‘I wonder if he thinks they’re going to kill him. It could have been Vernon who made the phone calls.’
‘It doesn’t work, does it? If he wanted us to know he was in danger, why not just come forward and tell us? What’s the point of making a mystery of it? Besides, the caller seems to be suggesting he’s the killer, not the victim.’
Cooper bit his lip in frustration. ‘Vernon hasn’t been in work today, you know. McGowan told me he called in sick.’
401
‘Yes, I got your message.’
Then he caught the worried tone in her voice. ‘Diane, do you think Vernon’s at risk?’
‘Yes, Ben. But I don’t think the risk to him is from Hudson or McGowan. I think it’s from your friend Professor Robertson.’
Cooper listened as Fry told him about Lucy Somerville. Then he finished the call and unlocked the car. He was thinking there were too many dead ends in this enquiry, and not just The Tale of Mr Tod. Too many dead people, too, for that matter. Audrey Steele, Sandra Birley, Richard Slack, a set of unidentified remains. Death from natural causes, death by accident. Dead and gone. Dead, and never called me mother.
It was only then that Cooper remembered the sparseness of the rooms in the Slacks’ house, and the reason struck him. There wasn’t a thing in the place that could have been identified as belonging to Vernon’s parents. Someone had removed all traces of Richard Slack from his old home.
402
33
‘You want a search warrant for Professor Robertson’s house?’ said DI Hitchens, squeaking his swivel chair anxiously. ‘What are your grounds?’
Fry reported her interview with Lucy Somerville, while the DI listened with increasing concern, a frown creasing his forehead deeper and deeper. She’d brought Gavin Murfin in with her, too, but he listened without surprise as she related the worries expressed by the professor’s daughter.
‘And then I got one of the support officers to see if he could find these websites and any indication of Robertson’s activities on them,’ said Fry.
‘What were you hoping for, Diane?’
‘I wondered how far Professor Robertson’s interest in death goes exactly. How close does he want to get to the real thing?’
Fry remembered Freddy Robertson standing in the churchyard at Darley Dale, admiring the memorials and telling Ben Cooper that body snatchers had never operated in Derbyshire. It had seemed to mean nothing at the time. But Fry knew the stories about body snatchers, just as everyone did. They’d existed only because they had customers willing to pay for illicitly obtained corpses.
‘What are you saying?’ asked Hitchens.
403
‘It’s incredible, the things you can find on the internet these days.’ She looked down the list she’d been given. ‘Death Online, The Death Clock, The Charnel House, oh, and something called Corpse of the Week.’
‘You’re kidding.’
Fry grimaced. ‘I took a look at that last one. You need a strong stomach, believe me. It’s an archive of photographs mostly stuff taken from mortuaries, crime scenes, that sort of thing. No details spared.’
‘This is a UK site?’ ‘Yes. But the contributions are from around the world pictures of Polish autopsies, executions in Afghanistan, the remains of Chechen suicide bombers.’
‘Is it legal?’
‘I think so. It’s not as if you could stumble on something by accident. You have to choose which pictures you want to see. But it depends how the photos have been obtained, I suppose. To me, a lot of them look like scans from official files. Mortuary assistants and crime scene photographers sharing their best work with the world.’
‘What’s “The Death Clock”?’ asked Murfin.
‘It’s a site that lets you enter your personal details - age, height, weight, whether you’re a smoker or not. And then it predicts the date you’ll die.’
‘Oh, great.’
Hitchens looked at Fry with interest. ‘Did you try it out?’
‘Yes.’
‘And …?’
‘The eighteenth of April 2040.’
She could see them both working it out, just as she’d done herself. How long she had left, what age she would be when she died. And how many years she’d be able to enjoy her police pension, if she ever made it to her thirty.
‘The Death Clock gives you your remaining time in seconds,’ she said. ‘It counts them down as you watch.’
404
‘It’s rubbish, though, isn’t it?’ said Murfin.
‘I suppose you might say it’s a bit of fun.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Anyway, look at these photographs Robertson submitted to Corpse of the Week.’
‘Hold on, how do you know he submitted them?’ said Hitchens.
‘The email address of the contributor is given. The professor left us his card with his contact details on, including his email address. He calls himself thanatos, of course.’
Hitchens studied the photos carefully. ‘Pretty gruesome.’
‘Where would you say they were taken, sir?’ said Fry.
‘Well, this one is in a mortuary somewhere - not ours, but it could be the Medico Legal Centre in Sheffield. And the next one is certainly a crime scene. The victim has gunshot wounds.’
