‘I saw Vernon’s motorbike parked outside the Jarvis house the first time I went there, you know. He might have been watching from the woods when I went down to look at the grave site. The dogs would have been used to him, I suppose. They got used to me pretty quick.’ Cooper had a sudden thought. ‘I wonder if that was when he tried to cross the stream further down and damaged his hands on the giant hogweed.’
Fry pushed her hands into her pockets and sat on the wooden plinth next to the miner, resting her arm on his knee. From here, there was a wonderful view over the dale, down to Ravenstor and Miller’s Dale in the south. They might have been able to see the spire of Tideswell Church to the north,
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but for the hills in between. Fry didn’t seem to notice any of it.
‘We traced the owner of the rifle,’ she said.
‘Oh? The one that Vernon used to kill Freddy Robertson?’
‘He got it from one of the gang who poach in Alder Hall woods. Vernon had seen the lampers. And he recognized one of them. When he met up with the man at a funeral, he dropped some hints and was invited to go lamping a couple of times. Then Vernon told him he needed a rifle to shoot rabbits on his own property.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. And you might be interested to know that we got a match with the bullet the vet took from Mr Jarvis’s dog.’
‘You’ve identified the person who shot Graceless?’
‘That’s why Mr Jarvis thinks so highly of you, Ben.’
‘But I didn’t ‘
‘It doesn’t matter.’
Cooper looked at Fry. For a long time, she’d regarded him as something to be avoided as far as possible. He seemed to be an irritant to her, every bit as noxious as the giant hogweed that had caused the burns on Vernon Slack’s arms.
‘Gavin Murfin came to see me, you know,’ he said. ‘Was it you who told him about something called the Death Clock?’
‘Yes. It’s a website that lets you put in your personal details, and it predicts how long you’ll live. It claims to give you the exact date of your death. Why?’
‘Well, Gavin found the website and tried it out.’
‘Ah. And did he get an interesting result?’
‘Yes,’ said Cooper. ‘It told him he’d died three months ago.’
‘Poor Gavin.’
Cooper couldn’t help smiling. ‘Actually, I think it did him good. He’s decided he might as well enjoy himself as much as possible if he’s living on borrowed time.’
‘Back to his old self, then.’
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‘Freddy Robertson was right, you know,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s the unknown we’re most frightened of, the things we don’t understand. And more than anything else in the world, death is the great unknown. The only way to come to terms with it is to understand it. If you can do that, then death loses its power to be quite so frightening.’
‘I hope that’s so.’
‘He wasn’t right about everything, though. Vernon Slack had been listening to him too much.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The idea that the soul hangs around the body until the flesh is gone from the bones - that isn’t true at all. There’s a moment when the personality dies, when the person you loved is gone for ever. In the hospital, I knew exactly when that had happened. There was no doubt about it, none at all. And then nothing mattered any more. I mean, I wasn’t worried about what death would mean for Mum, all that business about decomposition and the body digesting itself. Because anything that took place after that moment wasn’t happening to her. It was just nature tidying up.’
Fry straightened up. ‘Have you seen the clouds over there?’ she said.
Cooper looked across the valley in amazement. He had never known her to notice the weather in the Peak District before, not unless it was actually raining so hard that she was in danger of drowning. But he saw what she’d noticed. There were banks of dense grey clouds over Hammerton Hill, but they were breaking up as they rose, allowing a glimpse of sky.
He turned to look at Fry. She was gazing past him at the view, as if seeing the landscape for the first time. Over her shoulder, Cooper could see the carved miner smiling as the sun touched his face. The miner didn’t care what happened to his body - and why should he? Someone had captured his spirit and preserved it for ever. His memory would never decompose, his soul was intact, his eternity was beyond the
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need for a physical body. Somehow, from somewhere, he’d found the secret of peace.
But Cooper had one more thing he needed to say. It was something that had been burning a hole in his heart since he’d spent those hours sitting by his mother’s bed, with too much time to think.
‘Vernon Slack said the dead place was in other people’s hearts,’ he said.
‘Yes?’ said Fry.
‘But he was wrong about that, too, wasn’t he?’
‘What do you mean, Ben?’
‘Everybody who knew Vernon lied to protect him. Everybody. They tried to shift the blame on to his father, who deserved it, God help him. And his grandfather decided he’d rather suffer himself than allow Vernon to go through the nightmare he’d face if he was arrested.’
