wrong about this place.
Despite the blue paint peeling from its panels, the door was too solid for an abandoned building. It ought to be sagging from its hinges, the panels rotten or missing. There ought to be the remains of a broken lock where the door had once fitted securely to the stone lintel. But as Cooper got closer, he could see that the padlock and its hasp were not only intact, but clean and well-maintained. He crouched in front of the door, and sniffed the faint aroma of lubricating oil. Someone had been here within the last few weeks.
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He turned his attention back to the door. The lock that secured it was a strong, old-fashioned padlock. Somewhere there would be a large iron key on a key-ring, safe in a drawer or sitting in someone’s pocket. But whose pocket? The Saxton Trust owned this land - but what did they know about this disused building standing among the decaying beeches of an unmanaged woodland? Who cared about the overgrown remnants of Fox House Farm?
Cooper walked around the building, careful to place his feet on the dry vegetation rather than on bare ground. He found himself surprised by the size of the place. The side wall extended well back into the trees. Yet nothing had been allowed to root in the mortar between the stones, and no saplings grew in the corners and crevices, as they always did when left unchecked. Birds dropped seeds that would germinate in the least bit of dirt. But not here. Apart from a few clumps of grass in the broken guttering, the building seemed to have resisted the encroachment of nature.
On this side, Cooper could see that all the windows had been filled in with stone and sealed. He gave one stone an experimental shove, and it didn’t budge. Maybe there was a double thickness of stone, with mortar on the inside. Or perhaps someone had used breeze block to make a proper job of it.
He moved back a few yards and looked up at the roof. Surely that couldn’t have survived in one piece? The weather would have got in and collapsed some of the timbers. But the stone tiles he could see were sound. Sound, like Tom Jarvis had been sound.
But not quite. Where the building was divided by a wall, making a sort of lean-to extension at the back, the middle section of the roof was missing, exposing the interior to the air.
Cooper approached the wall again, found a foothold on the stones and pulled himself up with the help of a branch.
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He teetered precariously before managing to get high enough to pull himself on to the edge of the roof with one foot where the guttering should have been. He leaned forward but couldn’t see down into the building. He shifted his weight a bit further on to the tiles to peer in.
He’d been right about the weather getting in. A rotten timber cracked as soon as it took his weight, and part of the remaining roof tilted inwards. Tiles slithered and cascaded on to the ground, taking Cooper with them. He managed to cling to the branch just long enough to gain some control of his fall, then he landed in a crash of broken stone.
He sat up, patted his pockets to find his torch and shone it around the interior of the building as he brushed the dust off his clothes. Cooper ran the beam along one wall, then the next. He stopped near the opening into the larger room and moved the torch back a few inches, not quite sure of what he’d seen the first time.
‘Oh God, how do I get out of here again?’
Inside the abandoned building, the roots of an oak tree had burst through the broken floor like a tangle of snakes. Brambles lay thick on the stones. And blades of grass grew sick and pale through the eyes of the skull.
‘McGowan is saying nothing, except he’s blaming Richard Slack,’ said Fry when she broke off the interview to brief the DI. ‘Crucially, he won’t reveal where Audrey Steele’s body was delivered to. His evidence will be critical in that respect.’
Hitchens had rolled back his shirt cuffs to wipe the condensation off his window. The outside was just as wet, as the rain had been falling again for the past three hours.
‘On the basis of the toxicology report, it looks as though the body had been partially embalmed,’ he said.
‘That might have been done to keep the body fresh. On the other hand, I understand it’s becoming more and more
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common for funeral directors to carry out some cosmetic embalming as routine.’
‘So it might not be significant?’
‘No.’
‘But you think the body went to Professor Robertson, I suppose?’ said Hitchens.
‘I’m sure of it. Who else could it be?’
The DI squeaked his chair anxiously, seemed about to answer, then changed his mind.
‘What’s your strategy, Diane?’ he asked.
‘I’m going to leave McGowan to stew for a bit, then I’m going to let him see that I know he’s lying.’
‘About what?’
‘The body they put in the coffin in place of Audrey Steele’s. We know it wasn’t human.’
‘Not human?’
Fry realized she hadn’t told Hitchens about the anthropologist’s findings, so she brought him up to date.
‘Unbelievable,’ he said.
‘It seems all too believable in the present enquiry. It’s almost as if these experts create problems for us, instead of helping us solve them.’
‘No indication what kind of animal?’
‘Not yet. They need the opinion of another expert for that, apparently. A different discipline. And more delay while they find someone who’s available and the evidence is shuttled around the country.’
‘A pity.’ Hitchens squeaked again, and Fry decided she’d bring in a can of Three-in-One for him tomorrow, if she could remember.
Then the DI sifted among the papers on his desk for a report.
