The Dead Place

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 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.

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?’

‘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 break-in 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 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 break-in? 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.’

‘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 break-in, 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.’

‘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?’

‘Yes.’

‘His second message is starting to make sense at last. Let’s have a look at the map.’

‘Where’s the transcript?’

‘I don’t need it,’ said Fry. ‘It starts “All you have to do is find the dead place. Here I am at its centre, a cemetery six miles wide.” This Gibbet Rock is within three miles of Wardlow church, I presume?’

‘Easily.’

‘“See, there are the black-suited mourners, swarming like ants around a decaying corpse.” No problem there — he was at a funeral when he made the call. “Lay them out in the sun, hang their bones on a gibbet.” There’s your Gibbet Rock — ’ Fry stabbed a finger at the map. ‘Moving west from Wardlow.’

‘OK.’

‘“They should decay in the open air until their flesh is gone.”’

‘Audrey Steele?’ suggested Cooper. ‘It fits.’

‘Could be.’

‘That’s Litton Foot, there.’

Fry nodded. ‘“Or, of course, in a sarcophagus.”’

They were both silent for a moment.

‘I don’t know,’ said Cooper.

But Fry finished reciting the message to the end, as if it was programmed into her memory.

‘“It’s perfectly simple. All you have to do is find the dead place.”’

‘I still don’t know, Diane.’

‘All right. Then we have to follow the signs at “the gibbet and the rock”. Let me make a few phone calls, and we’ll go.’

‘Are you sure of this? There could be other interpretations.’

Fry glanced at him as she picked up the phone. ‘Yes, I’m sure. I’m starting to get inside his head here, Ben. Isn’t that what you said we should be able to do? Well, I’m doing it.’

‘The DI said no more chasing around the countryside — ’

But she was already speaking to someone on the phone. Cooper looked at the urn on his desk and the missing persons files. Oh, well. For once, he couldn’t be accused of going off and doing his own thing. It was Fry’s decision.

And she might be right. He hadn’t learned the messages by heart the way she had, but Cooper could recall the one line Fry had missed quoting from the second call. You can see it for yourself. Youcan witness the last moments. They might not have a lot of time to waste.

Half an hour later, Cooper found himself driving back towards Wardlow. It was Matt who’d reminded him that the road between Wardlow and Monsal Head had a local name — Scratter. ‘Scrat’ was a dialect word for scratching or clawing, and horses had to ‘scrat’ up the hill. But some said the name came from skratti, the Scandinavian word for a demon. The Devil himself was called Old Scratch in local folk stories.

The Vikings had left quite a legacy in these parts. Derbyshire had once belonged to Denmark, with an invading army stationed in the next county, in the caves under Nottingham Castle. Those Vikings had been superstitious folk, and had peopled the landscape with demons and monsters, entire swarms of them lurking in every dark place and at every unfamiliar spot on the map.

Over the centuries, their descendants had been reluctant to give up the most sinister stories, even in the face of all that new-fangled religion and rationality. Some of those legends had taken such a powerful grip on the hills and shadowed valleys that they would never be dislodged. Demons hid in the very place names.

‘Ben, this Professor Robertson,’ said Fry as they drove through Wardlow. ‘He’s definitely weird, isn’t he?’

‘He’s all right. He’s just a bit …’ Cooper hesitated, struggling for the right word. ‘Well, perhaps a bit obsessive. Look, he has this specialized interest, a subject he thinks he’s the world greatest expert on. He loves showing off his knowledge. That makes him appear rather …’

‘Weird?’

‘Just because he’s slightly eccentric and obsessed with the rituals of death doesn’t mean he goes home every night and acts out necrophiliac fantasies on the bodies of his victims.’

‘Has he talked to you about necrophilia?’

‘No.’

‘So that one came from your own imagination, did it?’

Cooper sighed. ‘You’ve obviously made your mind up about Freddy Robertson on no evidence. Is this some kind of intuition, Diane?’

‘Intuition, bollocks. This is experience. I’ve met enough weirdos to know one when I see one.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘So is the professor married?’

‘I don’t know. He’s never mentioned a Mrs Robertson.’

‘Can you find out?’

‘I suppose so.’

Cooper’s assumption had been that Robertson was a bachelor, or divorced. Men with obsessions were difficult to live with. But you could never be sure — it was remarkable the compromises people could come to in their relationships.

‘Oh, I forgot to tell you,’ said Cooper. ‘I had a really bad time at Mrs Gill’s. All the family were there, getting ready for the funeral this afternoon. Audrey Steele’s second funeral, that is. They interrogated me about how we were doing with the enquiry.’

‘What did you tell them?’

‘There wasn’t much I could tell them. They weren’t very happy with that. I was glad to get away before they formed a lynch mob.’

‘These jobs have to be done.’

The outcrop called Peter’s Stone or Gibbet Rock stood towards the north end of the Cressbrook Dale nature reserve, an area of limestone grassland, with ash woodlands further down the dale. There was a path along the stream into the dale, reached through a tiny, spring-loaded gate and a gap in the stone wall that was just wide enough for a slim person not wearing too many clothes. Cooper thought he would probably manage to squeeze through, as long as he was trying it before lunch and not after.

‘There must be another way,’ said Fry, looking at the fields full of sheep. In the bottom of the dale, the rushing stream looked impossible to cross.

‘Yes, I think there is.’

Right at the junction of the Wardlow road, they found a gateway in a farmyard, just wide enough for Cooper’s Toyota to scrape through, past a mildewed hawthorn tree. The gate was secured only by a length of orange baler twine looped over the stone gate post. The four-wheel drive managed fine on the track until they came to a point where the swollen stream had breached the field wall and swamped the ground on the other side. Cooper stopped and looked up at Peter’s Stone, still two hundred yards away.

‘We’re going to have to walk, I’m afraid.’

Fry opened the passenger door and looked down at the water lapping gently against the wheels. ‘I’m not getting out on this side.’

‘It’s deep, but clean.’

‘I’m not getting out.’

‘I can lend you some wellies,’ said Cooper. ‘They’re in the boot.’

‘OK.’

The path had been liberally sprinkled with droppings by the sheep that watched them pass, their eyes unblinking, their jaws moving rhythmically. The ewes had recently been shorn, and the red splotches of their owner’s mark showed clearly on their sides. Some still had lambs with them, a few months old now, but not yet eartagged.

‘Make sure you stay on the path, Diane,’ Cooper called as Fry began to lag behind.

‘Why, are the sheep dangerous?’

‘No, the ground is.’

Cooper smiled to himself as he climbed another stile. Fry had at least remembered him telling her how dangerous cows could be when they had calves with them. But sheep were different.

‘The signs are warning about dangerous mineshafts. There must have been lead mining around here. The shafts get covered over, and sometimes you don’t see one until you’re right on top of it.’

Cooper realized he was talking to himself. He turned to see Fry still near the last stile, with an expression of disgust on her face.

‘What’s the matter?’

She was looking at her hand in horror, as if it had turned into an alien object on the end of her arm. She bent over and began to wipe it vigorously on a patch of damp grass.

‘Oh, God, it’s sheep shit,’ she said. ‘There’s sheep shit on the top of this wall, and I put my hand right in it.’

‘Sheep? Are you sure it isn’t bird shit?’ said Cooper.

‘I don’t care what kind of shit it is. It’s on my hand.’

Cooper waited for her, wondering whether he ought to offer her a clean handkerchief or something, like a gentleman in a Jane Austen novel. But he didn’t carry a handkerchief. He might have a few crumpled Kleenex tissues in his pocket. He started to look for one, but Fry had already found her own and was gingerly stepping over the stile, without using her hands.

‘I was just saying …’ he began.

‘Stay on the path. I know.’

Cooper walked carefully through the grazing sheep and reclining cattle, not even looking at them as he passed. They glanced at him and went on cudding. But Fry shied away from the first ewe she came near, and the animal did the same, scrambling away and panicking its neighbours. The cattle slowly got up and moved away from her.

‘Diane, stop bothering the animals,’ said Cooper, turning to see what was going on.

‘I’m not — they’re bothering me.’

She turned at a rattle on the slope behind. An old ewe was peering over the ledge at her.

‘See, that one threw a stone at me.’

Finally, they crossed a small ridge and found themselves at the foot of Peter’s Stone — Gibbet Rock, as Tom Jarvis had called it. Cooper wondered if Anthony Lingard had been gibbeted on top of the outcrop, or from the side of the rock itself. Or perhaps from the slope below it? There was nothing to indicate which.

On this side of the rock, there was a scree slope, an unstable mass of tiny, loose stones. Scree was notoriously difficult to climb, so a path had been worn towards the eastern side, where the gradient was steeper but more stable underfoot. Cooper looked up at the limestone outcrop. It was full of nooks and crevices.

They were breathing heavily by the time they had scrambled to the top of the outcrop. Cooper helped Fry up the last stretch, and stopped to get his breath back. From here, there was only one farmhouse visible on the skyline further down the dale. The opposite slope was formed of limestone terraces and more scree. Lumps of stone dislodged by the sheep lay around it like giant hailstones.

A few minutes later, Cooper lay half-hidden between two rocks, his head down in a deep crevice. He began to inch back towards the air, and when he emerged, he was clutching something in one hand.

‘What have you got there?’ asked Fry.

Cooper was panting, and red in the face from the blood rushing to his head while he was upside down.

‘Well, it looks like a Tupperware box,’ he said. ‘It was tucked away out of sight in this fissure. And there’s something inside it, see — ’

‘Let’s have a look.’

The box was about nine inches long, with a tight yellow lid. It wasn’t actually Tupperware but something similar, made of tough translucent plastic. It had two handles that hinged on to the lid and held it in place, making the box pretty much airtight and waterproof. It had been hidden deep in the crevice, and concealed from casual view by a lump of limestone. Fry brushed off some dirt and eased open the lid.

‘Lord, what’s all that junk?’ she said.

Cooper leaned over her shoulder. Among a lot of other stuff in the box, he glimpsed a small toy dog, an England badge, a set of coloured crayons and a pair of sunglasses. There was even a Matchbox Land Rover Freelander that he would have loved as a child.

‘I can see a notebook, too,’ he said, reaching to lift the crayons out of the way.

Fry held up a hand. ‘Get it back to the office and let scenes of crime go through everything. If he’s left us a clue here, we don’t want to miss it.’

‘We’ve got an appointment,’ Cooper reminded her.

‘Yes, I know.’

Fry looked at her hand and sniffed her fingers, checking for traces of sheep droppings.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Cooper. ‘The dress code is casual. The Duke and Duchess won’t be at home.’

He took a last glance at the plastic box before they piled all the stuff back in. There were stickers and pens in a plastic Waitrose bag, a pencil sharpener, dart flights, sweets, and cloth badges advertising something called Les Randonneurs Mondiaux. A label inside the Waitrose bag said: Congratulations!You’ve found it!