The Dead Place

‘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.