Stephen Booth - The Dead Place

She wasn’t sure what she would have done if her car hadn’t been old enough to have a cassette player. But now she slid the tape in and pressed the ‘play’ button. She rested her head on the back of the seat and waited until the hiss faded away.

Soon there will be a killing. It might happen in thenext few hours. We could synchronize our watches andcount down the minutes …

As she expected, the voice was distorted. The caller had done something to disguise it — not just the old handkerchief over the mouth, but some kind of electronic distortion that gave the voice a metallic sound, vibrating and echoey. The accent was local, as far as she could tell. But she hadn’t yet worked out the subtle differences between Derbyshire people and their neighbours in Yorkshire, let alone between North and South Derbyshire. There were some who claimed they could pin down an accent to within a few miles, but that was a job for an expert.

One of the most worrying things about the tape was that the caller seemed completely calm and under control. His delivery was very deliberate, with no signs of agitation that she could detect. As Hitchens suggested, he sounded convincing. In fact, he would come over well in the witness box.

…What a chance to record the ticking away of alife, to follow it through to that last, perfect moment, when existence becomes nothing, when the spirit partswith the physical …

Fry glanced at the courthouse again. Her appearance seemed to have gone well, and the CPS were happy. Barring any major disasters during the rest of the hearing, Micky Ellis would be going down for a few years. It wouldn’t do much good for Denise Clay, who had lain dead in her nightdress with her personal stereo on the bedside table and cigarette burns on the duvet. For her, justice would come too late. Denise was long since buried by now.

But it didn’t do to personalize things too much. Sometimes, the processes of the law needed victims to take a back seat.

… We turn away and close our eyes as the gatesswing open on a whole new world — the scented, carnalgardens of decomposition. We refuse to admire thoseflowing juices, the flowering bacteria, the dark, bloatedblooms of putrefaction. This is the true nature of death. We should open our eyes and learn .

Fry’s eyes had started to close, but a few minutes later they came wide open again. She looked at the cassette player in bewilderment. She stopped the tape, rewound it and played it again from the section about Freud and the death instinct. There were a few seconds of silence, then the voice started again, filling the car with its metallic echoes.

‘Damn it,’ said Fry. ‘Why did no one tell me there were two calls?’

And you can see the end for yourself. All you have todo is find the dead place. Here I am at its centre, a cemeterysix miles wide. See, there are the black-suitedmourners, swarming like ants around a decaying corpse .

We fill our dead bodies with poison, pump acidthrough their veins. We pollute the atmosphere with thesmoke from their flesh. We let them rot below ground, in coffins bursting with gas or soaked in water like minestronesoup. But true death is clean and perfect. Laythem out in the sun, hang their bones on a gibbet. Letthem decompose where the carrion eaters gather. Theyshould decay in the open air until their flesh is goneand their bones are dry as dust. Or, of course, in asarcophagus. Clean and perfect, and final .

Yes, you can see it for yourself. You can witness thelast moments. Follow the signs at the gibbet and therock, and you can meet my flesh eater .

It’s perfectly simple. All you have to do is find thedead place .

There was a motorbike parked outside the Jarvis house, and several lumps of metal rusting in the paddock. The rain that had been falling all morning made sporadic rattling sounds in the long grass, as if hitting something metallic and hollow, like a car roof.

Ben Cooper stopped halfway up the path to take a closer look. Yes, the largest lump had been a car once — maybe an old Datsun Sunny, judging from the chocolate brown paintwork. Nearby were the remains of a chest freezer and a pig trailer with a broken chassis. None of them had served any useful purpose for a long time, except as homes for insects and rodents. Tongues of pale bracken were breaking through the floor of the Datsun, and nettles had folded themselves into its wheel arches, clutching the deflated tyres in tangles of spiky leaves. Now that summer was nearly over, the nettles, like everything else, were starting to die.

Cooper could feel the dampness penetrating the hems of his trousers as he brushed through the grass. Even when it wasn’t raining, it would be permanently wet down here on the low-lying ground at Litton Foot. White bracket fungus flourished wherever it could find an inch of surface soft enough to plant its spores. Layers of it grew from the rubber seal on the lid of the abandoned freezer, and from the crumbling foam insulation behind the dashboard of the car.

He saw that there were other rusted hulks lying in the paddock, and more of them hidden in brambles growing around a gate that led down to the woods. But it was too wet, and Cooper didn’t feel interested enough to explore.

A man in jeans and a thick sweater stood watching him from a wooden porch built on to the back of the house. Cooper hoped he hadn’t looked too interested in the wrecked Datsun. The man had the expression of a used car salesman spotting an approaching customer. Predatory, yet ready to turn on the charm. Cooper could feel himself being assessed.

‘Mr Jarvis?’ he called.

‘Aye. What can I do for you?’

Before he answered, Cooper moved a bit closer. He had to watch where he was putting his feet to avoid stepping on shards of rusted metal lying in the grass.

As he got closer, he saw that the porch itself seemed to have been made out of old timber salvaged from a converted chapel or schoolroom. The boards Mr Jarvis was standing on were massive planks of weathered oak, full of knotholes and the heads of six-inch nails embedded in the wood and painted over. Here and there, patches of black paint still showed through a layer of varnish. The whole structure must weigh a ton — no modern pine decking from Homebase for Tom Jarvis.

‘Detective Constable Cooper, sir. Edendale CID.’

Cooper was used to a variety of reactions when he identified himself. He was rarely a welcome visitor, even to someone who’d been the victim of a recent crime. Then, he was often the target of their frustration. But there was no anxiety or surprise from Tom Jarvis, only a slight disappointment that he hadn’t found a customer for the old Datsun after all.

‘Did you want something?’ he said.

‘Could I ask you a few questions, sir? Nothing to worry about — just routine.’

‘Come up on to the porch, then.’

The deck of the porch was quite a long way off the ground, and Mr Jarvis was looking down on him from a height of about nine feet. Cooper could have scrambled up, but he thought he might lose dignity doing it. Instead, he walked around to the side to reach a set of wide wooden steps that led down to a path into the trees.

Going up the steps, he felt as though he was mounting a stage. That was something he hadn’t done for a long time, not since he went up to collect his certificates at his school prize-giving. For a moment, Cooper felt as vulnerable as he had when he’d been convinced he was going to trip over the top step and fall flat on his face in front of eight hundred pupils and parents.

‘How are you, Mr Jarvis?’ he said.

‘Sound. I’m sound.’

‘This porch is a solid piece of work, sir. Did you build it yourself?’