The Dead Place

3

Hudson and Slack was one of the oldest established funeral directors in the Eden Valley. A dependable family firm, according to the sign over the entrance. Diane Fry pulled her Peugeot into the car park next to the chapel of rest. The company might be long established, but the premises dated from the 1960s, flat-roofed and square, with a modern plate-glass frontage. The place had been built discreetly out of sight in a side street off Fargate.

Fry got out of the car and stood at the gate, looking at the houses in Manvers Street. There were stone terraces on both sides, with no gardens between their front doors and the roadway. She wondered what sort of people would choose to live where death passed their windows every morning. How many times must they look up from a meal or a TV programme and see the long, black limousines creeping by? How often did they try to enjoy a moment’s peace, only to catch a glint of chrome from the handles of a coffin out of the corner of one eye?

She turned back to the entrance of Hudson and Slack. She was sure that living here wouldn’t suit her at all. But there must be many ways of shutting out the sight of death passing by, or pretending it didn’t exist.

‘I presume you want me to come in with you, Diane?’ said a voice from the other side of the car.

For a moment, she’d forgotten Ben Cooper. As usual, he’d been the only DC she could find in the CID room when she needed company. If there was anything to follow up from this visit, she wouldn’t be able to do it herself, because she’d be tied up in court.

‘Yes, of course. You’re not here to enjoy the scenery.’

Cooper followed her into the funeral director’s, where they found Melvyn Hudson to be a dapper man in his late forties, with neat hair greying at the temples. He was wearing a black suit and black tie, and he seemed to slip effortlessly into character as he came through the door into the waiting room and held out his hand.

‘Come through, come through. And please tell me exactly how I can help.’

Beyond the door was a passage, and two men walking towards them. Like Hudson, they were in black suits, though neither of them carried it off so well. The larger man had a shaven head and a prominent jaw, like a night-club bouncer, while the younger one was slender and ungainly, his suit barely concealing the boniness of his shoulders and wrists. They stopped in unison when they saw the visitors, and their faces fell into serious expressions.

‘Sergeant, these are two of our bearer drivers,’ said Hudson. ‘Billy McGowan – and this is Vernon Slack.’

The two men nodded and moved on, closing a door quietly behind them.

Hudson’s office felt like a doctor’s consulting room, with soothing décor, interesting pot plants and certificates framed on the wall. Who did funeral directors get certificates from, Fry wondered. Were there classes in undertaking at night school? A diploma in coffin manufacture at High Peak College?

‘You realize there are quite a lot of people like that?’ said Hudson, after Fry had explained what she wanted.

‘Like what?’

‘People who make a hobby of going to funerals. We see them all the time. Sometimes we joke to each other that a funeral isn’t complete without our usual little bunch of habitual mourners.’

‘You mean they go to the funerals of people they never knew?’

‘Of course,’ said Hudson. ‘They watch the church notice boards, or read the death announcements in the Eden Valley Times to see what funerals are coming up. And then they plan their diaries for the week ahead. For some people, funerals are their favourite type of outing. They become social occasions. Perhaps even a place where they meet new people.’

Hudson must have noticed the shocked expression on Fry’s face.

‘It’s perfectly harmless,’ he said. ‘These are people who simply like funerals.’

‘And you recognize these individuals when they turn up?’

‘Oh, yes. Many of them are familiar faces to staff at Hudson and Slack, as they are to all my colleagues in this area.’

Fry saw Cooper open his mouth as if about to join in, but she gave him a glance to shut him up. As he dropped his eyes to his notebook, an unruly lock of hair fell over his forehead. She ought to suggest it was time for a haircut again.

‘I don’t suppose you could let me have some names, Mr Hudson?’ she said.

‘As it happens, yes. The Eden Valley Times used to publish lists of mourners on its obituary page until quite recently, and it was usually our job to collect the names. We did it as part of our service to the bereaved family, you see. The names wouldn’t be hard to find, anyway. You’d only need to look through a few back copies of the newspaper and check the obituary pages, and you’d see them listed as mourners at almost every funeral in the area.’

‘No addresses, though?’

Hudson shrugged. ‘I can’t help you with that. The only thing I can say is that they tend to stick to funerals on their own patch. They don’t travel very much for their hobby.’

Fry nodded. ‘What about Wardlow?’

‘Well, that’s different,’ said Hudson. ‘A small village, a few miles out of town – there aren’t many funerals in a place like that, as you can imagine. Hudson and Slack are one of the busiest funeral directors in the valley, but we don’t do more than one job a year in Wardlow, if that. So if there were habitual mourners in Wardlow, I wouldn’t recognize them.’

He smiled, a sympathetic smile that suggested he cared about everybody, no matter who they were.

‘And I don’t suppose they get much outlet for their interest, either,’ he said. ‘They’d be all dressed up with nowhere to go. Rather like a dead atheist.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Just my little funeral director’s joke.’

Fry raised her eyebrows, then looked at Cooper to make sure he was taking notes. ‘Mr Hudson, you said a minute ago that the Eden Valley Times published lists of mourners until quite recently?’

‘Yes. But they’ve stopped doing it now. A new editor arrived, and he thought it was rather an old-fashioned practice. Well, I suppose he was right. The Times was one of the few local newspapers left in the country that still did it, so it was bound to go the way of all traditions eventually. But our customers liked it.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, locally, it became an indicator of status – an individual’s popularity and success in life were measured by how many mourners they had at their funeral, whether the mayor attended or only the deputy mayor, that sort of thing. Also, people would look to make sure they were on the list and their names had been spelled right. Of course, there was often a lot of gossip about who’d turned up and who hadn’t – especially if there had been some kind of family dispute. You know what it’s like.’

‘Not really,’ said Fry.

Hudson looked at her more carefully. ‘You’re not from around here, are you?’ he said. ‘I should have noticed.’

She tried to ignore the comment. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard it. The traces of her Black Country accent normally betrayed her straight away, but apparently Melvyn Hudson wasn’t quite so observant as he claimed to be. Nevertheless, Fry found herself unreasonably irritated by the implication that he ought to have been able to tell at a glance she wasn’t local.

‘Wouldn’t it be true to say there’s another factor?’ she said.

‘What’s that?’

‘That it isn’t enough just to show your respects when somebody dies, you have to be seen to be doing it. That’s the whole point of getting your name in the paper, isn’t it? So that everyone can see you were doing the right thing, no matter what you thought of the deceased person?’

‘I think that’s a little unfair.’

‘And it’s the purpose of all the money spent on floral tributes too, isn’t it? After all, they don’t do the person who’s died much good, do they?’

Cooper stirred restlessly and snapped the elastic band on his notebook, as if he thought it was time to leave. Hudson’s smile was slipping, but he stayed calm. Of course, he had to deal with much more difficult situations every day.

‘Have you had some kind of unfortunate personal experience?’ he said. ‘If something is troubling you, we can offer the services of a bereavement counsellor.’

‘No,’ snapped Fry. ‘It was a general observation.’

‘Well, your view might be considered somewhat cynical, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘But I won’t deny there’s an element of truth in what you say.’

‘All right. Do you conduct all the funerals here, Mr Hudson?’

‘My wife Barbara does some of them.’

‘And I suppose the fact that the Eden Valley Times stopped printing lists of mourners means your staff no longer collect the names,’ said Fry.

‘That’s correct. We don’t do it as a matter of course any more. Only if a customer specifically asks us to.’

‘And at Wardlow church yesterday?’

Hudson shook his head. He accompanied the gesture with his sympathetic smile, suggesting that he understood her distress, and she had his condolences.

‘No names at all,’ he said. ‘I’m very sorry.’

Back in the CID room after his unexpected trip to the funeral director’s, Ben Cooper wondered why Fry looked so distracted. Worried, even. But whatever was bothering her, at least she had time to take an interest in his forensic reconstruction, shuffling through the photographs he’d brought back from Sheffield.

‘They’re not bad,’ she said. ‘Are we going to get these into the papers?’

‘I delivered them last night. Media Relations have already set it up.’

‘Good. You might get an early result. Have you got any other ideas, Ben?’

‘I thought I might take copies round to show Mr Jarvis.’

‘Who?’

‘The owner of the property nearest to where the remains were found. His name is Tom Jarvis. We don’t know how she ended up down there, but it’s possible Mr Jarvis may have seen her around the place while she was still alive.’

‘No indication of how she died, right?’

‘Not so far.’

Fry handed the photos back. ‘Bear in mind, if it turns out she was killed, this Mr Jarvis might become a suspect.’

‘Of course,’ said Cooper. ‘But in that case, if he denies all knowledge of her now, it could be the thing that catches him out later on.’

‘Forward planning. I like that.’

For a moment, Cooper thought she was going to pat him on the head or give him a gold star. But she began to move away, already thinking about something else. She went back to her desk and began to open a package that had arrived from Ripley, suggesting she’d forgotten about him already. Cooper called across the office.

‘Have you got something interesting on, Diane? The visit to Hudson and Slack this morning – and I heard there was a tape of a call to the Control Room …’

‘It’s probably nothing,’ she said. And she picked up her phone, a sign that the conversation was over.

Cooper laid his photographs alongside the forensic anthropologist’s report. There were also a series of scene photos from Ravensdale. They showed the remains half-concealed by vegetation that had grown up around them, the long bones turning green with moss, like the roots of some exotic tree. When the tangles of bramble and goose grass were cut away, they revealed the skeletal hands folded carefully together, the legs straight, the feet almost touching at the heel, but turned outwards at the toes.

Dr Jamieson had an opinion on the feet. He felt it was only the tugging of scavengers at decomposing flesh that had moved them from their original position. They had been neatly closed together at the moment of death, or some time after.

It was the ‘some time after’ that worried Cooper. The location and position of the body were so carefully chosen that they gave the appearance of ritual. In fact, the foliage winding its way through the bones might even suggest an offering to nature, a human sacrifice that was slowly being claimed by Mother Earth. But that was pure fancy, surely.

He looked up the number and called the anthropologist again. Sometimes, you just had to hope for a bit of luck.

‘Any chance of a cause of death?’ he said.

‘You’re joking.’

‘Nothing at all?’

Dr Jamieson sighed. ‘I’ve looked for signs of any skeletal trauma that might suggest the manner of death, or indeed tell us something about what happened to the body after death.’

‘And?’

‘Nothing. No cut marks, no visible trauma, other than a certain amount of postmortem damage. Some gnawing of the bones at the extremities.’

‘Scavengers,’ Cooper said. ‘Foxes, rats.’

‘Or some kind of bird. We’re missing two of the carpals – the hamate and capitate. If you happen to come across them, one is a cuboid bone with a hooklike process, and one is a bit like a miniature half-carved bust. They’re small, but quite distinctive. We’ve also lost some of the tarsal bones from the left foot, but otherwise the extremities are mostly intact. And of course the hyoid bone is gone.’

‘Why “of course”?’

‘The hyoid is located just above the larynx, where it anchors the muscles of the tongue. It’s the only bone in the body that doesn’t touch any other bone. So when the tissue around it disappears, the hyoid drops away and can be lost completely. You’re lucky to have the incisors, since they have only one root. When the soft tissue decomposes, there’s nothing to hold them in the jaw.’

‘Doctor, isn’t the hyoid bone the one that sometimes gets broken when a victim is strangled?’

‘Yes, that’s correct.’

‘And with skeletonized remains, damage to the hyoid bone might be the only indication we have that the victim died of strangulation?’

‘I shouldn’t really comment on that. But it’s true that, without any soft tissues present, we can only look for trauma. Unless there are signs of fractures or nicks to the bone from knife wounds, the condition of the hyoid might well be crucial to an assessment of the cause of death. But only if the cause was manual strangulation.’

Cooper recognized the hopelessness of the thought that came into his mind then. But he said it anyway.

‘We’d have to organize another search of the scene, if we’re going to find that bone.’

‘It is a very small bone,’ the anthropologist said. ‘Given the nature of the location, you’ll be looking for a needle in a haystack. And, don’t forget, the hyoid could have disappeared from the scene completely.’

‘That doesn’t sound very hopeful.’

‘Well, I can give you an estimate of the time of death, based on plant growth. We got a botanist to have a look, and his report has just landed on my desk.’

‘And?’

‘Well, she probably died during the spring. Her body was already partially skeletonized by this summer, when vegetation began to push its way through the remaining tissue and between the ribs.’

‘February or March?’

‘Yes. But the botanist also found some dead vegetation – the previous season’s growth.’

‘You mean she died in the spring of last year?’

‘I’m just summarizing the report. I’ll send a copy through later today so you can see the details.’

‘Does that fit with the skeletonization?’

‘Oh, yes. You might want to get someone to check the weather during the relevant period. If it was cold, it would have delayed decomposition.’

‘Last summer was warm and wet,’ said Cooper. ‘It was like that for months.’

‘Hence the degree of skeletonization, then. An exposed body in warm, humid conditions. Decomposition must have advanced pretty fast. There’s a rough-and-ready formula, based on the average temperature of the surrounding area. In a reasonably warm summer, you’d get a temperature of around fifteen degrees Celsius perhaps?’

‘Yes.’

Cooper could almost hear him doing the mental calculation. ‘So during the summer, an exposed corpse could be skeletonized within around eighty-five days.’

‘Just eighty-five days? And this one could have been out in the open for eighteen months?’

‘Yes. If the body was left a few weeks earlier, skeletonization would take a little longer. But given the exposed position, you’re looking at a matter of months, not years. The botanist’s report will suggest an upper end of the time scale.’

‘What about a toxicological analysis?’ said Cooper.

‘Well, we could do that,’ said the anthropologist, ‘if you want us to.’

Cooper knew that ‘if you want us to’ translated as ‘if you’re prepared to pay us’.

‘I’ll check,’ he said, because budget decisions weren’t his to make.

Diane Fry sat for a while in her car outside the courthouse in Wharf Road. People were streaming down the steps and heading for their own vehicles – lawyers and court officials in one direction, members of the public in another. She was aware of the security cameras on the building watching her. Cameras were everywhere in the new riverside development – it was amazing how much crime took place in the precincts of the court.

Fry lifted the package from the passenger seat beside her. She ought to have taken it into court with her, but security would have asked awkward questions. When she’d seen the tape on her desk that morning, she’d known that the first time she listened to it couldn’t be in the office, surrounded by a bunch of cynical DCs. Nor in the DI’s office, with Hitchens watching her for a reaction. She needed to hear it alone.

She wasn’t sure what she would have done if her car hadn’t been old enough to have a cassette player. But now she slid the tape in and pressed the ‘play’ button. She rested her head on the back of the seat and waited until the hiss faded away.

Soon there will be a killing. It might happen in the next few hours. We could synchronize our watches and count down the minutes …