The Dead Place

33

‘You want a search warrant for Professor Robertson’s house?’ said DI Hitchens, squeaking his swivel chair anxiously. ‘What are your grounds?’

Fry reported her interview with Lucy Somerville, while the DI listened with increasing concern, a frown creasing his forehead deeper and deeper. She’d brought Gavin Murfin in with her, too, but he listened without surprise as she related the worries expressed by the professor’s daughter.

‘And then I got one of the support officers to see if he could find these websites and any indication of Robertson’s activities on them,’ said Fry.

‘What were you hoping for, Diane?’

‘I wondered how far Professor Robertson’s interest in death goes exactly. How close does he want to get to the real thing?’

Fry remembered Freddy Robertson standing in the churchyard at Edendale, admiring the memorials and telling Ben Cooper that body snatchers had never operated in Derbyshire. It had seemed to mean nothing at the time. But Fry knew the stories about body snatchers, just as everyone did. They’d existed only because they had customers willing to pay for illicitly obtained corpses.

‘What are you saying?’ asked Hitchens.

‘It’s incredible, the things you can find on the internet these days.’ She looked down the list she’d been given. ‘Death Online, The Death Clock, The Charnel House, oh, and something called Corpse of the Week.’

‘You’re kidding.’

Fry grimaced. ‘I took a look at that last one. You need a strong stomach, believe me. It’s an archive of photographs — mostly stuff taken from mortuaries, crime scenes, that sort of thing. No details spared.’

‘This is a UK site?’

‘Yes. But the contributions are from around the world — pictures of Polish autopsies, executions in Afghanistan, the remains of Chechen suicide bombers.’

‘Is it legal?’

‘I think so. It’s not as if you could stumble on something by accident. You have to choose which pictures you want to see. But it depends how the photos have been obtained, I suppose. To me, a lot of them look like scans from official files. Mortuary assistants and crime scene photographers sharing their best work with the world.’

‘What’s “The Death Clock”?’ asked Murfin.

‘It’s a site that lets you enter your personal details — age, height, weight, whether you’re a smoker or not. And then it predicts the date you’ll die.’

‘Oh, great.’

Hitchens looked at Fry with interest. ‘Did you try it out?’

‘Yes.’

‘And …?’

‘The eighteenth of April 2040.’

She could see them both working it out, just as she’d done herself. How long she had left, what age she would be when she died. And how many years she’d be able to enjoy her police pension, if she ever made it to her thirty.

‘The Death Clock gives you your remaining time in seconds,’ she said. ‘It counts them down as you watch.’

‘It’s rubbish, though, isn’t it?’ said Murfin.

‘I suppose you might say it’s a bit of fun.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Anyway, look at these photographs Robertson submitted to Corpse of the Week.’

‘Hold on, how do you know he submitted them?’ said Hitchens.

‘The email address of the contributor is given. The professor left us his card with his contact details on, including his email address. He calls himself thanatos, of course.’

Hitchens studied the photos carefully. ‘Pretty gruesome.’

‘Where would you say they were taken, sir?’ said Fry.

‘Well, this one is in a mortuary somewhere — not ours, but it could be the Medico Legal Centre in Sheffield. And the next one is certainly a crime scene. The victim has gunshot wounds.’

‘Suicide, according to the caption. What about the other two?’

‘I can’t tell. Not a mortuary, anyway. The lighting’s all wrong.’

‘I agree. But the body has been carefully laid out, so they’re not scene photos either.’

‘What do the captions to these say?’ asked Hitchens.

‘One for the necros.’

‘Jesus.’

‘As you can see, they show a female corpse, but with no signs of violence. It isn’t Audrey Steele, thank God.’

The DI looked at her sharply. ‘You think that’s something to be grateful for?’

Fry looked down, but said nothing.

‘A funeral director’s preparation room,’ said Hitchens. ‘It’s got to be.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘We ought to find out whether Robertson has any connection with Hudson and Slack.’

‘We can do that.’ Fry took the photographs back. ‘Yes, they might have been taken in the preparation room at a funeral director’s, but I’m not convinced. I’m wondering if there might be a similar room in the basement of an Edwardian gentleman’s residence.’

‘A what?’

‘Professor Robertson’s home at Totley.’

‘I see.’ Hitchens began to spin his chair again. ‘Diane, this isn’t evidence. It’s speculation. You need something more substantial.’

‘Well, we also came up with this — ’ Fry handed him two pages of closely printed text. ‘It’s an article written by Professor Robertson and published on one of the thanatology websites.’

Hitchens ran his eye over the pages. ‘It looks deadly stuff to me.’

‘I’ve highlighted the relevant paragraphs for you, sir.’

‘So you have.’

Fry watched Hitchens read, and saw the recognition dawn on his face. She hadn’t been sure whether he’d make the connection immediately. He hadn’t listened to the tapes of the phone calls as often as she had. He didn’t know the phrases by heart, the way she did.

But, as she watched him, she knew exactly the words that her DI was reading from Freddy Robertson’s website article.

Wasn’t it Sigmund Freud who said that every humanbeing has a death instinct? Inside every person, the evilThanatos fights an endless battle with Eros, the lifeinstinct. And according to Freud, evil is always dominant.In life, there has to be death. Killing is our naturalimpulse. The question isn’t whether we kill, but howwell we do it. Without a purpose, the act of death hasno significance.

For once, the flashing green light on the answering machine gave Cooper a little surge of pleasure as he walked into his flat. He pressed the button and listened to the recording before he even took his jacket off or paid attention to the cat.

‘Ah, yes,’ said the voice. ‘It’s Robertson here.’

Cooper stopped quite still in the middle of the room. Robertson? Professor Robertson? It must be, yet his voice sounded quite different. He’d lost the heartiness completely. Complacency and smugness had gone. Instead, he sounded weary and dejected. And, somehow, very small.

‘I, er … that is, I have something I need to tell you,’ said Robertson. ‘I hope you don’t mind my calling you at home, but you gave me your number. And, well, there is something …’

There was a pause on the recording. Cooper found himself listening for background noises, the way he’d listened to the tapes of the mystery caller. But there was nothing. No traffic, no voices raised in the opening verse of ‘Abide With Me’. Only the faint whisper of the professor’s breathing, slow and uncertain.

‘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. 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 third 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 under-age 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 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 Matt’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.

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. 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 ten-foot-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.

‘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.

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 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 back-up. 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.