The Dead Place (17 page)

'It was nothing, Abraham,' he said. 'Nothing to do with us.'

'Why did the police come, then?'

'It was only one officer. Just routine enquiries, I expect.'

Abraham Slack was a little more frail than he used to be, and paler. But he still had a strength and dignity that made Hudson feel uncertain when he had to deal with him.

The old man took a deep breath. 'It's damaging to the firm's reputation, Melvyn.'

'Yes, yes, I know. But nothing will come of it.'

'There would never have been anything like this in your father's day.'

'Abraham, you know damn well there wouldn't still be a company if it weren't for me - so don't start telling me what it was like in my father's day.'

Hudson realized he was losing his composure. He looked around anxiously, and saw some of the mourners watching him. This was the last funeral of the afternoon, and the crema

138 torium staff would be getting impatient if the family weren't shepherded off the premises soon.

'This is not the time,' he said.

'We need to talk, Melvyn,' said Abraham.

'Later, later.' Hudson brushed nervously at his black jacket as he strode back towards the chapel, his face returning automatically to its professional expression.

Tom Jarvis put on his boots and collected a spade from the workshop. He walked slowly away from the house, past the empty pigsties and down to a small paddock at the edge of the woods. They called this place the orchard because it contained two apple trees. But the fruit had suffered from blight for years, and now the windfalls already starting to litter the ground looked more like wrinkled plums than apples. Even the birds wouldn't touch them, unless the winter weather got really bad.

The ground was damp here, but it was the only part of the property where the soil was deep enough, without hitting rock. Jarvis settled his cap firmly on his head, spat on his hands, and began to dig. His mind seemed to switch off when he was involved in physical work. It helped him to avoid thinking about things too much.

He had been digging for about half an hour and had built up a good sweat, when he stopped for a moment to wipe his forehead. Across the stream, someone was watching him. The person was partly hidden by the trees, and was given away only by a slight movement. Jarvis stared at the figure for a while, until it slipped away into the woods, back towards the Alder Hall estate.

With a sigh, Jarvis took up his spade and began to dig again. The grave needed to be a bit deeper yet, and the soil was heavy. There was no need for him to call out, or go after the person who had been watching him. He already knew exactly who it was.

139 'Well, this is nice,' said Professor Robertson. 'And such a surprise. I really hadn't anticipated an outing this evening. I think I'm going to like you, Detective Constable Cooper. You bring a little excitement into my life.'

The professor stood on the grass between the graves in St Mark's churchyard. His hands were thrust into the pockets of his coat, as if he was afraid to touch anything. Long strands of hair hung over his ears, flapping in the breeze that blew down from the hillsides above Edendale. Below the church, the River Eden could be seen snaking its way through the town.

'I'm really sorry to drag you all the way out here, sir,' said Cooper. 'But it could be important.'

'Not at all, not at all. It's good to get out of the study and away from the books now and then. Very stimulating.' Robertson nodded, and smiled slyly. 'Besides, I'm thrilled to get a chance to meet your colleague.'

Behind Cooper, Fry was leaning against a tombstone, listening but saying nothing. He tried to avoid her eye.

'And these things are actually sarcophagi, you say?'

'Certainly.'

There were five of them, standing upright against a wall of the church, near the bell tower. Someone had arranged them in descending order, from six feet in length down to one the size of a small child. There were deep cracks in the stone and some of the corners had been sheered off. Pale green lichen had spread across the lower surfaces, like a shroud of cobwebs.

Cooper reached out a hand to touch the nearest one. He ran his fingers over the rough stone, and felt the chisel marks made by the mason. Despite the occasional bits of damage, the sarcophagi were remarkably intact for their age. Whatever their age was, exactly. They seemed to belong to that murky period of history beyond the medieval.

'Roman?' he said. 'They'd be about two thousand years old, I suppose.'

140 'Oh, perhaps of that era,' said the professor. 'It's impossible to date them with any accuracy. Their design never really changed. It was so simple and functional that there wasn't much you could do to tinker with it.'

'But they're just stone coffins, aren't they? Old churches often have them in their graveyards.'

Robertson shook his head. 'Most people think of them as stone coffins. And I can understand how they might give that impression, at first glance.'

The sarcophagus nearest to Cooper was one of the bigger examples, its upper end at eye level against the church wall. It tapered towards the foot, and the mason had hacked a vaguely human shape out of the stone, including the outline of a head and shoulders.

'There's no mistaking that they're designed to contain a body.'

'Ah, but there are differences. For a start, these sarcophagi never possessed lids. They were always open to the air like this.'

For some reason, Cooper felt reluctant to examine the smallest sarcophagus, so he concentrated on the bigger ones instead.

'Of course, the distinctive feature is the hole in the bottom. I wouldn't expect that in my coffin.'

Robertson nodded encouragingly, as if to a student who was none too bright but was making an effort. 'Exactly.'

Moving closer, Cooper tilted his head. The base had been shaped more carefully from the stone than at first appeared. Despite the crudeness of its construction, the surface showed a distinct dip towards the centre, where a hole a couple of inches across had been drilled through the stone.

'The hole must be there for drainage. If these things didn't possess lids, there had to be some way of letting the rain run out, or they'd be full of water.'

'No, no,' said Robertson. 'Sarcophagi were kept under cover. They had to remain dry. It was essential to the process.'

141 'But...?'

'Well, you're partly right, DC Cooper. However, rainwater wasn't involved. Yes, sarcophagi were designed to provide drainage - but it was the drainage of body fluids.'

'Ah.'

The professor flapped his coat like the wings of a bird as he stood back and looked up at the church. Underneath the coat, he was still wearing the baggy pinstripe suit. 'You see, the sarcophagus dates from a time before the practice of shutting up a corpse in a box and burying it. At that time, there was the charnel house and the sarcophagus. A chamel house was known as the "dead place", or the "place of the dead".'

Fry stirred for the first time at the mention of the phrase, and Robertson saw that he'd finally got her interest.

'It was your mention of the dead place that put the idea of a sarcophagus into my mind,' he explained. 'But I wasn't aware at the time of the significance. There could be other interpretations, of course.'

'What happened in this dead place, Professor?' asked Fry.

'A corpse was left exposed to the air until decay had done its work, the flesh had dried and the bones were clean enough for disposal. Periodically, a priest would enter the charnel house to check if the corpse was ready.'

'Ready?'

'Our ancestors considered decomposition a perfectly natural stage of the body's evolution,' said Robertson. 'It marked the passage from earth-bound spirit to a soul free to ascend to Heaven. They thought it was only the flesh that kept the soul trapped in the body. The soul had to be released to achieve real death. Looked at in that way, decomposition was a positive development. I imagine they might have wanted to observe this process taking place, much as we watch our children growing up.'

As they walked back down the flagged path through the churchyard, Cooper heard the professor muttering to himself.

142 He caught the sound of a familiar phrase and realized the historian was quoting Shakespeare. Hamlet, if he wasn't mistaken.

'"Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew."'

Robertson caught Cooper's eye and smiled.

'Appropriate, I think. More so than "dust to dust" and all that. Trust the Bard. He always had the right phrase for the occasion.'

'But that word - sarcophagus,' said Cooper. 'Where does it come from?'

'It's derived from the Greek. A compound of two words sark and phagos. We doctors do so love our Latin and Greek.' Cooper looked at the professor and raised his eyebrows to indicate that he was none the wiser. Robertson beamed with satisfaction and allowed himself a small dramatic pause before he explained.

'Loosely translated,' he said, 'the name means "flesh eater".'

Before either of the detectives could react, Robertson began to amble around the flagged paths, casting backwards and forwards as if trying to pick up a scent.

'If you're interested in old graveyards, you'd like those in Perthshire, where I hail from,' he said. 'Near Pitlochry, there's a churchyard where some of the graves were protected by mortsafes - a kind of iron cage over the grave, to prevent body snatching. A pernicious activity, which we Scots were particularly good at, it seems.'

Cooper looked at him in surprise. 'Body snatching? Yes, a particularly unpleasant crime.'

'Ah, that's where you're wrong. I'm surprised to find myself putting you right on a matter of law, Detective Constable.'

'What do you mean, sir?'

'Body snatching wasn't an offence. Once you were deceased, your physical remains couldn't be owned by anyone, and therefore couldn't be stolen. A body snatcher was only

143 committing a crime if he stole other items with the body, even the shroud. It was popular opinion that turned against the resurrection men, not the law.'

'But Burke and Hare . . .?'

'A different case altogether. They weren't content to wait for a supply of dead bodies to become available, so they decided to procure their own from among the living. Murder was their crime. It was all a question of market forces at work. The demand for bodies for dissection was enormous.'

'There are probably other reasons people might want to obtain a dead body,' said Cooper.

'Undoubtedly.'

Robertson followed Cooper's gaze as he looked around the graves in the churchyard.

'Oh, there are no records of body snatching taking place in Derbyshire,' he said. 'People feared it, nevertheless. They had a superstitious dread of the body being removed from its last resting place. It meant they wouldn't be able to rise from the grave on Judgement Day.'

'So I believe.'

Robertson glanced up at him. 'Perhaps I shouldn't have called it superstition. I don't want to be offensive.'

It sounded almost like an apology. Cooper waved it away. 'It doesn't matter.'

The professor straightened up with a sigh. 'Nobody can be sure when society developed its distaste for death. But for centuries it's been kept out of sight. Few people ever see the process of decomposition now. Only those whose profession is death have that privilege.'

'Pathologists, funeral directors?' said Cooper. 'Police officers?' 'All our good friends,' agreed Robertson. 'God bless them.'

Cooper looked at Fry, and knew it was time to leave. Dusk was falling, and the churchyard was filling up with shadows. They softened the edges of the tombs, obscured the inscriptions,

144 and made the stone slabs look a little less cold. Too much daylight didn't suit the dead.

The "flesh eater", Professor,' he said. 'What did the Greeks mean by that name?'

'Well, the original phrase was lithos sarkophagos: "flesh eating stone". It reflected a belief that a certain type of limestone consumed the flesh from the body, and was therefore the perfect material to be used as a receptacle for the dead.'

Cooper laughed, and gestured at the hills on all sides. 'Limestone? This is the White Peak. Everything is limestone here.'

'Yes,' said Robertson doubtfully. 'Of course, we only have the word of Pliny the Elder. Pliny said limestone could consume a body in forty days. Personally, I wouldn't rely on it too much as a forensic theory.'

As Fry lifted the latch on the churchyard gate, she turned towards them, and Cooper saw that her face was set into an expression of impatience and scorn.

'Thank you for the history lesson, Professor,' she said. 'I'm sure you've improved DC Cooper's education immensely. He'll be a much better detective from now on.'

Fry moved off towards the car, but Robertson touched Cooper's sleeve to hold him back as they reached the gate.

'There's one more word that I'm sure you know,' said the professor.

'What's that, sir?'

'Sarcasm. Another figurative expression handed down to us from the Greek. It means tearing or biting at the skin, like an animal. The Greeks didn't like sarcasm very much.'

Fry was waiting by the Toyota, tapping her fingers on the roof as she watched people walking by on the street. Cooper unlocked the car, and she slid quickly into the passenger seat.

'Oh yes, we doctors do so love our Latin and Greek,' she said, fastening her seat belt. 'It's so, so fascinating - but only for those with a little knowledge of the classical world. Not

145 for the ignorant plebs who studied useful subjects, instead of some ancient dead language.'

'Diane . . .'

She looked at him with irritation. 'A real bloody Aristotle we've got there, haven't we? I bet he can't get in the bath without jumping out again and shouting "Eureka!"'

'I think that was Archimedes,' said Cooper, waving to Freddy Robertson as they pulled away from the church. Standing by his BMW, the professor gave a little bow.

Fry stared out of the window at the streets of Edendale.

'Lawyers are just the same. Why do these people have to make their jobs sound like some kind of arcane mystery the rest of us couldn't possibly understand?'