‘That’s copper’s talk, isn’t it? You don’t know how to say what you mean, you lot. Dead, is she?’
I’ll
‘Yes. Did you know her well?’
‘Hardly at all. Kept herself to herself, she did.’
‘Perhaps she was frightened of dogs.’
The man watched Cooper walk to the door of number 10 and open it with the key he had been given by the agents. Cooper glanced back for a second. Two strings of saliva had run out of the Dobcrman’s mouth and were dripping on to the pavement. The muscles in its shoulders and haunches had tensed. He was glad when the door opened at the hrst attempt, letting him into the cold interior of Marie Tenncnt’s home.
The first thing he saw in the hallway was the green message light Hashing on an answering machine. He pressed the button and got a Scots voice. Not Highland, more urban Scots maybe Glasgow or Edinburgh, he was never sure of the difference. It was a woman, middle-aged, who didn’t bother to identify herself. There was no phone number given either for the return call.
‘Marie, give me a ring when you can. Let me know how vou’re going on, so 1 don’t worry about you.’
There were bills piled up on a table and yellow Post-it notes stuck to the bottom of the mirror. There was a red coat hanging on a hook behind the door, a pair of shoes under the table, and a box of books on the floor that had been delivered by the postman but not opened.
Cooper paused, trying to assimilate the immediate impressions of the house. There was something in the atmosphere that didn’t seem quite right. In an apparently empty house, an unexplained noise was immediately noticeable. But it wasn’t a noise that he had heard. He moved his head from side to side, sniffing carefully for gas or the smell of burning, or for the odour of something dead and decomposing. But there were none of the smells that would normally have set his alarm bells ringing. There was a faint, elusive scent in the hallway, but it evaded his senses after the first whiff, before he could identify it. lie wasn’t sure which direction it was coming from. It could simply be a lingering squirt of air freshener or a suggestion of recently used disinfectant.
The hallway was cold, but no colder than any other house that had been standing empty for a couple of days. He supposed
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there was no central heating in these cottages. Or, if there was, it would be on a timer, to save gas. If that was the case, then this was a time of day when Marie would not have expected to he at home, and that might have meant she had a job to go to.
Cooper stood completely still and listened. Somewhere, a clock was ticking. It was one of the worst sounds you could ever hear — the ticking of a clock in an empty house after its owner had died. It was a reminder that the world would carry on just the same after you had gone, that the second hand wouldn’t even hesitate in its movement as you passed from living to dying.
v 1 O V O
Tick, you were there. Tick, you were gone. As if you had never mattered. It was a sound that struck straight to some primal fear in the guts the knowledge that time was steadily counting you down to your own death.
Your clock ought to stop when you died. Cooper knew it was one of those irrational things, something that welled up from a deep superstition. But he wanted to climb up on a kitchen chair and take the battery out of the clock or remove its counterweight, to bring its hands to a halt. He wanted to demand silent respect in the presence of death. But he didn’t do it. Instead, he allowed the ticking to follow him around the house as he moved from room to room; he permitted it to mock him with its sound, like the chuckle of a malevolent mechanical toy.
The first door off the hallway opened on to a sitting room. Cooper walked straight to the fireplace and checked the items on the mantelpiece. A recent gas bill had been shoved behind a cracked Chinese willow-pattern bowl, and there was a Somerfield’s checkout receipt with it. He turned to the fold-out mahogany dining table in the corner. There was a glass vase containing a dried-flower arrangement standing on a raffia mat. But there was no suicide note.
The room also contained a desk, which was packed with bank and credit-card statements, letters and old photographs. Cooper carefully separated some of the more recent letters to study them for the names of Marie Tennent’s closest contacts. He took a few moments to make a note of some names and addresses. None of them was local, and none sounded like a boyfriend. One was
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called John and seemed to be a relative oi some kind who was at university in Glasgow.
V O
Then he saw that some paper had been burnt in an otherwise unused grate behind the gas hre. He crouched to look at it, already beginning to speculate why Marie would have written a suicide note, then burned it or whether somebody else might have burned it for her. But when he got a closer look, he could see that it wasn’t a suicide note at all. It was a letter which said Marie Tennent, of 10 Dam Street, Edendale, was a confirmed finalist for a 1250,000 cash prize. She was invited to state how she would like to receive the money, and the letter gave suggestions as to how she might spend it - a brand new car, a Caribbean holiday, a dream home in the country. Cooper poked the letter, and the blackened parts crumbled into dust. H you were already feeling desperate enough, the cynical irony of that bit of junk mail might be the thing to push you over the edge.
Cooper lifted all the cushions on the sofa and the two armchairs. He found three ballpoint pens, a handful of small coins and a dog’s squeaky toy in the shape of a bone. Did Marie have a dog somewhere? But she had been living in the cottage for only eighteen months, according to the agent. The dog could have belonged to a previous tenant. There were no dog hairs on the furniture or the carpet that he could see. There was a small damp patch on the wallpaper on the outside wall, but that looked more like poor maintenance. The windows hadn’t been cleaned for some time, either. The view of the boarded-up houses across the street was grey and smeared, spattered with small gobbets of dirty snow and dry streaks of bird droppings.
Cooper worked his way hack through the hallway and checked the cupboard under the stairs, where he found the controls for the central heating system. The heating was set to go off at 9 a.m. and come back on at 3 p.m. The more meticulous suicides would have turned the central heating off to save unnecessary gas, knowing that nobody would be home that afternoon to need it. For others, the more impulsive or self-absorbed, it would never have crossed their minds. He didn’t know enough about Marie Tennent yet to be able to say which type she was.
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When he reached the kitchen, he finally rccogni/.cd the smell. It was so distinctive that he couldn’t believe that it hadn’t registered with him immediately. It was composed of wet nappies and plastic bottles, warm milk and sterilix.ing fluid, washing powder and soiled liners. It was the smell of a baby in the house.
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13
Ken Cooper hanged on the door of number 8, then tried the next house, and the one beyond that. He got no answer at any of them. riven the man with the Doberman seemed to have disappeared, or was refusing to answer his door.
After he had called in for assistance, Cooper went back into Marie Tennent’s home and walked quickly through all the rooms again. He was sweating now from a surge of panic at the thought that there might be a baby lying somewhere in the house. How long could a baby survive if it was left on its own? He
