‘“By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?”’ Robertson smiled sadly. ‘We never expect it to be us, do we?’
Cooper didn’t know what to say. He was starting to feel very uncomfortable, and slightly queasy. He wasn’t sure if it was the tea or all the talk of decomposition.
‘Thank you for your help, Professor,’ he said. ‘I have to go now.’
‘A shame. You never did explain your interest in the sarcophagus. Does it relate to your enquiry into the human remains found at Litton Foot?’
‘No, it was something in one of the messages.’
Robertson had his back to him at that moment, pouring himself another drink. But Cooper saw his shoulders stiffen, his head come up with sudden interest. For a second, their
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eyes met in the mirror over the TV set. Cooper felt himself being probed again, as if the professor had found more depths in him than he’d anticipated.
‘Messages?’ he said.
Robertson turned, raising the glass of whisky to his face, but not drinking - an old trick to hide the expression, or to distract attention from the eyes.
‘I probably shouldn’t have mentioned them,’ said Cooper.
‘That sounds intriguing. Do tell.’
‘I’m sorry, sir, I can’t. It’s not really relevant to my present enquiry.’
‘Oh, a different enquiry altogether? Something I can help you with, though?’
‘I don’t think so, Professor. Thank you.’
For the first time, Robertson had lost his affability. He couldn’t hold the glass to his lips any longer without taking a drink, or it would have looked odd. He gulped a half-inch of whisky, and put the glass down. Cooper caught an irritable gleam in his eyes, a downwards curve of his mouth, as if the malt had turned sour in its bottle.
‘Well, I really must be going,’ said Cooper.
Robertson was still thoughtful as he accompanied him to the door and on to the gravel drive.
‘Tell me, those questions about Alder Hall - were those related to your messages? And decomposition. Why did you ask me about decomposition?’
‘Professor, I’m sorry ‘
‘You haven’t been entirely honest with me, have you?’
‘I wish I could share everything with you, Professor, but I’m working under certain limitations.’
‘Limitations, yes,’ said Robertson. ‘We all work under limitations, don’t we?’
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25
On his way home, Cooper called at the old cemetery in Edendale. The rain had stopped, but a cold wind was blowing across the grass and funnelling through the avenues of stone memorials. The gates were kept padlocked at night, but on the darkest edge of the cemetery there were gaps where the iron railings had been pulled apart. The damage had been done by someone going in, rather than coming out. Or so he hoped.
It was six forty-five and there was still half an hour to go before the cemetery closed. But Cooper could see no one in the grounds, except a woman walking a cocker spaniel on a lead. The dog’s ears were blowing backwards in the wind, like the ragged ends of a woollen scarf. As he watched, the dog began casting from side to side with its nose to the ground, sniffing for interesting odours among the lines of gravestones.
The sight made Cooper think of one of the traditional beliefs that still clung to rural burial grounds - the deadly graveyard miasma. Buried, decomposing bodies were supposed to give off a noxious gas that made its way up through the soil and formed an invisible fog. It hung over the graveyard and tainted the air, poisoning anyone who came near. But surely that was just another superstition to justify
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keeping away from graveyards and avoiding the presence of death.
Cooper shook himself to dismiss the morbid thoughts. These occasional quiet moments at the end of a shift were usually the time when events of the day ran continually through his head. All the most uncomfortable moments would repeat themselves, nudging him into worrying whether he could have done things better. Today, there had been several such moments. He thought he understood Tom Jarvis pretty well, at least. But he couldn’t help wondering whether Fry would have handled Madeleine Chadwick better, or if she’d have been able to deal with the steamroller technique of Freddy Robertson.
He could clearly remember the first time he’d met Diane Fry. He could see her now, walking into the CID room at West Street. She hadn’t met his eye at first, but had glanced from side to side as if searching for evidence of his faults, traces of any weakness she could exploit. Though she’d been leaner than Cooper had grown up expecting women to be, it was clear from the start that Fry was no weakling.
He only wished she would smile sometimes. A smile would relax her face and erase those dark shadows that always lurked in her eyes. Even in life, people could transform the look of their faces.
Earlier today, Melvyn Hudson had talked about performing miracles in a funeral parlour. And, in a way, it was true. They took in a dead body, with its sunken face and wrinkled fingers, and they pumped in a pink liquid that mixed with the remaining body fluids, like a shot of champagne in a cocktail. And gradually they transformed a shrivelled corpse back into someone’s granny. A miracle.
In the mortuary, too, the pathologist could restore the fingertips of corpses by injecting tissue builder, allowing the dead to be fingerprinted. You could even buy a readymade kit for the job, complete with syringes, needles and tissue
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builder. Who said the dead couldn’t communicate from beyond the grave?
Then Cooper thought of Audrey Steele. Audrey had surely been trying to communicate from beyond the grave. Somewhere, she’d be getting annoyed that he still wasn’t listening.
We turn away and close our eyes as the gates swing open on a whole new world - the scented, carnal gardens of decomposition. We refuse to admire those flowing juices, the flowering bacteria, the dark, bloated blooms of putrefaction. This is the true nature of death. We should open our eyes and learn.
