The Dead Place

34

It was the smell of wine and whisky. Sweet, sickly and pungent, like the scent of vinegar and stagnant water. Slippery pools of alcohol lay on the flagged floor of the cellar, a dark viscous red spreading to meet a trickle of gold. They were touching but not quite mingling, ruby globules gleaming in the lights. Three bottles of Bordeaux had shattered on the flags, and a fifteen-year-old Glenfiddich lay on its side, a film of whisky trembling on the lip of the neck, ready to spill.

Fry saw that someone had trodden in the liquid before they found the light switch, and his boot had left two sticky red prints. Wine racks stood against one of the walls, but she was disappointed to realize that there wasn’t much room for anything else. Freddy Robertson’s cellar was tiny.

She took out the photos printed from the Corpse of the Week website. No, they couldn’t have been taken in here. The wall in the background didn’t match, and the scale of the room was wrong.

Hitchens came down the steps behind her. ‘What a mess.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He looked over her shoulder at the photos. ‘No luck?’

‘There could be another cellar somewhere, or an attic room. The garage, maybe.’

‘Possibly. We’ll find it, if there is.’

He touched the Glenfiddich bottle with the toe of his shoe. It spun slightly in the pool of liquid. The neck turned to point towards Fry, and another drop of golden fluid ran on to the floor.

‘What do you think has been going on down here?’ he said.

‘I don’t know. I suppose he was fuelling himself with liquid courage for some reason.’

‘We’d better put out a stop request for his car.’

Half an hour later, Fry left the search still going on at the house in Totley and drove back to Edendale. She’d forgotten that she’d asked for Billy McGowan to be brought in for interview, and she was surprised to be told that he was waiting in an interview room. Waiting impatiently, too. But before she spoke to him, Fry had to spend a few minutes readjusting her mind, focusing on a different aspect of the enquiry.

Finally, she faced him across the interview-room table. ‘Mr McGowan, you were involved in the funeral of a lady called Audrey Steele, which took place eighteen months ago, in March last year.’

McGowan scratched his fingernails against the table, making a faint scrabbling sound that set Fry’s teeth on edge.

‘Was I?’

‘According to witnesses, you drove the hearse from the funeral service at St Mark’s Church to Eden Valley Crematorium. You were accompanied on this occasion by Vernon Slack. Do you remember?’

‘No. How would I? There are so many funerals.’

‘Oh, I think this one was quite special.’

McGowan shrugged and scraped his fingers again. Fry thought of the mice in the skulls at Alder Hall, scuttling through the eye sockets, curling up inside the cranium, their claws scratching the inner surface of the bone, where the brain had once sat.

‘Well, let’s see if this refreshes your memory,’ she said. ‘After this particular funeral, I believe you stopped on the way to the crematorium, and removed the body from the coffin.’

‘Wait a minute — ’

Fry held up a hand. ‘There’s no point denying it. What I most want to know, Mr McGowan, is whose body you replaced it with.’

McGowan laughed. ‘No one’s.’

‘It must have been someone’s. We have the computer records from the crematorium. They show that the cremation proceeded as normal — the right temperature during the burning, the right amount of residue left at the end. That means bone residue, Mr McGowan.’

‘It was no one.’

Fry stared at him hard. ‘You must see that we can’t accept that.’

‘Whatever you say.’

‘Let’s talk about the body of Audrey Steele, then. You won’t claim that was no one.’

McGowan dropped his hands from the table. He looked at Fry, then at the revolving tapes. ‘Look, it wasn’t really anything to do with me. I was doing as I was told, that’s all.’

‘Just obeying orders?’

‘That’s about the size of it.’

‘Whose orders?’

‘Mr Slack’s.’

‘Richard?’

‘Yes. He was quite a lad for a scheme, was Richard.’

‘And this was one of his schemes?’

McGowan licked his lips nervously. Despite his appearance, he wasn’t such a tough nut. He seemed glad to be able to get the story off his chest.

‘Richard said he’d found someone who’d pay a lot of money for a body, as long as it was in good condition.’

‘Who was this person?’

‘I don’t know. We were never told his name.’

‘And why did he want a body? For what purpose?’

McGowan smiled and shook his head, almost apologetically. ‘I don’t know, and I didn’t ask.’

‘You just took your share of the money, I suppose?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Mr McGowan, let’s get this straight. You’re telling us you did what you were told. And you never had any idea who was paying Richard Slack for this service? No clues at all?’

‘No.’

‘Well, that doesn’t really hold water, does it?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Let’s face it — you must have delivered the body somewhere. I don’t suppose you just left it by the side of the road for collection, did you?’

‘No …’

‘So, Mr McGowan — where did you deliver Audrey Steele’s body?’

Following the motorcycle tracks, Cooper finally came across a building on the edge of a plantation. It was an old building, probably some kind of livestock shed originally. Deep blocks of limestone formed the walls, and the door was of solid oak. Rust was leaking from the nail holes in the timber. But Cooper could see straight away that there was something wrong about this place.

Despite the blue paint peeling from its panels, the door was too solid for an abandoned building. It ought to be sagging from its hinges, the panels rotten or missing. There ought to be the remains of a broken lock where the door had once fitted securely to the stone lintel. But as Cooper got closer, he could see that the padlock and its hasp were not only intact, but clean and well-maintained. He crouched in front of the door, and sniffed the faint aroma of lubricating oil. Someone had been here within the last few weeks.

He turned his attention back to the door. The lock that secured it was a strong, old-fashioned padlock. Somewhere there would be a large iron key on a key-ring, safe in a drawer or sitting in someone’s pocket. But whose pocket? The Saxton Trust owned this land — but what did they know about this disused building standing among the decaying beeches of an unmanaged woodland? Who cared about the overgrown remnants of Fox House Farm?

Cooper walked around the building, careful to place his feet on the dry vegetation rather than on bare ground. He found himself surprised by the size of the place. The side wall extended well back into the trees. Yet nothing had been allowed to root in the mortar between the stones, and no saplings grew in the corners and crevices, as they always did when left unchecked. Birds dropped seeds that would germinate in the least bit of dirt. But not here. Apart from a few clumps of grass in the broken guttering, the building seemed to have resisted the encroachment of nature.

On this side, Cooper could see that all the windows had been filled in with stone and sealed. He gave one stone an experimental shove, and it didn’t budge. Maybe there was a double thickness of stone, with mortar on the inside. Or perhaps someone had used breeze block to make a proper job of it.

He moved back a few yards and looked up at the roof. Surely that couldn’t have survived in one piece? The weather would have got in and collapsed some of the timbers. But the stone tiles he could see were sound. Sound, like Tom Jarvis had been sound.

But not quite. Where the building was divided by a wall, making a sort of lean-to extension at the back, the middle section of the roof was missing, exposing the interior to the air.

Cooper approached the wall again, found a foothold on the stones and pulled himself up with the help of a branch. He teetered precariously before managing to get high enough to pull himself on to the edge of the roof with one foot where the guttering should have been. He leaned forward but couldn’t see down into the building. He shifted his weight a bit further on to the tiles to peer in.

He’d been right about the weather getting in. A rotten timber cracked as soon as it took his weight, and part of the remaining roof tilted inwards. Tiles slithered and cascaded on to the ground, taking Cooper with them. He managed to cling to the branch just long enough to gain some control of his fall, then he landed in a crash of broken stone.

He sat up, patted his pockets to find his torch and shone it around the interior of the building as he brushed the dust off his clothes. Cooper ran the beam along one wall, then the next. He stopped near the opening into the larger room and moved the torch back a few inches, not quite sure of what he’d seen the first time.

‘Oh God, how do I get out of here again?’

Inside the abandoned building, the roots of an oak tree had burst through the broken floor like a tangle of snakes. Brambles lay thick on the stones. And blades of grass grew sick and pale through the eyes of the skull.

‘McGowan is saying nothing, except he’s blaming Richard Slack,’ said Fry when she broke off the interview to brief the DI. ‘Crucially, he won’t reveal where Audrey Steele’s body was delivered to. His evidence will be critical in that respect.’

Hitchens had rolled back his shirt cuffs to wipe the condensation off his window. The outside was just as wet, as the rain had been falling again for the past three hours.

‘On the basis of the toxicology report, it looks as though the body had been partially embalmed,’ he said.

‘That might have been done to keep the body fresh. On the other hand, I understand it’s becoming more and more common for funeral directors to carry out some cosmetic embalming as routine.’

‘So it might not be significant?’

‘No.’

‘But you think the body went to Professor Robertson, I suppose?’ said Hitchens.

‘I’m sure of it. Who else could it be?’

The DI squeaked his chair anxiously, seemed about to answer, then changed his mind.

‘What’s your strategy, Diane?’ he asked.

‘I’m going to leave McGowan to stew for a bit, then I’m going to let him see that I know he’s lying.’

‘About what?’

‘The body they put in the coffin in place of Audrey Steele’s. We know it wasn’t human.’

‘Not human?’

Fry realized she hadn’t told Hitchens about the anthropologist’s findings, so she brought him up to date.

‘Unbelievable,’ he said.

‘It seems all too believable in the present enquiry. It’s almost as if these experts create problems for us, instead of helping us solve them.’

‘No indication what kind of animal?’

‘Not yet. They need the opinion of another expert for that, apparently. A different discipline. And more delay while they find someone who’s available and the evidence is shuttled around the country.’

‘A pity.’ Hitchens squeaked again, and Fry decided she’d bring in a can of Three-in-One for him tomorrow, if she could remember.

Then the DI sifted among the papers on his desk for a report.

‘What’s this?’ said Fry.

‘The second set of remains from the hillside near Ravensdale. All that fuss about lifting the skeleton and getting it to the lab intact, and it turned out it wasn’t intact in the first place.’

Fry held the report in her hand, reluctant even to look at it. ‘What do they say?’

‘The remains are mostly non-human. Apart from a few small bones, the majority are porcine in origin.’

‘What?’

‘It was part of a pig, Diane.’

She put the report back on the desk, placing it carefully among the other papers, as if she wanted to hide it, or pretend that she’d never heard of its existence.

‘What about Geoff Birley?’ she said.

‘We’re going to let him wait a bit longer, too.’ Hitchens hesitated. ‘Diane, we can’t place Birley anywhere near the locations where those phone calls were made. He can produce witnesses to his whereabouts on all three occasions.’

Fry sighed. ‘It doesn’t really surprise me. He never struck me as the type.’

‘Don’t forget to let DC Cooper know about any progress with McGowan, will you?’ said Hitchens.

‘Of course.’

‘Where is Cooper, by the way?’

‘He’s off duty.’

But Fry realized that it wasn’t actually an answer. On or off duty, Ben Cooper could still be working the case.

‘Fox House Farm,’ said Cooper when he got through to Fry on his mobile. ‘Remember it?’

‘In the plantation across the valley. What was it called?’

‘Corunna Wood. The Beatrix Potter book was a clue.’

‘What?’

‘The Tale of Mr Tod. “Tod” might mean death in German, but look at the cover of the book, Diane. I don’t know how I could have forgotten.’

‘Forgotten what?’

‘“Tod” is also the country word for a fox. That’s what Beatrix Potter’s Mr Tod is — a fox. And this is where he lives, at Fox House. Or rather, this is where he dies.’

‘Ben, I don’t really know what you’re talking about.’

‘Never mind. But I think I’ve found your dead place.’

‘You have? Is there any sign of Freddy Robertson?’

‘His BMW is parked near the Slacks’ house.’

‘And the Slacks themselves?’

‘Nowhere to be seen. You’ve been to Robertson’s place, Diane — have you seen any sign that he possesses a firearm? Maybe a shotgun?’

‘No. But, Ben — you say you’ve found the dead place?’

Cooper looked at the skull. The skeleton lay inside a limestone building, exposed to the air, not so much as a shred of desiccated flesh left on its gleaming bones. Something had picked it perfectly clean. Something that might be called a flesh eater.

‘Yes, Diane. I think this is it.’