The cat blinked at him inscrutably and swallowed the remains of the rodent’s back legs in one gulp. There would be a small patch of blood left on the carpet, and the mouse’s tiny internal organs, shiny and green, cleanly separated from its body by the cat’s teeth.
All his life, Cooper had been used to cats bringing their prey indoors. They’d done it at the farm, too - rabbits and small rodents, sometimes unharmed ones they turned loose in the house. He supposed it was only nature. But it could take days to get nature out of the house, once it was in. Sometimes, the only clue that something had got into the house was the smell it caused when it died.
He blinked at a couple of memories from his childhood at Bridge End - a barn owl breaking its neck by flying into their sitting-room window one night, a vole that fell down the chimney while the fire was lit, dying in seconds as it twisted silently in the flames.
And then there was that problem with the rats.
Cooper’s bedroom suddenly seemed to fill with the smell as the details of the incident rushed back to him, vivid and overpowering. There had been a particularly bad year when guns and dogs had failed to control the rats on the farm, and his grandfather had resorted to putting poison down in the outbuildings. Matt and Ben were given the job of checking the bait sites each morning and disposing of the corpses.
But one morning they had been late and in too much of a hurry. Matt had put two dead rats into the airtight plastic bucket that the poison came in, intending to dispose of them later. Two weeks had passed before they noticed the bucket and remembered what it contained. Holding their breath, the boys had prised off the lid. Inside, the two corpses had been black and glistening, sunken in on themselves, like slowly deflating furry toys. Slopping around in the bottom of the bucket had been a
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quarter of an inch of dark, evil-smelling liquid that hadn’t been there before. Where had it come from? Matt had wanted to look more closely, but the smell had been unbearable and Ben had felt sick, so they’d slapped the lid shut again.
After that, the stink had hung around the shed for weeks. Every time he went past the door, it had reminded Ben of the rats they’d killed but failed to dispose of properly. Their resentment still haunted the place, as thick and nauseous as the muddy liquid that had drained from their bodies.
Even now, Cooper felt sick as the smell seeped out of his memory. He closed his eyes, but soon realized there would be no more sleep tonight. He sighed, rolled out of bed and fetched a cloth from the kitchen to clean up the blood.
MY JOURNAL OF THE DEAD, PHASE FOUR But it doesn’t have to be like that. The Aztecs believe that life is a dream from which death awakens us. Mexicans celebrate and honour their dead on All Souls Day. The Tibetans believe a dead body mustn’t be buried, as the spirit goes to Hell. So they take corpses on to a mountainside and feed them to the birds. Everything must go, including the bones. Sometimes priests have to mutilate a corpse to make the job quicker and easier for the vultures.
The Jews waited for putrefaction to start before they disposed of their bodies. At least that way they could be sure of death. They kept their bodies in unsealed sepulchres, and went to check on them every day. That was what the followers of Jesus were doing when they found him alive. They were observing the progress of his decomposition. They knew he wasn’t really dead until the last of his flesh was gone.
The bones had to be perfectly clean, purified of all traces of our earthly corruption. And there is something pure about bones, isn’t there? Yet we recoil in horror at the thought of the slightest scrap of decomposing flesh. Consider the skull beneath the skin - the ultimate symbol of inner perfection.
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26
‘Groundspeak run a sport called geocaching,’ said Cooper next morning. ‘It seems to be a high-tech form of treasure hunting.’
‘Full marks, Ben. That’s what you predicted, wasn’t it?’
He looked at Fry in surprise. ‘Yes. Well, the way it works is this: somebody places a cache of items in a hidden location, and other geocachers set out to find it, using handheld GPS units and the location’s co-ordinates, which are on the website. They get a few clues, too, if they need them.’
‘Right.’
‘People put all kinds of things in caches - maps, books, software, CDs, videos, pictures, money, jewellery, tickets, tools, games …’
They looked at the inventory provided by scenes of crime. Many of the items from Peter’s Stone had been in plastic bags, or in clear zipped plastic envelopes of the type used in offices. Cooper watched Fry run her pen down the list, looking for some kind of meaning. Crayons, sunglasses, and a Beatrix Potter book, The Tale of Mr Tod. Her pen stopped at the skeleton key-ring.
‘There are scores of other caches,’ said Cooper. ‘Some of them quite close to Petrus Two.’
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‘I’m not interested in the others, Ben, just who might have been at this one.’
‘OK.’
‘Hold on, though. Did you say there’s a website with the GPS co-ordinates of all these caches? They give clues how to find them?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And do these locations have names?’
‘Yes. The person who sets up a cache gives it a name,’ said Cooper. He pointed at the contents of the cache from Peter’s Stone. ‘This one is called Petrus Two - “Petrus” is the Latin form of Peter, I suppose.’
‘Latin again?’
‘It may mean nothing. Nearby there are locations called Tunnel’s Mouth, Tidza Treat, Magic of Monsal, Jonah’s Journey. I counted twenty caches within five miles of Peter’s Stone.’
‘It’s the names I’m interested in,’ said Fry.
‘The names? Why?’
‘Look, people choose whatever name they like for a location, then they give clues how to get there. It’s all a big game. They like to set each other a challenge. Is that right?’
‘That’s what I said, Diane.’
‘You still don’t get it, do you?’ Fry leaned a little closer and recited a line that she didn’t need to read from any
