The Dead Place (2 page)

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.'

7 '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

8 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

10 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 grand Standing 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

11 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, halfhearted 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.

12 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.

13 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.'

14 '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.