The Dead Place (18 page)

'Maybe it's insecurity . . .' Cooper paused. 'Why didn't you let me listen to the tape of the phone calls before I went to see the professor?'

'You never asked.'

'It would have helped a lot. As it was, I only had partial information.'

'Yes, OK, Ben.'

The BMW closed up behind them as they stopped at the traffic lights before the relief road.

'Those sarcophagi he showed us,' said Fry. 'They're not even in our target area.'

'Yes,' said Cooper. 'I know.'

Robertson was right about one thing, though. Cooper had seen the watch house built at Bradfield to guard against men who might come by night to dig up freshly buried bodies from the churchyard. And here in Edendale was that massive block of sandstone carved in the shape of a coffin. There was no logical reason for its size and weight, except to prevent access to the grave beneath. And yet the body snatchers had never come to Edendale, or to anywhere else in Derbyshire.

Then Cooper remembered Audrey Steele, and corrected

146 himself. Body snatchers had never come to Derbyshire - until now.

MY JOURNAL OF THE DEAD, PHASE TWO

And the biggest unknown is death. We'd rather not think about death at all. We fear our own dead, we believe that corpses pollute the living. To acknowledge death is to accept our own mortality, so the dead have to be hidden away, shielded by rites, prayers and superstitions. Even in death, we fear the final battle with evil. We're afraid to face our angry gods.

That's why we've produced all our myths and folklore, all our rituals and deceptions. It means the thing we have to face is only a fiction of our own creation, and not the inconceivable reality. We're like a flock of chickens running around a yard until the day the axe falls on their necks. The only difference between us and the chickens is that we know the axe is there from the start. If you think about that too much, you might start to envy the chickens.

What happens after death is unspoken, and sometimes unspeakable. But we have to see the truth. We can close our mouths and ears, but we can't avert our eyes. Remember those visions of death that cross your mind as you enter into sleep f Your subconscious is trying to share the knowledge that you deny.

From the Buddhist Sutra on Mindfulness - Nine Cemetery Contemplations:

And further, a bhikkhu sees a body thrown on to the cemetery reduced to disconnected bones, scattered in all directions - here a bone of the hand, there a bone of the foot, a shin bone, a thigh bone, the pelvis, spine and skull. So he applies this perception to his own body thus: 'Verily, my own body, too, is of the same nature. Such it will become, and will not escape it.'

147 13

A manila envelope lay on Ben Cooper's desk on Friday morning. At first, he didn't want to touch it. It reminded him too much of the envelopes he saw at the hospital. There were always stacks of them behind the nurses' station, full of medical records and test results. A manila envelope would contain a patient's diagnosis and prognosis, a plan for their discharge or their disposal after death, the discreet arrangement of their living and dying, all wrapped up in brown paper.

He got himself a coffee from the machine in the corridor and finally felt able to rip open the sealed flap. The contents slid out on to his desk. Dental records, and it was good news. Or at least, he supposed he ought to consider it good news. He had a confirmed ID for his human remains.

Cooper tried to feel elated as he looked at the photographs of Audrey Steele again. But it seemed very tough on Audrey that she should have ended up like this.

There was a lot of talk these days about the dead speaking from beyond the grave. People usually meant the remarkable amount of forensic evidence that could be collected from a dead body. It was a way that murder victims could help investigators to achieve justice against their killers. But in Audrey's case, her voice was silent. The examination of her remains

148 had revealed nothing useful, as far as he could tell. And how could it, when she'd died of natural causes? Audrey's mother had the death certificate. Brain haemorrhage, confirmed by a second doctor prior to disposal by cremation.

But that didn't feel right to Cooper. From the moment he'd seen Suzi Lee's reconstruction in the Sheffield laboratory, he felt as though he'd been able to hear Audrey Steele speaking to him from the woods at Ravensdale. The fact that she hadn't told him anything crucial to the enquiry seemed to be his fault, not hers. From now on, he ought to listen a bit more carefully.

A few minutes later, DI Hitchens was rubbing his fingers together thoughtfully as he listened to Cooper run through the available facts.

'This woman was supposed to have been cremated eighteen months ago?' he said. 'Is that what you're saying?'

'Yes, sir. As far as her family are concerned, she was cremated.'

'And yet her remains turn up in the woods ten miles from the crematorium. I've never heard anything like it, Ben.'

'There seems to be no doubt she died of natural causes. I've got copies of the certificates.'

'All done properly? Signed by two doctors?'

'Yes.'

'OK. Then we're looking at an offence of unauthorized interference with a body. God knows what the penalty is for that. I've never come across a case of this kind before.'

'I'll get some checks done and see if similar incidents have been recorded anywhere.'

'Yes, that's a good first step. And you'll be talking to the family again, I suppose?'

'Of course.'

Hitchens swivelled his chair away from Cooper, a sign that something was worrying him.

'And then there's the question of when and where the theft

149 of the body took place. You said that Audrey Steele was in hospital when she died?'

'Yes.'

'Identified by the family, and all that?'

'I think so, but I'll get a statement from her mother, or whoever saw her in hospital last.'

'Right. Then the obvious places where the opportunity might have arisen would be the funeral director's premises, and the crematorium itself.'

'I'd have thought those were the only places,' said Cooper. 'The family didn't take her body home for a wake. The funeral director's preparation room and chapel of rest seem most likely, as regards an opportunity for interfering with the body.'

'And the funeral directors in this case are . . .?'

'Hudson and Slack.'

The DI nodded. 'Tread carefully, Ben. Be discreet. We don't want a scare on our hands, with bereaved relatives panicking about the fate of their dearly departed. Nor do we want to wreck the good name of a reputable company without cause.'

'I'll be careful, sir. In fact, I thought I might start with the crematorium and work backwards.'

'From the point of departure, so to speak? OK, that sounds like a plan.'

'Meanwhile, I wondered . . . well, what about a new search at Litton Foot?'

'In case we missed something the first time?'

'For one thing, there are some bones missing from Audrey Steele's remains,' said Cooper. 'There might be other evidence lying around the scene, too. Now that we have an angle on how she got there, I think we ought to take a fresh look, perhaps extend the area of the search.'

'It would only be on a limited scale, Ben.'

'I understand that, sir.'

Hitchens made a note. 'I'll get something set up.'

'Thank you.'

150 The DI turned back towards the window, as if he believed the meeting was over. 'At least Mrs Steele died of natural causes,' he said. 'So we're not looking at a murder enquiry here.'

Cooper thought of Vivien Gill at home on the Devonshire Estate, sitting in her smelly kitchen with her Doidy Cup and Bickiepegs.

'Well. ..' he said.

Hitchens spun round on his chair to face him. 'What? What?'

'It's just. . .' Cooper hesitated a moment under the DI's gaze. 'Well, sir, there is another question to be answered. If Audrey Steele's remains ended up in the woods in Ravensdale, then who was cremated in her place?'

Cooper sat down at his desk and ran a check on the Criminal Intelligence System, but without result. Apparently, unauthorized interference with corpses wasn't a common offence in Derbyshire. Who'd have guessed it? He requested a flag on any reports of similar incidents collated by intelligence officers on other forces, though he knew it would take time before there was any response.

Then he wondered what law the offence came under, and tried the legislation index. The Anatomy Act and the Human Tissues Act covered the anatomical examination of dead bodies and the removal of a dead person's organs respectively. Not really applicable. In any case, the maximum penalty under either act was three months' imprisonment, and hardly worth bothering about. He did locate a definition of a 'person lawfully in possession of the body', but even that wasn't very clear or helpful. And the only other reference he found was in Section 70 of the Sexual Offences Act - sexual penetration of a corpse. Best not to think about it.

Besides, if it turned out that Audrey Steele had been evicted from her coffin to make way for a body that hadn't died of

151 natural causes, the minor charge might become irrelevant. The case would escalate instantly into a murder enquiry.

Cooper felt a surge of excitement when he thought of it. Everything depended on what he did in the next few days. He'd have to trawl through missing persons again, dating back eighteen months at least. If he could narrow down the list and start making some connections, he'd be getting somewhere. First, he phoned Eden Valley Crematorium to make an appointment with the manager. It was a private sector operation, built by a company in East Anglia to meet the increasing demand for cremations. The manager's name was Lloyd, and he was available in his office all morning. Cooper picked up his car keys and notebook.

'Where are you going, Ben?' said Fry.

'The crem.'

She stopped what she was doing and stared after him as he went through the door.

'Why?' she said.

Cooper heard her, but kept going. As he closed the door behind him and set off down the corridor, he thought he could still hear her voice somewhere behind him. He'd explain to her later. She'd have to make do with partial information for a while.

Fry didn't really have time to worry about Ben Cooper. When her phone rang, it was Gavin Murfin suggesting that she come over to the CCTV control room.

'We've got something you'll want to see,' he said.

The control room staff monitored cameras covering the streets in the centre of Edendale. These cameras were mounted on high poles or on the sides of buildings, swivelling to cover a three hundred and sixty degree field of vision and capable of zooming in on suspicious individuals. Unlike the private security system at the Clappergate car park all of these cameras were functional and constantly monitored.

152 When Fry arrived, one of the monitoring staff was printing out some screen shots for Murfin, who looked pleased with himself.

'We've been trawling through all the CCTV footage,' he said. 'Not the car park cameras, the town centre ones. Remember we eliminated all the vehicles in the multi-storey itself? And we reckoned our man must have taken Sandra Birley out on to the street. . .'

'Yes?'

'Well, we got a possible sighting at the corner of Hardwick Lane and New Street.'

'Let's see it.'

They played back the tape for her. It had been recorded by a camera high above New Street, close to the traffic lights at the start of the pedestrianized section of Clappergate. Seven forty-five. It was pretty much dark, of course, but the street lighting was on and the quality of the image was surprisingly good. At first, there seemed to be no one in the street, only the brake lights of a car moving away from the camera position.

Then a dark shape appeared from the corner of Hardwick Lane. It seemed to be one person. But a second later, Fry realized there were two people, one much heavier and taller than the other. They were unnaturally close together, the larger with his arm around the smaller.

'Is that Sandra Birley on the left, do you think?'

'We estimate she's about the right height to fit the description,' said one of the operators. 'Dark-haired, too. And she's wearing a skirt, as you'll see in a moment.'

The smaller figure seemed to stumble, or try to pull away. As they separated, it became clear for the first time that she was a woman, wearing a dark skirt with a hem just above knee length. Then she was pulled back towards the tall man, seemed to stumble again, but regained her footing.

'There's no indication that he's threatening her with a weapon,' said Fry.

153 'No, sorry.'

'Maybe he didn't need to,' said Murfin. 'He's twice her size at least.'

'Why didn't she scream, though? There must have been people within earshot.'

'OK, he could be holding a knife close to her body. We wouldn't see it from this angle, nor would any passers-by in the street. She wouldn't dare scream with a knife in her ribs.'

'That's possible.'

The couple made slow progress up the street. This was no quick getaway. At one point, the woman seemed to turn towards the man and speak to him. No, she was arguing with him, trying to turn back the way she'd come. He shook his head, said something, pulled her roughly along with him again. This time, the violence was more overt.

'We eliminated the Sheffield man, didn't we?' said Fry, watching the jerky footage.

'Yes. Dad's Army checked him out,' said Murfin.

'Who?'

'Oh, the temporary CID support staff.'

'Right.'

'And remember, his car was parked in the multi-storey. This one is in New Street, look '

Then Fry saw the car. It was a light colour, barely picked out by the streetlamps on the upper edge of the camera's field of view. She peered closer, squinting at the boot and the rear wings.

'Is that a Vauxhall?'

Murfin gave her a smug smile. 'We've already blown up the screen shots and identified the model,' he said.

'Well done, Gavin.'

'It gets better. The guys here read off a partial licence plate number for me, and I ran it through the PNC just before you arrived. We've narrowed it down to two possible owners.'