‘You don’t have to give the name of a family member. It can be a friend, or a colleague.’
‘Just a friend. OK.’
‘Bag the card with the rest of the stuff, though. There might have been more to the relationship between them than we think.’
Fry nodded. As she slid the organ-donor card into an evidence bag, she read the slogan in white lettering across a bright red heart: I want to help others to live in the event of my death. Well, you couldn’t really wish for more than that from your death. No matter what you’d done during your life.
Cooper looked up and saw Vernon Slack standing over him with a rifle. Staring at the end of the barrel, he thought of the bullet wound in Tarn Jarvis’s dog, Graceless. Tears were running down Vernon’s face.
‘Who have you killed, Vernon?’ said Cooper.
Something moved and glittered in Vernon’s eyes. Then it was gone again instantly. It was as if two black beads had rolled over, revealing their glistening cores for a second.
‘It doesn’t matter now,’ he said. ‘I might have killed someone, I might not. It’s all the same in the end.’
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Cooper thought of Abraham Slack. The old man had moved to Greenshaw Lodge so that Vernon could take care of him. But the phrase ‘take care of was open to a different meaning. The house hadn’t seemed a welcoming place, not the sort of home you’d expect to rest in and be looked after. Instead, it had felt sparse and cold, more like a house that someone was preparing to leave.
He tried to sit up, forgetting the rifle, or the fact that it might be more sensible to keep still.
‘Where’s your grandfather?’ he said.
But Vernon only stared at him ‘You aren’t very clever. You’re not clever enough, and you’re too slow. If you’re stupid, you’ll get beaten.’
Cooper closed his eyes, trying to make sense of what was being said. There was something surreal about the situation. Maybe it was the pain in his foot or the loss of blood that was making him light-headed and strangely unafraid. But he didn’t feel threatened by Vernon, despite the firearm in his hands.
‘You told us to look for “the dead place”, didn’t you?’ he said.
At first, Vernon seemed not to hear him. His attention was focused on the building where the white bones lay gleaming in the darkness with a curious fluorescence. He shifted the rifle under his arm until the barrel was pointing at the skull. It was as if he feared the dead more than he did Cooper.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But, like everyone else, you were looking in the wrong direction.’
‘What do you mean?’
Vernon coughed, and turned weary eyes back to Cooper.
‘You’re still being stupid. The dead place isn’t a building, or a location in the landscape. It isn’t in the physical world at all.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘The dead place …’ said Vernon, a sudden blockage choking his throat, ‘the dead place is in other people’s hearts.’
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Then the barrel of the gun swung upwards and Vernon turned quickly, his heels squealing in the wet grass.
That was the sound Cooper would remember most clearly for weeks afterwards. It seemed to be the only thing that made sense for a while. In his memory, the squeal went on for a long time, rising to a shrill scream, high- pitched and inhuman. Then there was a loud roar and a flash, and Vernon had disappeared.
In the doorway of the abandoned building, Abraham Slack stood outlined for a moment in the light of the blast, a double barrelled shotgun trembling in his hands.
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36
By morning, crime scene tents had sprung up like mushrooms in the autumn rain. SOCOs, photographers and police officers were finding different ways of getting lost while travelling from the old engine house at Greenshaw Lodge to the ruins of Fox House Farm on the Alder Hall estate.
As a result, the forensic work went slowly, and it was well into the day before the bodies of Professor Freddy Robertson and Vernon Slack were removed. Longer still before recovery work began on the skeletal remains from the abandoned building.
Meanwhile, Abraham Slack wasn’t talking. In the interview rooms at West Street, detectives were used to frustrating silences. But the old man, sitting with his solicitor, refused to offer even the beginnings of an explanation for his decision to kill his grandson. The first discharge of the shotgun had torn apart Vernon’s torso, and pellets from the second barrel had shredded both his lungs, so he’d died breathing his own blood.
As he listened to Diane Fry reading the description of Vernon’s injuries, Slack hung his head and sagged with distress. The interview had to be suspended while a doctor examined him. To Fry, the old man looked as though he’d
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given up at that point. Perhaps he had. But when they got him back into the interview room, he still wasn’t talking.
Fry was relieved when DI Hitchens called her out of the room. She was exhausted, and her head was aching again, worse than ever. Though she’d managed to get home some time in the early hours of the morning, she hadn’t slept at all. Whenever she’d started to drift out of consciousness, those steel springs had snapped in her forehead and plunged deep into the nerves behind her eyes, like the teeth of a gin trap.
‘Billy McGowan is changing his story,’ said Hitchens.
‘Really?’
‘It looks as though he’d decided that Richard Slack was the perfect scapegoat. Being dead can make you useful sometimes.’ Fry nodded. ‘McGowan used to work for Abraham, didn’t he? Was he protecting the old man?’
‘No,’ said Hitchens. ‘Vernon.’
‘But Professor Robertson - ?’
‘The team at Robertson’s house found comprehensive records on the professor’s computer. It turns out that Vernon Slack was one of his private students. Perhaps Vernon thought he had something to prove to the people who thought he was so useless.’
