The Dead Place (23 page)

'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.'

189 '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

190 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

191 desk, where it joined two more cups half-full of cold, scummy liquid.

The, 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 creme de la crem."

192 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 already 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

193 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?'

'No, but she thinks she is.'

Cooper took the phone, grimacing at Murfin. 'Hello, Diane.' 'Drop anything else you're doing, Ben,' she said. 'We need the whole team down here for a meeting with Dr Kane.'

'The psychologist?'

'Yes. We're setting up in the conference room. I want you and Gavin here in ten minutes.'

194 17

Well, have you found the dead place? Or did you lose the scent? Strange, when the odour is so distinctive. Some say it's sweet, like rotting fruit.

Did you know that you don't have to step on a decomposing body to carry away its smell on your shoes? The soil around a corpse is soaked with all those volatile fatty acids produced by human decay. Our soft tissues all decompose, but some more quickly than others. The uterus can last for months - the organ of life surviving intact as the body festers around it. Just one of nature's little jokes.

And then all we have left is the skeleton. The teeth, the skull, the gleaming bones. This is the final revelation. It's the uncovering of truth. To most people, death is a dirty secret, a thing of shame, the last taboo. To me, it's completion, the perfect conclusion. It's my only chance to be free.

I'm close to perfection now, you see. And you're going to be too late. You may never find the dead place at all. You may never meet my flesh eater.

'There was a German psychoanalyst called Erich Fromm,' said Dr Rosa Kane. 'You might be interested in one of his personality theories.'

195 She stood at the head of the table, looking smart and self possessed. Fry was reminded of Professor Robertson in a perverse sort of way. Dr Kane seemed to be the modern, more acceptable face of the same school. She hadn't hesitated when DI Hitchens had invited her to take the central role in the meeting.

'Fromm believed that even the most severely neurotic person is at least trying to cope with life,' said Kane. 'He called that type "biophilous", or life-loving. But there's another type he refers to as "necrophilous" - the lovers of death.'

Fry looked around the table, and saw both Hitchens and Cooper writing the new words in their notebooks. The DI looked as though he might be having trouble with the spelling.

'Necrophilous?' he said.

'Yes. These are people who have a passionate attraction to anything dead or decayed. It's a passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive. Fromm called it "a passion to tear apart living structures". Typically, the individual concerned will be comfortable with machinery, but won't be able to cope with people.'

Fry frowned. 'Why machinery?'

'Anything mechanical is unalive, and therefore predictable and reliable. If a machine breaks down, you can figure out why, and repair it. But people aren't like that. We can't always understand why they behave the way they do.'

'That's certainly true of some people around here,' said Murfin. But Dr Kane ignored him. She'd probably noticed that Murfin hadn't opened his notebook. Chances were he didn't even have a pen with him.

'For a subject with this type of personality disorder,' she said, 'machines are vastly preferable. If they're forced to deal with people, that's when problems can arise. Human unpredictability appears threatening. A subject may feel the compulsion to render a living person unalive, to make them safe.'

That was too much. Fry felt the irritation boil over.

196 'Render a person unalive? What sort of mealy-mouthed expression is that?'

Kane paused, pursed her lips and brushed back a strand of hair. She was silent for just long enough to make it clear she wasn't going to respond to the question. She looked up at DI Hitchens.

'In terms of an individual's own distorted perceptions, such an act might be considered a form of self-defence,' she said.

Fry snorted, and Hitchens glared at her.

'There's another thing that might help you,' said Kane. 'Personality disorders of this nature often become evident in childhood. But it generally requires some kind of traumatic experience to bring it to the surface, producing a child who clings to ritual as a source of security. Such a child will find predictability reassuring, even when it flies in the face of normal logic'

'Can you give us an example?' asked Hitchens.

'Imagine that you're a child, and your father sometimes beats you when he comes home drunk on a Saturday night. A normal child will keep his head down and hope his father won't beat him this week. But if you're this kind of child, it's preferable for your father to beat you every Saturday night, rather than not knowing whether he will or won't. Unpredictability is the most frightening thing, you see. A child in that situation might deliberately do something to enrage his father, to make sure that he's beaten. Then he feels secure.'

'Good God.'

Kane nodded. 'It's a difficult disorder to deal with. There are no cures, only ways of minimizing the effects - and then only if the condition is diagnosed before it's too late.'

'Too late?' said Hitchens.

'Well, as a child, this type of individual lacks the power to influence the actions of adults, other than by making himself a victim. But later in life he may realize there's another way to deal with the unpredictability of people.' The psychologist

197 turned her head slightly to look at Fry. That's when he discovers the power to make them predictable - by rendering them unalive.'

'The big question is whether he's serious about his statement that he intends to kill someone,' said Fry. 'Or could his messages be referring to something that's happened in the past?'

'If there was an earlier incident, it could have been a practice killing,' said Kane.

'A practice killing?'

'Exercising that newly discovered power over people. This individual may be seeking some kind of perfection. It makes sense.'

'None of this makes sense.'

Kane took off her glasses to look at Fry. 'It does if you take the trouble to put yourself in the mind of the psychotic individual, to understand his motivations and thought processes.'

'But we agree that we do have a killer here, Doctor,' said Hitchens.