Cooper closed his eyes, trying to make sense of what was being said. There was something surreal about the situation. Maybe it was the pain in his foot or the loss of blood that was making him light-headed and strangely unafraid. But he didn’t feel threatened by Vernon, despite the firearm in his hands.

‘You told us to look for “the dead place”, didn’t you?’ he said.

At first, Vernon seemed not to hear him. His attention was focused on the building where the white bones lay gleaming in the darkness with a curious fluorescence. He shifted the rifle under his arm until the barrel was pointing at the skull. It was as if he feared the dead more than he did Cooper.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But, like everyone else, you were looking in the wrong direction.’

‘What do you mean?’

Vernon coughed, and turned weary eyes back to Cooper.

‘You’re still being stupid. The dead place isn’t a building, or a location in the landscape. It isn’t in the physical world at all.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘The dead place …’ said Vernon, a sudden blockage choking his throat, ‘the dead place is in other people’s hearts.’

Then the barrel of the gun swung upwards and Vernon turned quickly, his heels squealing in the wet grass.

That was the sound Cooper would remember most clearly for weeks afterwards. It seemed to be the only thing that made sense for a while. In his memory, the squeal went on for a long time, rising to a shrill scream, high-pitched and inhuman. Then there was a loud roar and a flash, and Vernon had disappeared.

In the doorway of the abandoned building, Abraham Slack stood outlined for a moment in the light of the blast, a double-barrelled shotgun trembling in his hands.

Chapter Thirty-Six

By morning, crime scene tents had sprung up like mushrooms in the autumn rain. SOCOs, photographers and police officers were finding different ways of getting lost while travelling from the old engine house at Greenshaw Lodge to the ruins of Fox House Farm on the Alder Hall estate.

As a result, the forensic work went slowly, and it was well into the day before the bodies of Professor Freddy Robertson and Vernon Slack were removed. Longer still before recovery work began on the skeletal remains from the abandoned building.

Meanwhile, Abraham Slack wasn’t talking. In the interview rooms at West Street, detectives were used to frustrating silences. But the old man, sitting with his solicitor, refused to offer even the beginnings of an explanation for his decision to kill his grandson. The first discharge of the shotgun had torn apart Vernon’s torso, and pellets from the second barrel had shredded both his lungs, so he’d died breathing his own blood.

As he listened to Diane Fry reading the description of Vernon’s injuries, Slack hung his head and sagged with distress. The interview had to be suspended while a doctor examined him. To Fry, the old man looked as though he’d given up at that point. Perhaps he had. But when they got him back into the interview room, he still wasn’t talking.