BooksBarbecue
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

‘Moorhouse’s in Bargate. He’s NHS, so you have to go for a check-up every six months or you get kicked off his list. Audrey always went regularly. She was a nurse – she knew about looking after her health.’

Cooper smiled as he gathered the photographs together. ‘I bet she took regular exercise, too.’

Mrs Gill stood and gazed out of the windows as she waited for him to leave.

‘She swam as often as she could,’ she said. ‘Audrey competed in the county championships when she was a youngster. Her brother was a good swimmer, too – this is his child I’m looking after.’

‘Audrey also has a sister, doesn’t she?’

‘Oh, her. She doesn’t live around here any more.’

There was something about the way Mrs Gill said ‘her’ that reminded Cooper of Tom Jarvis, as though there was a name that mustn’t be spoken. But there had been a gruff affection in Jarvis’s voice when he referred to his wife. There was none in Mrs Gill’s when she spoke of her daughter.

‘Has there been some kind of rift in the family?’

‘Eh?’

‘You’ve fallen out with your other daughter?’

‘We just don’t see as much of each other, not since she re-married. I don’t trust that new husband of hers. A leopard doesn’t change its spots so easily – no matter what she says.’

Cooper ust had time to call in at West Street before he was due to meet Professor Robertson. But the moment he walked into the office and sat down, the phone rang on his desk. It was Tom Jarvis.

‘The old girl’s dead,’ said Jarvis. ‘Somebody shot her.’

Cooper sat bolt upright.

‘Dead? Have you called 999, Mr Jarvis?’

‘Nay. But I thought you’d want to know.’

‘Where –? I mean, where’s the body?’

‘I laid her out on the porch. But I’ll bury her by and by. I thought I’d put her in the orchard. She always liked it there.’

‘No, Mr Jarvis, don’t touch her. Just wait until someone gets there. I’ll send the paramedics, and a doctor. We need to get scenes of crime there. And she was shot, you say? My God, we need the armed response unit as well. You really should have called 999 straight away.’

Jarvis breathed down the phone at him for a few moments in puzzled silence.

‘Well, I didn’t think you’d be all that bothered,’ he said. ‘Not for a dog.’

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Eleven

Professor Freddy Robertson’s home stood on rising ground in a cluster of newer houses on the outskirts of Totley. It had a flat, brick face broken by bay windows and an oak front door. Its gardens were reached from a broad gravelled driveway that ran past a detached garage with a dark blue BMW drawn up outside.