Cooper still hadn’t been given a chance to hear the tapes of the phone calls that Fry was so worried about. But her hunt through the area for locations had left him turning over in his mind the possible meanings of the phrase the caller had used.
‘Yes. What does “the dead place” mean to you?’
Robertson gazed out of the window thoughtfully, took a sip of his Glenfiddich, and shook his head, stirring the wings of grey hair over his temples. He repeated the phrase silently to himself a couple of times, his lips glittering with drops of whisky as they moved.
‘It could mean anything, couldn’t it?’ said Cooper finally.
The professor jerked as if woken from a daze. ‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’
Cooper closed his notebook. ‘Well, I think that’s about it for now, sir.’
‘Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you need to talk again. It all sounds most intriguing.’
As he made his way back through the tiled hallway, Cooper passed under the coat rack. He wondered if the professor had shot the deer himself and taken its feet instead of its antlers as a trophy.
‘Fashions change,’ said Robertson, his voice echoing in the hallway. ‘But our deepest instincts don’t, I’m afraid. We’re fascinated by death, yet afraid of it. The enclosed coffin is a symptom of our refusal to accept the reality. Did you know
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the word “burial” derives from the Anglo-Saxon birgan, meaning to conceal. Personally, I’ve always felt the sarcophagus was a rather more civilized option.’
‘A sarcophagus?’ Cooper’s head was suddenly filled with images of Egyptian mummies, and a half-remembered kaleidoscope of pyramids, pharaohs and golden effigies of Tutankhamen.
‘At least we’d enjoy a bit of light and air,’ said Robertson as he opened his front door.
And Cooper was still shaking his head at the professor’s non-sequitur as he drove past the new houses, out of Totley, and back towards the Derbyshire border.
It was Graceless who lay dead on the boards of Mr Jarvis’s porch. As Ben Cooper walked up the steps, the first thing he noticed was the bloodstained patch of hair on the dog’s side, just behind her front leg.
‘Did you see anybody, Mr Jarvis?’
‘No. They were off in the woods somewhere. But I heard the shot.’
It was immediately obvious to Cooper that the dog had been killed by a rifle bullet, not by a discharge from a shotgun, as he’d expected. He’d seen dogs killed by shotgun pellets before. In fact, a few weeks ago, Matt had shot a stray Doberman that had been worrying his sheep. A cartridge full of pellets caused a very visible mess. But in this case, the blood seemed to have come from a single wound, close enough to the heart and other vital organs to be instantly fatal.
When he bent to examine the injury, Cooper saw that the blood had already darkened and begun to dry. It had matted the hair even more and made it difficult to find the exact entry point of the bullet. He forced apart two hanks of sticky fur and glimpsed a neat black hole in the dog’s skin.
‘Only one shot?’
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‘That’s all I heard. I thought there must be folk out rabbiting.’
‘Maybe there were. And a stray shot…’
‘Oh, aye. A stray shot that hit the old lass right in the heart. That’d be what it was, no doubt.’
Jarvis threw a blanket over the dog and turned away.
‘Where are the other dogs?’ said Cooper.
‘Down in the paddock.’
Everything was soaking wet, including the boards and the dog. Jarvis took off his cap, revealing a patch of white scalp where his hair had receded but the sun had never reached his skin.
‘You’d best get moving if you’re going to stand a chance of catching them,’ he said.
‘We’ll be following the incident up, sir.’
‘Bloody amazing.’
He reached down to the dog’s neck and unfastened the collar. When Cooper followed him to the door of the house, he saw Jarvis drop the strip of worn leather into a drawer of the kitchen dresser. He thought he glimpsed other collars in there, perhaps mementos of previous dogs he’d owned. A little private collection of memories.
‘If you could just show me exactly where you found the dog, sir?’ said Cooper.
They walked through the overgrown paddock and down towards the stream. The three remaining dogs were pacing restlessly backwards and forwards in the grass. One of them crept behind the abandoned trailer and waited out of sight for Cooper to pass. But it only wanted to sidle up to him and push its wet muzzle into his hand. He patted the dog’s head and rubbed its ears.
‘Why did you come down here in the first place?’ asked Cooper as he stood looking at the stream running through the damp shade of the ash trees.
‘I heard a noise in the woods during the night.’
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‘What sort of noise? Voices?’
Jarvis frowned. ‘No, not that. A metallic thump, like they’d walked into something in the dark.’
Cooper glanced up at the paddock, with its lumps of rusting metal hidden by the long grass.
‘More than likely,’ he said. ‘And what did you do, Mr Jarvis?’
‘I went out to have a look, of course.’
‘What time was this?’
