Stephen Booth - The Dead Place

‘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.