06.The Dead Place

by Stephen Booth

  ‘My grandma used to say we should draw the curtains and cover the mirrors, as a sign of respect,’ said one of the old women, licking a coating of chocolate from her finger. ‘But I say that’s just daft. Life goes on, doesn’t it?’

  ‘She still lives in my heart,’ said the child’s mother. ‘Every day.’

  In a house on Manchester Road he met a mother and daughter who both wore cropped jeans and ankle chains, and a ring through the right nostril. It was almost as if they were trying to look like sisters. But where the girl had a studded belt and jeans cut low enough to reveal bony hips, the mother had a smooth roll of fat. The daughter was fashionably pale, but her mother was tanned – though it was the sort of tan gained in a cubicle on the High Street at thirty-nine pence a minute.

  ‘It can bring you closer,’ they said, almost together. The father had nothing to say. His ashes were in the brass urn they allowed Cooper to sign for.

  His last visit was to the Devonshire Estate again, where Maureen Connolly told him that her sister had stolen their mother’s ashes.

  ‘She had no right to take them. They belonged to me. Good riddance to her, I say. She was always a tart, anyway. My only consolation is that she’ll be suffering for it, wherever she is.’

  ‘She’s dead?’

  ‘No, not her. Last I heard, she was living on some council estate in Derby with four snotty kids by two different blokes – both of them in prison. One or the other will do for her when he comes out, unless she drinks herself to death first.’

  ‘When did you last see her?’

  ‘See her? Not for almost a year. Oh, she rang me a few weeks ago. Wanting money, naturally. She must have been down to the last dregs, or she wouldn’t have bothered with me. Desperation, that was. I never doubted it, no matter what she said.’

  Mrs Connolly pressed her lips together in an expression of satisfaction. It wouldn’t do to smile, of course. It wasn’t nice to be seen enjoying someone else’s misfortune. But her face came as close to a smile as was permissible.

  ‘I don’t suppose you have an address?’ said Cooper.

  ‘I didn’t ask her for it – why should I? Besides, she’s probably moved by now. Persuaded the council to give her a different house somewhere, hoping she can’t be found. Some hopes.’

  ‘Well, I can see there’s no love lost between you and your sister,’ said Cooper, ignoring the look of derision on her face at his understatement. ‘But aren’t you at all concerned about what might happen to her children?’

  ‘Why? They’re nothing to do with me.’

  ‘They’re your nephews and nieces.’

  Mrs Connolly snorted. ‘Nephews and nieces?’

  She leaned closer, her face communicating a mixture of disgust and triumph.

  ‘Two of them,’ she said, ‘are black. Almost.’

  Cooper was sweating by the time he got back into his car. The effort of remaining polite and sympathetic in Maureen Connolly’s house had been almost intolerable. Now he felt more depressed than he had in any of the places where death had been all around him. The professional morbidity of the funeral parlour, the intellectual prurience of Freddy Robertson, the cremated remains as an interior-design feature. None of them had seemed so negative, or so tragic, as the things that people could do to each other in life.

  16

  ‘Of course, while we were all feeling sorry for Geoff Birley, what he didn’t bother telling us was that Sandra had been threatening to leave him for some time,’ Fry said in the DI’s office. ‘He says he didn’t believe she meant it, that she would never really leave him.’

  ‘He was fooling himself, then,’ said Hitchens.

  Fry shook her head. ‘Actually, no. Sandra agrees with him. She says she wasn’t planning to leave her husband at all, just to stay away for a night or two to teach him a lesson. In fact, she was planning to phone him today. The Birleys might have been back together by tonight.’

  ‘But what about Ian Todd? He’s Sandra’s lover, surely?’

  ‘There’s certainly more to the relationship than being just good friends, as they’d like us to believe,’ said Fry. ‘Todd wants Sandra to leave her husband and stay with him permanently. But, as for her, well …’ Fry shook her head. ‘Who are we to try to understand other people’s relationships? A lot of us don’t understand our own.’

  ‘So the business in the car park – what was that all about?’

  ‘Sandra had arranged to meet Ian Todd in the pub after work, before they went back to his place in Darton Street. But she was kept late at the office by a meeting that over-ran. Naturally, Todd thought she’d changed her mind. He couldn’t get hold of Sandra on her mobile, because she had it turned off while she was in the meeting. So he went to the car park to see if he could catch her on her way home. When he found Sandra’s Skoda on Level 8, he decided to wait for her. And by then, he was out of contact because there was no mobile signal on his network inside that multistorey.’

  ‘Why didn’t he wait by Sandra’s car?’ said Hitchens. ‘That would have been the logical thing to do.’

  ‘He said he didn’t want to give her a chance to get away,’ said Fry. ‘So he waited by the lift. He felt sure she’d come up that way, and he wanted her to see him as soon as the doors opened.’

  ‘He doesn’t know Sandra quite as well as her husband does, then.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I suppose it all fits. But it’s a pain in the neck that people can’t sort their lives out without giving us all this trouble.’

  ‘It’s not sorted out quite yet. Mr Todd is seriously pissed off at this moment.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said Hitchens. ‘Not only has he been used as a pawn in a row between the Birleys, but he’s been pulled in and questioned by us on suspicion of a serious crime that he didn’t commit.’

  Fry remembered the snatch of CCTV footage from the camera in New Street, the two figures walking towards Ian Todd’s car. She recalled a brief struggle, a woman apparently trying to break free from the grasp of a man much bigger and stronger than she was.

  ‘It won’t do him any harm,’ she said.

  Fry had been away from the DI’s office for only a few minutes when Hitchens threw open the door again and shouted for her. When she went back in, he was on the phone. He talked to her while holding the phone to his ear.

  ‘What’s happened, sir?’

  ‘There’s been another call.’

  ‘From the same man?’

  ‘Sounds like it.’

  ‘Have you got a trace on it?’

  ‘What do you think I’m doing?’

  Fry folded her arms and waited.

  ‘Yes?’ shouted Hitchens into the phone. ‘It’s where? OK, yes. I’ve got it. I want units there now. They’re to seal off the area around the payphone, and make sure no one leaves.’ Hitchens listened, raising his eyes to the ceiling. ‘Yes, I realize there’ll be a funeral going on. I’m not asking them to wade in with their batons out and lob CS gas at the mourners. They can be as discreet as they damn well like. They can take flowers and hand out sympathy cards, if they want. But no one leaves until we’ve had a chance to talk to them.’

  He slammed down the phone and pulled on his jacket.

  ‘Not another funeral?’ said Fry.

  ‘Yes, another funeral,’ said Hitchens. ‘This time, he called from a public payphone in the visitors’ waiting area at Eden Valley Crematorium.’

  ‘You think our man is actually attending the service?’ said Fry in the car on the way to the crematorium.

  ‘He’d be conspicuous if he didn’t. Have you ever been to the crem, Diane?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Well, this is quite different from the situation at Wardlow. There’s no way you can give the impression you’re just passing. Our man will have had to drive through the crematorium grounds to the visitors’ car park and then walk up to the chapel entrance. And it’s not as if you could pretend you were visiting the crematorium for some other re
ason. There’d be other mourners there. They might well notice someone who turned up, then went away again.’

  ‘What if he was making a delivery or something?’

  ‘A delivery of what?’

  ‘I don’t know – they must bring in supplies of some kind. Aren’t there offices at the crematorium?’

  ‘At the back, but there’s a separate entrance. Delivery drivers don’t mingle with the hearses and mourners. You’ll see.’

  The public payphone was in a small foyer on the far side of the porte-cochere from the chapel entrance. Beyond the foyer were toilets and a quiet room containing a book of remembrance.

  ‘We’ll have to get Forensics to give it the works. If we’re really lucky, they might lift a print to match one from the phone box at Wardlow.’

  ‘The prints were all very indistinct at Wardlow. No one would be willing to swear to a match. There’s no way they could find enough points of similarity.’

  ‘We can hope, anyway,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘The good news,’ said Wayne Abbott when they arrived, ‘is that this payphone has been cleaned more recently than the phone box at Wardlow. So we have fewer prints, less overlay, less smudging. We’ve found a few latents for you already, and we’re dusting the walls for more. We may not be able to match anything up with Wardlow, but some of these prints are clear enough to make an ID if you can produce a suspect.’

  ‘It always comes back to us, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Hey, it’s your job to provide the bodies, Inspector. We’re not CSI: Miami, you know. We do our bit, then we go and sit in the van and have a cup of tea while we wait for you blokes to make the arrest. That’s real life, that is.’

  ‘What funeral was going on here?’ asked Fry.

  A PC was standing nearby with a notebook. ‘This was the cremation of a child,’ he said. ‘A thirteen-year-old boy who was killed in a road accident in Chesterfield.’

  ‘Why didn’t they take him to the crematorium at Brimington?’

  ‘I don’t know, Sergeant. Perhaps Brimington was too busy. Or maybe this one’s cheaper.’

  ‘Don’t let anybody hear you making remarks like that,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘Actually, I think it might be a space question,’ said Abbott. ‘This was a big funeral – about two hundred mourners, I’d say. They have a bigger chapel here, and facilities for relaying the service to the waiting room if there’s still an overspill.’

  ‘OK. Who was the funeral director?’

  ‘One of the big Chesterfield outfits.’

  Fry looked at the mourners waiting in the chapel. This was what the caller wanted. He’d enjoy the thought of the police waiting for a body to turn up; he’d planned to leave them helpless and frustrated. For now, he was in control of the situation. He’d even told them what he was going to do. Soon there will be a killing. Some people really got off on playing God, didn’t they?

  Cooper carried the urn into the CID room and put it down on his desk. Gavin Murfin eyed it suspiciously, dipping his hand into a bag of jelly babies hidden in his desk drawer.

  ‘What have you got there, Ben?’

  ‘About seven pounds of bone ash.’

  Murfin gazed at the urn, chewing reflectively on a jelly baby. ‘Well, while you’ve been out collecting ashes, we’ve had background checks done on the crematorium staff.’

  ‘Did the list come through from Christopher Lloyd?’

  ‘It did. They’re all clean, apart from one who had a couple of minor convictions for taking without consent when he was a teenager.’

  ‘Taking cars without consent, presumably, rather than bodies.’

  ‘Yes, I think you can presume that. Also, I found this – a job advert for a crematorium technician with one of the local councils. You know, those blokes are pretty badly paid. A lot of people wouldn’t leave the house for this sort of salary, let alone deal with dead bodies all day.’

  Bereavement Services are looking for a self-motivated and enthusiastic individual to work

  alongside our experienced team of cremator

  operators. The successful applicant will perform

  cremations in accordance with the Code of

  Cremation Practice, and will undertake chapel

  attendant duties, ensuring that services are

  conducted in a dignified, orderly and caring

  manner. Applicants must be willing to undertake the Cremator Technicians Training Scheme.

  ‘But this is a vacancy at a local authority crematorium,’ said Cooper. ‘Maybe operators in the private sector earn better money.’

  ‘I doubt it. No qualifications needed, you see. There aren’t many jobs like that these days. The sort of job a kid could go into straight from school, with no A levels.’

  ‘What’s this Cremator Technicians Training Scheme, then?’

  ‘On-the-job training, like. You learn the ropes from your workmates as you go along. Maybe there’s some kind of NVQ you can get.’

  Cooper tried to picture the sort of teenager who’d want to leave school after his GCSEs and become a crematorium technician. There must be some, but he didn’t think he’d ever met any. A career spent burning dead bodies wasn’t one he’d ever heard recommended by a career advisor at High Peak College.

  He studied the advert again. ‘It looks as though the cremator operators are the same people who act as chapel attendants. I never realized that. I always thought the men in black coats were the undertaker’s people.’

  Murfin took a sniff of his coffee and put it down on his desk, where it joined two more cups half-full of cold, scummy liquid.

  ‘Me, too.’

  ‘That’s a bit tough, isn’t it? I mean, you might get used to the burning part. The bodies would mean nothing, after a while. It would be just a way of earning a living. But before you do the cremation, they make you mingle with the bereaved family …’

  ‘What are you getting at, Ben?’

  ‘It seems to me that would make the job quite different. Much more human. It’s the human aspects that are most difficult to deal with.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Murfin. ‘I’d much rather view a dead body at a murder scene than break the news to the victim’s family.’

  ‘Exactly. People find emotions in others difficult to deal with. You never know how they’re going to react, whether they’re going to burst into tears at the wrong word. It would make you see a crematorium job quite differently.’

  Now an image was starting to form in Cooper’s mind of that elusive school leaver. He saw a tall youth with bad skin, awkward in a black suit that was two sizes too big for him. A bright enough lad, but lacking in confidence and social skills, frightened of other people and their unpredictable emotions. He would be acutely embarrassed among strangers, averting his face and refusing to make eye contact. But the awkwardness would drop from him like a cloak when he found some task that interested him, something he could do well.

  ‘You know this crematorium,’ said Murfin, taking the bag of jelly babies from his desk and peering inside to see what was left.

  ‘Yes, Gavin?’

  ‘Do they have such a thing as a deluxe cremation?’ he said. ‘What you might call la crème de la crem.’

  ‘That’s not funny, Gavin.’

  Cooper called up his list of missing persons from eighteen months previously. He’d already eliminated those who’d turned up in the meantime, either dead or alive. He didn’t have many names left to play with. Seven, in fact. And that was a good thing, he supposed.

  His favourite possibility was a woman from Middleton who had failed to collect her seven-year-old from school one day and hadn’t been seen since. Two years she’d been gone now, and there had been no confirmed sightings of her, nor any communication with the family, or so they said. The husband had been looked into fairly thoroughly at the time. There were no indications of depression or any problems in her life that might have caused her to do a runner or harm herself. The difficulty was that she’d alre
ady been missing for six months before Audrey Steele’s funeral. Where could she have been during that time?

  The other mispers belonged to different age groups from Audrey, and all but one were male. Not that it made any difference. The cremator made no distinction between genders, except for the amount of bone ash that came out of the pulverizer. Perhaps he should be looking at them by weight rather than by age or gender, and getting an estimate of their bone mass. There were no other clues to follow, as far as he could see.

  Losing concentration, Cooper looked across the desk at Murfin. He was calculating his back time. He always kept a careful record in his diary of how many days and hours he was owed. Not that he ever made any attempt to take the time off – he just enjoyed complaining about it.

  ‘Do you believe in Heaven and Hell, Gavin?’ asked Cooper.

  Murfin didn’t look up. ‘Have a jelly baby, Ben. It’ll make you feel better.’

  ‘No, seriously.’

  ‘What, you mean like the stuff they teach the kids in Sunday school? A lot of flames, and devils with toasting forks? Eternal damnation for having naughty thoughts?’

  ‘Well, any sort of Hell you like, Gavin. And any sort of Heaven, too.’

  Murfin chewed for a minute and wiped some white dust off his hands from the bag of sweets.

  ‘The former I believe in,’ he said. ‘But I’ve never seen any evidence of the latter. I’m sorry, Detective Constable Cooper, but your unsupported claims of the existence of Heaven would be thrown out of court by any judge.’

  ‘A Hell, but no Heaven? So you reckon the equation is a bit out of balance, then? How did that happen, Gavin? Some kind of design fault in Creation?’

  ‘You shouldn’t say things like that,’ said Murfin, wagging a sugar-coated finger. ‘You’ll upset God.’

  The phone rang, and Murfin answered it.

  ‘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?’