The Dead Place (49 page)

He stopped, looked at the screen again, and remembered the call he'd tried to make to Freddy Robertson. The professor wasn't at home tonight.

'Oh, shit,' said Cooper. 'He's gone there now.'

Freddy Robertson's BMW was missing from the drive in front of his house, and there was no answer to the door.

'OK, let's get it open,' said Hitchens. 'Not too much damage, if you can help it.'

Fry watched the oak door being forced. She didn't really mind if it was damaged. In fact, she rather hoped that the mosaic tiles in the hall might get cracked and the mahogany balustrades chipped. Accidentally, of course.

She followed the team into the house as they checked the rooms to make sure no one was inside. She was looking for a cellar, which she felt sure must exist. An image of the crypt at Alder Hall was strong in her mind - the innocuous door off the hallway, the stone steps down into darkness, the smell of damp and earth.

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.

412

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

413

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 backup. 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.

414

34

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.'

415

'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.

416

'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?'

'That's about the size of it.'

'Whose orders?'

'Mr Slack's.'

'Richard?'

'Yes. He was quite a lad for a scheme, was Richard.'

'And this was one of his schemes?'

McGowan licked his lips nervously. Despite his appearance, he wasn't such a tough nut. He seemed glad to be able to get the story off his chest.

'Richard said he'd found someone who'd pay a lot of money for a body, as long as it was in good condition.'

'Who was this person?'

417

'I don't know. We were never told his name.'

'And why did he want a body? For what purpose?'

McGowan smiled and shook his head, almost apologetically. 'I don't know, and I didn't ask.'

'You just took your share of the money, I suppose?'

'That's right.'

'Mr McGowan, let's get this straight. You're telling us you did what you were told. And you never had any idea who was paying Richard Slack for this service? No clues at all?'

'No.'

'Well, that doesn't really hold water, does it?'

'I don't know what you mean.'

'Let's face it - you must have delivered the body somewhere. I don't suppose you just left it by the side of the road for collection, did you?'

'No . . .'

'So, Mr McGowan - where did you deliver Audrey Steele's body?'

Following the motorcycle tracks, Cooper finally came across a building on the edge of a plantation. It was an old building, probably some kind of livestock shed originally. Deep blocks of limestone formed the walls, and the door was of solid oak. Rust was leaking from the nail holes in the timber. But Cooper could see straight away that there was something wrong about this place.

Despite the blue paint peeling from its panels, the door was too solid for an abandoned building. It ought to be sagging from its hinges, the panels rotten or missing. There ought to be the remains of a broken lock where the door had once fitted securely to the stone lintel. But as Cooper got closer, he could see that the padlock and its hasp were not only intact, but clean and well-maintained. He crouched in front of the door, and sniffed the faint aroma of lubricating oil. Someone had been here within the last few weeks.

418

He turned his attention back to the door. The lock that secured it was a strong, old-fashioned padlock. Somewhere there would be a large iron key on a key-ring, safe in a drawer or sitting in someone's pocket. But whose pocket? The Saxton Trust owned this land - but what did they know about this disused building standing among the decaying beeches of an unmanaged woodland? Who cared about the overgrown remnants of Fox House Farm?

Cooper walked around the building, careful to place his feet on the dry vegetation rather than on bare ground. He found himself surprised by the size of the place. The side wall extended well back into the trees. Yet nothing had been allowed to root in the mortar between the stones, and no saplings grew in the corners and crevices, as they always did when left unchecked. Birds dropped seeds that would germinate in the least bit of dirt. But not here. Apart from a few clumps of grass in the broken guttering, the building seemed to have resisted the encroachment of nature.

On this side, Cooper could see that all the windows had been filled in with stone and sealed. He gave one stone an experimental shove, and it didn't budge. Maybe there was a double thickness of stone, with mortar on the inside. Or perhaps someone had used breeze block to make a proper job of it.

He moved back a few yards and looked up at the roof. Surely that couldn't have survived in one piece? The weather would have got in and collapsed some of the timbers. But the stone tiles he could see were sound. Sound, like Tom Jarvis had been sound.

But not quite. Where the building was divided by a wall, making a sort of lean-to extension at the back, the middle section of the roof was missing, exposing the interior to the air.

Cooper approached the wall again, found a foothold on the stones and pulled himself up with the help of a branch.

419

He teetered precariously before managing to get high enough to pull himself on to the edge of the roof with one foot where the guttering should have been. He leaned forward but couldn't see down into the building. He shifted his weight a bit further on to the tiles to peer in.

He'd been right about the weather getting in. A rotten timber cracked as soon as it took his weight, and part of the remaining roof tilted inwards. Tiles slithered and cascaded on to the ground, taking Cooper with them. He managed to cling to the branch just long enough to gain some control of his fall, then he landed in a crash of broken stone.

He sat up, patted his pockets to find his torch and shone it around the interior of the building as he brushed the dust off his clothes. Cooper ran the beam along one wall, then the next. He stopped near the opening into the larger room and moved the torch back a few inches, not quite sure of what he'd seen the first time.

'Oh God, how do I get out of here again?'

Inside the abandoned building, the roots of an oak tree had burst through the broken floor like a tangle of snakes. Brambles lay thick on the stones. And blades of grass grew sick and pale through the eyes of the skull.

'McGowan is saying nothing, except he's blaming Richard Slack,' said Fry when she broke off the interview to brief the DI. 'Crucially, he won't reveal where Audrey Steele's body was delivered to. His evidence will be critical in that respect.'

Hitchens had rolled back his shirt cuffs to wipe the condensation off his window. The outside was just as wet, as the rain had been falling again for the past three hours.