The Dead Place. Stephen Booth

of a pub. There’ll be no spasm of senseless violence, no pathetic spurt of immature passion. There’s no place for the brainless lunge of a knife, the boot in the side of the head. There’ll be no piss among the blood, no shit on the stones, no screaming and thrashing as a neck slithers in my fingers like a sweat-soaked snake …

      No, there’ll be none of that sort of mess. Not this time. That’s the sign of a disorganized brain, the surrender to an irrational impulse. It’s not my kind of killing.

      My killing has been carefully planned. This death will be a model of perfection. The details will be precise, the conception immaculate, the execution flawless. An accomplishment to be proud of for the rest of my life.

      TRANSCRIPTION NOTE: BRIEF PAUSE, LAUGHTER.

      A cold worm moved in Fry’s stomach. She looked up from the faxed sheets, suppressing a feeling of nausea that had risen as she read the last sentence.

      ‘I need to hear the original tape,’ she said.

      ‘Of course. It’s on its way from Ripley. We’ll have it first thing in the morning.’

      ‘What are they using – a carrier pigeon?’

      Hitchens turned to look at her then. He smoothed his hands along the sleeves of his jacket, a mannerism he’d developed over the past few weeks, as if he were constantly worrying about his appearance. Tonight, he looked particularly uncomfortable. Perhaps he wasn’t sleeping well, either.

      ‘Diane, I’ve heard this tape,’ he said. ‘This guy is convincing. I think he’s serious.’

      When the footsteps outside the door moved on, Fry followed their sound and let her mind wander the passages of E Division headquarters – down the stairs, past the scenes of crime department, the locked and darkened incident room, and into a corridor filled with muffled, echoing voices. By the time the sounds had faded away, her thoughts were aimless and disoriented, too. They were lost in a maze with no way out, as they so often were in her dreams.

      ‘No, he’s laughing,’ she said. ‘He’s a joker.’

      Hitchens shrugged. ‘Don’t believe me, then. Wait until you hear the tape, and judge for yourself.’

      Fry regarded the DI curiously. Despite his faults as a manager, she knew he had good instincts. If Hitchens had heard the tape and thought it should be taken seriously, she was inclined to believe him. The printed words on the page weren’t enough on their own. The caller’s real meaning would be captured in the sound of his voice, the manner of his speech, in the audible layers of truth and lies.

      ‘He seems to be hinting that he’s killed before,’ she said.

      ‘Yes. There are some significant phrases. “Not this time”, for a start.’

      ‘Yet in the same breath he’s disapproving of something. Disapproving of himself, would you say?’

      With a nod, Hitchens began to smooth his sleeve again. He had strong hands, with clean, trimmed fingernails. A white scar crawled all the way across the middle knuckles of three of his fingers.

      ‘He could turn out to be an interesting psychological case for someone to examine,’ he said.

      The DI’s voice sounded too casual. And suddenly Fry thought she knew why he was looking so uncomfortable.

      ‘Don’t tell me we’ve got a psychologist on the case already?’

      ‘It wasn’t my decision, Diane. This has come down to us from Ripley, remember.’

      She shook her head in frustration. So some chief officer at Derbyshire Constabulary HQ had got wind of the phone call and decided to interfere. That was all she needed. She pictured one of the ACPO types in his silver braid strolling through the comms room at Ripley, demonstrating his hands-on approach to visiting members of the police committee, hoping they’d remember him when promotion time came round.

      ‘OK, so who’s the psychologist?’ said Fry. ‘And, more to the point, who did he go to school with?’

      ‘Now, that’s where you’re wrong,’ said Hitchens. He pulled an embossed business card from the clip holding the case file together. As she took the card, Fry noticed that it was a pretty slim file so far. But it wouldn’t stay that way, once reports from the experts started thumping on to her desk.

      ‘Dr Rosa Kane,’ she said. ‘Do you know anything about her?’

      The list of accredited experts and consultants had recently been updated. Someone had wielded a new broom and put his own stamp on the list, bringing in people with fresh ideas.

      ‘Not a thing,’ said Hitchens. ‘But we have an appointment to meet her tomorrow.’

      Fry took note of the ‘we’. She made a show of writing down Dr Kane’s details before handing back the card. If the psychologist turned out to be fat and forty, or a wizened old academic with grey hair in a bun, Fry suspected that she’d become the liaison officer, not Hitchens.

      She stood up and moved to the window. The view of Edendale from the first floor wasn’t inspiring. There were rooftops and more rooftops, sliding down the slopes to her right, almost obscuring the hills in the distance, where the late afternoon sun hung over banks of trees.

      Whoever had designed E Division’s headquarters in the 1950s hadn’t been too worried about aesthetics. Or convenience either. The public were deterred from visiting West Street by the prospect of an exhausting slog up the hill, and the lack of parking spaces. Because of its location, Fry missed the sensation of normal life going on outside the door. There had always been that feeling when she served in the West Midlands – though maybe not since they’d started building their police stations like fortresses.

      ‘You haven’t finished the transcript,’ said Hitchens.

      ‘I think I’ll wait for the tape, sir, if you don’t mind.’

      ‘There isn’t much more, Diane. You might as well finish it.’

      Fry bit her lip until the pain focused her mind. Of course, even in Derbyshire, all the darkest sides of human experience were still there, hidden beneath the stone roofs and lurking among the hills. This was the smiling and beautiful countryside, after all.

      The transcript was still in her hand. Holding it to the light from the window, she turned over to the last page. The DI was right – there were only three more paragraphs. The caller still wasn’t giving anything away about himself. But she could see why somebody had thought of calling in a psychologist.

      Detective Constable Ben Cooper watched the dead woman’s face turn slowly to the left. Now her blank eyes seemed to stare past his shoulder, into the fluorescent glare of the laboratory lights. The flesh was muddy brown, her hair no more than a random pattern against her skull, like the swirls left in sand by a retreating tide.

      Cooper was irrationally disappointed that she didn’t look the way he’d imagined her. But then, he’d never known her when she was alive. He didn’t know the woman now, and had no idea of her name. She was dead, and had already returned to the earth.

      But he’d formed a picture of her in his mind, an image created from the smallest of clues – her height, her racial origins, an estimate of her age. He knew she had a healed fracture in her left forearm. She’d given birth at least once, and had particularly broad shoulders for a female. She’d also been dead for around eighteen months.

      There had been plenty of unidentified bodies found in the Peak District during Cooper’s twelve years with Derbyshire Constabulary. Most of them had been young people, and most of them suicides. In E Division, they were generally found soon after death, unless they were dragged from one of the reservoirs. But this woman had been neither.

      In profile, the face was cruelly lit. Shadows formed under the cheekbones and in the eye sockets. Creases at the corners of the eyes were picked out clearly in the lights.