Stephen Booth - The Dead Place

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.

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?’