06.The Dead Place

by Stephen Booth

  14

  An unmarked car was already in position in Darton Street, parked a few doors down from number 28 to keep surveillance on the front door.

  DI Hitchens picked up the radio handset. ‘Is he still at home?’

  ‘The suspect entered the house about twenty minutes ago, and we haven’t seen him come out again.’

  ‘What about a rear exit?’

  ‘He’d have to go over the garden wall, sir. But there’s a unit in the back alley, just in case.’

  ‘Good. Remember, this individual could be armed, so no one goes near him without a vest on. Understood? Just stay out of the way and let the arrest team deal with him.’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘Here’s the van now,’ said Diane Fry, as a police Transit pulled into the end of the street and officers in bulletproof vests deployed from the rear doors.

  In a few more minutes, the scene would be contained, and ready for the execution of a safe and uneventful arrest. With Ian Todd removed from the scene, they could bring in the SOCOs and search teams. But would Sandra Birley still be alive somewhere?

  It was more than sixty hours since Sandra had been taken from the multistorey car park. Two days and three nights – more than enough for her abductor to carry out whatever he had in mind. Although his supervisor at Peak Mutual confirmed that Todd had been working as normal during those two days, his job involved spending several hours on the road each day, visiting clients across North Derbyshire.

  In any case, the nights had been entirely free for him to pursue his activities. He was unmarried and lived alone, so there was no one at home demanding an account of his whereabouts, or to question the condition of his car or his clothing. He could have taken his victim anywhere during that first night, before she was even reported missing. She could be at the other end of the country.

  But Fry didn’t think that was the case. She thought Sandra Birley would be found within a few miles of Edendale, in a six-mile radius of Wardlow. Ian Todd had been ideally placed to make the phone calls. He had been on the road in his light green Vauxhall Vectra when both those calls had been made.

  That Vectra stood on the drive of number 28 now. Shortly, it would become a crime scene and Forensics could give it a going-over.

  Then the radio crackled back into life.

  ‘He’s out of the house, sir, going for the car. He must have seen us.’

  ‘Who the hell blew it?’ shouted Hitchens. ‘Never mind – get moving. Block him in and we’ll take him now, before he gets his vehicle on to the street.’

  The unmarked car started up and pulled away from the kerb with a squeal of tyres. The surveillance team were only yards from the driveway of number 28 and within seconds they had blocked Ian Todd’s exit. He looked up and saw them coming just as he reached his Vectra and thumbed the remote on his keyfob.

  Fry was out of her door and standing in the road. She had a good view of Todd as he momentarily froze in his garden. He was tall, about six feet two, she guessed, and strongly built. But right now he looked scared.

  ‘He’s going to leg it,’ she said.

  ‘Diane, don’t go near him,’ said Hitchens. ‘You’re not wearing a vest.’

  But in the end, she didn’t have to go near Ian Todd at all. He glanced from one end of the street to the other, taking in Fry and the police vehicles. And then he ran towards the marked van, where four officers in uniforms and bulletproof vests were advancing towards him. He met them a few yards down the road, and two of them took hold of his arms, turned him round and handcuffed him. Fry saw his face then. He looked more surprised than frightened.

  ‘Well, he must have thought you looked really scary,’ said Gavin Murfin, arriving at Fry’s shoulder. ‘He took one look at you and ran the other way.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be here, Gavin,’ she said. ‘You’re not wearing a vest.’

  ‘He’s handcuffed. What’s he going to do, kill me with his evil stare?’

  Fry scrutinized Ian Todd’s house. It looked ordinary enough, but what killer’s home didn’t?

  As Fry walked up the drive to the house, the front door opened. She stopped, suddenly conscious that Todd might have had an accomplice. If there was a second person involved and they were armed, she was completely exposed. She was appalled at herself for making such an elementary error.

  Then, from the shadows of the hallway, a woman emerged and stood on the step. She was dark-haired and attractive, with a startled look in her eyes. They stood frozen, staring at each other, until Fry felt the initial surge of shock give way to anger. She stepped forward and held out her warrant card.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Fry, Edendale Police,’ she said. ‘And you, I believe, are Mrs Sandra Birley.’

  *

  ‘Excuse me. Detective Constable Cooper?’

  Cooper turned to find a man in a dark suit standing behind him. Another funeral director’s assistant? But no …

  ‘I’m Christopher Lloyd, the crematorium manager.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Lloyd. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me.’

  Lloyd looked at Vernon Slack. ‘Come inside. It’ll be a little less public.’

  Another funeral party was gathering, even while the previous one was less than halfway through its service. Because they couldn’t go into the chapel, the mourners were milling about outside near the porte-cochere. They’d be in the way when the hearse arrived, but no doubt there would be someone whose job it was to herd them in the right direction.

  The cremation suite itself stood at right angles to the chapel, with frosted windows under its square chimney stack. Inside, it had an inevitable industrial feel. The main room was dominated by two giant stainless-steel ovens with sliding doors just wide enough to take a coffin.

  Cooper had only ever seen one cremator before, and that had been in Germany – a huge thing, fed by a machine built into the floor with an overhead crane to lift coffins into place, while others waited in line, as if on a conveyor belt. But the one he was looking at now was smaller. The only way of loading the coffins was by hand from a hydraulic bier.

  To one side, he saw a computer control desk and a cremator operator wearing heat-resistant gloves and an aluminium apron. There was very little smell, except for the aroma of hot brick and metal from the ovens and the heat exchanger behind them.

  ‘Now, what would you like to know?’ said Lloyd. ‘Would it help if I began with a brief description of the way we operate?’

  ‘Yes, sir. For a start, does the body always stay with the coffin after it arrives here?’

  ‘Without exception. Our code of practice requires the coffin to be placed in the cremator exactly as received. When a coffin arrives in the committal room, it’s labelled with a card that accompanies the body right through until final disposal.’

  ‘How long does that process take?’

  ‘A modern gas-fired cremator can deal with the average body in half an hour.’

  ‘And the ashes?’

  ‘The cremains,’ corrected Lloyd. ‘Well, when they come out of the chamber, they consist mostly of bone residue. Sixty per cent of bone is nonburnable material, so at that stage there’ll be a number of bone fragments.’

  Cooper was shown a cooling tray where bone residue was run under a magnet to sift out wedding rings and scraps of melted jewellery. When Lloyd lifted the lid, the cremated bones inside looked the colour and consistency of meringue – pale grey, granular and brittle. In places, their shape was still visible, but Cooper felt sure they would crumble at a touch.

  They passed through into what Lloyd called the preparation room, where an electric pulverizer was used to reduce the bone fragments to ash. Now the grey material looked more like fine cat litter, the sort that Randy always refused to use.

  ‘From a man, we get an average weight of about seven and a half pounds of bone residue, and from a woman just under six pounds,’ said Lloyd.

  ‘So gender is reduced to a difference in bone structure, in the final analysis?’


  ‘You might put it that way, I suppose.’

  Cooper filed that one away for future reference. It might be something he could point out to Diane Fry at a suitable moment.

  ‘Is it possible for the ashes from two different people to get mixed up, Mr Lloyd?’

  The manager shook his head. ‘Everyone worries about getting the right ashes. They think more than one coffin might be cremated at a time, but that isn’t so. We’re not allowed to do that, and in any case it’s impossible. The cremator will only take one coffin at a time, and the ashes have to be withdrawn before it’s used again.’

  ‘But you have more than one cremator here, don’t you?’

  ‘Two,’ admitted Lloyd. ‘But it isn’t often that both are in use, unless we have a really busy day. We need two so we can still operate when one of them is shut down for maintenance.’

  Cooper looked into the committal room, where the coffins slid through from the chapel on silent rollers.

  ‘And when you do get a busy day,’ he said, ‘the bodies must arrive in here faster than the staff can get them in and out of the cremator.’

  Now Lloyd looked worried. ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘So you must have to store coffins in here for a while before they’re cremated. Cremation doesn’t happen straight after the service, as people imagine?’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘You see, I’ve always pictured the flames waiting behind an oven door that opens as soon as those curtains close. But actually, the coffin probably just gets put on a shelf for a while.’

  ‘Not for long. The code of practice requires cremations to take place on the same day as the service, wherever possible.’

  ‘The same day?’

  Lloyd swallowed. ‘Wherever possible.’

  ‘But you could have bodies stacking up in here all day until you get a chance to clear the backlog?’

  ‘It isn’t like that. Not in a well-managed crematorium.’

  ‘Is there always someone in here?’

  ‘The cremator should never be left unattended.’

  ‘Is that in the code of practice, too?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lloyd stiffly. ‘Is there anything more I can do for you?’

  ‘Two more things,’ said Cooper. ‘First, I’d like details of staff members who have access to the cremation suite.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Going back eighteen months, to the beginning of last March.’

  ‘I’ll need authority from my company’s head office to release personnel information, but we should be able to manage that.’

  ‘Also, I’ll need a list of cremations that took place here on Monday the eighth of March last year.’

  ‘It might take some time to produce the lists. We’re very busy today.’

  ‘You can fax them to me,’ said Cooper. ‘The number is on my card.’

  He paused at the door of the cremation suite and sniffed the air. ‘It’s funny, Mr Lloyd, but I expected more of a smell in here.’

  Lloyd blinked, as if he’d already dismissed Cooper from his mind. ‘There are automatic controls built into the system to maintain a slightly negative pressure in the cremation chamber,’ he said.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means we make sure any unpleasant odours don’t leak out. They’re kept firmly on the inside.’

  Back at the office, Cooper picked up the phone on his desk and rang through to Scenes of Crime. He was in luck for once – Liz Petty answered.

  ‘Liz, is it possible to identify cremated remains using DNA?’ he said.

  ‘Nope. Cremation destroys DNA. The lab can’t get anything usable from cremation remains.’

  ‘That’s a pity.’

  ‘Well, don’t despair, Ben. There’s another possibility.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘One thing the public doesn’t realize about cremation is that teeth stay pretty much intact, even after the bone residue has been pulverized. If you poke about a bit in the urn, you can often find a few teeth, fillings, posts, that sort of thing.’

  Cooper raised an eyebrow. ‘I think that probably counts as one of the things the public doesn’t want to know.’

  ‘I expect you’re right. But it might be useful, eh? You could get some partial dental mapping done. Artificial teeth are more difficult to destroy than natural teeth, so if your deceased person had crowns or bridgework, you might be in luck. Sometimes, it only needs one tooth.’

  ‘Hoping for another match from dental records?’ said Cooper. ‘But I need to get a possible ID first.’

  ‘Of course. But you’ve already trawled through the mispers for that period, haven’t you? When you were trying to ID Audrey Steele’s remains.’

  ‘A lot of good that will do me,’ said Cooper. ‘Skeletonized remains are one thing – at least the experts can come up with information on age, height, gender, racial background. And I was lucky that I got a facial reconstruction done, otherwise Audrey Steele would have remained unidentified. But tell me – how do I go about obtaining a biological identity from a few pounds of bone ash?’

  The list of cremations was the first to come through on the fax machine. Eight names and addresses, complete with details of next of kin and the funeral director responsible for the arrangements. In addition to Audrey Steele, that meant seven more dead people with bereaved families.

  ‘Maybe that was the point,’ said Fry, when Cooper briefed her on his progress.

  ‘What was?’

  ‘Well, somebody was willing to risk Audrey Steele’s remains being identified and traced, weren’t they?’

  ‘It was a very small risk. We were lucky with the reconstruction.’

  ‘Nevertheless, the risk was there. And the only reason I can think of that somebody might take that risk would be if they were convinced it would be impossible for us to identify the second body.’

  ‘It’s not entirely impossible,’ said Cooper. ‘With time, effort and perseverance …’

  ‘Impractical, then,’ said Fry. ‘You know how many missing persons there are on the files, Ben. You have no way of narrowing them down. And there’s always the possibility that it was someone who was never reported missing.’

  Cooper sighed. ‘You’re right. I suppose I might be able to make more progress if I come at it from another angle.’

  Fry leaned back in her chair. ‘And what if there never was another body? You might be approaching this from a false assumption, Ben. The explanation could be something much more prosaic.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, imagine for a moment that something went badly wrong at the crematorium that day, and one or more people took a lot of trouble to cover it up. In other words, a cock-up rather than a conspiracy.’

  ‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘That’s a cock-up and a conspiracy.’

  ‘Whatever. But there might not have been an extra body to dispose of at all. Do you see what I mean?’

  ‘So whose ashes would be in Audrey Steele’s urn?’

  Fry began to warm to her theory. ‘Maybe they just shared out the ashes that they already had. How many other cremations took place that day?’

  ‘Seven.’

  ‘Well, that’s enough, don’t you think? A few ashes from one cremation, a few from another. You’d soon have an extra urn full enough to convince a relative.’

  ‘Ashes from several bodies mixed together?’ said Cooper thoughtfully. ‘Mr Lloyd admitted himself it’s the biggest concern that families have at a cremation.’

  ‘There you go, then. Perhaps he has a guilty conscience.’

  But Cooper shook his head. ‘Hold on, Diane – the computer records show a normal burn time and a normal weight of residue. I’ve got a printout in the file.’

  ‘Are you telling me that computer records can’t be falsified?’

  ‘If you knew what you were doing, I suppose…’

  ‘Well, before you go off looking for a murder victim who never existed, you might want to take a look at those
other cremations,’ said Fry. ‘See if you can track down the ashes and let Forensics do some comparisons. All you need is one match between urns and your body-swap theory goes up in flames.’

  Cooper looked at her to see if she was joking, but she wasn’t. ‘That’s going to take time, Diane.’

  ‘I know. But you don’t need to get anyone’s life story, just their urns – if they still have them.’

  ‘Even so –’

  ‘Ben, it’s preferable to the amount of time and resources that could be wasted if we initiate a futile murder enquiry.’

  ‘All right. I’ll get on to it.’

  ‘Fine.’

  As Fry got up to leave, Cooper asked her: ‘By the way, is there any progress on the Birley enquiry?’

  She nodded. ‘Right now, we’ve got Sandra Birley and her supposed abductor sitting in inter view rooms downstairs.’

  ‘Mrs Birley is alive and well?’

  ‘Very much so. And she has some explaining to do.’

  When Fry had moved out of earshot, Gavin Murfin leaned across the desk. ‘It wasn’t entirely luck that we got an ID for Audrey Steele, though, was it?’ he said. ‘It was your persistence that made the difference, Ben. Most other people would have given up, like Miss wanted you to. She ought to have acknowledged that, at least.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Gavin.’

  Murfin sniffed. ‘You’re too tolerant by half.’

  ‘I can’t be bothered about it now. I’ve got some difficult visits to make.’

  Cooper hoped that eighteen months had been long enough for the bereaved families to come to terms with their loss. He might be about to intrude on their grief in a big way.

  15

  Cooper didn’t need prompting this time before seating himself in one of the low armchairs in Vivien Gill’s sitting room – he’d already seen the blinds separating across the road. The baby seemed to be either sleeping or being looked after somewhere else, because he wasn’t taken through into the kitchen. That didn’t mean he couldn’t smell it, though.

  ‘Mrs Gill, this is a bit difficult,’ he said. ‘But you’re aware that we found your daughter’s remains. The identification has been confirmed from dental records.’