Stephen Booth - The Dead Place

He wiped his hands on the grass, thinking too late of the possibility that there might be another trap nearby. Then he tried to roll over to bring his arms nearer to the trap, only to be driven back by the agony that shot through his leg. He could feel his foot starting to swell, his boot growing tighter and tighter against the damaged flesh.

After a brief rest, he tried again, but more slowly this time. He edged over on to his side and inched bit by bit across the ground until he could reach the base of the trap. He was sweating by now. When he wiped a hand across his forehead, he wasn’t sure whether the slipperiness he felt was perspiration or blood, or a mixture of both.

His mobile phone had fallen in the grass a few feet to the right. He could reach it. It would hurt, but he could reach it. He’d charged the phone up in the car, as he always did. And it had only fallen in grass, so it wouldn’t be damaged. He thought he could even see the faint glow of the display.

Cooper nearly blacked out from the pain, but he knew his fingers were almost touching the phone. He breathed deeply, trying to clear his vision of the swarms of black specks, and the dark tide that was creeping in from the edges.

But maybe he’d lost too much blood and he was hallucinating. A slow rumble that he’d been hearing for a few seconds came closer, and stopped. A motorbike? It was followed by a rattle and the creak of a hinge. But then came a long silence, and he almost decided that it was an illusion — until he saw movement in the long grass, and heard a faint swish coming towards him, steadily getting nearer.

Two dark shapes appeared at the edge of his vision, and he blinked to try to make them go away. But that only made the specks swarm more quickly. If they were a pair of feet in black boots, he’d have heard more than their swish through the grass, more than the distant whisper of breath far above him. He’d have heard reassuring words, a call for help, or someone speaking his name. There would have been something .

Consciously trying to ignore the dark shapes, Cooper began to edge his fingers further across the grass. He had almost touched the phone, when suddenly it was gone. A movement came down out of the sky, and the phone was gone.

Cooper groaned. And then he lay listening to the swish of someone passing back through the grass towards the trees, gradually moving further away from him, further away with his only means of summoning help.

After all the photographs had been taken, Diane Fry bent over Robertson’s body and went through his pockets. She took out his wallet, an address book, an opened letter, car keys and a mobile phone. Finally, she pulled out a blue plastic card with lettering superimposed over a red heart. She showed it to DI Hitchens, who had just ducked under the tape of the inner cordon.

‘An organ-donor card. Why did he have this on him, I wonder?’

‘You’re supposed to carry those things with you,’ said Hitchens. ‘Otherwise, they’re not much use. Who does he give as his next of kin? His daughter?’

Fry turned the card over. ‘Well, well. It says: “In the event of my death, contact Mr Vernon Slack.” Full name and signature. And it says he wanted his organs to be used for the treatment of others.’

Hitchens studied the body. ‘It’s a bit late for that. He’s beyond being any use to anybody.’

‘But surely he wasn’t related to Vernon Slack?’

‘You don’t have to give the name of a family member. It can be a friend, or a colleague.’

‘Just a friend. OK.’

‘Bag the card with the rest of the stuff, though. There might have been more to the relationship between them than we think.’

Fry nodded. As she slid the organ-donor card into an evidence bag, she read the slogan in white lettering across a bright red heart: I want to helpothers to live in the event of my death . Well, you couldn’t really wish for more than that from your death. No matter what you’d done during your life.

Cooper looked up and saw Vernon Slack standing over him with a rifle. Staring at the end of the barrel, he thought of the bullet wound in Tam Jarvis’s dog, Graceless. Tears were running down Vernon’s face.

‘Who have you killed, Vernon?’ said Cooper.

Something moved and glittered in Vernon’s eyes. Then it was gone again instantly. It was as if two black beads had rolled over, revealing their glistening cores for a second.

‘It doesn’t matter now,’ he said. ‘I might have killed someone, I might not. It’s all the same in the end.’

Cooper thought of Abraham Slack. The old man had moved to Greenshaw Lodge so that Vernon could take care of him. But the phrase ‘take care of’ was open to a different meaning. The house hadn’t seemed a welcoming place, not the sort of home you’d expect to rest in and be looked after. Instead, it had felt sparse and cold, more like a house that someone was preparing to leave.

He tried to sit up, forgetting the rifle, or the fact that it might be more sensible to keep still.

‘Where’s your grandfather?’ he said.

But Vernon only stared at him ‘You aren’t very clever. You’re not clever enough, and you’re too slow. If you’re stupid, you’ll get beaten.’

Cooper closed his eyes, trying to make sense of what was being said. There was something surreal about the situation. Maybe it was the pain in his foot or the loss of blood that was making him light-headed and strangely unafraid. But he didn’t feel threatened by Vernon, despite the firearm in his hands.

‘You told us to look for “the dead place”, didn’t you?’ he said.

At first, Vernon seemed not to hear him. His attention was focused on the building where the white bones lay gleaming in the darkness with a curious fluorescence. He shifted the rifle under his arm until the barrel was pointing at the skull. It was as if he feared the dead more than he did Cooper.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But, like everyone else, you were looking in the wrong direction.’

‘What do you mean?’

Vernon coughed, and turned weary eyes back to Cooper.

‘You’re still being stupid. The dead place isn’t a building, or a location in the landscape. It isn’t in the physical world at all.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘The dead place …’ said Vernon, a sudden blockage choking his throat, ‘the dead place is in other people’s hearts.’

Then the barrel of the gun swung upwards and Vernon turned quickly, his heels squealing in the wet grass.

That was the sound Cooper would remember most clearly for weeks afterwards. It seemed to be the only thing that made sense for a while. In his memory, the squeal went on for a long time, rising to a shrill scream, high-pitched and inhuman. Then there was a loud roar and a flash, and Vernon had disappeared.

In the doorway of the abandoned building, Abraham Slack stood outlined for a moment in the light of the blast, a double-barrelled shotgun trembling in his hands.

By morning, crime scene tents had sprung up like mushrooms in the autumn rain. SOCOs, photographers and police officers were finding different ways of getting lost while travelling from the old engine house at Greenshaw Lodge to the ruins of Fox House Farm on the Alder Hall estate.

As a result, the forensic work went slowly, and it was well into the day before the bodies of Professor Freddy Robertson and Vernon Slack were removed. Longer still before recovery work began on the skeletal remains from the abandoned building.

Meanwhile, Abraham Slack wasn’t talking. In the interview rooms at West Street, detectives were used to frustrating silences. But the old man, sitting with his solicitor, refused to offer even the beginnings of an explanation for his decision to kill his grandson. The first discharge of the shotgun had torn apart Vernon’s torso, and pellets from the second barrel had shredded both his lungs, so he’d died breathing his own blood.