The Dead Place

Stephen Booth

For everyone who has ever had to deal with death.

‘For what is it to die, But to stand in the sun and melt into the wind? And when the Earth has claimed our limbs, Then we shall truly dance.’

Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931), ‘The Prophet ’

The Death Clock really exists, but try it at your own risk! You can find it at: http://www.deathclock.com

Contents

Title Page Epigraph Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty One Chapter Twenty Two Chapter Twenty Three Chapter Twenty Four Chapter Twenty Five Chapter Twenty Six Chapter Twenty Seven Chapter Twenty Eight Chapter Twenty Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty One Chapter Thirty Two Chapter Thirty Three Chapter Thirty Four Chapter Thirty Five Chapter Thirty Six Chapter Thirty Seven About the Author By the Same Author Copyright About the Publisher

1

Soon there will be a killing. It might happen in the next few hours. We could synchronize our watches and count down the minutes. What a chance to record the ticking away of a life, to follow it through to that last, perfect moment, when existence becomes nothing, when the spirit parts with the physical.

The end is always so close, isn’t it? Fate lurks beneath our feet like a rat in a sewer. It hangs in a corner of the room like a spider in its web, awaiting its moment. And the moment of our dying already exists inside us, deep inside. It’s a dark ghost on the edge of our dreams, a weight that drags at our feet, a whisper in the ear at the darkest hour of the night. We can’t touch it or see it. But we know it’s there, all the same.

But then again … perhaps I’ll wait, and enjoy the anticipation. They say that’s half the pleasure, don’t they? The waiting and planning, the unspoiled thrill of expectation. We can let the imagination scurry ahead, like a dog on a trail, its nostrils twitching, its tongue dribbling with joy. Our minds can sense the blood and savour it. We can close our eyes and breathe in the aroma.

I can smell it right now, can’t you? It’s so powerful, so sweet. So irresistible. It’s the scent of death.

Footsteps approached in the corridor. Heavy boots, someone pacing slowly on the vinyl flooring. Here was a man in no hurry, his mind elsewhere, thinking about his lunch or the end of his shift, worrying about the twinge of pain in his back, a waistband grown too tight. An ordinary man, who rarely thought about dying.

The footsteps paused near the door, and there was a rustle of papers, followed by a moment’s silence. An aroma of coffee drifted on the air, warm and metallic, like the distant scent of blood.

As she listened to the silence, Detective Sergeant Diane Fry rubbed at the black marks on her fingers with a tissue. The fax machine invariably did this to her. Every time she went near the damn thing, the powder ended up on her skin. There always seemed to be a spill from a cartridge, or fingerprints left on the casing. But tonight she felt as though she were trying to wipe a much darker stain from her hands than fax toner.

‘He’s seriously disturbed,’ she said. ‘That’s all. A sicko. A Rampton case.’

But she didn’t expect a reply. It was only a tactic to delay reading the rest of the transcript. Fry scraped at her fingers again, but the marks only smeared and sank deeper into her pores. She would need soap and a scrubbing brush later.

‘Damned machines. Who invented them?’

On the other side of the desk, Detective Inspector Paul Hitchens waited patiently, rotating his swivel chair, smiling with satisfaction at a high-pitched squeal that came from the base at the end of each turn.

Fry sighed. Waiting for her in the CID room was the paperwork from several cases she was already up to her neck in. She was due in court tomorrow morning to give evidence in a murder trial, and there was a conference with the Crown Prosecution Service later in the day. She didn’t have time to take on anything else, as her DI ought to know.

She’d also slept badly again last night. Now, at the end of the day, her head ached as if steel springs had been wound tight across her forehead and driven deep into the nerves behind her eyes. A growing queasiness told her that she ought to go home and lie down for a while until the feeling passed.

And this will be a real killing – not some drunken scuffle in the back yard of a pub. There’ll be no spasm of senseless violence, no pathetic spurt of immature passion. There’s no place for the brainless lunge of a knife, the boot in the side of the head. There’ll be no piss among the blood, no shit on the stones, no screaming and thrashing as a neck slithers in my fingers like a sweat-soaked snake …

No, there’ll be none of that sort of mess. Not this time. That’s the sign of a disorganized brain, the surrender to an irrational impulse. It’s not my kind of killing.

My killing has been carefully planned. This death will be a model of perfection. The details will be precise, the conception immaculate, the execution flawless. An accomplishment to be proud of for the rest of my life.

TRANSCRIPTION NOTE: BRIEF PAUSE, LAUGHTER.

A cold worm moved in Fry’s stomach. She looked up from the faxed sheets, suppressing a feeling of nausea that had risen as she read the last sentence.

‘I need to hear the original tape,’ she said.

‘Of course. It’s on its way from Ripley. We’ll have it first thing in the morning.’

‘What are they using – a carrier pigeon?’

Hitchens turned to look at her then. He smoothed his hands along the sleeves of his jacket, a mannerism he’d developed over the past few weeks, as if he were constantly worrying about his appearance. Tonight, he looked particularly uncomfortable. Perhaps he wasn’t sleeping well, either.

‘Diane, I’ve heard this tape,’ he said. ‘This guy is convincing. I think he’s serious.’

When the footsteps outside the door moved on, Fry followed their sound and let her mind wander the passages of E Division headquarters – down the stairs, past the scenes of crime department, the locked and darkened incident room, and into a corridor filled with muffled, echoing voices. By the time the sounds had faded away, her thoughts were aimless and disoriented, too. They were lost in a maze with no way out, as they so often were in her dreams.

‘No, he’s laughing,’ she said. ‘He’s a joker.’

Hitchens shrugged. ‘Don’t believe me, then. Wait until you hear the tape, and judge for yourself.’

Fry regarded the DI curiously. Despite his faults as a manager, she knew he had good instincts. If Hitchens had heard the tape and thought it should be taken seriously, she was inclined to believe him. The printed words on the page weren’t enough on their own. The caller’s real meaning would be captured in the sound of his voice, the manner of his speech, in the audible layers of truth and lies.

‘He seems to be hinting that he’s killed before,’ she said.

‘Yes. There are some significant phrases. “Not this time”, for a start.’

‘Yet in the same breath he’s disapproving of something. Disapproving of himself, would you say?’

With a nod, Hitchens began to smooth his sleeve again. He had strong hands, with clean, trimmed fingernails. A white scar crawled all the way across the middle knuckles of three of his fingers.

‘He could turn out to be an interesting psychological case for someone to examine,’ he said.

The DI’s voice sounded too casual. And suddenly Fry thought she knew why he was looking so uncomfortable.

‘Don’t tell me we’ve got a psychologist on the case already?’

‘It wasn’t my decision, Diane. This has come down to us from Ripley, remember.’

She shook her head in frustration. So some chief officer at Derbyshire Constabulary HQ had got wind of the phone call and decided to interfere. That was all she needed. She pictured one of the ACPO types in his silver braid strolling through the comms room at Ripley, demonstrating his hands-on approach to visiting members of the police committee, hoping they’d remember him when promotion time came round.

‘OK, so who’s the psychologist?’ said Fry. ‘And, more to the point, who did he go to school with?’

‘Now, that’s where you’re wrong,’ said Hitchens. He pulled an embossed business card from the clip holding the case file together. As she took the card, Fry noticed that it was a pretty slim file so far. But it wouldn’t stay that way, once reports from the experts started thumping on to her desk.

‘Dr Rosa Kane,’ she said. ‘Do you know anything about her?’

The list of accredited experts and consultants had recently been updated. Someone had wielded a new broom and put his own stamp on the list, bringing in people with fresh ideas.

‘Not a thing,’ said Hitchens. ‘But we have an appointment to meet her tomorrow.’

Fry took note of the ‘we’. She made a show of writing down Dr Kane’s details before handing back the card. If the psychologist turned out to be fat and forty, or a wizened old academic with grey hair in a bun, Fry suspected that she’d become the liaison officer, not Hitchens.

She stood up and moved to the window. The view of Edendale from the first floor wasn’t inspiring. There were rooftops and more rooftops, sliding down the slopes to her right, almost obscuring the hills in the distance, where the late afternoon sun hung over banks of trees.

Whoever had designed E Division’s headquarters in the 1950s hadn’t been too worried about aesthetics. Or convenience either. The public were deterred from visiting West Street by the prospect of an exhausting slog up the hill, and the lack of parking spaces. Because of its location, Fry missed the sensation of normal life going on outside the door. There had always been that feeling when she served in the West Midlands – though maybe not since they’d started building their police stations like fortresses.

‘You haven’t finished the transcript,’ said Hitchens.

‘I think I’ll wait for the tape, sir, if you don’t mind.’

‘There isn’t much more, Diane. You might as well finish it.’

Fry bit her lip until the pain focused her mind. Of course, even in Derbyshire, all the darkest sides of human experience were still there, hidden beneath the stone roofs and lurking among the hills. This was the smiling and beautiful countryside, after all.

The transcript was still in her hand. Holding it to the light from the window, she turned over to the last page. The DI was right – there were only three more paragraphs. The caller still wasn’t giving anything away about himself. But she could see why somebody had thought of calling in a psychologist.

Detective Constable Ben Cooper watched the dead woman’s face turn slowly to the left. Now her blank eyes seemed to stare past his shoulder, into the fluorescent glare of the laboratory lights. The flesh was muddy brown, her hair no more than a random pattern against her skull, like the swirls left in sand by a retreating tide.

Cooper was irrationally disappointed that she didn’t look the way he’d imagined her. But then, he’d never known her when she was alive. He didn’t know the woman now, and had no idea of her name. She was dead, and had already returned to the earth.

But he’d formed a picture of her in his mind, an image created from the smallest of clues – her height, her racial origins, an estimate of her age. He knew she had a healed fracture in her left forearm. She’d given birth at least once, and had particularly broad shoulders for a female. She’d also been dead for around eighteen months.

There had been plenty of unidentified bodies found in the Peak District during Cooper’s twelve years with Derbyshire Constabulary. Most of them had been young people, and most of them suicides. In E Division, they were generally found soon after death, unless they were dragged from one of the reservoirs. But this woman had been neither.

In profile, the face was cruelly lit. Shadows formed under the cheekbones and in the eye sockets. Creases at the corners of the eyes were picked out clearly in the lights. He could see now that it was a face with a lot of character, marked by life and formed by experience. A woman in her early forties. Someone’s daughter, and someone’s mother.

But the human remains found by walkers in the woods at Ravensdale had lain there a long time, exposed to the weather and the attention of scavengers. The body had decomposed beyond recognition. It had begun to disappear under the growth of moss and lichen, its shape concealed by the blades of coarse grass that had grown through the eyes of the skull.

The head continued to rotate. It travelled through three hundred and sixty degrees, revealing the back of the neck then the opposite profile, finally coming to a halt facing forward again.

‘What about the eyes?’ said Cooper. ‘Are those her proper eyes?’

‘We’ll try a couple of different colours. Blue and brown, perhaps.’

Suzi Lee had cropped dark hair and long, slender hands. She was a forensic artist who worked with the Pathology department at Sheffield University. Cooper watched her fingers stroke the sides of the reconstructed head, as if feeling for the shape of the skull that lay beneath the clay.

‘Blue and brown? We don’t know which?’

‘The eyes are one of the first parts of the body to decompose. There’s no way we can tell what colour they were in life.’

‘It was a silly question,’ said Cooper.

‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘OK. Here’s another one, then – just how accurate is this reconstruction?’

‘Well, like the eyes, the appearance of the nose and mouth can’t be predicted with any confidence, so they’re largely guesswork. If I use a wig for her hair, that will be a stab in the dark, too. But the overall shape of the head is pretty accurate. That’s the foundation for a person’s physical appearance. It’s all a question of bone structure and tissue depth. Look at these –’

She showed him a series of photographs of the skull, first with tissue depth markers glued to the landmark locations, then with a plasticine framework built up around them. The numbers of the markers still showed through the plasticine like a strange white rash.

‘Let’s hope it’s good enough to jog someone’s memory, anyway,’ said Cooper.

‘I take it this is a last resort?’ said Lee. ‘Facial reconstruction usually is.’

‘The clothes found with the body had no identification. There was no jewellery, or other possessions. And no identifying marks on the body, obviously.’

‘The remains were completely skeletonized?’

‘Pretty much,’ said Cooper. But it wasn’t entirely true. He still remembered the partially fleshed fingers, the thin strips of leathery tendon attached to the bones. Some parts of the woman’s body had clung together stubbornly, long after her death.

‘By the way, I’ve been calling her Jane Raven,’ said Lee. ‘Jane, as in Jane Doe. Raven after where she was found. That’s right, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, Ravensdale, near Litton Foot.’

‘Apart from the basic facts and a few measurements, that’s all I know about her. But I don’t like to leave a subject completely anonymous. It’s easier to interpret a face if I give the individual a name.’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘So I named her Jane Raven Lee. Then I could think of her as my sister. It helps me to create the details, you see.’ Lee smiled at his raised eyebrows. ‘My English half-sister, obviously.’

Cooper looked at the file he’d been holding under his arm. It contained a copy of the forensic anthropologist’s report in which the dead woman had been assigned a reference number. This was her biological identity, all that was officially known about the person she had once been. A Caucasian female aged forty to forty-five years, five feet seven inches tall. The condition of her teeth showed that she’d been conscientious about visiting the dentist. There would be useful records of her dental work somewhere, if only he knew which surgery to call on.

But perhaps it was the detail about the width of her shoulders that had given him his mental picture of the dead woman. He imagined the sort of shoulders usually associated with female swimmers. By the age of forty-five, after at least one pregnancy, her muscles would have become a little flabby, no matter how well she looked after herself. Living, she might have been generously built. A bonny lass, his mother would have said.

‘Facial reconstruction is still an art as much as a science,’ said Lee. ‘The shape of the face bears only limited resemblance to the underlying bone structure. It can never be an exact likeness.’

Cooper nodded. A reconstruction couldn’t be used as proof of identification, but it did act as a stimulus for recollection. The accuracy of the image might not be as important as its power to attract media attention and get the eye of the public. Any ID would have to be confirmed from dental records or DNA.

‘There’s a fifty per cent success rate,’ said Lee. ‘You might be lucky.’

Cooper accepted a set of photographs from her and added them to the file. It immediately felt thicker and more substantial. Reference DE05092005, also known as Jane Raven Lee, five feet seven, with shoulders like a swimmer. A bonny lass.

‘Thank you, you’ve been a big help,’ he said.

Lee smiled at him again. ‘Good luck.’

But as he left the laboratory and went out into the Sheffield drizzle, Cooper wondered if he was imagining too much flesh on the unidentified woman now. It could be an emotional reaction to compensate for what he had actually seen of her, those last few shreds of skin on the faded bones.

Her biological identity had been established, at least. Now the anthropologist and the forensic artist were passing the responsibility back to him. He had to find out who Jane Raven really was.

Twenty-five miles away, in the centre of Edendale, Sandra Birley had stopped to listen. Were those footsteps she could hear? And if so, how close?

She turned her head slowly. Echoey spaces, oil-stained concrete. A line of pillars, and steel mesh covering the gaps where she might hurl herself into space. A glimpse of light in the window of an office building across the road. But no movement, not on this level.

Sandra clutched her bag closer to her hip and followed the stairs to the next level. At night, multi-storey car parks were the scariest places she knew. During the day, they were made tolerable by the movement of people busy with their shopping bags and pushchairs, fumbling for change, jockeying for spaces amid the rumble of engines and the hot gust of exhaust on their legs. But after they’d gone home, a place like this was soulless and empty. Drained of humanity, even its structure became menacing.

She pushed at the door to Level 8, then held it open for a moment before stepping through, her senses alert. Not for the first time, Sandra wondered whether she ought to have worn shoes with flatter heels, so she could run better. She fumbled her mobile phone out of her bag and held it in her hand, gaining some reassurance from its familiar feel and the faint glow of its screen.

This was a night she hadn’t intended to be late. A last-minute meeting had gone on and on, thanks to endless grandstanding from colleagues who wanted to show off, middle managers who didn’t want to be seen to be the first going home. She’d been trapped for hours. And when it was finally over, the Divisional MD had taken her by the elbow and asked if she had a couple of minutes to go over her report. Why hadn’t he taken the trouble to read it before the meeting? But then, why should he, when he could eat into her personal time, knowing that she wouldn’t say no?

Her blue Skoda was parked at the far end of Level 8. It stood alone, the colour of its paintwork barely visible in the fluorescent lights. As she walked across the concrete, listening to the sound of her own heels, Sandra shivered inside the black jacket she wore for the office. She hated all these ramps and pillars. They were designed for machines, not for humans. The scale of the place was all wrong – the walls too thick, the roof too low, the slopes too steep for walking on. It made her feel like a child who’d wandered into an alien city. The mass of concrete threatened to crush her completely, to swallow her into its depths with a belch of exhaust fumes.

And there they were, the footsteps again.

Sandra knew the car park well, even remembered it being built in the eighties. Some feature of its design caused the slightest noise to travel all the way up through the levels, so that footsteps several floors below seemed to be right behind her as she walked to her car.

She’d experienced the effect many times before, yet it still deceived her. When it happened again tonight, Sandra couldn’t help turning round to see who was behind her. And, of course, there wasn’t anyone.

Every time she heard the sound of those footsteps, she turned round to look.

And every time she looked, there was no one there.

Every time, except the last.

Wasn’t it Sigmund Freud who said that every human being has a death instinct? Inside every person, the evil Thanatos fights an endless battle with Eros, the life instinct. And, according to Freud, evil is always dominant. In life, there has to be death. Killing is our natural impulse. The question isn’t whether we kill, but how we do it. The application of intelligence should refine the primeval urge, enrich it with reason and purpose.

Without a purpose, the act of death has no significance. It becomes a waste of time, a killing of no importance, half-hearted and incomplete. Too often, we fail at the final stage. We turn away and close our eyes as the gates swing open on a whole new world – the scented, carnal gardens of decomposition. We refuse to admire those flowing juices, the flowering bacteria, the dark, bloated blooms of putrefaction. This is the true nature of death. We should open our eyes and learn.

But in this case, everything will be perfect. Because this will be a real killing.

And it could be tonight, or maybe next week.

But it will be soon. I promise.

2

Melvyn Hudson had decided to do this evening’s removal himself. He liked a fresh body in the freezer at the end of the day – it meant there was work to do tomorrow. So he called Vernon out of the workshop and made him fetch the van. Vernon was useless with the grievers, of course. He always had been, ever since the old man had made them take him on. But at least he’d be where Hudson could keep an eye on him.

The vehicle they called the van was actually a modified Renault Espace with black paintwork, darkened windows and an HS number plate. Like the hearses and limousines, the van’s registration number told everyone it was from Hudson and Slack. Your dependable local firm.

They were dependable, all right. Bring out your dead – that might be a better slogan. Sometimes Melvyn felt like the council refuse man arriving to pick up an old fridge left on the back doorstep. Nobody worried about what happened to their unwanted rubbish. Their disused fridges could pile up in mouldering mountains on a landfill site somewhere and no one would be bothered, as long as they didn’t have to look at them. Most people were even more anxious to get a corpse off the premises.

A few minutes later, Vernon drove out on to Fargate, hunched over the steering wheel awkwardly, the way he did everything. Hudson had sworn to himself he’d get rid of Vernon if he messed up one more thing, no matter what old man Slack said. The lad was a liability, and this firm couldn’t afford liabilities any more.

Hudson snorted to himself as they drove through the centre of Edendale. Lad? Vernon was twenty-five, for heaven’s sake. He ought to be learning the business side of things, ready to take over when the time came. Some chance of that, though. Vernon was nowhere near the man his father had been. It had to be said that Richard had done a poor job of shaping his son. Not that there’d be a business much longer for anyone to run.

When they reached the house in Southwoods, Hudson asked the relatives to wait downstairs. There was nothing worse than having distressed grievers watching the deceased being manhandled into a body bag. If full rigor hadn’t set in, the corpse tended to flop around a bit. Sometimes, you’d almost think they were coming back to life.

This corpse was an old man, shrunken and smelly, with a bubble of grey froth on his lips. He wasn’t quite cold yet, but his skin felt like putty, flat and unresisting. Hudson thought that if he poked a finger hard enough into the man’s stomach, it would sink right in until it touched his spine.

Vernon was standing by the bed like an idiot, his arms hanging at his sides, his mind on anything but the job.

‘What’s up with you?’ said Hudson.

‘Melvyn, when you do a removal like this one, don’t you ever notice the little things in a person’s bedroom?’

‘Like what?’

‘Just the little things. Look, there’s a glass of water he’s only half drunk. There’s a razor here that somebody used to shave him with this morning. It’s still got some of his hairs on it, even though he’s dead.’

‘Of course he’s bloody dead,’ said Hudson, struggling to keep his voice down. ‘What do you think we’re doing here?’

‘Don’t you look at those things, Melvyn?’

‘No. It’s just a job. We’re professionals.’

‘But don’t you sometimes think … Well, while all this stuff is lying around, it’s as if he’s not really dead at all. He’s still here in the room.’

‘For God’s sake, leave off the thinking, Vernon, and get a grip on this stiff.’

Hudson took the knees of the corpse, while Vernon grasped the shoulders. An arm lifted and a hand flapped, as though waving goodbye.

‘Watch it, or he’ll end up on the floor,’ said Hudson. ‘The family down there are doing their best to pretend they don’t know what’s happening. An almighty thump on the ceiling will ruin the illusion.’

They got the body on to the stretcher and began to negotiate the stairs. These old cottages were always a problem. The doorways were too narrow, the stairs too steep, the corner at the bottom almost impossible. Hudson often thought that people must have been a lot smaller when they built these houses – unless they lowered corpses out of the window on the end of a rope in those days.

They loaded the stretcher into the van, then Hudson went back into the house, smoothing the sleeves of his jacket. It wasn’t his funeral suit, of course, just his old one for removals. But appearances mattered, all the same.

‘Now, don’t worry about a thing,’ he told the daughter of the deceased. ‘I know your father was ill for some time, but it always comes as a shock when a loved one passes over. That’s what we’re here for – to ease the burden and make sure everything goes smoothly at a very difficult time.’

‘Thank you, Mr Hudson.’

‘There’s only one thing that I have to ask you to do. You know you need to collect a medical certificate from the doctor and register your father’s death? The registrar will issue you with a death certificate and a disposal certificate. The disposal certificate is the one you give to me.’

‘Disposal?’ said the daughter uncertainly.

‘I know it seems like a lot of paperwork, but it has to be done, I’m afraid.’ Hudson saw she was starting to get flustered, and gave her his reassuring smile. ‘Sometimes it’s best to have lots to do at a time like this, so you don’t have time to dwell on things too much. We’ll give your father a beautiful funeral, and make sure your last memories of him are good ones.’

The daughter began to cry, and Hudson took her hand for a moment before leaving the house.

Back in the van, Vernon reached for the pad of forms under the dashboard.

‘Leave the paperwork,’ said Hudson. ‘I’ll do it myself.’

‘I know how to do it, Melvyn.’

‘I said leave it. You just concentrate on driving.’

‘Why won’t you let me do the forms?’

‘Oh, shut up about it, Vernon, will you? You get the best jobs, don’t you? I let you drive the van. I even let you drive the lims.’

‘I’m a good driver.’

Hudson had to admit that Vernon was quite a decent driver. But everyone liked driving the limousines. You got to hear some interesting stuff from the grievers in the back. They didn’t care what they said on the way to a funeral, and especially coming back. They gave you a different view of the deceased from what the vicar said in his eulogy. Vernon was the same as everyone else – he liked to earwig on the grievers. But if he was going to go all moody and yonderly on a removal, it was the last straw.

A few minutes later, they drew up to the back door of their own premises, got the body into the mortuary and slid it into one of the lower slots of the refrigerator. Even Vernon would have to admit a corpse was just a thing once it was removed from the house, away from the half-drunk glass of water and the hair on the razor. There was no other way to think about it, not when you did the things you had to do to prepare a body – putting in the dentures, stitching up the lips, pushing the face back into shape. It never bothered Hudson any more. Unless it was a child, of course.

‘Watch it, don’t let that tray slide out.’

Vernon jerked back into life. His attention had been drifting, but so had Hudson’s. Even at this stage, it wouldn’t do to spill the body on to the floor.

Vicky, the receptionist, was in the front office working on the computer, but there were no prospects in, no potential customers. The last funeral was over for the day, though the next casket was waiting to go in the morning, and one of the team was already attaching the strips of non-slip webbing to hold wreaths in place.

Hudson knew that some of the staff thought he fussed too much. They sniggered at him behind his back because he got obsessed about timing, and was always worrying about roadworks or traffic jams. But he wanted things to be just right for every funeral. It was the same reason he spent his evenings on the phone to customers, advising them on what to do with their ashes, getting feedback on funerals, hearing how the family were coping.

It was all part of the personal service. And personal service was Hudson and Slack’s main asset. Probably its last remaining asset.

Ben Cooper drove his Toyota out on to the Sheffield ring road, just beating a Supertram rattling towards the city centre from Shalesmoor. Technically, he was off duty now, but he plugged his mobile into the hands-free kit and called the CID room at E Division to check that he wasn’t needed. He didn’t expect anything, though. In fact, it would have to be really urgent for somebody to justify his overtime.

‘Miss is in some kind of meeting with the DI,’ said DC Gavin Murfin. ‘But she didn’t leave any messages for you, Ben. I’ll tell her you checked in. But I’m just about to go home myself, so I wouldn’t worry about a thing.’

‘OK, Gavin. I’ve hit rush hour, so it’ll take me about forty minutes to get back to Edendale anyway.’

Brake lights had come on in front of him as scores of cars bunched at the A57 junction. A few drivers were trying to take a right turn towards the western suburbs of Sheffield. But most seemed intent on crawling round the ring road, probably heading for homes in the sprawling southern townships, Mosborough and Hackenthorpe, Beighton and Ridgeway. Some of those places had been in Derbyshire once, but the city had swallowed them thirty years ago.

‘Gavin, what’s the meeting about?’ said Cooper, worried that he might be missing something important. Everything of any significance seemed to happen when he was out of the office. Sometimes he wondered if Diane Fry planned it that way. As his supervising officer, she wasn’t always quick to keep him informed.

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Murfin. ‘She didn’t tell me. I’ve got some files to give her, then I’m hoping to sneak away before she finds another job for me to do.’

‘There’s no overtime, Gavin.’

‘Tell me about it.’

Cooper had come to a halt again. Clusters of students were standing near him, waiting for the tram to re-emerge from its tunnel under the roundabout. They all wore personal stereos or had mobile phones pressed to their ears. The main university campus was right across the road, and he could make out the hospital complexes in Western Bank. The one-way system in central Sheffield always baffled him, so he was glad to be on the ring road. He didn’t want to stay in the city any longer than necessary.

‘I don’t suppose you fancy going for a drink tomorrow night?’ said Murfin.

‘Don’t you have to be at home with the family, Gavin?’

‘Jean’s taking the kids out ice skating. I’ll be on my own.’

‘No, I’m sorry. Not tomorrow.’

‘You’re turning down beer? Well, I could offer food as well. We could have pie and chips at the pub, or go for an Indian. The Raj Mahal is open Wednesdays.’

‘No, I can’t, Gavin,’ said Cooper. ‘I’ve got a date.’

‘A what?’

‘A date.’

‘With a woman?’

‘Could be.’

At last, Cooper was able to take his exit, turning right by the Safeway supermarket and the old brewery into Ecclesall Road. Ahead of him lay a land of espresso bars, Aga shops and the offices of independent financial advisors. In the leafy outer suburbs of Whirlow and Dore, the houses would get bigger and further away from the road as he drove into AB country.

‘Are you still there, Gavin?’

Murfin’s voice was quieter when he came back on the phone.

‘I’m going to have to go. Miss has come out of her meeting, and she doesn’t look happy. Her nose has gone all tight. You know what I mean? As though she’s just smelled something really bad.’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘So it looks as though I’ve blown it. I just wasn’t quick enough.’

‘Good luck, then. Speak to you in the morning.’

Cooper smiled as he ended the call. Murfin’s comment about Diane Fry had reminded him of the forensic anthropologist’s report on the human remains from Ravensdale. The details in the document had been sparse. Like so many experts’ reports, it had seemed to raise more questions than it answered. But he’d made a call to Dr Jamieson anyway, mostly out of optimism. In the end, there was only one person whose job it was to find the answers.

‘The nasal opening is narrow, the bridge steepled, and the cheekbones tight to the face. Caucasian, probably European. An adult.’

‘Yes, you said that in your report, sir.’

‘Beyond that, it’s a bit more difficult. We have to look for alterations in the skeleton that occur at a predictable rate – changes in the ribs where they attach to the sternum, or the parts of the pelvis where they meet in front. We can age adults to within five years if we’re lucky, or maybe ten. So you’ll have to take the age of forty to forty-five as a best guess.’

‘And the chances of an ID?’ Cooper had asked.

‘To a specific individual? None.’

Dr Jamieson had sounded impatient. Probably he had a thousand other things to do, like everyone else.

‘Look, all I can give you is a general biological profile – it’s up to you to match it to your missing persons register. I’m just offering clues here. I don’t work miracles.’

‘But it’s definitely a woman?’ Cooper persisted.

‘Yes, definitely. That should narrow it down a bit, surely? You don’t have all that many missing women on the books in Derbyshire, do you?’

‘No, Doctor, we don’t.’

And Jamieson had been right. The problem was, no one had ever filed a missing person report answering the description of Jane Raven.

Fry got herself a cup of water from the cooler and waited a few moments before she went back into the DI’s office. She was vaguely aware of Gavin Murfin lurking rather furtively in the CID room, sitting down again when she looked his way. But the rest of the place was already deserted. It smelled stale, and ready for the arrival of the cleaners.

She walked back in and put her water down on Hitchens’ desk.

‘He was on the phone for more than three minutes,’ she said. ‘Why haven’t they traced the call?’

‘They have. He was in a public phone box.’

‘Of course he was. No doubt in some busy shopping centre where no one would notice him. And I suppose he was long gone by the time a patrol arrived?’

Hitchens looked at her with the first signs of impatience, and Fry realized she’d gone a bit too far. She blamed it on the headache, or the fact that she felt so exhausted.

‘Actually, Diane, the phone box was in a village called Wardlow.’

‘Where’s that?’ She screwed up her eyes to see the map on the wall of the DI’s office, making a show of concentrating to distract him from her irritability.

‘On the B6465, about two miles above Monsal Head.’

Fry kept the frown of concentration on her face. She thought she had a vague idea where Monsal Head was. Somewhere to the south, on the way to Bakewell. If she could just find it on the map before the DI had to point it out …

‘Here –’ said Hitchens, swinging round in his chair and smacking a spot on the map with casual accuracy. ‘Fifteen minutes from Edendale, that’s all.’

‘Why there?’

‘We can’t be sure. At first glance, it might seem a risky choice. It’s a quiet little place, and a stranger might be noticed – or at least an unfamiliar car parked by the road. Normally, we’d have hoped that somebody would remember seeing a person in the phone box around that time.’

‘So what wasn’t normal?’

‘When a unit arrived in Wardlow, a funeral cortege was just about to leave the village. There had been a burial in the churchyard. Big funeral, lots of mourners. Apparently, the lady who died came from Wardlow originally but moved to Chesterfield and became a well-known businesswoman and a county councillor. The point is, there were a lot of strangers in the village for that hour and a half. Unfamiliar cars parked everywhere.’

Hitchens drew his finger down the map a short way. ‘As you can see, it’s one of those linear villages, strung out along the road for about three-quarters of a mile. While the funeral was taking place, every bit of available space was occupied, including vehicles parked on the grass verges or on the pavement, where there is one. Some of the villagers were at the funeral themselves, of course. And those that weren’t would hardly have noticed one particular stranger, or one car. On any other day, at any other time. But not just then.’

‘So it was an opportunist call? Do you think our man was simply driving around looking for a situation like that to exploit and took the chance?’

‘Could be.’

Fry shook her head. ‘But he had the speech all prepared, didn’t he? That didn’t sound like an off-the-cuff call. He either had a script right there in front of him in the phone box, or he’d practised it until he was word perfect.’

‘Yes, I think you’re right.’

‘Either way, this man is badly disturbed,’ she said.

‘That doesn’t mean he isn’t serious about what he says, Diane.’

Fry didn’t answer. She was trying to picture the caller cruising the area, passing through the outskirts of Edendale and the villages beyond. Then driving through Wardlow and spotting the funeral. She could almost imagine the smile on his face as he pulled in among the mourners’ cars and the black limousines. No one would think to question who he was or why he was there, as he entered the phone box and made his call. Meanwhile, mourners would have been gathering in the church behind him, and the funeral service would be about to get under way.

‘The recording,’ said Fry. ‘Have Forensics been asked to analyse the background noise?’

‘We’ll make sure they do that,’ said Hitchens. ‘But why do you ask?’

‘I wondered what music was playing. “Abide With Me”, perhaps. Or “The Lord’s My Shepherd”. We might be able to tell what stage the funeral service had reached, whether he was already in the phone box as the mourners were going in, or waited until the service had started to make the call. Maybe there were some late arrivals who noticed him. We’ll have to check all that. If we can narrow it down, we might be able to trace the people who were most likely to have seen him.’

‘That’s good.’

‘And another thing –’

‘Yes?’

‘I wonder if he just drove away again as soon as he’d finished the call.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, that would make him stand out, wouldn’t it? Someone might have wondered why he left without attending the service. If he was really so clever, I’m guessing he’ll have stayed on.’

‘Stayed on?’

‘Joined the congregation. Stood at the back of the church and sung the hymns. He might have hung around the graveside to see the first spadeful of dirt fall on the coffin. He probably smiled at the bereaved family and admired the floral tributes. He’d be one of the crowd then.’

‘Just another anonymous mourner. Yes, I can see that.’

‘One of the crowd,’ repeated Fry, struck by her own idea. ‘And all thinking about the same thing.’

‘What do you mean, Diane?’

‘Well, we know nothing about him yet, but I bet he’s the sort of person who’d love that idea. All those people around him thinking about death while he made his call.’

She paused and looked at Hitchens. He turned on his chair and met her eye, his face clouded by worry. Fry saw that she’d reached him, communicated her own deep uneasiness. The caller’s words in the transcript were bad enough. Now she found herself anticipating the sound of his voice with a mixture of excitement and dread.

‘Except that his death,’ said Hitchens, ‘the one he was talking about in his call, was nothing to do with the deceased councillor who was being buried in Wardlow churchyard. It was a different death altogether.’

‘Of course it was,’ said Fry. ‘But we have no idea whose.’

The DI looked at his watch. It was time to call it a day. Unlike some of his officers, he had good reasons for wanting to get home on time – an attractive nurse he’d been living with for the past two years, and a nice house they’d bought together in Dronfield. But it’d be marriage and kids before long, and then he might not be so keen.

‘It’s the Ellis case in the morning, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘What time are you on, Diane?’

‘Ten thirty.’

‘Is everything put together?’

‘DC Murfin is doing a final checklist for me.’

‘Good. Well, the undertaker who conducted the funeral at Wardlow is based right here in town,’ said Hitchens. ‘You’ll have time to drive round and speak to him in the morning before you’re due in court.’

Fry wasn’t looking forward to her court appearance next morning. But at least she’d done everything she could to make it as straightforward as possible and give the CPS a solid case. With a bit of luck, there’d be another long-term resident occupying a bunk in Derby Prison by the end of the week.

Many of the details of the Micky Ellis case were depressingly predictable. Whenever officers of E Division got a call-out to a body on Edendale’s Devonshire Estate, they expected it to be another domestic. A killing in the family, a Grade C murder.

‘You know, it never ceases to amaze me how often the offender calls in the incident himself in a case like this,’ said Fry, checking through the files Gavin Murfin had gathered for her. ‘They can’t think what else to do when they see the body on the floor, except dial 999.’

‘Well, I think it’s very considerate of them to worry about our clear-up rate at a time like that,’ said Murfin.

‘Is everything there, Gavin?’

‘All tied up with a neat bow. Fingers crossed for a short hearing, then,’ said Murfin as she closed the top file. ‘I hear Micky is pleading guilty, so it should all be over by Christmas. Not that he had much choice in the matter.’

‘It was just a walkthrough,’ said Fry.

‘The best kind. I hate the whodunits, don’t you? All those computers thinking they can tell me what to do, and every bugger in the building complaining about my paperwork.’

‘I presume you’re referring to the HOLMES system.’

‘HOLMES – who thought up that name? Some Mycroft down in Whitehall, I suppose. One day they’ll sack all the dicks and let the computers out on the streets.’

‘When is your tenure up, Gavin?’

Murfin said nothing. He worked in silence for a while. Out of the corner of her eye, Fry could see his mouth still moving, but no words came out.

‘Only a few months left now, aren’t there?’ she said.

‘Could be.’

‘Back to core policing for a while, is it?’

‘Unless I get promoted,’ said Murfin bitterly.

‘Let’s hope for the best, then.’

Fry was aware of the look that Murfin gave her. Of course, they might have different ideas as to what the best might be.

Ben Cooper was still smiling as he cleared the outskirts of Sheffield and dropped a gear to start the climb towards Houndkirk Moor. At the top of this road was the Fox House Inn, where he crossed back into Derbyshire and entered the national park. As soon as he passed the boundary marker at the side of the road, Sheffield seemed to fall away behind him quite suddenly. And when he saw the moors opening out ahead of him, burning with purple heather, it always filled his heart with the pleasure of coming home.

Cooper looked again at the file on the passenger seat. In all likelihood, the area he was entering had been home for Jane Raven Lee, too. Somewhere in the valleys and small towns of the White Peak would be the place she’d lived, a house full of her possessions, perhaps a family who still missed her and wondered what had become of her. But a family who loved and missed someone reported them missing, didn’t they?

The previous weekend, Cooper had spent a couple of days walking in the Black Mountains with his friends Oscar and Rakesh. There had been plenty of fresh air to blow away the cobwebs, and a chance to forget the job for a while. But there had been an undercurrent of unease that he hadn’t been able to identify until they were on their way home, driving back up the M5 from South Wales.

It had been Rakki who dropped the first bombshell. He was due to get married next April, and he’d started to talk about moving back to Kenya. His reasons had seemed impractical, even to Cooper – something to do with the smell of lemon chilli powder, tiny green frogs in the grass, and the moonlight on the beach at Mombasa. But Rakki had been five years old when his family emigrated to Britain in the late seventies, and those were the only memories he had. Later, when they stopped off at Tamworth Services, he’d mentioned Gujarat, the Indian province his grandparents came from. Rakki had never even seen it, but his brother Paresh had visited last year. There were endless opportunities for the educated Gujarati, apparently.

And then it had occurred to Cooper that Oscar had been in a serious relationship for almost a year. He could sense his old High Peak College friendships slipping away, a process that had started when they went their separate ways and took up different professions – Oscar to become a solicitor and Rakki to go into IT. Points of contact were becoming difficult to maintain. And one day soon, as they stood on top of a hill somewhere in the country, they would quietly agree. It would be their last weekend together.

Cooper put his foot down a little harder on the accelerator as the Fox House came into view, outlined against the evening sky. He sensed the Toyota surging forward, eager to cover the ground. An irrational feeling had come to him, one probably born of relief at getting out of the city. It was a sudden burst of confidence, a certain knowledge that he was going to achieve his task.

The facial reconstruction had given him the chance he needed, and he was sure it was going to work. Once he crested that hill, Jane Raven Lee would be coming back home, too.

With a sharp backwards kick of her right foot, Diane Fry slammed the street door of the house. But the noise from the ground-floor flat didn’t even falter. Disco-house with urban drum loops at full volume. No matter how hard she slammed it, the damn students wouldn’t hear the sound of the door over the din of their stereo system.

For a moment, she thought of ringing their bell and complaining. It might give her a brief feeling of satisfaction to shout at them. But she knew she’d be wasting her time, and she’d only get herself wound up unnecessarily. Coming home from work was supposed to help you relax, not pile on more stress. Wasn’t that right?

Fry looked up the stairs at the door of her own flat. Yeah. Some hopes.

Inside, there was no noise but for the thud of the drum loops through the floor. So Angie was out. There was no note, nothing to indicate when she might be back. Fry opened the door of her sister’s room and looked in. If it was anyone else, she might have been able to tell by what clothes were missing whether the person who lived there had gone to the pub, gone out for a run, or set off for a job interview. But not in Angie’s case. One T-shirt and one pair of jeans would do as well as any other, whatever the occasion.

Since her sister had moved into the flat with her, Fry found herself worrying about her almost as much as she had when Angie was missing. Perhaps more. During all those years when they were separated, Angie’s whereabouts had been a generalized anxiety, deep and nagging, but an aspect of her life she had learned to accept, like an amputated finger. Now, the worry was sharper and more painful, driven in by daily reminders. By her sister’s presence in the flat, in fact.

Fry found a cheese-and-onion quiche in the freezer compartment and slid it into the microwave. Then she opened a carton of orange juice, sat down at the kitchen table and turned to the Micky Ellis file. She’d appeared in crown court to give evidence many times, but always found it a difficult experience. Defence lawyers would be waiting to pounce on her smallest slip, the slightest hint of doubt in her manner, the most trivial inconsistency between her oral evidence and written statement. A case could so easily be lost on a suggestion of failure in procedure. Forget the question of innocence or guilt. That was yesterday’s justice system.

And yet this defendant was certainly guilty. There couldn’t truly be any doubt.

There was an old joke on Edendale’s Devonshire Estate that you had three options when someone in your family died. You could bury them, cremate them – or just leave them where they fell when you hit them with the poker. Micky Ellis had chosen the Devonshire Estate third option.

When Fry had arrived at the scene, the body of Micky’s girlfriend had still been sprawled right where she’d fallen, half on the rug and half under the bed on the first floor of their council semi. She remembered that the bedroom had lemon yellow wallpaper in pale stripes, and a portable TV set standing on the dresser. She’d noticed a series of cigarette burns on the duvet cover close to the pillow on the left-hand side of the bed, where a personal stereo and a half-read Bridget Jones novel lay on the bedside table. Fry had looked up at the ceiling for a smoke alarm then, but there wasn’t one. And she remembered thinking that maybe Denise Clay had been lucky to live as long as she did.

In this case, it had been the uniforms who made the arrest. The first officers to arrive had found Micky Ellis in the kitchen washing the blood off his hands and worrying about who would feed the dog. It was a walkthrough, a self-solver. Somebody had the job of doing the interviews, of course, as well as taking statements, gathering forensic evidence and putting a case together for the prosecution. And that was down to CID. The DI would be able to add the case to his CV, notching up a successful murder enquiry. It was all very predictable, but at least it didn’t tie up resources the division couldn’t spare. No one wanted the cases that stayed on the books for months, or sometimes years – the cases that Gavin Murfin called ‘whodunits’.

Fry heard a sound and looked up from the file. But it was only one of the students leaving the house. She could tell by the way the music increased in volume as a door opened, then reverted to its normal mind-numbing thud.

The microwave pinged, and she realized she’d forgotten to get out a plate for the quiche. But first she put the orange juice back and opened a bottle of Grolsch instead. There was a shelf full of swing-tops in the fridge. Maybe she’d get a bit drunk on her own tonight. It would ruin her fitness programme, but she needed something to help her sleep. Come the morning, she would have a chat with a funeral director to look forward to before her court appearance in a grubby little murder trial that might drag on for days. And then, if Ripley finally got their act together, she could expect to spend a bit of quality time listening to the voice of a sick, disturbed individual with violent fantasies and intellectual pretensions.

Fry stabbed a fork into the quiche. The outside was hot, but the centre was stone cold. Some days, this was about the best that it got.

3

Hudson and Slack was one of the oldest established funeral directors in the Eden Valley. A dependable family firm, according to the sign over the entrance. Diane Fry pulled her Peugeot into the car park next to the chapel of rest. The company might be long established, but the premises dated from the 1960s, flat-roofed and square, with a modern plate-glass frontage. The place had been built discreetly out of sight in a side street off Fargate.

Fry got out of the car and stood at the gate, looking at the houses in Manvers Street. There were stone terraces on both sides, with no gardens between their front doors and the roadway. She wondered what sort of people would choose to live where death passed their windows every morning. How many times must they look up from a meal or a TV programme and see the long, black limousines creeping by? How often did they try to enjoy a moment’s peace, only to catch a glint of chrome from the handles of a coffin out of the corner of one eye?

She turned back to the entrance of Hudson and Slack. She was sure that living here wouldn’t suit her at all. But there must be many ways of shutting out the sight of death passing by, or pretending it didn’t exist.

‘I presume you want me to come in with you, Diane?’ said a voice from the other side of the car.

For a moment, she’d forgotten Ben Cooper. As usual, he’d been the only DC she could find in the CID room when she needed company. If there was anything to follow up from this visit, she wouldn’t be able to do it herself, because she’d be tied up in court.

‘Yes, of course. You’re not here to enjoy the scenery.’

Cooper followed her into the funeral director’s, where they found Melvyn Hudson to be a dapper man in his late forties, with neat hair greying at the temples. He was wearing a black suit and black tie, and he seemed to slip effortlessly into character as he came through the door into the waiting room and held out his hand.

‘Come through, come through. And please tell me exactly how I can help.’

Beyond the door was a passage, and two men walking towards them. Like Hudson, they were in black suits, though neither of them carried it off so well. The larger man had a shaven head and a prominent jaw, like a night-club bouncer, while the younger one was slender and ungainly, his suit barely concealing the boniness of his shoulders and wrists. They stopped in unison when they saw the visitors, and their faces fell into serious expressions.

‘Sergeant, these are two of our bearer drivers,’ said Hudson. ‘Billy McGowan – and this is Vernon Slack.’

The two men nodded and moved on, closing a door quietly behind them.

Hudson’s office felt like a doctor’s consulting room, with soothing décor, interesting pot plants and certificates framed on the wall. Who did funeral directors get certificates from, Fry wondered. Were there classes in undertaking at night school? A diploma in coffin manufacture at High Peak College?

‘You realize there are quite a lot of people like that?’ said Hudson, after Fry had explained what she wanted.

‘Like what?’

‘People who make a hobby of going to funerals. We see them all the time. Sometimes we joke to each other that a funeral isn’t complete without our usual little bunch of habitual mourners.’

‘You mean they go to the funerals of people they never knew?’

‘Of course,’ said Hudson. ‘They watch the church notice boards, or read the death announcements in the Eden Valley Times to see what funerals are coming up. And then they plan their diaries for the week ahead. For some people, funerals are their favourite type of outing. They become social occasions. Perhaps even a place where they meet new people.’

Hudson must have noticed the shocked expression on Fry’s face.

‘It’s perfectly harmless,’ he said. ‘These are people who simply like funerals.’

‘And you recognize these individuals when they turn up?’

‘Oh, yes. Many of them are familiar faces to staff at Hudson and Slack, as they are to all my colleagues in this area.’

Fry saw Cooper open his mouth as if about to join in, but she gave him a glance to shut him up. As he dropped his eyes to his notebook, an unruly lock of hair fell over his forehead. She ought to suggest it was time for a haircut again.

‘I don’t suppose you could let me have some names, Mr Hudson?’ she said.

‘As it happens, yes. The Eden Valley Times used to publish lists of mourners on its obituary page until quite recently, and it was usually our job to collect the names. We did it as part of our service to the bereaved family, you see. The names wouldn’t be hard to find, anyway. You’d only need to look through a few back copies of the newspaper and check the obituary pages, and you’d see them listed as mourners at almost every funeral in the area.’

‘No addresses, though?’

Hudson shrugged. ‘I can’t help you with that. The only thing I can say is that they tend to stick to funerals on their own patch. They don’t travel very much for their hobby.’

Fry nodded. ‘What about Wardlow?’

‘Well, that’s different,’ said Hudson. ‘A small village, a few miles out of town – there aren’t many funerals in a place like that, as you can imagine. Hudson and Slack are one of the busiest funeral directors in the valley, but we don’t do more than one job a year in Wardlow, if that. So if there were habitual mourners in Wardlow, I wouldn’t recognize them.’

He smiled, a sympathetic smile that suggested he cared about everybody, no matter who they were.

‘And I don’t suppose they get much outlet for their interest, either,’ he said. ‘They’d be all dressed up with nowhere to go. Rather like a dead atheist.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Just my little funeral director’s joke.’

Fry raised her eyebrows, then looked at Cooper to make sure he was taking notes. ‘Mr Hudson, you said a minute ago that the Eden Valley Times published lists of mourners until quite recently?’

‘Yes. But they’ve stopped doing it now. A new editor arrived, and he thought it was rather an old-fashioned practice. Well, I suppose he was right. The Times was one of the few local newspapers left in the country that still did it, so it was bound to go the way of all traditions eventually. But our customers liked it.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, locally, it became an indicator of status – an individual’s popularity and success in life were measured by how many mourners they had at their funeral, whether the mayor attended or only the deputy mayor, that sort of thing. Also, people would look to make sure they were on the list and their names had been spelled right. Of course, there was often a lot of gossip about who’d turned up and who hadn’t – especially if there had been some kind of family dispute. You know what it’s like.’

‘Not really,’ said Fry.

Hudson looked at her more carefully. ‘You’re not from around here, are you?’ he said. ‘I should have noticed.’

She tried to ignore the comment. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard it. The traces of her Black Country accent normally betrayed her straight away, but apparently Melvyn Hudson wasn’t quite so observant as he claimed to be. Nevertheless, Fry found herself unreasonably irritated by the implication that he ought to have been able to tell at a glance she wasn’t local.

‘Wouldn’t it be true to say there’s another factor?’ she said.

‘What’s that?’

‘That it isn’t enough just to show your respects when somebody dies, you have to be seen to be doing it. That’s the whole point of getting your name in the paper, isn’t it? So that everyone can see you were doing the right thing, no matter what you thought of the deceased person?’

‘I think that’s a little unfair.’

‘And it’s the purpose of all the money spent on floral tributes too, isn’t it? After all, they don’t do the person who’s died much good, do they?’

Cooper stirred restlessly and snapped the elastic band on his notebook, as if he thought it was time to leave. Hudson’s smile was slipping, but he stayed calm. Of course, he had to deal with much more difficult situations every day.

‘Have you had some kind of unfortunate personal experience?’ he said. ‘If something is troubling you, we can offer the services of a bereavement counsellor.’

‘No,’ snapped Fry. ‘It was a general observation.’

‘Well, your view might be considered somewhat cynical, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘But I won’t deny there’s an element of truth in what you say.’

‘All right. Do you conduct all the funerals here, Mr Hudson?’

‘My wife Barbara does some of them.’

‘And I suppose the fact that the Eden Valley Times stopped printing lists of mourners means your staff no longer collect the names,’ said Fry.

‘That’s correct. We don’t do it as a matter of course any more. Only if a customer specifically asks us to.’

‘And at Wardlow church yesterday?’

Hudson shook his head. He accompanied the gesture with his sympathetic smile, suggesting that he understood her distress, and she had his condolences.

‘No names at all,’ he said. ‘I’m very sorry.’

Back in the CID room after his unexpected trip to the funeral director’s, Ben Cooper wondered why Fry looked so distracted. Worried, even. But whatever was bothering her, at least she had time to take an interest in his forensic reconstruction, shuffling through the photographs he’d brought back from Sheffield.

‘They’re not bad,’ she said. ‘Are we going to get these into the papers?’

‘I delivered them last night. Media Relations have already set it up.’

‘Good. You might get an early result. Have you got any other ideas, Ben?’

‘I thought I might take copies round to show Mr Jarvis.’

‘Who?’

‘The owner of the property nearest to where the remains were found. His name is Tom Jarvis. We don’t know how she ended up down there, but it’s possible Mr Jarvis may have seen her around the place while she was still alive.’

‘No indication of how she died, right?’

‘Not so far.’

Fry handed the photos back. ‘Bear in mind, if it turns out she was killed, this Mr Jarvis might become a suspect.’

‘Of course,’ said Cooper. ‘But in that case, if he denies all knowledge of her now, it could be the thing that catches him out later on.’

‘Forward planning. I like that.’

For a moment, Cooper thought she was going to pat him on the head or give him a gold star. But she began to move away, already thinking about something else. She went back to her desk and began to open a package that had arrived from Ripley, suggesting she’d forgotten about him already. Cooper called across the office.

‘Have you got something interesting on, Diane? The visit to Hudson and Slack this morning – and I heard there was a tape of a call to the Control Room …’

‘It’s probably nothing,’ she said. And she picked up her phone, a sign that the conversation was over.

Cooper laid his photographs alongside the forensic anthropologist’s report. There were also a series of scene photos from Ravensdale. They showed the remains half-concealed by vegetation that had grown up around them, the long bones turning green with moss, like the roots of some exotic tree. When the tangles of bramble and goose grass were cut away, they revealed the skeletal hands folded carefully together, the legs straight, the feet almost touching at the heel, but turned outwards at the toes.

Dr Jamieson had an opinion on the feet. He felt it was only the tugging of scavengers at decomposing flesh that had moved them from their original position. They had been neatly closed together at the moment of death, or some time after.

It was the ‘some time after’ that worried Cooper. The location and position of the body were so carefully chosen that they gave the appearance of ritual. In fact, the foliage winding its way through the bones might even suggest an offering to nature, a human sacrifice that was slowly being claimed by Mother Earth. But that was pure fancy, surely.

He looked up the number and called the anthropologist again. Sometimes, you just had to hope for a bit of luck.

‘Any chance of a cause of death?’ he said.

‘You’re joking.’

‘Nothing at all?’

Dr Jamieson sighed. ‘I’ve looked for signs of any skeletal trauma that might suggest the manner of death, or indeed tell us something about what happened to the body after death.’

‘And?’

‘Nothing. No cut marks, no visible trauma, other than a certain amount of postmortem damage. Some gnawing of the bones at the extremities.’

‘Scavengers,’ Cooper said. ‘Foxes, rats.’

‘Or some kind of bird. We’re missing two of the carpals – the hamate and capitate. If you happen to come across them, one is a cuboid bone with a hooklike process, and one is a bit like a miniature half-carved bust. They’re small, but quite distinctive. We’ve also lost some of the tarsal bones from the left foot, but otherwise the extremities are mostly intact. And of course the hyoid bone is gone.’

‘Why “of course”?’

‘The hyoid is located just above the larynx, where it anchors the muscles of the tongue. It’s the only bone in the body that doesn’t touch any other bone. So when the tissue around it disappears, the hyoid drops away and can be lost completely. You’re lucky to have the incisors, since they have only one root. When the soft tissue decomposes, there’s nothing to hold them in the jaw.’

‘Doctor, isn’t the hyoid bone the one that sometimes gets broken when a victim is strangled?’

‘Yes, that’s correct.’

‘And with skeletonized remains, damage to the hyoid bone might be the only indication we have that the victim died of strangulation?’

‘I shouldn’t really comment on that. But it’s true that, without any soft tissues present, we can only look for trauma. Unless there are signs of fractures or nicks to the bone from knife wounds, the condition of the hyoid might well be crucial to an assessment of the cause of death. But only if the cause was manual strangulation.’

Cooper recognized the hopelessness of the thought that came into his mind then. But he said it anyway.

‘We’d have to organize another search of the scene, if we’re going to find that bone.’

‘It is a very small bone,’ the anthropologist said. ‘Given the nature of the location, you’ll be looking for a needle in a haystack. And, don’t forget, the hyoid could have disappeared from the scene completely.’

‘That doesn’t sound very hopeful.’

‘Well, I can give you an estimate of the time of death, based on plant growth. We got a botanist to have a look, and his report has just landed on my desk.’

‘And?’

‘Well, she probably died during the spring. Her body was already partially skeletonized by this summer, when vegetation began to push its way through the remaining tissue and between the ribs.’

‘February or March?’

‘Yes. But the botanist also found some dead vegetation – the previous season’s growth.’

‘You mean she died in the spring of last year?’

‘I’m just summarizing the report. I’ll send a copy through later today so you can see the details.’

‘Does that fit with the skeletonization?’

‘Oh, yes. You might want to get someone to check the weather during the relevant period. If it was cold, it would have delayed decomposition.’

‘Last summer was warm and wet,’ said Cooper. ‘It was like that for months.’

‘Hence the degree of skeletonization, then. An exposed body in warm, humid conditions. Decomposition must have advanced pretty fast. There’s a rough-and-ready formula, based on the average temperature of the surrounding area. In a reasonably warm summer, you’d get a temperature of around fifteen degrees Celsius perhaps?’

‘Yes.’

Cooper could almost hear him doing the mental calculation. ‘So during the summer, an exposed corpse could be skeletonized within around eighty-five days.’

‘Just eighty-five days? And this one could have been out in the open for eighteen months?’

‘Yes. If the body was left a few weeks earlier, skeletonization would take a little longer. But given the exposed position, you’re looking at a matter of months, not years. The botanist’s report will suggest an upper end of the time scale.’

‘What about a toxicological analysis?’ said Cooper.

‘Well, we could do that,’ said the anthropologist, ‘if you want us to.’

Cooper knew that ‘if you want us to’ translated as ‘if you’re prepared to pay us’.

‘I’ll check,’ he said, because budget decisions weren’t his to make.

Diane Fry sat for a while in her car outside the courthouse in Wharf Road. People were streaming down the steps and heading for their own vehicles – lawyers and court officials in one direction, members of the public in another. She was aware of the security cameras on the building watching her. Cameras were everywhere in the new riverside development – it was amazing how much crime took place in the precincts of the court.

Fry lifted the package from the passenger seat beside her. She ought to have taken it into court with her, but security would have asked awkward questions. When she’d seen the tape on her desk that morning, she’d known that the first time she listened to it couldn’t be in the office, surrounded by a bunch of cynical DCs. Nor in the DI’s office, with Hitchens watching her for a reaction. She needed to hear it alone.

She wasn’t sure what she would have done if her car hadn’t been old enough to have a cassette player. But now she slid the tape in and pressed the ‘play’ button. She rested her head on the back of the seat and waited until the hiss faded away.

Soon there will be a killing. It might happen in the next few hours. We could synchronize our watches and count down the minutes …

As she expected, the voice was distorted. The caller had done something to disguise it – not just the old handkerchief over the mouth, but some kind of electronic distortion that gave the voice a metallic sound, vibrating and echoey. The accent was local, as far as she could tell. But she hadn’t yet worked out the subtle differences between Derbyshire people and their neighbours in Yorkshire, let alone between North and South Derbyshire. There were some who claimed they could pin down an accent to within a few miles, but that was a job for an expert.

One of the most worrying things about the tape was that the caller seemed completely calm and under control. His delivery was very deliberate, with no signs of agitation that she could detect. As Hitchens suggested, he sounded convincing. In fact, he would come over well in the witness box.

…What a chance to record the ticking away of a life, to follow it through to that last, perfect moment, when existence becomes nothing, when the spirit parts with the physical …

Fry glanced at the courthouse again. Her appearance seemed to have gone well, and the CPS were happy. Barring any major disasters during the rest of the hearing, Micky Ellis would be going down for a few years. It wouldn’t do much good for Denise Clay, who had lain dead in her nightdress with her personal stereo on the bedside table and cigarette burns on the duvet. For her, justice would come too late. Denise was long since buried by now.

But it didn’t do to personalize things too much. Sometimes, the processes of the law needed victims to take a back seat.

… We turn away and close our eyes as the gates swing open on a whole new world – the scented, carnal gardens of decomposition. We refuse to admire those flowing juices, the flowering bacteria, the dark, bloated blooms of putrefaction. This is the true nature of death. We should open our eyes and learn.

Fry’s eyes had started to close, but a few minutes later they came wide open again. She looked at the cassette player in bewilderment. She stopped the tape, rewound it and played it again from the section about Freud and the death instinct. There were a few seconds of silence, then the voice started again, filling the car with its metallic echoes.

‘Damn it,’ said Fry. ‘Why did no one tell me there were two calls?’

And you can see the end for yourself. All you have to do is find the dead place. Here I am at its centre, a cemetery six miles wide. See, there are the black-suited mourners, swarming like ants around a decaying corpse.

We fill our dead bodies with poison, pump acid through their veins. We pollute the atmosphere with the smoke from their flesh. We let them rot below ground, in coffins bursting with gas or soaked in water like minestrone soup. But true death is clean and perfect. Lay them out in the sun, hang their bones on a gibbet. Let them decompose where the carrion eaters gather. They should decay in the open air until their flesh is gone and their bones are dry as dust. Or, of course, in a sarcophagus. Clean and perfect, and final.

Yes, you can see it for yourself. You can witness the last moments. Follow the signs at the gibbet and the rock, and you can meet my flesh eater.

It’s perfectly simple. All you have to do is find the dead place.

4

There was a motorbike parked outside the Jarvis house, and several lumps of metal rusting in the paddock. The rain that had been falling all morning made sporadic rattling sounds in the long grass, as if hitting something metallic and hollow, like a car roof.

Ben Cooper stopped halfway up the path to take a closer look. Yes, the largest lump had been a car once – maybe an old Datsun Sunny, judging from the chocolate brown paintwork. Nearby were the remains of a chest freezer and a pig trailer with a broken chassis. None of them had served any useful purpose for a long time, except as homes for insects and rodents. Tongues of pale bracken were breaking through the floor of the Datsun, and nettles had folded themselves into its wheel arches, clutching the deflated tyres in tangles of spiky leaves. Now that summer was nearly over, the nettles, like everything else, were starting to die.

Cooper could feel the dampness penetrating the hems of his trousers as he brushed through the grass. Even when it wasn’t raining, it would be permanently wet down here on the low-lying ground at Litton Foot. White bracket fungus flourished wherever it could find an inch of surface soft enough to plant its spores. Layers of it grew from the rubber seal on the lid of the abandoned freezer, and from the crumbling foam insulation behind the dashboard of the car.

He saw that there were other rusted hulks lying in the paddock, and more of them hidden in brambles growing around a gate that led down to the woods. But it was too wet, and Cooper didn’t feel interested enough to explore.

A man in jeans and a thick sweater stood watching him from a wooden porch built on to the back of the house. Cooper hoped he hadn’t looked too interested in the wrecked Datsun. The man had the expression of a used car salesman spotting an approaching customer. Predatory, yet ready to turn on the charm. Cooper could feel himself being assessed.

‘Mr Jarvis?’ he called.

‘Aye. What can I do for you?’

Before he answered, Cooper moved a bit closer. He had to watch where he was putting his feet to avoid stepping on shards of rusted metal lying in the grass.

As he got closer, he saw that the porch itself seemed to have been made out of old timber salvaged from a converted chapel or schoolroom. The boards Mr Jarvis was standing on were massive planks of weathered oak, full of knotholes and the heads of six-inch nails embedded in the wood and painted over. Here and there, patches of black paint still showed through a layer of varnish. The whole structure must weigh a ton – no modern pine decking from Homebase for Tom Jarvis.

‘Detective Constable Cooper, sir. Edendale CID.’

Cooper was used to a variety of reactions when he identified himself. He was rarely a welcome visitor, even to someone who’d been the victim of a recent crime. Then, he was often the target of their frustration. But there was no anxiety or surprise from Tom Jarvis, only a slight disappointment that he hadn’t found a customer for the old Datsun after all.

‘Did you want something?’ he said.

‘Could I ask you a few questions, sir? Nothing to worry about – just routine.’

‘Come up on to the porch, then.’

The deck of the porch was quite a long way off the ground, and Mr Jarvis was looking down on him from a height of about nine feet. Cooper could have scrambled up, but he thought he might lose dignity doing it. Instead, he walked around to the side to reach a set of wide wooden steps that led down to a path into the trees.

Going up the steps, he felt as though he was mounting a stage. That was something he hadn’t done for a long time, not since he went up to collect his certificates at his school prize-giving. For a moment, Cooper felt as vulnerable as he had when he’d been convinced he was going to trip over the top step and fall flat on his face in front of eight hundred pupils and parents.

‘How are you, Mr Jarvis?’ he said.

‘Sound. I’m sound.’

‘This porch is a solid piece of work, sir. Did you build it yourself?’

‘With a bit of help from my sons. Joinery used to be my trade, but this was a challenge. I wanted something that’d last, not some rubbish that would blow down in the first gale.’

‘It won’t do that.’

Jarvis kicked a post reflectively. His boot connected with a dull thud. ‘No, I reckon it won’t.’

Cooper grasped the rail to help himself up the last step. The wood felt smooth and comfortable, and he saw that it was turned in decorative patterns, like the end of a church pew. It was the sort of smoothness that resulted from the touch of many hands over centuries of use, wherever it had originally come from.

‘You’ll be all right,’ said Jarvis from the end of the porch. ‘They won’t bother you. They always sleep at this time of day, and it’d take Armageddon to wake ’em up.’

Puzzled, Cooper looked up. Four huge mongrel dogs lay in a tangled heap on the porch, like a badly made rug. At least, he thought there were four. There could have been another shaggy head or two somewhere in the middle of the heap, without making much difference.

‘What are their names?’ he said, knowing it always went down well with the punters to show an interest in their pets.

Jarvis grimaced at the dogs. ‘Feckless, Pointless, Graceless and Aimless.’

‘Really?’

‘Don’t ask me why. It was her idea.’

‘Whose?’

He jerked his head towards the house. ‘Hers. The wife’s.’

‘Well, I don’t need to ask why. Mrs Jarvis must be a fan of Cold Comfort Farm. The Starkadders and Aunt Ada Doom.’

‘Aunt who?’

‘“Something nasty in the woodshed.”’

Jarvis shrugged, his expression unreadable. ‘If you say so.’

Cooper stepped carefully over the dogs. None of them moved, or even opened an eye to look at him. There seemed to be an awful lot of muddy paws and scruffy tails protruding from the heap and sprawling across the oak boards. But Mr Jarvis said there were only four dogs, and Cooper had to believe him.

‘Just routine,’ said Jarvis. ‘That’s what you all say, isn’t it? Do they teach you that in police school?’

Cooper laughed. ‘Yes. But I do mean it for once.’

Jarvis gave him a brief nod. ‘You’ve time for a brew then, if it’s just routine.’

‘No, sir. Thank you.’

‘Suit yourself.’

‘Actually, it’s about the human remains that were found at the edge of your property,’ said Cooper.

‘Bloody hell, that was weeks ago. Have you found out who the poor bugger was?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Some dropout, I reckon,’ said Jarvis.

Cooper smiled at the old-fashioned term. It was what his grandfather had called anyone with long hair, an expression he’d picked up in the sixties and never stopped using.

‘Why do you say that, sir?’

‘Well, it was a skeleton. That person must have been there for years. Yet nobody missed them.’

‘Perhaps.’

Cooper produced the photographs he’d been given by Suzi Lee. ‘This is a facial reconstruction. Does it remind you of anyone you might have seen around this area at any time?’

‘The dead person?’ said Jarvis, making no attempt to reach for the pictures.

‘Yes, sir. We’ve had them done by a forensic artist, so the likeness won’t be exact. We’re hoping it might jog someone’s memory.’

Rather reluctantly, Jarvis took the photos. He frowned at the appearance of the face, perhaps noticing the inhuman aspects of it first before focusing on the features that might be recogniz able.

‘A woman,’ he said.

‘Yes, sir. We know that much, at least. She was white, aged between forty and forty-five, five feet seven inches tall. The hair and eyes may not be quite right.’

Jarvis was silent, staring fixedly at the photos. Cooper waited patiently, conscious of a trickle of dampness in his collar and a pool of water forming at his feet as the rain ran off his clothes on to the porch.

‘Do they ring any bells, sir?’ he asked.

But Jarvis shook his head. ‘Strange to think she was lying dead as a doornail just down there. It makes me feel a bit peculiar.’

‘I understand.’

‘She doesn’t look like a dropout, though.’

‘No,’ agreed Cooper. ‘She doesn’t.’

Jarvis handed the photos back. ‘I never thought it would be a woman. No bugger told me that.’

‘While I’m here, would you mind if I had a look at the site where the remains were found?’ asked Cooper.

‘If you like. There isn’t much to see.’

As Cooper turned, he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. One of the dogs was loping across the grass towards the woods. Matted lumps of hair bounced on its sides, and legs flew in all directions as its tongue sprayed saliva into the air. The dog had a curious gait – it ran almost sideways, with one shoulder pointing in the direction it was going, but its head turned to the side, like a circus clown grinning to the audience. Cooper had no idea which of the dogs it was, but he knew which name would fit perfectly.

‘Yes, that’s Graceless,’ said Jarvis. ‘The only bitch in the bunch. Lovely nature, she has. Ugly as sin, though.’

‘Yes, I can see.’

Graceless seemed to be the only one of the dogs with enough energy to reach the woods. Feckless, Pointless and Aimless lay on the porch and watched her with weary, patronizing expressions. One of them yawned deeply and dropped his head back to the floor with a thump, rolling his eyes at the two men.

‘They’re hoping it’ll be dinner time soon,’ said Jarvis. ‘Idle buggers, they are. I don’t know why I give them house room.’

‘Are they any good as guard dogs?’

Jarvis snorted. ‘Guard dogs? Well, if I could train them to sleep in the right places, they might trip somebody up in the dark. But that’s about the strength of it.’

‘Still, they’re big enough,’ said Cooper. ‘The sight of them alone might deter burglars.’

‘Aye, happen so.’

But Jarvis didn’t seem convinced. Perhaps living at the damp end of the valley for so long had given him an eternally sceptical view of life. The outlook was always rain at Litton Foot. He would probably react the same way if Cooper told him the sun would break through one day. Aye, happen so.

Jarvis descended the steps and headed down the path, not looking to see if Cooper was following.

‘Graceless, now, she really likes people,’ he said. ‘Whenever somebody new comes to the house, she always wants to …’

‘What?’

‘Well, she likes to sniff their trousers, if you know what I mean.’

‘Their trousers?’

‘If you know what I mean.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Not everybody likes it,’ said Jarvis.

‘No, I can imagine.’

‘But she’s only being friendly. I’m wasting my time trying to stop her. She’s a big lass, and if she wants to go somewhere, she goes. She doesn’t mean any harm by it, but some folk get the wrong idea when they see her coming.’

‘Yes.’

‘She hates it,’ said Jarvis, with that jerk of his head again.

‘Your wife? Well, it must be a bit embarrassing when you have visitors.’

‘What visitors?’

‘Business not good, sir?’

Jarvis gave him a sour look and wiped the moisture from his hands on the legs of his jeans.

It had been dry on the porch, but now Cooper was glad he’d put on his jacket before he left the car. It was the one he’d taken to the Black Mountains with him for the weekend, so the pockets were full of all kinds of odds and ends, but it kept him dry as he waded through the long grass in the rain.

Litton Foot lay deep in Ravensdale, above Cressbrook village. Ash woods hung above the stream here, deep and dank. Ivy had wrapped itself around the tall, slender trunks of the trees, spiralling high into the canopy, seeking a bit of sun. Everything at ground level was covered in moss so thick that it was difficult to tell what was stone, what was wood, and what was something else slowly rotting in the damp air.

Just downstream, he knew there were two rows of cottages built for the workers at Cressbrook Mill, but they weren’t visible from here. Stepping stones crossed the water down there to help climbers reach the limestone pitches on Ravenscliffe Crags. On the wet margins of the stream grew clumps of a plant that Cooper didn’t recognize – something like a ten-foot-high cow parsley with purple stems and spotted leaf stalks, furred with tiny spines.

‘There’s a footpath at the bottom of your land, isn’t there, sir?’ he said.

‘It isn’t the footpath that’s the problem,’ said Jarvis. ‘That’s been there for centuries, as far as I know. It’s this new law they brought in. This … what is it? … right to roam. Some folk think it gives them the right to go traipsing all over the shop. There was a bunch of them came right down through the paddock and tried to walk across the weir. I don’t mind admitting, I were fair chuffed when one of them fell in the stream. She were near to drowning, judging by her noise.’

Finally, they reached the patch of ground that had been dug out around the remains of the unidentified woman. Blue-and-white police tape still clung to the trunks of nearby trees, some of it trailing on the ground now in sodden strands, one loose end rattling sporadically in the breeze. Cooper couldn’t tell now how wide an area the search had covered.

He hadn’t brought any of the scene photos with him, but could remember them well enough to picture the position of the skeleton. The skull had been at the far end of the excavation, close to the roots of an ash tree; the arms had been slightly bent at the elbow, so that the fleshless hands rested somewhere in the pelvic region, while the legs were laid out straight and close together, with the feet near to where he was standing now.

Cooper looked up through the canopy of trees to locate the sun. The cloud cover wasn’t heavy, and a gleam of brightness was visible, despite the rain. Higher up, on the moors, he could always orient himself if he could see the sun. But down here, among the winding dales and shelving banks of woodland, it was easy to lose his sense of direction.

Most of the available sunlight seemed to be coming from beyond the trees to his left. Since it was morning, that should be approximately southeast. Cooper patted the pockets of his jacket. Somewhere here, he was sure … ah, yes. He pulled out a small Silva compass and swivelled it until he’d oriented the needle to the north. He looked at the grave again. Head there, feet here. He nodded. But it probably meant nothing.

‘What are you doing?’ said Jarvis.

Cooper had almost forgotten him. The man had been so silent and so still that he might as well have merged into the trees. He was standing under the boughs of an oak, with water dripping on to his sweater. He hadn’t bothered to put on a coat before they came down to the stream. In a few more minutes, he’d be as wet as the ground he was standing on.

‘Nothing important, sir,’ said Cooper. ‘Just checking some details.’

‘Routine?’

Jarvis said the word as if it summed up everything that was wrong with the world. This was a world that wouldn’t leave him alone to sit in peace on his porch with his dogs.

‘What’s on the other side of these woods?’ asked Cooper, pointing across the stream to the east.

‘It’s part of the Alder Hall estate.’

‘I’ve never heard of it.’

‘It’s not exactly Chatsworth – though they say it belongs to the Duke again now. The house has been empty for the last two years, anyway. This stream is the estate boundary.’

‘But there’s a fence up there above the trees. That looks as though it ought to be the boundary.’

‘That fence is new. It marks the end of the access land.’

‘Of course.’

The walkers who found the human remains at Litton Foot had been here only as a result of their new freedom under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act. The so-called ‘right to roam’ legislation had opened up a hundred and fifty square miles of private land in the national park to public access for the first time. Otherwise, the remains might have lain undiscovered for years yet. In a different location, they’d probably have been found months ago, before they deteriorated beyond hope of identification.

‘Bad business, it being a woman,’ said Jarvis.

‘Yes.’

‘She doesn’t know. The wife, I mean. She gets upset about stuff like that. Hates these ramblers coming across our land. But I suppose I’d better tell her.’

‘It’ll be in the papers anyway,’ said Cooper.

‘Aye.’

Cooper almost slipped on the stones, and put his hand on to the wall to keep himself upright. The moss covering the wall was thick and fibrous to the touch, like a cheap carpet that had been soaked in a flood and never dried out. It held water as effectively as a sponge, and no air could penetrate it. When he raised his hand from the wall, Cooper’s fingers smelled dank and woody.

‘Well, thank you for your time, sir,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve got what I need for now.’

‘Aye? You don’t need much, then.’

As they walked back towards the house, Cooper noticed an enclosure next to the paddock. A row of old pigsties stood on a concrete apron surrounded by muddy ground and a stone wall, mortared to give it extra stability.

‘Do you raise livestock, Mr Jarvis?’ he said.

‘No. These dogs are enough livestock for me.’

Cooper dug into an inside pocket for one of his cards.

‘If you do happen to remember anyone, sir – I mean if the facial reconstruction rings any bells later on – you will let us know, won’t you? The photographs should be in the papers in a day or so, too. You can contact me at the office on this number, or leave a message.’

Jarvis took the card and glanced at it before tucking it away somewhere in his clothes.

‘Cooper. That’s you, is it?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Cooper braced himself for the inevitable question. Tom Jarvis was local. He would surely know all about Cooper’s father and how he’d met his death. Memories were long in these parts, and he didn’t expect he would ever escape it, no matter how long he lived.

But Jarvis just gave him a quizzical look, no more than the lifting of an eyebrow and a momentary understanding in his dark eyes. And Cooper suddenly found himself liking the man much more.

He walked back through the overgrown garden, the only sounds the swish of his own footsteps in the wet grass and the rattling of raindrops on rusted metal. The place had an air of dereliction, a sense of things that had been left to rot in peace.

Tom Jarvis didn’t come with him to the gate but stood and watched him from the top of the porch steps, with the dogs sprawled at his feet. When Cooper reached his car, he turned to say goodbye.

‘Well, Graceless hasn’t bothered me at all while I’ve been here,’ he said.

‘No, you’re right,’ said Jarvis. ‘The old bitch must not fancy you, then.’

Diane Fry watched DI Hitchens tapping a pen against his teeth and swivelling in his chair. Some of his mannerisms were starting to annoy her, but she tried not to show it too much.

‘The two calls weren’t linked straight away,’ said Hitchens. ‘I didn’t know about the second one myself until this morning, and there was no chance to tell you about it.’

Fry hadn’t bothered looking at the transcript yet. She felt too angry. ‘Where was the call made from? Wardlow again?’

‘We don’t know, Diane. It was too brief to be traced. But they were only a few minutes apart, so it’s a good bet.’

She looked up at the map, finding Wardlow easily this time. ‘It’s an entirely different kind of message, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. The similarities between them are the voice distortion and the timing, otherwise the connection might not have been made at all.’

‘He’s being very specific: “a cemetery six miles wide.” And what does he mean by “the dead place”? Or “a flesh eater”?’

‘We’ll analyse it later,’ said Hitchens. ‘Was your funeral director any use?’

‘Mr Hudson did manage to remember who a few of the mourners were at Wardlow. There’s the family, of course. And they had some local dignitaries and business types in the congregation, people who’d worked with the deceased councillor, so I’ve got a decent list to be going on with. And when we talk to the family, we can get more names. That would be a good start.’

‘Yes,’ said Hitchens, without enthusiasm.

Fry took off her jacket. ‘I appreciate we’re talking about over two hundred people, sir. But if we put a couple of enquiry teams on to it, we can add more names with each interview until we build up a picture of the whole congregation. We should be able to narrow the possibilities down to a few individuals who nobody knew. And one of those will be our man.’

‘That probably won’t be necessary,’ said the DI. ‘But we’ll bear it in mind.’

Fry looked at him. ‘Why won’t it be necessary?’

‘It’s a lot of effort for potentially little result, Diane. There are other major leads we can be following up.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as the possibility that our caller has already committed his murder.’

5

‘She never liked using that car park,’ said Geoff Birley. ‘But it was the only place near enough to the office, without her having to walk a long way.’

He stared down at his large pale hands where they lay helplessly on his knees. He’d given his age as forty-one, three years older than his wife. He was a foreman on the despatch floor at one of the big distribution centres just outside town. Hard physical work, no doubt, but never any sign of sun.

‘That’s the trouble with this town, you know. Not nearly enough parking spaces.’

He looked at DI Hitchens for understanding. Always a mistake, in Diane Fry’s view. But Birley’s face was pale and set in an expression of shock, so maybe he knew no better at the moment. A family liaison officer had been appointed, a female officer who might make a better job of sympathizing with Birley and getting him to talk once the detectives had gone.

‘They keep opening more shops, and encouraging more and more tourists to come in, but they don’t give people anywhere to park.’

Hitchens didn’t answer. He left it to Birley’s sister, Trish Neville, a large woman wearing an apron, who had insisted on making tea that neither of the detectives had touched.

‘Geoff, I’m sure the inspector doesn’t think that’s worth fretting about just now,’ she said. ‘He has more important things to talk to you about.’

She spoke to her brother a little too loudly, as if he were an elderly relative, senile and slightly deaf.

‘I know,’ said Birley. ‘But if it hadn’t been for that … If there had been somewhere nearer to park her car, and more secure. If the company had provided parking for its staff …’

They were sitting in a low-ceilinged room with small windows, like so many of the older houses in the area. Peak Park planning regulations wouldn’t have allowed the owners to knock holes in the walls and put picture windows in, even if they’d wanted to. It wouldn’t have been in keeping.

The room might have been dark and gloomy, if it hadn’t been recently decorated with bright floral wallpaper and dazzling white gloss on the woodwork. Somebody, presumably Sandra Birley, had arranged mirrors and a multi-faceted glass lamp to catch what light there was from the windows and spread it around the room. Fry found herself seated in an armchair with a chintz cover, facing the windows. Normally, she disliked the fussiness of chintz intensely. But in this room it seemed to work, softening the crude lines of the stone walls.

Geoff Birley had stopped speaking. He licked his lips anxiously, as if he’d forgotten what he was saying. He seemed to know they were expecting something of him, but wasn’t sure what it was. He looked up at his sister, who was standing over him like an attentive nurse.

‘Well, I’m just saying, Trish,’ he said. ‘About the car park.’

Trish Neville sighed and folded her arms across her chest. She looked at the two detectives. Over to you, she seemed to say.

‘Despite that, your wife used the multi-storey car park regularly, didn’t she, sir?’ said Fry.

‘Yes, she did,’ said Birley. ‘But she always tried to get a space on the lower levels, so she wouldn’t have to go up to the top to fetch her car if she worked late at the office. Only, you have to get there early, you see. You have to be there at seven o’clock, or you’ve had it for the rest of the day.’

‘And she was late yesterday morning?’

‘She got held up by a phone call as she was leaving the house. It was only her mother, mithering about nothing as usual. But Sandra always has to spend a few minutes listening to the old bat and calming her down. Sandra is like that – if she cut her mother off short, she’d have felt guilty about it all day. So she made herself late because of it. By the time she got to Clappergate, the bottom levels of the car park would already have been full. A few minutes make all the difference, you see. And when that happens, you have to go up and up, until you’re on the bloody roof.’

‘Her car wasn’t quite on the roof level, in fact,’ said Fry. ‘It was on the one below, Level 8.’

‘She was lucky, then. She must have nipped into a space.’

Fry and Hitchens exchanged a glance. The fact that Mr Birley should still be describing his wife’s actions as ‘lucky’ told them that reality hadn’t sunk in for him yet. The one thing Sandra Birley hadn’t been last night was lucky.

‘Mr Birley,’ said Hitchens. ‘When your wife went back for her car, we think she used the stairs to get to Level 8, instead of the lift. Yet the lift was working. Would that have been her usual habit, do you think?’

The question seemed only to confuse Geoff Birley. ‘How do you mean?’

‘Would your wife normally have used the stairs to go up eight floors, rather than take the lift?’

Birley hesitated. ‘It depends. What did it smell like?’

Now it was Hitchens’ turn to look puzzled. ‘I’m sorry, sir?’

‘The lift. What did it smell like? Did anyone open it and have a smell inside?’

Fry had been present when the lift was examined. Even now, she had to swallow a little surge of bile that rose to her throat as she remembered the stink.

‘Yes, it smelled pretty bad.’

‘Like somebody had thrown up in there, then pissed on it?’

‘Those smells featured, I think.’

Birley shook his head. ‘Then Sandra wouldn’t have gone in it. She might have pressed the button and opened the doors. But if the lift smelled as bad inside as you say it did, she wouldn’t have used it. No way. She couldn’t stand bad smells in an enclosed space. It made her feel sick.’

‘So you think she’d have used the stairs, even though the lift was working?’

‘Yes, I’m sure she would. You can count on it.’

Trish put her hand on her brother’s shoulder, perhaps detecting some sign of emotion that Fry had missed. She left it there for a few moments, while Birley breathed a little more deeply. The two detectives waited. Fry noticed that Trish’s arms were broad and fleshy, yet ended in surprisingly small, elegant hands with long fingers, as though the hands had been transplanted from someone else.

‘I’m fine, really,’ said Birley at last.

‘Your wife was late leaving the office too, wasn’t she, sir?’ said Fry.

‘Yes, she was. There was a late meeting, and then she had some work she had to finish. She’s done very well for herself at Peak Mutual, you know. She’s an account executive.’

‘Did you know she’d be late?’

‘She rang me just before five thirty to let me know, and told me not to wait for her to get home before I had something to eat. I got a pizza out of the freezer and left half of it for her. Hawaiian-style. She likes pineapple.’

Fry saw Trish’s hand tighten on his shoulder in an affectionate squeeze. She was anticipating Birley’s realization that the five-thirty phone call was the last time he would ever speak to his wife, that Sandra would never come home to eat her half of the pizza. But the moment didn’t come. Or at least, it didn’t show on Geoff Birley’s face.

‘When Mrs Birley called, you were already home, sir?’ asked Hitchens.

‘Yes, I was on an early shift.’

‘Your wife didn’t happen to say what the work was she had to finish?’

‘No, she didn’t often talk about her work. She told me about the people in her office – little bits of gossip, you know. But she didn’t bring her work home. She was good at her job, but she liked to keep the two halves of her life completely separate, she said.’

It was a good trick if you could do it. Fry glanced at Hitchens, who nodded.

‘Mr Birley, we have to ask you this,’ she said. ‘Can you think of anyone who might want to harm your wife?’

He frowned and shook his head. ‘No, not at all. Everybody liked her. She wasn’t the sort of person to get into arguments. She hated upsetting people. If there was someone at work she didn’t get on with, she would just try to avoid them.’

‘I see.’

‘It wasn’t somebody Sandra knew, was it? Surely it was one of these lunatics who prey on women? She was a random victim. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

‘Most likely, sir,’ said Hitchens. ‘But we have to cover all the possibilities.’

Geoff Birley looked up at his sister again. It seemed to Fry that it was Trish he was talking to now, as if the police had already left his house.

‘Only, I’d hate to think it was someone Sandra knew that attacked her. I couldn’t bear the thought of that. It had to be a stranger, didn’t it? That’s the only thing we can cling to. It’s some consolation, at least.’

‘What time did you first try to call your wife’s mobile, sir?’

‘About eight, I suppose.’

‘And it was already off then?’

‘Yes.’

Hitchens leaned forward in his chair, as if about to leave.

‘Would it be all right if we take a look around while we’re here, sir?’ he said.

‘What for?’

‘Anything that might help us find your wife.’

Puzzled, Birley looked at his sister, whose face had set into an angry expression. ‘I suppose it’ll be all right,’ he said.

The Birleys lived in a detached limestone cottage with an enclosed garden. Fry guessed there were probably three or four bedrooms upstairs. From outside, it was obvious that the property had been created by combining two cottages whose roofs were at slightly different heights. An external chimney stack at one end suggested there might have been a third cottage in the row at some time.

Fry looked first into the kitchen and saw an enamelled range, the kind that provided central heating and hot water as well as cooking. She’d never be able to manage one of those herself. In the sitting room, the focal point had been a castiron stove with a carved surround, which looked equally impractical.

In the dining room, Fry paused to admire a carving of a leaping dolphin on a table near the fireplace. There was much more light at the back of the house, thanks to a sliding door that led into a conservatory, with pine floorboards covered in raffia matting. She walked straight through it and out into the garden, past a lawn and a series of raised borders, until she found a brick store place and a garden shed that had been painted bright blue. Neither of them contained the body of Sandra Birley.

Re-entering the house, Fry saw Hitchens descending the stairs from the bedrooms. She shook her head, and they both went back into the sitting room, where they were met with a glare from Trish Neville. Geoff himself was gazing at the carved surround of the stove, as if searching for a meaning in its decorative curlicues.

‘Is that your car parked outside, sir?’ said Hitchens. ‘The green Audi?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘Do you mind if DS Fry takes a look?’

Birley found the keys to the Audi without argument. Either he’d cottoned on by now, or his sister had explained it to him while they were out of the room.

Fry went outside and checked the interior and boot of the car. It contained nothing more incriminating than half a roll of blue stretch wrap that looked as though it might have come from the despatch department at a distribution centre.

‘I don’t know what I’ll do without Sandra,’ Birley said, as the detectives prepared to leave.

‘We don’t know that your wife is dead, Mr Birley,’ said Hitchens.

‘What? You think he might be keeping her prisoner somewhere?’

‘It’s quite possible. Until we know one way or the other, we’re keeping an open mind.’

Birley had begun to look hopeful. But now he dropped his eyes again.

‘You’re just saying that. You’ll find her dead, won’t you? You know you will. Why else would he have snatched her from that car park?’

‘Until that happens, we can still hope for the best, sir.’

As soon as he’d spoken, Fry remembered having said something similar quite recently. But she couldn’t quite recall when and where.

Detective Chief Inspector Oliver Kessen leaned against the side of the crime scene van and thrust his hands into his pockets. ‘Well, this place must be dead overnight,’ he said. ‘Do many people leave vehicles in here until morning?’

Fry assumed that the DCI was talking to her, though he gave no sign of it. Scenes of crime had almost finished with Sandra Birley’s Skoda, and were moving away along the retaining wall towards the ramps.

‘Very few,’ said Fry. ‘It’s too expensive.’

She looked around for Ben Cooper to get confirmation.

‘This is a shoppers’ car park,’ he said. ‘It’s meant for short stay. But some of the office workers use it, if they need to. The other parking facilities get full.’

‘That’s what Mr Birley told us, too,’ added Fry.

Kessen kept his eye on the Skoda, as if it might do something. Perhaps he expected it to crack open its bonnet and make a confession.

‘The attacker must have known it would be empty by that time.’

Fry nodded, though she knew Kessen wouldn’t see her gesture. He’d barely looked at her yet.

‘Yes, he certainly seems to have known his way around. There are eleven CCTV cameras in here – one on each level, and two at the entrance and exit. But he must have known exactly where they were, because none of them seem to have caught him, so far as we can tell from the attendant.’

One of the SOCOs, Liz Petty, glanced over towards them and smiled. Fry thought she’d found something significant, but she went back to dusting the edge of the wall near Sandra Birley’s car. Elsewhere, DI Hitchens was supervising a search on the stairs and in the lift, followed by the concrete parking bays between them and the car. The whole of Level 8 had been sealed off, which meant no one could reach the roof level of the car park either. Apart from the Skoda, the only vehicles here now belonged to the police team.

‘Just one attendant?’ said Kessen.

‘At that time of night, yes. He has a little office on the first level, and he monitors the cameras from there.’

‘Someone will have to go through every bit of footage.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Looking at the vehicles lined up in the multistorey car park reminded Fry that her Peugeot was due for its MoT this month. She ought to check the date on the certificate – she suspected there were only a few days left before it expired. It didn’t do a police officer’s reputation any good to be caught driving an illegal vehicle.

Sealing off the two top levels of the car park was undoubtedly causing problems. The ‘full’ sign at the entrance had already been illuminated when the first police officers arrived to look at Sandra Birley’s car. Now, frustrated motorists were continually pulling up to the barrier at ground level and reversing away again.

‘What about the lifts?’

‘They’re cleaned out every day,’ said Cooper. ‘The interiors are specifically designed for easy washing and disinfecting. It’s a familiar problem, apparently.’

‘And here I was thinking it was only a problem in high-rise flats on council estates in Birmingham,’ said Fry. ‘You’ve imported some dirty habits into Derbyshire, haven’t you?’

‘Well, I got on to the cleaning contractors a few minutes ago. They swear the lift at the Hardwick Lane entrance was thoroughly cleaned early yesterday morning. So it shouldn’t have smelled of anything but industrial disinfectant with a hint of pine forest when Mrs Birley arrived.’

‘When she arrived, yes. But somebody had been up to their dirty tricks by the time she came back for her car that night.’

‘Do you think she’d have been safer using the lift?’

Fry strode in front of the DCI and gestured at the Skoda, the SOCOs in their scene suits still clustered round it. It wasn’t a murder enquiry, not without a body. So Kessen would disappear soon. He needed to know who had the ideas at an early stage.

‘Well, look at the layout of this level,’ she said. ‘If Sandra Birley used the lift, she’d have had only a few feet to walk before she reached her car. In fact, I think it’s likely she chose that parking space precisely because it was near the lift. But the exit from the stairs is fifty yards further on, and it meant she had to pass the bottom of the down ramp from Level 9 on the way to her car.’

‘Where her attacker may have been waiting behind the concrete barrier.’

‘Exactly.’

‘So it seems her own fastidiousness led her into danger.’

DI Hitchens trotted towards them from the stairs, red in the face and puffing slightly. He was followed by the crime scene manager, Wayne Abbott, who was about the same age as Hitchens but looked much more fit.

Abbott had recently been appointed senior SOCO for the area after finishing a scientific support management course at the training centre near Durham. Fry didn’t much like having to deal with him at a crime scene. There was something about his aggressively shaved head and permanent five o’clock shadow that suggested too much testosterone. From the first time she set eyes on him, she’d wondered why Abbott was a civilian. He ought to be kitted out in full public-order gear, wielding a baton and breaking down doors.

‘Sir, the bad news is that only half the CCTV cameras in this place are operational,’ said Hitchens. ‘The others are dummies.’

Kessen cursed quietly. ‘And Level 8?’

‘One of the dummies.’

‘Damn and blast.’

‘The camera at the exit is working, sir. We can get registration numbers for any vehicles that left the car park after the attack.’

‘He wouldn’t have been so stupid,’ said Kessen. ‘Ten to one he was on foot.’

‘That would make the job much more difficult than just bundling someone into a vehicle.’

‘But it would be the only way to avoid the cameras. So what about pedestrian access?’

‘Two flights of stairs, one at either end. Lifts at the entrance into the shopping centre. Also, the attacker could have made his way down through the levels via the car ramps. That would be a dangerous thing to do during the day, when it’s busy. But after seven o’clock it would be so quiet that he could do it easily. And he’d have heard any car coming a long way off. Noises really travel in here, have you noticed?’

‘Yes, I have.’

‘But wouldn’t the operative cameras pick him up on some of the levels, at least?’ said Fry.

‘Yes, you’re right, DS Fry.’ Kessen looked thoughtful. ‘Who’s talked to the attendant?’

‘The FOAs. He’s got his supervisor here with him now, too. He called his head office as soon as we arrived.’

‘We need to talk to him again,’ said Kessen. ‘If it was so quiet in here last night, it makes me wonder what exactly the attendant was doing down there.’

Hitchens wiped his face with a handkerchief. He was getting very unfit if he couldn’t walk up a few flights of stairs without risking a heart attack.

‘At least he heard the scream,’ he said.

‘Oh yes, the scream.’

‘It helps us with the timing.’

‘Well, it’s a pity he wasn’t quicker off the mark getting up here, instead of staring at his little screens wondering if he was on the wrong channel.’

‘According to his initial statement, there was no one around when he did come up to check, so he thought it must be kids messing around outside.’

‘And then he went back to his tea break, no doubt,’ said Kessen.

Hitchens shrugged. ‘Also, the mobile phone network recorded the logging-off signal from Mrs Birley’s phone. But I don’t think that will help us much, in the circumstances.’

The smashed phone had been bagged by the SOCOs, along with the bits of broken plastic scattered across Level 8 by the tyre of a Daihatsu 4x4 that had driven over it. The SIM card would identify the phone definitely, but it matched the description given by Geoff Birley – a Nokia with a soft leather case and a red fascia.

Fry walked to the outside wall of the car park and looked over the ledge at the buildings in Clappergate. Far below, a group of youths wearing rucksacks went by with their skateboards, whistling between their teeth as they entered the shopping precinct. She tugged at the wire mesh, but it didn’t shift an inch.

A movement caught Fry’s attention, and she saw Liz Petty again, walking across to the crime scene van to speak to Abbott, who was now her supervisor. She had pushed her hood back from her face, and she looked flushed. SOCOs didn’t like wearing the hoods of the scene suits if they could help it, especially the female officers. Petty brushed her hair back and tried to confine it in the clip behind her head. She saw Fry watching her, and smiled again.

‘I’ll get everything under way, sir,’ Hitchens was saying. ‘DS Fry and I have an appointment with the psychologist.’

‘The phone calls?’ said Kessen.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I don’t suppose we’ve had a call since Mrs Birley disappeared?’

‘No. And it’s difficult to know whether we should hope for one or not.’

‘At least we’d know where we stand. You need to make the right call on this one, Paul.’

Fry felt a little sorry for Hitchens. Nine times out of ten there were other reasons why people went missing, especially adults. They usually turned up alive and well, with surprised looks on their faces at all the fuss they’d caused. That could waste a lot of time and resources if a hasty decision was made.

For now, Hitchens was the man who had to make that judgement. He’d want firm evidence of a serious crime before he pressed the alarm button. A vague message from a disturbed individual wasn’t adequate justification – not enough to look good on paper when the DI’s handling of the case was reviewed. But add a scream in the night, a dropped mobile phone and a missing woman, and the equation became much more difficult. All Fry could hope for was that it added up on the right side for Sandra Birley.

6

Dr Rosa Kane wasn’t what Fry had expected at all. New experts with fresh ideas were fine, but they weren’t supposed to be young and attractive, with Irish accents and the shade of red hair that DI Hitchens had a weakness for. These were factors that distracted Fry from the start, and somehow interfered with her ability to listen to what Dr Kane was saying with serious attention.

‘We can make some tentative deductions from the language he uses, of course,’ said Dr Kane, some time after the introductions had been made and the content of the calls summarized.

‘Can we?’ said Fry.

Then she realized immediately that her surprised tone might give away the fact that it was the first comment from the psychologist she’d really heard.

‘For a more detailed analysis, you’ll need the services of a forensic linguist. But some of it is fairly obvious. If you’d like my opinion, that is …?’

‘Please go ahead, Doctor,’ said Hitchens, smiling as he saw an opportunity to save on the expense of another expert.

‘Well, for a start, there’s his tendency to make grammatical switches from first person singular to first person plural, and then to third person. That’s very interesting. When he says “I”, “me” and “my”, he’s almost certainly telling the truth. But when he switches to the plural or third person, or to a passive form, that’s when he’s concealing something. It’s an unconscious sign of evasion.’

Intrigued now, Fry hunched over the transcript. She ran a yellow highlighter pen through some of the phrases. Perhaps I’ll wait, and enjoy the anticipation … I can smell it right now, can’t you? … I promise … My kind of killing … And then there was a change halfway through a sentence: as a neck slithers in my fingers …

There were a few more sentences with ‘me’ and ‘my’. But then the entire final section was couched in the first person plural, as if to draw his listeners into a conspiracy. The question isn’t whether we kill, but how we do it. That section contained all the stuff about Freud and Thanatos, too. No ‘I’ in it anywhere. ‘I see what you mean,’ Fry said, reluctantly.

She pushed the highlighted transcript across to the DI, who smiled. A cheap result.

‘As for the second message, some of the phrases don’t fit at all,’ said Dr Kane.

Fry was taken aback. In a speech written by someone so disturbed, it hadn’t occurred to her there might be some phrases that didn’t fit. Because none of it fit, did it? Not with anything rational.

‘Yes, of course,’ said Hitchens. He pulled his reading glasses out of his pocket and looked at the transcript with an intelligent smile. ‘Which phrases were you thinking of in particular, Doctor?’

‘“A cemetery six miles wide”, for example. What does that have to do with anything? It’s too specific.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Yes. “Here I am at its centre.” Also “the signs at the gibbet and the rock”. The most significant thing about these phrases is that all three of them occur in the second message, the one which is obviously scripted. In my opinion, he was making sure that he included those phrases. They were important, for some reason.’

‘“Six miles wide”,’ said Hitchens. ‘Do you think …?’

‘They’re clues,’ said Fry suddenly. ‘He’s left us some clues to a location. It’s a location within a six-mile radius of … Well, of what?’

‘His own position?’ said Dr Kane. ‘The place where he was making the call from?’

‘Of course. “Here I am at its centre.”’

She took off her glasses, and Hitchens did the same.

‘That would suggest he knew in advance where he was going to make the call,’ said the DI.

‘Is that a problem?’

‘Well, it isn’t the scenario we had in mind. We think he had the speech prepared, but not the location.’

‘It could be that he simply inserted an appropriate figure according to where he eventually made the call,’ said Dr Kane. ‘A six-mile radius? He might have driven around a specific area until he found somewhere suitable that he knew was within that range.’

Hitchens looked worried. ‘Damn it, he might just have been guessing at the three miles, in that case. How many people know even the approximate distance from one spot to another across the countryside? I don’t suppose he’s using GPS.’

‘And that’s only if he meant the distance as the crow flies, rather than the distance by road, which people might be more familiar with.’

Fry saw from the DI’s expression that he was starting to lose faith in his expert. Dr Kane seemed to be setting up more obstacles than she was helping to overcome. But experts loved to make things look more complex than they really were, didn’t they? It helped to justify their fees.

‘So what about the dead place?’ said Fry. ‘And the gibbet? The flesh eater?’

But the psychologist had begun to gather her papers together. ‘That’s your job, I believe. You have an individual here who’s trying to draw attention to himself, perhaps because he knows subconsciously that he needs help. Right now, he’s doing his best to assist you. His clues are a little obscure and ambiguous, certainly. That’s because he has to appear to be demonstrating his superior intelligence. But if you listen properly to what he’s telling you, I’m sure it will help you far more than I can at this stage.’

Dr Kane stood up ready to leave, then paused. She was looking at Fry, not at Hitchens, when she delivered her parting advice.

‘It’s generally true,’ she said, ‘that you can learn a lot by listening to what other people have to say.’

The regional manager for PNL Parking was called Hicks. Cooper found him in a cramped office on the street level with an attendant in a yellow fluorescent jacket.

‘We’re bound by all the rules, you know,’ said Hicks. ‘We have to register the CCTV system and make sure we’re compliant with the Data Protection Act.’

‘No one is suggesting you’ve broken any rules,’ said Ben Cooper for the third time.

But Hicks barely blinked. ‘Apart from anything else, footage won’t be accepted as evidence in court if we don’t comply with the rules,’ he said. ‘And registering the system means we have to deal with requests from people for copies of film.’

‘Do you get many requests?’

‘Some. A lot of them are too vague, though. They have to give us an idea of what time they might have been filmed, where they were and what they look like.’ He shrugged. ‘Most of them give up when they’re asked for details. They’re just fishing. And then there are some where we have to admit we didn’t film them at all, because the camera they saw was a dummy. Well, we don’t say dummy. We just say the camera wasn’t functioning at the time.’

‘And the camera on Level 8 would be one of those dummies?’ asked Cooper.

‘Yes.’

‘Has it always been non-functioning?’

‘For as long as I can recall.’ Hicks hesitated. ‘Yes, I’m pretty sure it was installed like that. It’s a bit ridiculous really, but at the time it was considered more economical. Cameras were supposed to be a deterrent, as much as anything else.’

‘I’d like to see any requests you have on file for copies of film from the camera on Level 8.’

‘As I said, we don’t give out copies of film from that camera, because it’s non-functioning.’

‘Exactly,’ said Cooper. ‘You know that, and I know that. And anyone who’s ever requested film from it must know that, too.’

Hitchens got up to escort Dr Kane out of the building, leaving Diane Fry on her own. She watched them walking away down the corridor, the DI’s hand lightly touching the doctor’s elbow as he chatted to her about his student days in Sheffield.

Fry knew that seeing visitors off the premises would normally be a job the DI delegated to somebody more junior. But for Dr Kane, Hitchens was making an exception. Probably because she was an expert and had to be treated with respect. Probably.

To prevent herself from thinking about it any more, Fry lowered her gaze and found herself staring at the yellow highlighter marks on the transcript in front of her. She wished she hadn’t used yellow. Now that the colour had dried, it looked faintly rancid and unhealthy, like a four-day-old bruise or a urine stain. Pink or orange would have been much more cheerful.

But who was she kidding? Whatever colour she chose wouldn’t make a bit of difference to the sly, evil look of the words themselves.

I can smell it right now, can’t you? It’s so powerful, so sweet. So irresistible.

She left the DI’s office and walked slowly back to the CID room. Ben Cooper wasn’t at his desk, but Gavin Murfin and a couple of other DCs were in, and they looked up as she entered.

As usual, there was a whiff of pastry from Murfin’s direction. Steak pie or Cornish pasty, she wasn’t sure. Right now, she wouldn’t have been able to identify it. Another, more elusive smell was in her nostrils, something rancid, unhealthy, yellow and evil. It was a smell she knew would only get closer and couldn’t be dispersed by the ventilation system.

I can smell it right now, can’t you? … It’s the scent of death.

‘Let’s get the map out,’ said Hitchens, almost before he could get back into the CID room. ‘We need the Ordnance Survey map, Diane – White Peak.’

‘We could use the mapping system on the computer,’ said Fry.

‘That’s no good for a six-mile radius. We won’t be able to see enough detail at that scale.’

He cleared a table while Fry found a copy of the right map and they spread it out.

‘Wardlow is here,’ said Hitchens. ‘Now we need a ruler to measure three miles in each direction. Damn it, the village is too close to the edge of the map – we’ll have to turn over to the other side. Why is everything you want to look at on an OS map always too close to the edge?’

Cooper came in as they were finding a ruler, and Hitchens called him. ‘Ben, just the lad we need. You know this area, I’m sure.’

‘Yes, sir. What is it you’re looking for?’

The DI explained, while Fry checked the scale of the map and used the ruler and a pen to draw a rough circle around the location of the public phone box in Wardlow, helpfully marked by the OS with a capital ‘T’ and a little blue handset.

‘Why the six-mile radius?’ asked Cooper.

‘We’ve got some clues from the tape. Or we think they’re meant as clues.’

Continuing the westward arc of her three-mile circle on to the other side of the map was tricky, but finally Fry managed it.

‘We’ll get somebody to do a proper job of it, but this will do for now,’ said Hitchens, oblivious to the exasperated look that Fry gave him. ‘What do you make of it?’

Cooper bent over the map. ‘Well, you’ve got an area that includes a dozen villages and one small town. Several dales on the western side, including part of the Wye Valley. The main A6 between Bakewell and Buxton is down here, and near the top there’s a smaller trunk road that cuts right across the A623.’

‘A busy area, would you say?’

‘Only parts of it, sir. The two main roads carry a lot of traffic. And there are some popular tourist spots, such as Tideswell and Monsal Head. And Eyam of course, on the eastern side.’

‘That’s the plague village, isn’t it?’

‘Plague?’ asked Fry.

‘Oh – Ben will tell you the story some time.’

‘I’ll look forward to it.’

Cooper moved a hand across the map, spanning his fingers over tight clusters of contour lines and long bands of green woodland. ‘But there are much quieter corners here, too. This is part of the Derbyshire Dales Nature Reserve. Only walkers can get into some of these smaller dales, and the woods on the valley sides are quite dense. What roads there are tend to be single track and too narrow to take a vehicle of any size. On the other hand, the eastern and northern parts are limestone plateau. That’s farming country, with a few small villages and the odd abandoned quarry thrown in.’

Fry watched Cooper and Hitchens poring over the map. They looked like two schoolboys marshalling their armies of toy soldiers to act out a desktop battle.

‘We’re looking for somewhere within this area that might be referred to as “the dead place”,’ she reminded them.

Cooper stood up and drew a hand across his forehead. ‘The possibilities are endless.’

Fry sighed. ‘Ben, that isn’t what we wanted to hear.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s not your fault,’ said Hitchens. ‘Let’s think about this logically. What are the possibilities.’

‘“The dead place” …’ said Fry. ‘Well, does he mean the place itself is dead, or is he referring to a place for the dead.’

‘As in a cemetery?’ said Cooper.

‘Hold on, let’s take the first option,’ said Hitchens. ‘What did you say – where the place itself is dead?’

‘Yes. It depends what sort of bee he has in his bonnet.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, it could be some kind of anti-quarry protest, or some farmer driven to the end of his tether by Foot and Mouth Disease. Are there any disposal pits for incinerated cattle around here?’

‘Not that I know of. Foot and Mouth never reached these parts, but there were some farms affected down on the Staffordshire border.’

‘Factory closures, then. Any major employers gone under?’

‘Not since the pits closed in the east of the county. Lots of communities almost died out there. But not here.’

‘Toxic waste dumps?’

‘OK, wait … yes, there’s one near Matlock.’

Hitchens shook his head. ‘Too far. It’s way outside of the six-mile zone.’

‘What about a place for the dead, then?’ said Fry. ‘A cemetery. What better place to hide a dead body than among hundreds of others?’

‘He’d still have to bury it, or conceal it in some way,’ said Cooper. ‘People visit cemeteries all the time. I’m sure they wouldn’t be used to seeing a fresh body left lying around.’

‘There must be some abandoned cemeteries,’ said Fry.

‘Well, plenty of closed churchyards. Most of the older ones are full now and don’t have room to expand. In a lot of villages they have to send you to the municipal cemetery, or to the crematorium.’

‘Mostly the crem these days, isn’t it? I don’t think I’ve ever been to a burial in my life. Everyone I’ve known who died has been cremated.’

‘But the churchyards are still there.’

‘OK. Anywhere else you can think of, Ben?’

‘It depends what you mean by a cemetery. There are plenty of burial places, some of them thousands of years old – Neolithic sites, remains of chambered cairns. A lot of them are in fairly remote locations, but hikers like to visit the more historic sites. You couldn’t leave a body in full view for long without it being discovered.’

‘Like the Nine Virgins,’ said Fry.

‘Exactly.’

Cooper remembered the Nine Virgins well. The body of a murdered mountain biker left inside the stone circle had been found within minutes of her death. No such luck in this case, though.

‘Some sites aren’t so well known, of course,’ he said. ‘There’s the Infidels’ Cemetery, for example.’

‘The what?’

‘The Infidels’ Cemetery. Oh, it’s really a tiny, neglected nineteenth-century graveyard on the road between Ashford in the Water and Monsal Head. Last time I saw the place, it was waist high with nettles and weeds. And it’s in the middle of nowhere – you’d drive right by without knowing it was there.’

‘And why is it there?’

‘I think it was actually the graveyard for a community of Baptists. They weren’t regarded very highly by their neighbours, I suppose.’

‘Why “infidels”?’

‘Well, the story is that the inscriptions were recorded by a local historian, who noticed that none of the epitaphs contained references to the Bible, God or Jesus. That was so unusual at the time that it was considered very suspicious.’

‘Between Ashford in the Water and Monsal Head?’ Fry remembered the DI mentioning Monsal Head. ‘It’s not far from Wardlow, then.’

‘Very close.’

‘Let’s go take a look. I’d like to get the lie of the land around Wardlow anyway.’

She looked at Hitchens, who nodded. ‘I can handle everything here. It’s going to be a question of waiting at the moment.’

‘Do you have time, Ben?’ asked Fry. ‘You’re the obvious candidate for a guide.’

‘I’ll get my coat.’

In the CID room, Gavin Murfin had seen Dr Kane leave after the meeting.

‘You know, I didn’t realize they made profilers so young,’ he said.

‘Actually, she doesn’t call herself a profiler,’ said Fry.

‘Oh no, of course not. Not since the Washington Snipers, and the Rachel Nickell case. Not to mention Soham, when the SIO took the wrong advice. Even profilers start to get themselves a bad name after too many disasters. So obviously they have to change their name to something else.’

For once, Fry didn’t try to shut him up. It was DI Hitchens who started to look annoyed. ‘As a matter of fact, DC Murfin, the real professionals have always tried to play down the hype that the press generate around psychological profiling. Dr Kane has asked us to refer to her simply as a specialist advisor because she wants to avoid publicity.’

‘To keep a low profile, in fact,’ said Murfin, and laughed.

Hitchens went a bit red around the ears. It was interesting to watch, because the DI was known as a man who found amusement in winding up his own senior officers. Some people said it was why he hadn’t made chief inspector by now.

‘Dr Kane is an investigative psychologist,’ he said. ‘She’s trained in behavioural science and criminology, so she can provide a useful insight into the investigative process. She’s been an advisor on a number of cases for other forces.’

Fry gave Murfin a warning glance, and he tried hard to look chastened. ‘No offender profile then, sir?’

Hitchens shook his head, still edgy. ‘We don’t have enough information at this stage. We don’t even know what sort of offence we’re looking at, if any.’

Murfin seemed to think about what else to say, then changed his mind and kept quiet. Hitchens waited for more comments, fidgeting a little, before turning to go back to his office.

‘Besides,’ he said, ‘she isn’t all that young. Thirty-three.’

7

Twenty minutes later, Cooper’s car was climbing out of Ashford in the Water. The River Wye took a sharp turn here as it came down from the north, so an observer standing at Monsal Head seemed to be looking up two separate valleys. A small road dropped down from a Bavarian-style hotel and an adjoining café before running north into the woods of Upperdale and Cressbrook Dale. To the south there was no road, only a footpath that clung to the slope for a while before slithering down to the river and crossing a bridge to the opposite bank.

A few walkers were on the five-arched viaduct that spanned the valley. The Wye narrowed as it ran underneath, and less adventurous visitors could be seen sitting on the banks of smooth grass enjoying an hour of September sunshine. But the walk down to the river was steep, and many people stayed to have lunch at the café or eat an ice cream while they enjoyed the view.

Fry shaded her eyes against the sun in the south-west. ‘What’s that place on the side of the hill up there? It looks like the ruins of a house.’

‘Hob Hurst’s House,’ said Cooper. ‘It isn’t really a house.’

‘And I suppose there was never really anyone called Hob Hurst?’

‘Well, no.’

‘How did I guess?’

‘It’s the name of a character in local folk stories. A goblin or a giant, I’m not sure which. What you can see there is actually the result of a landslip, but it does look like a ruined house from a distance, if you have a bit of imagination.’

‘Whoever built that hotel certainly had a bit of imagination,’ said Fry. ‘Some romantic Victorian, I suppose, fresh from a trip to the Alps.’

‘Probably. You know, when this viaduct was built for the railway line, there was a campaign against it. Everyone said it would ruin the view, just for the sake of getting from Bakewell to Buxton more quickly. Now it’s one of the most popular sights in the area.’

They almost passed the Infidels’ Cemetery without seeing it, although it was right by the roadside. Cooper had driven a few yards beyond it before he braked suddenly and reversed. Part of the wall that had once protected the graveyard had been knocked down. A wire fence was all that barred the gap, though the deep beds of stinging nettles behind it looked pretty hostile.

It was much quieter here than at Monsal Head. Across the valley they heard a shepherd calling to his dog, his voice a high, harsh cry like a moorland bird. Somebody was shooting on the opposite hill. As always in the countryside, the sound of gunfire didn’t seem out of place, let alone worth commenting on.

‘Well, nobody has been in this cemetery for months,’ said Fry. ‘Even I can tell that.’

‘They didn’t venture beyond the first couple of yards, anyway.’

Most of the ancient gravestones had fallen flat and were smothered with tangled goose grass and brambles. The stones that had stayed upright were coated in yellow lichen and shrouded in ivy that masked their familiar graveyard shapes. The only exceptions were the two stones nearest the road. Someone had cleared the ivy from them, revealing their inscriptions.

With difficulty, Cooper read the name and dates on one of the stones.

‘I don’t think this person was much appreciated in his day,’ he said. ‘“Though man’s envy may thy worth disdain, Still conscious uprightness shall fill thy breast.” I might suggest that one to Gavin for his epitaph.’

‘Why? Is he feeling under-appreciated?’

‘I think so.’ Cooper moved a few yards to the side. ‘Diane, look at this one.’

Only a small patch had been cleared in the ivy covering the second stone. It had been done quite recently, too. The broken stems were still shredded and oozing a little sap when Cooper touched them.

‘That’s a bit odd,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘Well, I was assuming that whoever cleared the ivy from these stones was an amateur historian, trying to confirm the names of people buried here. Or maybe a relative who wanted an ancestor to be remembered, not just lost in the undergrowth.’

‘Seems reasonable,’ said Fry.

‘But look at this – the name and dates haven’t been exposed, just the inscription after them. It’s only a short one, too. Caro data vermibus. What does that mean?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘You’re the educated one.’

‘Ben, I took a degree in Criminal Justice and Policing at the University of Central England. It didn’t make me fluent in Latin.’

Cooper walked backwards and forwards in front of the stones, but beyond the first few feet of ground from the road the blanket of nettles and brambles was dense and unbroken. He watched a butterfly flit among the nettles.

Impatiently, Fry walked back to the entrance and looked up the road. ‘How near is this to Wardlow, did you say?’

‘Only a couple of miles.’

In the language of Derbyshire place names, ‘low’ always meant ‘high’. So this particular village must have been named after the lookout hill, Wardlow Cop, whose flattened conical shape appeared on their left as they began the descent from Monsal Head.

Wardlow itself was just as DI Hitchens had described it – a series of farms and houses scattered along one road. It was bordered on both sides by long, narrow strips of pasture land, preserved in their medieval patterns by drystone walls, networks of them strung across the fields and climbing the hills. Some parts of the White Peak plateau were said to have twenty-four miles of wall for every square mile of farmland. Instead of regular field patterns, the eye was likely to see a confusing geometry of stone, long courses of wall exaggerating every contour in the landscape.

Some of the farms at Wardlow had been converted into homes, but others were still working. A tractor turned out of a yard as they reached the start of the village, where two Union Jacks were flying. Cooper noticed that the village pub was closed during the day, like so many in places without much tourist trade. The Church of the Good Shepherd was just beyond a cattery operating from a cluster of surplus farm buildings. It was a small stone church with a slate roof and leaded windows, but no tower. Anything bigger would have been out of place.

They finally found space wide enough to park alongside someone’s hedge without blocking the road completely, and they crossed to the church. Through double gates they walked into a grassed area, where a pair of stocks stood near the rear wall. Cooper didn’t think they were medieval – more likely erected for a village fête some time in the last few decades. A chance to throw wet sponges at the vicar, rather than rotten eggs at a convicted felon. Ritual humiliation, all the same.

Behind the church was the graveyard itself, small and under-used. There’d be no need to close this one to burials for a few years yet.

‘Melvyn Hudson said there were very few funerals in Wardlow,’ said Fry.

‘He’s from the funeral directors, Hudson and Slack?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, I’m sure Mr Hudson is right. A lot of these graves date back to Victorian times.’

Several large sycamores and beeches darkened the top end of the graveyard, and nothing grew underneath the trees. Even their own seedlings had sprouted and died in the barren ground. Dead branches, beech nuts and small stones crunched under their feet as they walked among the gravestones. Swallows swooped around them, diving almost to the ground in pursuit of the small flies that hung in clouds over the graves. The Victorian graves were surrounded by low iron railings, rusted and falling apart in the damp air.

‘Here’s the deceased councillor,’ said Cooper. ‘Mrs Sellars, right? It’s by far the newest burial here.’

‘OK. Now, where’s the phone box?’

‘The other side of the church.’

A small parish room was attached to the church, a kitchen visible through a window piled with jars, cutlery and old newspapers. As they walked past it towards the phone box, Cooper saw a movement inside a house directly across the road. It was no more than a shape against the light, but he knew they were being watched.

‘Has anyone spoken to the neighbours?’ he asked.

‘All those who had a view of the church or the phone box,’ said Fry. ‘Uniforms did it yesterday.’

‘The residents directly opposite have a good view.’

‘Unfortunately, they were attending the councillor’s funeral themselves.’

‘Pity.’

‘As you can see, there aren’t many others to talk to.’

Cooper looked at the red phone box itself, twenty yards away from where he was standing. It was more than a pity, wasn’t it? It was a big stroke of luck for the individual who’d made the phone call. There was no way he could have known that the occupiers of that property opposite weren’t watching every movement he made.

Although he hadn’t heard the tapes himself yet, Cooper was starting to have a sneaking doubt about the caller’s intentions. On the surface, he appeared to have taken care to conceal his identity, as might be expected. But some of this individual’s actions looked almost reckless – as if he wanted to be identified. Maybe the whole thing was no more than a cry for help. But there was no point in suggesting the idea to Fry.

Behind the churchyard, Cooper could see a sprawl of farm buildings and trailers, and a wandering pattern of drystone walls. A cockerel crowed somewhere nearby, though it was already afternoon. The phone box stood close to a footpath sign, its fingerpost so weathered that the lettering had worn away completely, and now it seemed to indicate a path that led nowhere.

Then the sun came out, and the limestone walls formed themselves into a bright tracery running across the landscape. Cooper wondered what he might find if he followed those white pathways. The instinct to pursue the light rather than return to the gloomy churchyard was almost irresistible.

Half a mile north, at the junction with the A623, there was a smaller collection of houses called Wardlow Mires. A petrol station and another pub called the Three Stags’ Heads sat among farms and some derelict buildings covered in honeysuckle.

The A623 took traffic through sheep pastures and across the plateau towards Manchester. Almost as soon as Cooper turned on to it, he sensed the landscape opening out on his left. In a gap between the hills stood a strange, isolated outcrop of limestone. Its distinctive shape looked almost artificial – straight, pillared walls of white rock split by crevices and fissures, and a rounded cap grassed over like a green skullcap. The slopes of short, sheep-nibbled grass around it seemed to be gradually encroaching on the limestone, as if reaching up to pull it back into the ground.

The rock looked familiar. Searching his memory, Cooper thought it might be called Peter’s Stone. He had no idea what the name meant, but guessed it was probably some biblical reference to St Peter, the reasons for it lost in the passage of time and the mists of folklore.

‘Can I listen to the tapes some time, Diane?’ he said.

‘Don’t imagine you’ll recognize the voice. It’s electronically disguised.’

‘I might have some ideas, though.’

‘Yes, OK. Remind me when we get back.’

‘Thanks.’

Fry tapped a finger on the map. ‘Ben, we should be going the other way. Eyam.’

Cooper pulled over and reversed into the Litton turning. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘my unidentified remains were found at Litton Foot, in Ravensdale.’

‘Yes? What about them?’

‘Litton Foot is less than three miles from Wardlow across country. It falls within your circle.’

Fry looked at the map. ‘But your body is eighteen months old, Ben.’

‘I know.’ Cooper shrugged. ‘I just thought I’d mention it.’

‘Tell me about Eyam.’

‘For a start, it’s pronounced “Eem”. The village was infected by the plague from some infected cloth, but the villagers quarantined themselves so they wouldn’t spread it to the rest of Derbyshire.’

‘When was this?’

‘Seventeenth century.’

‘OK.’

‘Well, three hundred and fifty people died in Eyam. The names of the victims are recorded on some of the cottages. Plague victims couldn’t be buried in the churchyard, so their graves are in the fields around the village. Whole families together sometimes.’

‘Are these places well known?’

‘Well known? They’re a tourist attraction.’

Back at West Street, Diane Fry disappeared for a meeting with the DI before the evening briefing, and Cooper didn’t get a chance to remind her of her promise. So instead of listening to the tapes, he took the opportunity to spread out the photos of the human remains found in Ravensdale.

The quality of crime scene photography had improved tremendously since the photographic department spent money on replacing its printing equipment. Colours had started to bear some relationship to reality, instead of looking like snaps taken by a passing tourist with a Polaroid. Now you could see that the stuff on the floor near a body was actually blood, not the corner of a donkey-brown rug.

Outdoors, they sometimes managed to get quite interesting lighting effects. In one of the Ravensdale photographs, Cooper could make out the dappling effect of sunlight through the canopy of trees. The sun had swung round to the south by the time the shots were taken, so it must have been around the middle of the day. The photographer would have been wondering when he’d get a chance for his lunch.

There was also a sketch plan done by one of the SOCOs, complete with arrows indicating the points of the compass. It confirmed what Cooper had noticed at the site: the feet of the victim had been pointing to the east and the head to the west.

He had a feeling there was some significance in that alignment. It was one of those half-remembered things, a vague superstition in the back of his mind. He couldn’t have said who had put the idea in his head, or when. Maybe it was only something he’d overheard as a child, a whispered conversation among elderly relatives at a funeral, a bit of local folklore.

East to west. Yes, there was some significance, he was sure. But the alignment of the body was just as likely to be a coincidence, wasn’t it?

From the fragments collected at the scene, the dead woman seemed to have been wearing a rather plain, light blue dress, underwear, tights and blue strappy shoes with one-inch heels. No coat, nothing worn outside the dress. It was unlikely that she’d walked down to the stream at Litton Foot herself, but not impossible.

The skeleton had been incomplete when it was found, with several small bones missing. And there was no jewellery that might have been used for identification. No engraved bracelets, no wedding ring. This woman had been someone’s daughter and mother. But had she been someone’s wife, too?

Cooper knew he might never be able to get a lead on how the woman had died. Not from the remains, at least. Forensics could perform wonders, but not miracles.

And there was the question of what had happened to Jane Raven Lee’s body after her death. The possibilities were bothering him. The dead woman hadn’t been buried, she’d been laid out and exposed to the elements. The whole thing had too much ritual about it. Cooper wished there was someone on hand who could tell him whether he was discerning a significant fact, or just imagining things again.

The evening briefing didn’t last long. There wasn’t much to report, after all. A forensic examination of the scene had found no signs of a struggle near Sandra Birley’s car, which suggested her abductor had given her no chance to make a run for it, and had probably used a weapon to subdue her quickly. The Skoda had still been locked, and there was no sign of the keys.

The concrete floor of a multi-storey car park was hell for a fingertip search. Who could say whether an item found on the oil-stained surface had been dropped by Sandra Birley, her attacker, or one of a thousand other people who had used Level 8 in the past few weeks? Scores of fibres had been recovered from the retaining wall and the ramp barrier. Partial footwear impressions were numberless. And the SOCOs had collected enough small change to pay their coffee fund for a week.

‘One question I’d like answered,’ said DCI Kessen, ‘is whether our man knew which CCTV cameras were dummies, and which weren’t. And if so, how? There’s no way of telling just by looking at them, is there?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said DI Hitchens. ‘Maybe he’d worked there himself, or he knows somebody who does. Anyway, DC Cooper is already on to the employees angle.’

‘What do we make of the husband? What are the odds we’ll find a green Audi on the CCTV footage?’

Hitchens shrugged. ‘He seemed genuine enough to me. He says he was at home when his wife phoned him. We should be able to confirm that from phone records.’

‘So not much to go on at this stage.’

‘We do have two confirmed sightings of Sandra Birley prior to her abduction,’ said Hitchens. ‘She was seen leaving her office and walking down Fargate in the direction of the multi-storey car park between seven fifteen and seven thirty. Even allowing for a margin of error on the part of the witnesses, she ought to have reached her vehicle by around seven forty.’

‘Hold on,’ said Fry. ‘When was the last sighting of her exactly?’

Hitchens consulted his notes. ‘No later than seven thirty. A shopkeeper in Fargate saw her passing his shop.’

‘He was in his shop at seven thirty? What sort of shop is this? I thought everything in Edendale closed by six at the latest.’

‘It’s a shoe shop. And yes, it was closed. As luck would have it, the proprietor was in the store room stock-taking – he’s closing down and selling up soon, so he’s doing a full stock check. But he could see through the shop on to the street. He said he’d seen Sandra Birley many times, and he knew she worked at Peak Mutual, though he didn’t know her name. We showed him the photos, and he’s positive about the ID.’

‘OK.’

Fry picked up the transcripts of the two phone calls. The fax sheets had been sitting on her desk only since this morning, but already they were getting smudged and creased at the corners. It was a plain paper fax, and they were supposed to be a lot better than the old thermal rolls. Maybe it was something to do with her hands. Too much heat.

She checked the information at the top of the first page, though she knew both messages almost by heart. Soon there will be a killing … All you have to do is find the dead place.

‘This second call was received by the control room at Ripley shortly after three thirty yesterday afternoon,’ she said.

‘What of it, DS Fry?’

‘He appears to be warning us of his intentions. “Soon there will be a killing.” That’s what he says.’

‘Yes.’

Fry dropped the sheets. ‘If Sandra Birley was the victim he was talking about in his phone calls, it means he had four hours to drive into the town centre and either set up an abduction he’d already planned in advance – or choose a victim.’

‘Still, it’s possible.’

‘What we don’t want to face is the possibility that Sandra Birley isn’t the victim he was warning us about. That his killing is yet to take place.’

‘We’ll probably get another call from him, Diane. He’s obviously an attention seeker, so he’ll want us to know this is him. No doubt he’ll think he’s being very clever.’

‘What did the psychologist say?’ asked Kessen.

‘She told us to listen to the phone calls,’ said Fry.

Hitchens scowled. ‘Actually, that wasn’t quite all Dr Kane said. She gave us some useful ideas about what the caller is trying to tell us.’

‘Are we expecting miracles from her?’ asked Fry.

Kessen looked at her for the first time that day. And Fry knew that he’d seen everything, heard everything, and taken it all in. She found herself fooled by his manner every time.

‘We can always hope, DS Fry,’ he said.

Then the DCI turned back to Hitchens.

‘By the way,’ he said, ‘let me make one thing clear. Nothing goes from us to the media about these phone calls. Not a word. Otherwise we’ll have every lunatic in the country calling in. And one lunatic at a time is quite enough.’

A few minutes later, Cooper knocked on the door of the DI’s office to explain his problem. With the briefing over, Hitchens was already getting ready to go home. Cooper caught the chink of bottles, and saw that the DI was checking the contents of a carrier bag. From the frown on his face, he was wondering whether he’d bought the right wine for dinner tonight.

‘I could use some advice on the Ravensdale human remains case, sir,’ said Cooper. ‘If I might be allowed to consult –’

The DI held up a hand. ‘If you’re going to mention anybody who charges for their services, Ben, the answer is “no”. We’ve already met the cost of a facial reconstruction on your case. Forensic artists don’t come cheap, you know. Unless you can come up with enough evidence to turn the case into a murder enquiry, you’re on your own.’

‘But, sir, there could be unusual areas of significance – subjects I don’t know anything about.’

‘I’m sure everyone understands that, Ben. But you’ll have to cope for a while. We have other priorities at the moment.’

‘Well, mightn’t there be …?’

But the DI shook his head. He tucked the bag under his arm and rattled his car keys impatiently.

Cooper went back to his desk. He separated one of the photographs of the facial reconstruction from its stack and clipped it on to the copy holder attached to his PC screen. The room was emptying, and no one paid any attention to him, or noticed that Ben Cooper was talking to himself again. It was just one sentence anyway, spoken resignedly to the photograph next to his screen.

‘It’s just you and me then, Jane,’ he said.

The face of Jane Raven Lee gazed back at him silently – the muddy brown flesh, the random streaks against her skull, the blank eyes awaiting an identity.

8

When Cooper got back to his flat that night, the light on the answering machine was flashing and the cats were demanding to be fed. One was always more urgent than the other, so it was a few minutes before he pressed the button to play back his messages. There were three of them.

‘Ben, it’s Matt. Give me a call.’

The first one was a very short message, but it made Cooper frown. His brother didn’t usually call him unless it was really necessary. In fact, Matt was always scrupulous about not phoning his mobile because he knew he used it for work. He supposed he’d have to call back and see what was wrong. But there were two more messages to listen to yet.

‘Ben. Matt. Give me a call as soon as you can. It’s important.’

Now Cooper began to feel uneasy. He pressed the button for the third message.

‘Ben, please give me a call. It’s very important.’ Then a pause. ‘It’s about Mum.’

Turning her Peugeot from Castleton Road into Grosvenor Avenue, Diane Fry finally pulled up at the kerb outside number 12. The house had once been solid and prosperous, just one detached Victorian villa in a tree-lined street. Its front door nestled in mock porticos, and the bedsits on the top floor were reached only by hidden servants’ staircases. But now most of the occupants were students at the High Peak College campus on the west side of town.

Fry often found her flat depressing, especially when it was empty. But she’d found Wardlow depressing, too. The very ordinariness of the place had made the calls from the phone box near the church seem even more disturbing.

Though Wardlow had been bad enough, at least it wasn’t the real back of beyond, the area they called the Dark Peak. Up there was only desolation – bleak, empty moorlands with nothing to redeem them. She recalled the road sign she’d seen last time she was there: sheep for 7 miles. Seven miles. That was the distance all the way across Birmingham from Chelmsley Wood to Chad Valley, taking in a population of about a million people. But here in Derbyshire you could find seven miles of nothing. That just about summed it up.

She’d transferred from the West Midlands as an outsider, the new girl who had to prove herself. It had been a struggle at times, just as she’d expected. But she’d been focused, and she’d worked hard. And now she got a lot of respect, though it was mostly from people she despised.

Fry went to the window, thinking she’d heard a car in the street. But she could see no vehicles, not even pedestrians passing on their way home for the night. All she could see out there was Edendale.

No, wait. There was someone. Two figures parting on the corner, so close to the edge of her field of view that she had to press her forehead to the window pane to see them. A second later, one of the figures came into focus, walking towards the house. Angie.

Fry pulled away from the window before she was seen, and went into the kitchen. Two minutes later, she heard Angie’s key in the lock.

‘Hi, Sis.’

‘Hi. Had a good day?’

‘Sure.’

‘What have you been doing?’

Angie had that secret little smile on her face as she took off her denim jacket. It was hard for Diane to know how to feel towards her sister. She knew she ought to be glad that Angie looked so much better than when she first moved in. Her skin was less pallid now, her eyes not quite so shadowed, her wrists and shoulders less painfully thin and bony. Anyone who didn’t know them might not be able to guess which sister was the recovering heroin addict.

Yet Diane was unable to suppress a resentment that was there every day now, barely below the surface of their relationship. No sooner had she been reunited with Angie than her sister had started to drift away from her again, and this time it seemed more personal. Would it have been different if she’d found Angie herself, without the interference of Ben Cooper? She would never know.

‘Actually, I’ve got myself a job,’ said Angie.

‘What?’

‘Did you think I was going to sponge off you for ever, Di? I’m going to pay you some rent.’

Angie kicked off her shoes and collapsed on the settee. Diane realized she was hovering in the doorway like a disapproving parent, so she perched on the edge of an armchair.

‘That’s great,’ she said. ‘What sort of job?’

There was that smile again. Angie felt among the cushions for the remote and switched on the TV. ‘I’m going to work in a bar.’

‘You mean you’re going to serve behind a bar,’ said Diane carefully.

Angie looked at her, and laughed at her expression. ‘What did you think, I was going to be a lap dancer or something? Do they have Spearmint Rhino in Edendale?’

Diane didn’t laugh. She tried to force herself to relax. ‘What pub are you going to work in?’

‘The Feathers. Do you know it?’

‘I’ve heard of it.’

‘I’ve done a bit of barmaid work before, so I’ll be fine. A few tips, and I’ll even have some spending money. Aren’t you pleased, Sis?’

In her head, Diane was running through the wording of Police Regulations. Regulation 7 restricted the business interests of police officers and any members of their family living with them, including brothers and sisters.

‘As long as you’re not going to be a licensee, or I’d have to get permission from the Chief Constable.’

She tried to say it lightly, but Angie flicked off the TV and stared at her in horror.

‘You’ve got to be bloody joking.’

‘No.’

‘Your chuffing Chief Constable can’t run my life. So what if he didn’t give permission? What does he think he could do to me?’

‘Nothing,’ said Diane. ‘But I’d have to resign from the force.’

‘Oh, tough.’

Angie bounced back on to her feet and picked up her shoes as she went towards her bedroom. Diane began to get unreasonably angry.

‘Angie –’

Her sister turned for a second before she disappeared. ‘Quite honestly, Di, resigning from that bloody job of yours would be the best thing you could do. And then maybe I’d get back the sister I remember.’

Diane remained staring at the door as it slammed behind Angie. She didn’t know what else to think, except that she’d never got a chance to ask who the man was she’d seen on the corner of the street.

Ben Cooper felt as though he’d been walking through hospital corridors for half an hour. He was sure he’d turned left at a nurses’ station a hundred yards back, yet here was another one that looked exactly the same. Had hospitals always been so anonymous, or was it just a result of the latest improvements at Edendale General?

And then, in the corridor ahead, he saw a familiar figure wearing worn denim jeans and a thick sweater with holes at the elbows. Cooper smiled with relief. His brother Matt looked totally out of place in a hospital. For a start, Matt was built on a different scale to the nurses who passed him. His hands and shoulders looked awkward and too big, as if he might break anything fragile he came near. He wasn’t a man you’d want to let loose among hypodermic needles and intravenous drips.

He also looked far too healthy to be inside a hospital, even as a visitor. Constant exposure to the sun and weather had given a deep, earthy colouring to his skin that contrasted with the clinical white, the pale pastels of the newly painted walls.

Matt looked up and began to move towards him. He put his arm round his brother’s shoulder, a rare gesture of affection that made Ben’s heart lurch with apprehension.

‘I’ve spoken to the doctor,’ said Matt. ‘Not the top man, just some houseman or whatever they call them. Come down to the waiting room. We can get a cup of tea.’

‘I want to see Mum.’

‘She’s asleep, Ben. They say she needs to rest. Actually, I think they gave her something to put her out.’

‘Matt –’

‘Come on, it’s this way. I think the WI still do a canteen for visitors, so the tea should be all right.’

Ben felt he was being swept along by his brother, dragged in his wake. Almost the way it had been with their father for so many years.

‘Matt, never mind the tea. I need to know how Mum is now. What happened?’

Instead of answering, Matt began to move along the corridor again. He was a couple of inches taller than his brother, and much heavier. Ben knew it was pointless trying to dig in his heels, and tried to keep up with his brother’s stride instead. He felt a warm flush of resentment starting, a rush of anger that he knew was born of fear.

‘Tea,’ said Matt. ‘And then I’ll tell you everything I know.’

* * *

Matt Cooper walked carefully back across the hospital cafeteria balancing two cups of coffee. He looked terrified of spilling liquid on the polished vinyl tiles, in case someone slipped and broke a leg. An accident in a hospital would seem worse than one that happened anywhere else, somehow.

Ben wrapped his hands around the cup, needing only the warmth and the comfort of watching the movement of steam – anything to settle his impatience.

‘Kate says she saw you earlier today,’ said Matt. ‘Your car was parked on Scratter.’

‘Where?’

‘Scratter. The road between Wardlow and Monsal Head. That’s what they call it.’

Ben frowned. ‘Come on, Matt, get on with it.’

His brother sighed as he eased himself into a chair. ‘It seems Mum had a bit of a fall at the nursing home.’

‘What do you mean “it seems”?’

‘Well, all right – she had a fall. But the staff at Old School aren’t sure how it happened. And you know how confused Mum gets. I managed to speak to her before they sedated her, and she hadn’t a clue where she was.’

‘How badly is she injured?’

‘She’s broken her hip.’

‘Shit.’

‘I know. And they think she might have banged her head when she fell, too. She was very dazed, and couldn’t really remember anything.’

‘Somebody from the nursing home ought to be here,’ said Ben. ‘Why aren’t they here? It’s their responsibility.’

‘Ben, calm down. The senior nurse came to the hospital with her and stayed for two hours until I sent her back. The manager’s been on the phone twice to see how Mum is. They’re all concerned about her.’

‘So they should be. They’ve got some questions to answer.’

Matt took a drink of his coffee, but Ben didn’t even lift his cup. He found that his hand was shaking with anger, and he knew he would only spill it.

Someone had left a copy of the evening paper on the table, folded to the top half of the front page. Ben could see only the first inch of a photograph above the fold, but he recognized it straight away. He’d been looking at it for a large part of the day. At least Media Relations had done their job properly.

‘When will Mum be awake?’ he said.

‘They want to keep her sedated until they can do the X-rays and get her into theatre. Tomorrow we can talk to her, perhaps. But we can go and sit with her for a few minutes, if we ask the sister.’

Ben stared at his cooling coffee. It looked particularly unappealing now that the steam had vanished.

‘Let’s do that, then.’

‘It’s just a fall, Ben. A broken hip sounds bad at first, but she’s not all that old.’

‘Don’t you know what head injuries are like? Even a minor knock –’ Ben stopped, took a deep breath. ‘OK, I’m sorry. You think I’m overreacting.’

‘Yes, you are.’

‘Sorry, Matt,’ he said again. ‘Work, you know …’

‘Getting you down again?’

Ben didn’t like the ‘again’ part. As they walked back down the corridor towards the ward, he felt another surge of anger. He put his hand on Matt’s arm.

‘What’s the name of the manager at Old School?’

‘Robinson. Why?’

‘When I leave here, I’m going to go and see him.’

‘Ben, you wouldn’t do any good.’

‘I need to know exactly how this happened, and what they’re going to do about it.’

Matt took hold of his arm, gripping a little too tightly. His face was flushed a deeper red than usual, and he was breathing too heavily.

‘I’m warning you – don’t start lashing out at everyone you can find, Ben. You can’t get rid of your guilt feelings this way.’

Broken earth lay under her feet, like shards of glass. Two days of rain had splashed her legs with mud, and now it lay dark and damp in the cracks between her toes and in the line of an old fracture on her left thigh. Ants had emerged from the leaf mould on the woodland floor to wander among the stiff folds of her dress and crawl across her hands. One of them paused at her scentless flowers before climbing upwards. But it didn’t seem to know what to do when it reached her head. It wasn’t aware of the sky, or even of Alder Hall Woods. The ant saw only its own tiny patch of her body – an inch of her neck, its surface white and hard, and smooth to the touch.

That afternoon, someone had come into the woods. It was a figure wrapped in a coat and scarf against the wind, hands thrust into pockets, a canvas bag over one shoulder. The visitor had followed the path from the bottom of Alder Hall Quarry, crossed the stream and climbed the slope through the trees. At the edge of the clearing, the figure stopped for a few moments before moving into the open, then forced a way through the tall swathes of willowherb, oblivious to fragments of stem that caught on sleeves and clung to jeans.

Reaching the plinth, the visitor opened the canvas bag, took out a spray of flowers and placed them at the feet of the statue, then stood back to admire the arrangement. The sight brought a smile of satisfaction. The flowers were white chrysanthemums, suitable for a death.

* * *

MY JOURNAL OF THE DEAD, PHASE ONE

No one told me that the worst nightmares would come while I was still awake. No one ever warned me that I’d lie in my bed in the darkness, eyes wide open, praying for sleep. Those were the hours I spent counting faces in the wallpaper, seeing the shape of a monster where my clothes lay strewn on a chair. Those were the times I listened to the noises outside the house, listened as hard as I could, hoping I might make the noises inside go away. Finally, as the hours went by, there would be nothing left but the sounds of the night – the slither of the darkness as it crept across my roof.

Something lives in that darkness. It’s our greatest fear, and it’s called the unknown. Everyone knows this fear, but few of us dare to think about it. We’d never be able to go on living our lives if we really saw the grinning presence that waits behind our shoulder. It’s far better to pretend we don’t see the beast. We turn away our eyes and convince ourselves it’s just a shadow cast by the sun. It’s only a draught from an open window, a rustle of dead leaves on the other side of the door.

It’s the same fear for the child whose bedroom door has to stand open at night for a glimpse of light and for the old woman whose hand trembles as she draws back the bolts. In the end, we’re all destined to fall into the claws of that darkness we glimpse in our dreams. The great snatcher of souls, the unseen lurker on the threshold. What threshold would he lurk on, if not on the threshold of death?

Do you see that shadow now? Do you feel the chill, and hear the rustling?

These days, my dreams are different. Sometimes, in my nightmares, I see bodies moving inside their coffins. Their mouths twist, their limbs writhe, their hands open and close like claws as they reach towards the light. I try to make them settle down, to lie still so they can be buried. But it never does any good. In my dreams, the dead just won’t stop squirming.

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