Stephen Booth - The Dead Place

‘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.’

When Fry arrived at Greenshaw Lodge, four uniformed officers had gathered on the steps near the back of the house, their torches playing across the ground. They were wearing yellow jackets with white glowing strips, like figures from a ghost train. One of them was talking into his radio, calling for the medical examiner and specialist support.

‘What have you found?’ she said.

‘A body, Sergeant. Quite a fresh one. Dead no more than an hour or two, we reckon. The clothes are barely wet.’

‘Any ID?’

‘Not yet.’

Fry stepped to the edge of the pool of light created by the officers’ torches. The body lay on its side, the left cheek pressed into the grass, hanks of grey hair tangled and damp on the neck. Life had gone from the face, the eyes were open and staring. But she could see as much as she needed to.

‘I know who it is. It looks as though death came a bit closer than he expected, after all.’

‘What?’

‘The victim is known to us,’ she said. ‘His name is Professor Frederick Robertson.’

‘Are you sure, Sarge?’

‘Certain.’

While the officer using his radio relayed the information to Control, Fry looked at one of the other men behind the torchlight.

‘Do we have any idea how he died?’

‘It looks as though he was shot.’

He directed the beam of his torch on to the ground near the professor’s shoulder. Fry saw the oily gleam of congealing blood, the dark stains of a man’s life draining into the earth. For a moment, she didn’t know what to say. Then a phrase came into her mind, a phrase so appropriate that it could almost have been spoken in Robertson’s own voice.

She turned away from the officer’s puzzled face and gazed into the darkness.

‘ Caro data vermibus ,’ she said. ‘Flesh given to the worms.’

Ben Cooper thought of the old Datsun in Tom Jarvis’s damp paddock, the clumps of grass pushing through its corroded floor. The paddock and this building in the woods seemed to be worlds apart at first glance. But they had a similar atmosphere, forsaken and lifeless, the result of their human use. Both places had the feeling of somewhere that had been turned into a graveyard.

Then Cooper shook his head. No, not a graveyard. That wasn’t right. There had been no attempt at burial here, only prolonged exposure of the corpse to the air, a sacrifice to the destructive effects of the Peak District climate. This building couldn’t be considered a graveyard. But it might be called a charnel house. A dead place.

Near the skull lay a large stone, which he’d dislodged when he fell. Cooper remembered the stone on the hillside at Ravensdale. The grass had been pale green underneath it, recently covered over. But the underside of this stone and the ground it had been lying on were swarming with wood lice. Their grey shapes scurried in all directions when he turned it over.

As a child, Cooper had known the tiny crustaceans as coffin cutters. He imagined the name must have originated in one of those rural beliefs around death. Wood lice liked the dark and the damp, they were associated with dead and rotting vegetation. They were like flat little tanks, with legs that protruded from overlapping armoured plates. But he’d been told that the reason wood lice sought the dark and damp was because their bodies weren’t watertight. They dried up and died when they were exposed to the air.

Straightening up, Cooper backed away from the skeleton towards the wall. With some difficulty, he located a couple of toe holds where the crumbling mortar had left gaps between the limestone blocks. Stone dust and fragments of mortar cascaded down the wall, dislodged by his boots. He winced, hoping he wasn’t doing too much damage to the scene. He’d never hear the end of it, if he was.

Finally he saw the tree branch close above his head and was able to reach it to help himself up to the top of the wall. He scrambled over the edge and slid back down into the undergrowth. Beyond the woods, he could hear the occasional sound of an engine. For a moment, one of them seemed very close, but it stopped and he wasn’t sure. Distances could be very deceptive.

Cooper took a few steps away from the building into the overgrown weeds, intending to wait under the trees. But before he’d gone three yards, he felt something give way beneath his foot with a metallic snap. For a split second, he felt only the instinctive fear of an unseen danger. There was no time for his muscles to respond.

Then steel jaws slammed shut on his ankle, biting hard from both sides, their teeth sinking in deep. He staggered, thrown off balance by the sudden loss of use of his right foot. Then the impact was followed by pain, and he could feel the jaws gnawing deeper with the slightest movement. Driven by its powerful spring, the trap had caught him just above the top of his boot, penetrating his trousers and socks and puncturing the soft flesh with vicious ease.

Cooper collapsed in the grass, gasping at the jolt of agony as the metal teeth moved sideways, tearing at him like the blades of a saw. He fumbled desperately at his foot, found the jaws of the trap and felt the rusted metal, already slick with his blood. It was an old-fashioned animal trap, shaped like a clamshell and sprung by his weight on a strip of steel lying in the grass.

After a few minutes of fruitlessly trying to prise the teeth from his ankle, Cooper felt his fingers slipping on the metal, and knew that his hands must be covered in his own blood. He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself so he could think clearly. If he was right about what type of trap he was caught in, it would be impossible to open the jaws without depressing the spring that powered them. Somewhere, there ought to be a chain and metal stake holding the trap to the ground, and a spring lever to force back the jaws.