‘But surely you must have noticed something. His age, height, build, the colour of his hair? What he was wearing?’
Cooper was surprised to see Madeleine Chadwick looking faintly embarrassed. It was the first suggestion of a crack in her confident demeanour.
‘All I can tell you,’ she said, ‘is that he wasn’t the sort of person I would invite into my home. One often knows these things instinctively, without the need for noticing details. I hope you understand what I mean.’
She seemed to avoid looking at him as she pinched off a dead bloom. After a moment, Cooper felt a blush starting from somewhere deep in his boots. With perfect delicacy, he’d just been told that he, too, was a person Madeleine Chadwick would forget as soon as he’d removed himself from her property.
Then she suddenly seemed to relent. ‘There was one thing …’ she said.
‘Yes?’
‘He gave off a strange scent. I didn’t get close to him, of course, but I noticed it after he left. It must have lingered, and I’m so familiar with the scent of my flowers that it was incongruous.’
‘What sort of scent?’
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She extended her tongue slightly between her lips, the way some people did when they were thinking. On Madeleine Chadwick, it looked as though she were tasting the air, testing for a scent. For a second, Cooper was reminded of the chameleon in its tank.
‘Not a particularly unpleasant smell, but it didn’t seem quite right on a man of his kind.’
‘Could you describe it?’
‘Oh, you know how a smell fades from your memory once it’s gone. In any case, I couldn’t identify it at the time. I felt as though I ought to, but I couldn’t.’
‘And this man hasn’t bothered you since?’
‘No, thank goodness.’
Cooper took the card from his pocket in its plastic bag. ‘Do these words mean anything to you, Mrs Chadwick?’
She squinted slightly to read the card. She was probably one of those people who ought to wear glasses but didn’t for some reason.
‘“Watch over the bones. They must forget.” Was this found with the flowers?’
‘Yes.’
‘I suppose it might have something to do with the bones in the crypt. Is that your conclusion?’
‘It’s possible. I don’t suppose you recognize the handwriting?’ She gave him a regretful smile. ‘No.’
Cooper said goodbye to Mrs Chadwick at the gate and crossed the drive to his car. He took one look back at the garden, and saw her already bending over a plant, her hair catching the sunlight, her elegant fingers no doubt smelling of port wine.
He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. Madeleine Chadwick might be right about the triumph of good over evil. But the petals of a rose lasted barely a few days before they wilted and fell. Their triumph was short-lived. The thorns of the rose were different. Their cruelty lasted for ever.
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24
Cooper tried not to look at Professor Robertson differently next time they met. He was making an effort to keep Diane Fry’s comments out of his mind, not to mention his own reference to necrophilia. That was definitely one thought to rebury in whatever hole it had come from.
When he arrived at the house in Totley, the professor was in his garden, spraying ant powder on the flagged path and against the back wall. This evening, he was wearing black Wellington boots. Yet the trouser legs of his pinstriped suit were flapping outside the boots, which rather defeated the object of wearing them, surely?
‘Come in, come in,’ said Robertson. ‘The blasted insects have seen enough of me. I’m sure they must have grasped my intentions by now.’
They entered the house through the back door into a utility room. The refurbishment had revealed pine floorboards in many of the rooms, and even the kitchen units were built in Edwardian style, with beech and granite work surfaces.
When the professor passed close to him, Cooper caught a whiff of odour from his clothes. He felt sure it was from his clothes, though he couldn’t quite name the smell. It made him think of old garments draped on wooden hangers in a
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mahogany wardrobe - especially the clothes at the back, the ones that were never worn any more.
Robertson sat with his hands clasped together as Cooper delivered the information he was allowed to share.
‘Glycerine, phenol and formaldehyde?’ said the professor when he’d finished. ‘An unholy trinity, if ever I met one.’
‘They’re used in embalming fluids, I believe.’
‘Exactly. Formaldehyde slows the rate that proteins degrade, so muscle tissues become fixed. That’s why it’s so difficult to move the limbs of an embalmed body. They no longer have the flexibility of living muscles.’
‘Oh?’ Cooper hadn’t expected to be presented with such an immediate image of the professor handling a dead body.
‘Glycerine softens the tissues and reduces fluid loss. An antibacterial substance like phenol prevents breakdown by microorganisms.’
‘It delays decomposition, in other words.’
‘Indeed. What embalming really does is coagulate the body’s proteins, temporarily hardening and preserving. The work of the embalmer is the art of denial, the creation of an illusion. The body is drained, stuffed and painted for its final performance.’ Drained, stuffed and painted. Cooper filed that expression away in his memory.
