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Back The Dead Place Save as PDF
Chapters (43)
  1. Dedication
  2. Author’s Note
  3. Epigraph
  4. Chapter One
  5. Chapter Two
  6. Chapter Three
  7. Chapter Four
  8. Chapter Five
  9. Chapter Six
  10. Chapter Seven
  11. Chapter Eight
  12. Chapter Nine
  13. Chapter Ten
  14. Chapter Eleven
  15. Chapter Twelve
  16. Chapter Thirteen
  17. Chapter Fourteen
  18. Chapter Fifteen
  19. Chapter Sixteen
  20. Chapter Seventeen
  21. Chapter Eighteen
  22. Chapter Nineteen
  23. Chapter Twenty
  24. Chapter Twenty-One
  25. Chapter Twenty-Two
  26. Chapter Twenty-Three
  27. Chapter Twenty-Four
  28. Chapter Twenty-Five
  29. Chapter Twenty-Six
  30. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  31. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  32. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  33. Chapter Thirty
  34. Chapter Thirty-One
  35. Chapter Thirty-Two
  36. Chapter Thirty-Three
  37. Chapter Thirty-Four
  38. Chapter Thirty-Five
  39. Chapter Thirty-Six
  40. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  41. About the Author
  42. Also by Stephen Booth
  43. About the Publisher

‘DC Murfin speaking. Oh, hi. Yes, OK.’ He held the phone out at arm’s length. ‘It’s for you, Ben.’

‘Who is it? God?’

‘No, but she thinks she is.’

Cooper took the phone, grimacing at Murfin. ‘Hello, Diane.’

‘Drop anything else you’re doing, Ben,’ she said. ‘We need the whole team down here for a meeting with Dr Kane.’

‘The psychologist?’

‘Yes. We’re setting up in the conference room. I want you and Gavin here in ten minutes.’

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Seventeen

Well, have you found the dead place? Or did you lose the scent? Strange, when the odour is so distinctive. Some say it’s sweet, like rotting fruit.

Did you know that you don’t have to step on a decomposing body to carry away its smell on your shoes? The soil around a corpse is soaked with all those volatile fatty acids produced by human decay. Our soft tissues all decompose, but some more quickly than others. The uterus can last for months – the organ of life surviving intact as the body festers around it. Just one of nature’s little jokes.

And then all we have left is the skeleton. The teeth, the skull, the gleaming bones. This is the final revelation. It’s the uncovering of truth. To most people, death is a dirty secret, a thing of shame, the last taboo. To me, it’s completion, the perfect conclusion. It’s my only chance to be free.

I’m close to perfection now, you see. And you’re going to be too late. You may never find the dead place at all. You may never meet my flesh eater.

‘There was a German psychoanalyst called Erich Fromm,’ said Dr Rosa Kane. ‘You might be interested in one of his personality theories.’

She stood at the head of the table, looking smart and self-possessed. Fry was reminded of Professor Robertson in a perverse sort of way. Dr Kane seemed to be the modern, more acceptable face of the same school. She hadn’t hesitated when DI Hitchens had invited her to take the central role in the meeting.

‘Fromm believed that even the most severely neurotic person is at least trying to cope with life,’ said Kane. ‘He called that type “biophilous”, or life-loving. But there’s another type he refers to as “necrophilous” – the lovers of death.’

Fry looked around the table, and saw both Hitchens and Cooper writing the new words in their notebooks. The DI looked as though he might be having trouble with the spelling.

‘Necrophilous?’ he said.

‘Yes. These are people who have a passionate attraction to anything dead or decayed. It’s a passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive. Fromm called it “a passion to tear apart living structures”. Typically, the individual concerned will be comfortable with machinery, but won’t be able to cope with people.’

Fry frowned. ‘Why machinery?’