Purged

by Peter Laws

  But when he turned there was nothing.

  And he laughed into the empty space like a stressed out, mad person, and put his hands in his pockets to stop them from shaking.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Matt trudged back through the foyer and into the now-empty chapel, feeling embarrassed at how much he’d let Chris get to him. His head throbbed, hard enough to hear the rhythmic pulse of blood through his ears. A lady, probably in her seventies, suddenly creaked out from behind the organ holding a foot-thick music book under her arm. She flipped her other hand outwards and a telescopic walking stick clicked itself into place like an oversized flick knife.

  ‘You’re too late,’ she said, thinking he was a mourner. ‘Mr Keech is already in the oven. But you could pray, I suppose.’

  She turned up the aisle and headed slowly for the door.

  Matt sat on one of the pews for a minute. It was quiet here and it felt like a good place to calm down and get himself together.

  Assessing Chris’s bizarre reaction to the news about Isabel was a helpful distraction from his own hang-ups. But as soon as he started to mentally walk back through Chris’s words, his phone buzzed in his pocket. He grabbed it, eagerly.

  ‘Hi, Matt. You got a minute?’ It was Larry.

  ‘Tell me you have something on those names.’

  ‘Nothing major.’

  ‘What about Chris Kelly? He’s acting seriously weird about all of this. I think he’s hiding something—’

  ‘Are you alone?’

  Matt sat up a little in the pew and looked around. ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘Do you want some advice?’

  Matt waited. ‘Go on.’

  ‘You need to watch yourself.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It’s Miller. My grapevine says he’s asking questions about you.’

  ‘What sort of questions?’

  ‘If you’re trustworthy. What sort of work you do for me. If you have any prior police record.’

  Matt turned to look at the chapel door. It was closed and silent. ‘What are you saying to me?’

  ‘I have a DS friend of mine up there. Works in Oxford. I mentioned your missing women situation.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Are you sitting down?’

  ‘Bloody hell, Larry, just tell me.’

  ‘Miller’s thinking you might have something to do with the missing women.’

  ‘What? Because of a couple of emails? That’s ridiculous. I get a couple of—’

  ‘Look, I’ve known you for years and I know you’re not the type. That’s why I’m giving you the heads-up. But there’s more. My Oxford guy says that in the last hour Miller’s asked for forensics on a fox they found outside your house.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Nicola Knox had anorexia and bulimia.’

  ‘I know that. So?’

  ‘She vomited so many times that the acids apparently rotted her teeth. So she got gold ones put in on the NHS. Two of them, apparently.’

  ‘You’re losing me here. What’s this got to do—’

  ‘They found one of them stuffed down that fox’s throat.’

  The room tilted.

  ‘My guy says they’ve got plier marks on them. Probably ripped out of her head. They haven’t found the other one,’ he sighed. ‘So listen, mate. I hate to say it but if someone really did put that fox on your doorstep then someone is setting you up.’

  Matt hunched forward, eyes closed and sank his head on the pew. ‘This is completely insane.’

  ‘I’ll drive up tomorrow morning, alright? It’s the first I can get there. But I have to let these guys do their thing for now.’

  ‘Holy crap, it must be Chris. It must be him. He got me here through Wren, sent me those emails. Dumped the fox. And you think he might have actually pulled her teeth out, just to plant evidence on me?’

  ‘Well, what other reason would he have to pull them? It obviously wasn’t to sell them.’

  Matt said nothing because he was, for the moment, incapable. His mind was a rally car racing around the facts, skidding past them in the hope they might suddenly make sense.

  ‘I thought you said he liked you,’ Larry said. ‘Why would he frame you?’

  Matt laughed bitterly. ‘I thought he liked me, too.’

  ‘For what it’s worth, up until this I really think Miller trusted you. But now the fox thing’s spooked him. So for now I suggest you find out all you can about Chris at your end. I’ll look up what I can from here. And don’t panic, alright? The truth has a way of coming out.’

  They both stayed silent for a moment, neither of them daring to state the simple fact that there were plenty of cases when the truth stayed permanently and thoroughly buried.

  ‘Just hang in there, mate,’ Larry said, then he was gone.

  Matt sprang to his feet, unsure of what to do, or where to go. And after pacing for a few seconds he found himself, perhaps through old instinct, standing behind the little pulpit with its hymn books and control buttons for the curtains and the coffin rollers.

  He looked up and gazed out desperately at the empty chapel, visualising Nicola, Tabitha and Isabel sitting there, drumming dead fingers on the pews, waiting for him to figure this out.

  Nicola was opening her jaw and pointing a skinny finger into her mouth and the gaps there, where there once was gold.

  And when he looked Tabitha and Nicola in the eyes, he heard his own whisper, ‘How does anyone just disappear?’

  He blinked and the three women faded into nothing.

  He ran his hand through his hair and headed for the chapel door, which led back out to the foyer. It was just as he reached for the handle that he heard a low rumble coming from somewhere. His hand hovered on the metal and he looked back down to the pulpit and to the curtains beyond, to the buttons that Chris Kelly would have pressed only moments ago, to send Reginald Arthur Keech on his final little trip.

  The rumbling started again and he knew if he was to walk to the pavement outside, right now, there’d be white smoke belching out of that chimney. Essence of Keech would be wisping its way, literally fading …

  … into thin air.

  It was as if the three girls had suddenly tapped him on the forehead with a glowing finger and planted a thought there. But in reality he wondered if it had been lurking in his subconscious ever since he’d parked the car here and stared for so long at this building. It was an idea that made him quicken his step.

  Surely not. Can’t be.

  He headed back down the aisle, towards the curtains and tried to work out which door led to the furnace room.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Deep green curtains hung across the back wall of the sanctuary but as he lifted them back he didn’t find some creepy old Wizard of Oz, cranking levers and burning bodies. Just a closed white door that said No Entry. He glanced back over his shoulder. The chapel was still and empty. He held back the heavy material and pushed the handle down. It made a pleasant-sounding click and, rather randomly, made him think of a cassette cover on a very old stereo he used to have. It had opened its mouth for audio tapes with an almost identical klunk-hiss.

  The door swung open to a steep staircase made of old wood. It looked like it might crack apart with each footstep but it didn’t even creak as he hurried down it. This place was built on solid stone. A fire precaution? he wondered. He reached the bottom and noticed that the natural light had faded as he moved under the floor of the chapel. The corridor down here was lit with bare electric bulbs, hanging on chains.

  It was impossibly clammy down here as if the concrete itself was sweating. The rumble of the furnace had become a steady roar. A grimy metal door stood at the end of the short corridor and he noticed that it wasn’t fully shut. Light sparkled in a line around the edge of it.

  He paused, wondered what on earth he was doing, then pushed it open.

  It was a room lined with pipes with a thin layer of dust, all leading
to a huge furnace in the centre like any other heating or boiler room, apart from the corpse lurking in the middle of it. Matt could see a flicker of flames coming through the small circular viewing window at the front.

  Sitting on a high stool and staring through the glass at the burning body was a young man in his early twenties with an industrial mop’s worth of straggly hair: ginger, and wet with sweat. He was wearing dark-blue overalls and had his back to the door. He hadn’t noticed Matt come in.

  ‘Hello,’ Matt called out. Then again, louder. ‘Hello?’

  The man turned and almost slipped off his chair.

  ‘Can we talk?’ Matt asked, nodding at the furnace.

  ‘You can’t come in here.’

  Matt ignored him, moved closer.

  ‘Listen, you can’t be in here. So get out. Like, right now.’

  ‘I’m helping Sergeant Miller with a few things. And I’ve got some questions. What’s your name?’

  The man slowly wiped the back of his hand across his lips with a long streak. The ball of his thumb glistened instantly with sweat. ‘James Talbot.’

  ‘And you run this place?’

  ‘I just work here. Look, can’t this wait? I’m burning someone. He’s almost finished.’

  ‘May I?’ Matt leant over and looked through the reinforced glass. The heat pulsed out from it and flushed his cheeks. Inside was a single roar of flame coming from the ceiling of the furnace. It looked like a huge Bunsen burner, only firing down.

  The flame was scorching into a white heat at the centre, while orange flames roared across the grille. Squinting through the fire he could see the coffin had already completely burnt up. A black skinny lump of bones sat in the centre. Arms and legs had collapsed. He could make out the cranium of the skull, the home of Keech’s personality and his memory. His favourite songs, his secret dreams, his memories of moonlit nights out with the women he loved or hurt or both, the films that made him cry. The totality of the man was in that head shell. But now there were cracks in his skull and each of them was glowing bright orange as the hot flames hollowed it out.

  Some of the bones in the deformed torso were rocking back and forth with the sheer force of the flames, as if Keech’s soul was holding on to it. An angry tenant refusing an eviction notice.

  ‘How much ash is left after a body?’ Matt grabbed another stool. He plonked himself next to James so they were like tennis umpires.

  James said nothing.

  ‘Listen. These questions aren’t optional. I want you to answer them, alright?’

  ‘Sorry. I’m just a bit weirded out hearing a voice out loud down here. These guys aren’t exactly in the mood to chat.’

  As he said that, the arch of Keech’s ribcage, now just a black set of sticks, collapsed in on itself.

  ‘About three and a half litres. You’ve seen the urns they get put in.’ James pushed out his hands to demonstrate the top, bottom and sides of an urn. It looked like he was doing a dance move. ‘Obviously the amount of ash depends on the size of the deceased. You should see a baby in there. That really is something. Barely over a litre of ash left. Sometimes with the premature ones there’s nothing at all, so you’ve got to give the parents an empty urn. You’re not allowed to fill it with anything else, though, so you have to tell them that there’s nothing left. You should see the look on their faces when they hear their kid is all gone.’

  ‘Could someone burn a body in here without your knowledge?’

  Talbot turned in a pivot on his stool. ‘Why on earth would anyone want to do that?’

  ‘Answer the question.’

  ‘Of course they couldn’t. Besides, I’m the only one who can operate the machinery.’

  ‘I see … does anyone else work down here?’

  ‘No. Just me. The actual funeral service part happens upstairs. The undertakers and vicar sort that out. They get organists in. I just lurk around down here and make sure the bodies are fully cremated. I put the ashes in the right tub, then the undertaker puts them in the urn.’

  ‘Do you record how many times the cremator gets used?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would it be possible to tell if it was used more than was recorded?’

  ‘What’s this about?’

  Matt paused. ‘I’m investigating the disappearance of Tabitha Tansy Clarke and Nicola Knox.’

  ‘Oh, them.’ His eyes flashed with a sort of tabloid glee. ‘I heard they’d run off together. Sailed to the Isle of Lesbos as they say.’

  ‘That’s unlikely.’

  ‘So what … you think it’s more likely that they ended up in here? Because I’m telling you that they didn’t. I’d know.’

  ‘You didn’t answer my question. Would it be possible to tell if the cremator was used more than was recorded in your logs?’

  ‘Yes. The gas metre would have a different number. I record those figures religiously. If someone used it when they shouldn’t, the records wouldn’t match.’

  ‘Where are these records?’

  ‘But they do match. They always do.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘They aren’t kept down here any more. They’re upstairs in the office.’

  ‘Then let’s go and have a look—’

  ‘Sorry.’ He slipped off his stool and stood up straight. He looked a hell of a lot bigger on his feet. ‘Are you even a policeman?’

  ‘I work with them. I’m a consultant.’

  He laughed at that. ‘Yeah, well you can’t just waltz into a legitimate business and see private records like that. I watch TV. I know you need a warrant or something.’

  ‘Then I’ve another question.’ Matt paused. ‘What else is left from a body after the cremation?’

  ‘Ash, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously. I mean is there anything else?’

  ‘Only the stuff that makes it through the cremulator.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The cremulator. I’ve always thought that’d make a good American wrestler name. It’s a machine. I sweep up the ashes and put them in the cremulator. It’s got two big stone balls that smash the leftovers up.’ He pointed his fists towards each other and started to hammer them together, making crushing noises with his mouth like a morbid version of that old coffee advert, where people pretend they had a fancy coffee-maker when really it was just instant. He stopped crunching. ‘The cremulator pulverises them. Helps make sure all the bits are ground down. But before I put them in I get the metal bits out with a magnet.’

  Talbot wandered to a shelf and grabbed a blue metal container. It was an old tin of Roses chocolates.

  ‘Check this out.’ He opened it, now excited for some reason.

  The tin was filled with chunks of metal, the melted remnants of rings, hips, even an old pacemaker.

  ‘I throw the bits in here,’ he said. ‘Probably two hundred people in this tin. Fathers, daughters, wives and sons.’

  Matt gave an eager look inside, eyes scanning for something resembling a golden tooth. James must have noticed his sudden staring too. He curled his lip a little in disgust, ‘Er … there aren’t actually any chocolates left in here, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  ‘I’d like to sort through this. With you watching me do it.’

  ‘Why? What are you looking for?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that. Not yet.’

  Talbot looked down as he pressed the lid back on. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Why? What do you do with this stuff?’

  ‘I sell it.’

  Matt just looked at him.

  ‘There’s a precious metal refiner who buys the stuff off me, once a year. It’s a little bit of pocket money.’

  ‘And that’s legal?’

  ‘’Course it is. Post cremation this stuff doesn’t legally belong to anyone. It’s fine. So you needn’t look at me like that.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Matt sighed and watched Talbot place the Roses tin back on the shelf. When he turned back round, Matt asked the que
stion he’d been brewing up to for the entire time he was down here. ‘Who else has access to this part of the building, and to the furnace specifically?’

  ‘Well, we have a few keyholders, but—’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Me. Phyliss Bainbridge, the organist. But she’d never come down here. Chris Kelly, obviously.’

  ‘Come to the crematorium often, does he?’

  ‘When people die, he does.’

  ‘And does he ever come down here? Has he ever asked you questions about all of this?’

  ‘Not that I recall. Only a proper weirdo would creep down here and do that …’ Talbot’s eyes started to narrow. ‘What did you say your name was again? Why are you so interested in cremation?’

  A bead of sweat wriggled itself down Matt’s face and he wiped it with his fingertip. ‘But Chris would have access to this place, yes?’

  Talbot gave a weak nod, but his frown was growing. A little glance to the door.

  Matt slipped off the stool. ‘Well, thank you for your help. I’ll go now.’ Before heading for the door Matt scanned the room one last time. There was a row of fire extinguishers and an old metal table with a kettle, a tea-stained cup on it and an open copy of Auto Trader on it. A packed toolbox sat on the floor with a dirty blue rag hanging out of it.

  As Matt was leaving he noticed something above the door, leading out. A wooden cross. Skinny and low-tech. Pretty much just two strips of balsa wood hammered together with a nail in the join. The lights smeared their ominous shadows up towards the ceiling.

  ‘So you’re a churchgoer, James?’

  ‘Of course I am. Aren’t you?’

  ‘And you go to Kingdom Come, I take it?’

  ‘Where else?’

  Suddenly, the rumble of the cremator started to dissipate and the room fell into an unsettling hush. Matt glanced into the viewing window again and saw that there was hardly anything left now. He shook his head, amazed at the efficiency of it.

  ‘Pretty much everyone gets cremated these days,’ James muttered. He turned some levers on the side of the cremator to help cool it down. ‘It’s cos all the green places are shrinking. No more room to plant full-sized folk in the ground. But not me. I’m getting buried.’