The Dead Place

27

‘Petrus Two isn’t actually my cache, you understand,’ said David Mead. ‘But I know it well. And I’ve got a few of my own in this area. Some of the best, if I say so myself.’

Dangerous Dave wasn’t quite what Cooper would have expected. He was a tall, athletic man in his thirties, with his hair cropped very short. He could have been a police officer, but he explained that he was a fireman based in a station on the outskirts of Sheffield. He liked to spend his off-duty time walking in the Peak District, and had been fascinated to hear from a friend that there was a sport where he could use his GPS unit as well.

‘But you do know the person who left this particular cache, Mr Mead?’ asked Fry.

‘Oh, yes. He’s OK. He’s been a geocacher for years. I’ve met him a few times, but I think he’s on holiday at the moment.’

‘All right. And what about these other people?’

She passed Mead a list of names transcribed from the log book left in the cache. He looked through it, nodding occasionally. ‘They’re all familiar names. Some of them I’ve met. The rest I’ve seen posting their reports on the website, or signing in other log books.’

‘You’d say they were all genuine, er … geocachers, then?’

‘Yes, I would. It’s quite a small community in the sport. We tend to know each other.’

‘What about the items that people put into a cache? What’s the protocol?’

‘We do have some rules. Common sense, really. No explosives, ammunition, knives, drugs or alcohol. Nothing illegal. Oh, and food items are always a bad idea — animals will chew through the box and destroy the cache. So most people leave small toys, novelty items, perhaps a CD or a book, stuff like that.’

‘And what is this exactly?’ asked Fry, holding up the bag containing the purple grasshopper with its metal tag.

‘A hitchhiker.’

‘A what?’

‘Or, if it has a Groundspeak tag, a Travel Bug.’

‘Yes, it does.’

‘Well, a hitchhiker is an item that you can move from cache to cache,’ said Mead. ‘There’s a candle that has travelled from Australia to Arizona, and a Mr Potato Head that hops from cache to cache all over the place. With a Travel Bug, you can track your hitchhiker’s travels through the website.’

‘And all this is done with the help of GPS?’

‘A good GPS unit can give you an approximate location within around six to twenty feet, as long as it isn’t located somewhere really inaccessible where you need specialist equipment. But you don’t need to know all the technical jargon. All you need to be able to do is to enter a waypoint.’

‘And when you reach the co-ordinates and locate a cache, you open it up to make an entry in the log book?’

‘Sometimes you have to wait for muggles to get clear of the area,’ said Mead.

‘Muggles?’

‘Members of the public. Non geocachers. Usually hikers or mountain bikers, just passing by on a footpath or trail. But now and then they can do something infuriating, like settling down near a cache site to have their lunch. You can’t open a cache while they’re there, because it gives the location away to muggles. You either have to sit it out and wait for them to go, or move on to another site.’

‘Aren’t muggles the non-wizards in the Harry Potter books?’ asked Cooper.

‘It’s the same sort of thing, really.’

‘People who aren’t in the know and have to be kept out of the secret?’

‘Exactly.’

Fry sighed. ‘And in addition to making an entry in the log book, do I understand that the normal practice would be to take an item from the cache?’

‘Only if you put something else in to replace it,’ said Mead. ‘That’s the rule. Otherwise it’s TNLN.’

‘I’m sorry, sir, you’ll have to explain that.’

‘TNLN: Take Nothing, Leave Nothing.’

TNLN. Cooper liked that idea. It was a good motto for anyone visiting the national park, where the number of wild flowers picked illegally was exceeded only by the amount of litter left behind. Visitors were constantly urged to take only photos and leave nothing but footprints. If only it were so simple.

‘Would you be able to find out for us who left these items?’ asked Fry.

Mead pulled a face. ‘Some of them. Maybe not all.’

‘If you could try …?’

‘OK.’

‘Particularly this, sir,’ she said, holding up one of the bags.

‘A skeleton key-ring. Glow in the dark, is it?’

‘I believe so.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Yes, we’d like a list of caches in the area. Their names particularly.’

‘Well, that’s easier. But what area? There must be sixty caches within ten miles of Petrus Two.’

‘Within three miles,’ said Fry, ‘will be fine.’

* * *

‘You know, I’ve been thinking about this body-swap scenario,’ said Cooper, after David Mead had left. ‘It doesn’t make any practical sense, does it?’

‘What do you mean, Ben?’

‘Well, think about it. Put yourself in the position of an individual who’s ended up with a body on his hands, for whatever reason.’

‘A murderer, you mean?’

‘Not necessarily. It could have been an accident.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘Well, whatever. But you have a dead body on your hands, right? You have to find some way of disposing of it.’

‘And your friend the manager of the crematorium won’t play ball?’ said Fry. ‘If we believe what Christopher Lloyd told us, that conversation with Richard Slack could well have been the first attempt at disposing of the body. But when Lloyd said “no”, some other means had to be found.’

‘Exactly. And you’re someone who has access to the chapel of rest at the funeral director’s, where you know there’s another body already casketed up, ready to be cremated next morning.’

‘OK.’

‘So you take your body back to the shop and you do the changeover. On your own, that would be a difficult thing to achieve, but perhaps not impossible. I guess they have trolleys and so on. It would take time, though, and a lot of physical effort. You’d have to tidy up and make sure everything looked in order for the funeral next morning. And then you’d have to put the legitimate body back into your vehicle, wouldn’t you?’

Fry frowned. ‘Yes.’

‘Well, what have you achieved with all that work and effort? Not to mention the risk? The fact is, you still have a dead body to dispose of. In practical terms, you’re back to square one.’

‘You think he went to all that trouble for nothing?’

‘It seems like it, doesn’t it?’

‘I think he’s far too clever to have done something like that for no good reason.’

‘Well, he had a different body, that’s all. Why didn’t he just dispose of his original victim in the woods instead of poor old Audrey Steele?’

‘One good reason — there was something about the other body he needed to conceal. Probably some evidence of the way the victim died, a clue that would lead directly back to him. He put that evidence permanently beyond retrieval, by means of cremation. On the other hand, Audrey Steele’s body bore no evidence that could incriminate him.’

‘But surely he must have known that once we identified her remains, it would take us straight to the doors of Hudson and Slack?’

Fry nodded. ‘I think he was relying on two things. Firstly, that we might never be able to identify her, even if she was found. The longer she remained undiscovered, the more remote our chances. If it hadn’t been for the accuracy of the facial reconstruction — ’

‘And a bit of persistence,’ said Cooper.

‘OK, OK — and your persistence.’

‘What’s the second thing?’

‘Well, we might have been led to the doors of Hudson and Slack, but after all this time, how can we possibly hope to prove which member of staff was responsible for swapping the bodies? Any forensic evidence is long gone or contaminated beyond recovery. And the more time passes, the fainter the memories of potential witnesses.’

‘And some of them might have left in the meantime. We’re going to have to track them all down,’ said Cooper.

‘It’ll be difficult to justify the time and resources for an exercise like that, Ben, when there are more pressing cases to be dealt with.’

‘I was afraid you might say that.’

‘If we had an easier, quicker lead to follow up, it would be different. Possibly our only real hope is that a member of staff noticed something wrong at the time. Or had their suspicions, at least.’

‘And that they’re willing to share what they know with us,’ said Cooper. ‘Which isn’t exactly a given.’

‘No. But without that, he might well get away with it. Suspicions are nothing without evidence. And in this case, we have no evidence at all. You know, sometimes you hear of a murder enquiry with no body. This is the first case I’ve ever known where we have a body — but it’s the wrong one.’

‘It’s got to be that way, hasn’t it? Too many people would notice if there was no corpse in a coffin sent for cremation.’

‘Yes.’

‘So someone removed Audrey Steele’s body and put another in its place. Dangerous Dave would approve of that.’

Fry stared at him. ‘What?’

‘If you’re going to take an item from a cache, you must leave something to replace it. Those are the rules of the game.’

‘The rules of the game. Right.’

Cooper thought of the mourners standing round the green burial site the day before to say farewell to the remains of Audrey Steele. Many of them had looked baffled to be attending another funeral for the same person, as if they’d just discovered that a human being could die twice over and everything could be even worse the second time round.

‘Some game, though,’ he said.

The Slacks lived in Miller’s Dale, among the winding loops of the River Wye. Cooper knew that these middle stretches of the Wye could be surprisingly remote. From Lees Bottom, the route of the main A6 swung away from the river for a few miles before the roads converged again near Topley Pike. In between, the limestone dales were accessible only by narrow back roads or by hiking through the woods on riverside paths.

A railway line had once skirted the valley sides, in the days when the mills had been working. Now, apart from some disused tunnels, all that was left of the line in Miller’s Dale was a double viaduct rising high above the road. It came as a surprise to Cooper every time he saw it. The bridge and its massive iron supports seemed to leap suddenly out of the trees cloaking the narrow valley.

A sharp turn opposite the church took him past the back of the Angler’s Rest and into a dark lane alongside the Wye. Cooper drove beneath limestone cliffs and negotiated a flooded stretch of road to reach the hamlet of Litton Mill, where he found Greenshaw Lodge. It had been an engine house once, part of the mill complex. But progressive demolition of the older mill buildings had left the house isolated on the lower slopes among the trees.

As Cooper pulled up in front of the Slacks’ house, he saw a man standing on the doorstep. He was in his seventies probably, tall and lean, with the same slightly ungainly look that Vernon had. The old man didn’t seem to be waiting for anybody, just standing looking at nothing in particular. When he heard the engine, he turned to stare at Cooper’s car with a bemused expression.

‘Mr Abraham Slack?’

‘Come in,’ said the old man without even asking who he was. Cooper thought of giving him some security advice about identifying visitors before he let them into the house, but decided it wasn’t the time.

One wall of the sitting room was exposed stonework. Two arches led to the dining room and a breakfast kitchen with Shaker-style wall units. Outside, three steps led to a gravel path which went all the way down the garden. A neatly mowed lawn was broken by recently clipped hedges.

‘I sold my own house and moved here to be with Vernon,’ said Abraham, putting the kettle on to make tea in the automatic way of local people. ‘He looks after me now.’

‘You have no other family left, sir?’

‘Oh, I have two daughters. Both married with families of their own. One lives in London, and the other in Canada. They both suggested that I might want to go and live with them, but I couldn’t face the idea of moving away from here at my age. This is where I’ve always been, and I’ll stay here until I die. I have my grave plot already paid for, of course.’

‘Well, of course — considering your profession.’

Abraham smiled. ‘Not that either of my daughters would actually welcome having me living with them, I’m sure. They have their own lives to lead. Looking after children is a full-time job in itself, and nobody wants the responsibility of an old person as well, do they?’

Cooper looked away. But he wondered if the old man really was looked after by Vernon, or

whether it was the other way round. Abraham looked healthy and sturdy enough not to need any nursing just yet.

‘You say that you sold your own home to come here, sir? So was this the house where your son lived?’

‘Yes, that’s right. Richard and Alison lived here all their married life. But it’s Vernon’s house now.’

‘He’s made a nice job of it.’

Cooper glanced around the room. The place was very neat. In fact, the lack of decoration had a rather minimalist feel. But finally he found what he’d been unconsciously looking for. Everyone had family mementos in the house, even Freddy Robertson. Here, a framed photograph stood on a shelf in an alcove.

‘Is this yours, sir?’

‘Yes, it’s my family. My wife and I, with our three children. Vernon grumbles about it, but he knows how much it means to me. Richard would have been about twelve at the time.’

‘He looks very solemn,’ said Cooper.

‘He was the eldest of the three, and he made it his job to look after his little sisters. Richard took the responsibility seriously.’

‘What age was he when he was killed in the accident?’

‘Forty-six.’

Cooper did a quick mental calculation. The photograph must have been taken around 1970: the year that flower power died, the summer of love already a distant memory. You would never have known from this family group that the sixties had ever happened. The adolescent Richard had the suggestion of an unruly fringe to his blond hair, but no more than that. The whole family looked respectable and well dressed, as if they’d put on their Sunday clothes specially for the photograph. They were posed like a Victorian group, the dignified patriarch with his wife and children gathered around him.

‘You must have been proud of him, sir.’

‘Oh, yes. And he made a very good funeral director, you know. The firm was in good hands with Richard there.’

Cooper looked up. Was he mistaken, or had he detected a hint of criticism of Melvyn Hudson? It would be understandable, in the circumstances. The old man must deeply regret that his own son wasn’t still there to play his part in running Hudson and Slack. Abraham must be reminded of his son’s death every time he heard the name of the company or saw it on the letterhead.

‘Are the books yours, too?’

‘No, those are Vernon’s. I brought a few books and knick-knacks with me, but I keep them upstairs in my own room mostly. It’s Vernon’s house, after all.’

Actually, Cooper thought the room could have done with a few knick-knacks. The shelves could have taken a few more books. In fact, it felt really sparse, a stripped-down room. Perhaps this was the way Vernon liked it. It was, after all, a male household.

‘That’s my chair in the corner, though,’ said the old man. ‘I brought a few bits of my best furniture with me. The display cabinet is mine, too, and the grandfather clock.’

As Abraham pointed out his possessions, Cooper wondered what the room had been like without them. There must hardly have been anything in here at all. No woman would have tolerated such a lack of interior decoration.

‘When did you retire from Hudson and Slack, sir?’ asked Cooper.

‘Strictly speaking, I haven’t retired,’ said Abraham. ‘I still own a half-interest in the company, so I attend meetings occasionally. But I haven’t been active in the business for more than seven years now. I was lucky enough to be able to retire at sixty-five.’

‘Because you had your son to pass the mantle on to?’

‘Yes. But Richard … he died, you know.’

‘That must have been a great blow.’

‘We come to terms with these things after a while. But that’s why there’s just me and Vernon now.’

‘What about Vernon’s mother?’

‘She and Richard were already divorced when he died. She re-married and lives in Shropshire now. Vernon phones her, and he’s visited them in Oswestry a couple of times, but he doesn’t like her new husband, so he doesn’t see as much of his mother as he’d like to.’

‘So, Mr Slack, you weren’t actively involved in the firm at the time of your son’s death?’

‘No.’

‘Or in the period immediately before that?’

‘Seven years ago, I passed day-today running of the company over to Richard. And Melvyn, of course. Is there something wrong?’

‘We’re investigating an incident that may have happened shortly before your son died.’

‘May have happened?’

‘Sorry, I should say it did happen. And someone at Hudson and Slack may have been involved.’

‘We have a very high reputation,’ said Abraham stiffly. ‘We can’t afford any irregularities. None at all. It’s a very sensitive business we’re in.’

‘Nevertheless, there was a body which didn’t get cremated as it should have been.’

‘I know nothing about that. Neither Richard nor Melvyn ever mentioned it. I’m sure you must be mistaken.’

‘No, sir.’

Abraham shook his head vehemently. ‘No, I would have known about it. There are too many regulations and double checks. Something like that couldn’t be concealed. And why, anyway?’

‘Sir?’

‘Why on earth would anyone do a thing like that?’

The old man glanced out of the window, and Cooper followed his gaze. He saw a car drawing up in the yard, an old Escort with a rattling exhaust. Vernon Slack got out, looked at Cooper’s Toyota and fiddled nervously with his keys, as if he might get back in the Escort and drive off again.

‘That’s handy,’ said Cooper. ‘I’ll just have a quick word with your grandson on my way out, sir.’

‘Don’t bully him,’ said Abraham suddenly.

‘Now why would I do that?’

Vernon had seen him coming. He looked nervous, but then he always seemed nervous. He remained standing in the yard while Cooper came out of the front door. His eyes flickered to the window, so his grandfather was probably giving him some kind of signal, telling him how to behave or what to say. Maybe just a finger to the lips, enough for Vernon to understand: Saynothing.

‘Just home from work, sir?’ said Cooper.

‘Yes, I finished a bit early. We were quiet today.’

‘I suppose that’s bad for business, but good in a way, too.’

‘What?’

‘It means fewer people are dying,’ said Cooper.

‘Oh. Yeah.’

Looking past Vernon, he noticed an access to a cess pit concealed below flags between the hedges. It was well designed, almost invisible. There was a workshop attached to the house, with strip lighting and power points. On the other side, a garage contained an inspection pit, shelves full of tools and a large roof space used for storage. The only thing in a state of disrepair was an ancient stone-built privy in the corner of the garden.

‘Do you enjoy the work at Hudson and Slack?’ asked Cooper.

Vernon shrugged. ‘It’s OK. I don’t do anything too difficult.’

He looked at the window again, but the old man had disappeared. Vernon started to look anxious.

‘What were you talking to Granddad about?’

‘Mr Slack, I wonder if you remember doing a funeral about eighteen months ago for a lady called Audrey Steele?’

‘I wouldn’t remember anything like that. You’ll have to speak to the boss,’ said Vernon.

‘The service was at the parish church in Edendale, St Mark’s, and it was followed by cremation. Did you drive the hearse that day?’

‘I’ve no idea. Mr Hudson has the records. He makes all the arrangements.’

Cooper looked at him. ‘Don’t you ever know whose funeral you’re assisting at?’

‘Why would I need to? I just drive and help carry the casket.’

‘What about when you collect a body?’

‘I might get told the name. But I don’t know any more about it than that. There isn’t any need for it, you see. We do the job and look after the grievers, and then we go home. The boss sees to everything else, and he tells us when we’re wanted.’

‘You’re not the least bit curious?’

Vernon shrugged. ‘Sometimes, you don’t even know the details of a call until you turn up at the house to do a removal.’

He began to edge past Cooper towards the house. Even walking slowly, his movements were a little awkward. Cooper was reminded of Freddy Robertson. But the professor must be nearly forty years older than Vernon, and it was understandable if he was showing his age. Vernon was a young man. He looked like someone who’d suffered recent bruising.

‘So you don’t remember Audrey Steele’s funeral, sir?’ said Cooper, trying to keep Vernon from disappearing altogether.

‘We do a lot of funerals. We do them every day. How would I remember?’

‘Tell me, do you work with Billy McGowan often?’

‘Obviously.’

‘You get on with him all right?’

‘’Course I do.’

Cooper was about to press him further about the funeral of Audrey Steele, when he saw Vernon’s nervousness and remembered how Diane Fry had left Melvyn Hudson to stew for a while. Even if the trick didn’t work on Hudson, it should work on Vernon Slack. In any case, he was keen to be back in the office to hear the geocacher’s news.

Then his attention was drawn by the jingle of car keys, and he noticed Vernon’s hands.

‘How did you get those burns on your hands, sir?’ he asked.

‘They’re not burns, it’s just a rash.’

‘A pretty nasty rash, Mr Slack.’

‘I was doing some gardening, and I must have touched something I was allergic to.’

‘Perhaps you ought to see a doctor.’

‘No, it’ll go down in a day or two.’

‘Is that why you’ve been wearing gloves?’

‘Yes, it looks better in front of the grievers.’

Cooper raised his eyes and looked at Vernon Slack steadily. But Vernon shifted his gaze. There was no doubt he was frightened of something or somebody. And it wasn’t Ben Cooper.