urgently. ‘Wind it back a bit, Diane. Let me listen to that last part again.’

‘If you want, Ben. There’s nothing in it, though. Only a lot of pretentious drivel he likes to spout.’

But she did as he asked, and replayed the last couple of minutes.

‘Well, if that isn’t pretentious, I don’t know what is,’ she said.

‘Not that part,’ said Cooper. ‘Shh.’

They should decay in the open air until their fleshis gone, said the metallic voice.

Then there was a pause. And to Cooper it seemed a perfectly drawn-out pause, like the skilful timing of an experienced actor.

Or, of course, a sarcophagus.