phone began to ring. But the oak front door had already closed, a key had turned in the lock, a car started up in the drive. The house was empty.
And now it was Ben Cooper’s turn to leave his voice on a machine. He was talking into a void.
Most of the restaurants in the High Street were closed on Monday night. The pubs were open, but full of underage drinkers. At this time, there was nowhere he could comfortably find something to eat except McDonald’s. Oh, well. One Happy Meal wouldn’t ruin his arteries, would it?
Cooper didn’t immediately recognize the staff member serving behind the counter. Perhaps it was the uniform and baseball cap, the cloak of corporate anonymity, that fooled him.
‘You’re Ben Cooper, aren’t you?’ said the young man, after putting through the order and taking his money.
‘That’s right.’
Cooper looked more closely. He didn’t forget faces easily, and this one did look vaguely familiar. Gelled hair with blond streaks, a stubble of beard, a nose that had perhaps been broken once, but mended well. There was something about
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the eyes, now that he took the trouble to look the young man in the face. Perhaps it was an arrest he’d made some time in the past?
‘I’m sorry,’ said Cooper. ‘I know I’ve met you, but I can’t remember where.’
‘I’m Nick Summers. My dad’s a friend of your brother Mart’s.’
‘Of course. Your father works for the agricultural merchant’s. You’ve been to the farm a few times with him, haven’t you? But I thought I heard that you’d gone away to university.’
The young man looked up as the door opened. But it was only two customers leaving. He relaxed, and leaned on the counter.
‘I graduated in the summer. I got a BSc in Environment and Ecology from Leicester.’
‘ Congratulations.’
Cooper watched the teenagers sitting at the corner table with their Cokes and large fries, and listened to the sound of laughter coming from the kitchen. Inside, he could see two more youths in red baseball caps opening packets of buns.
‘So - what are your plans now, Nick?’
‘Oh, I’m waiting for the right job to come up. In the meantime, I earn a living as a crew member here. It’s not so bad. They wanted to promote me, but I don’t really need that. Something will come up before long that suits my qualifications.’ There was a burst of noise as a group of customers came in, straight from the pub across the road. Nick straightened up and moved back to the till. Cooper’s food arrived and he moved towards a table.
‘Good luck, anyway,’ he said.
While he ate his burger, Cooper watched Nick Summers serving customers. He seemed like a natural for the job. It didn’t matter what academic qualifications he had or didn’t have, provided he could wear the uniform and use the till.
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Cooper remembered his own holiday job as a teenager, cleaning caravans with a bucket of soapy water and a long brush. He’d been studying hard at the time, determined to achieve his ambition of joining the police. But he’d still been grateful for the tips given him by the tourists, who’d treated him as if he were the village idiot. He’d never bothered to disabuse them of the idea.
The fries had smelled better than they tasted. Cooper spread a bit of tomato ketchup on them to see if it helped. The sauce was thick and aromatic, and some of it stuck to his fingers.
That was the trouble with preconceptions. They allowed people to pretend they were something else entirely, without even trying.
The thought brought to Cooper’s mind an image of the preparation room at Hudson and Slack. He pictured a naked body on the table, the blood draining from a vein as corrosive fluid was pumped in to replace it. He thought of a corpse with formaldehyde flowing through its tissues, coagulating the proteins, fixing the cells of the muscles, soaking into the organs, halting the processes of death like a hand stopping a clock. And yet, in a way, it was still a human being on the table, someone who looked years younger than they did a few days ago. Years younger.
Preparing a body for viewing, the embalmer moulded a face, much like the forensic artist had done to create the impression of Audrey Steele. Dead faces dropped and looked grim, so they had to be pushed into an appropriate shape to please the relatives. Tweak the mouth, brush the hair, apply cosmetics.
Drained, stuffed and painted. That’s what Professor Robertson had said. Well, forget the draining and stuffing. A man who could make the dead look alive would surely be able to disguise his own appearance with cosmetics, at least well enough to fool a casual observer. A whole range of liquids, creams and powders had been in stock at Hudson and Slack.
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A practised hand could easily change colouring, widen or narrow the cheeks, conceal a double chin, firm up the eyelids.
Then Cooper remembered what Madeleine Chadwick had said about the man who’d turned up wanting to see the bones in the Alder Hall crypt, the man whose age she’d been so vague about. Mrs Chadwick ought to have been able to identify his smell. But it had been out of context, a scent that she wouldn’t have expected to notice on a man. She’d have associated it more with a session at the beauty parlour, perhaps. It might have been the blend of alcohol, oil, wax and glycerin that came from cosmetic creams and massage oils.
Cooper waited until Nick Summers was free, and went back to the counter. ‘Environment and Ecology?’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose you happen to know a plant that looks like tenfoot high cow parsley with a purple stem?’
When he got back to his flat, Cooper checked his answering machine again, then turned on his PC and did a Google search to see whether Nick Summers’ suggestion was a good one. Yes, it certainly appeared to be the plant he’d seen. Giant hogweed. A nasty-looking thing, too.
The cheeseburger he’d eaten was stirring a bit in his stomach when he switched to one of the major online booksellers and looked up Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Mr Tod. So ‘Tod’ meant death in German, did it? No doubt Professor Robertson would have been able to tell him that, if he’d asked. He probably knew the word for death in thirty-five languages.
But when the cover of the book came up on his screen, Cooper stared at it for a second or two, then slapped himself hard on the forehead.
‘What an idiot,’ he said. ‘That’s what you get for trying to be too bloody clever.’
