The Dead Place. Stephen Booth
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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.
Cooper laid his photographs alongside the forensic anthropologist’s report. There were also a series of scene photos from Ravensdale. They showed the remains half-concealed by vegetation that had grown up around them, the long bones turning green with moss, like the roots of some exotic tree. When the tangles of bramble and goose grass were cut away, they revealed the skeletal hands folded carefully together, the legs straight, the feet almost touching at the heel, but turned outwards at the toes.
Dr Jamieson had an opinion on the feet. He felt it was only the tugging of scavengers at decomposing flesh that had moved them from their original position. They had been neatly closed together at the moment of death, or some time after.
It was the ‘some time after’ that worried Cooper. The location and position of the body were so carefully chosen that they gave the appearance of ritual. In fact, the foliage winding its way through the bones might even suggest an offering to nature, a human sacrifice that was slowly being claimed by Mother Earth. But that was pure fancy, surely.
He looked up the number and called the anthropologist again. Sometimes, you just had to hope for a bit of luck.
‘Any chance of a cause of death?’ he said.
‘You’re joking.’
‘Nothing at all?’
Dr Jamieson sighed. ‘I’ve looked for signs of any skeletal trauma that might suggest the manner of death, or indeed tell us something about what happened to the body after death.’
‘And?’
‘Nothing. No cut marks, no visible trauma, other than a certain amount of postmortem damage. Some gnawing of the bones at the extremities.’
‘Scavengers,’ Cooper said. ‘Foxes, rats.’
‘Or some kind of bird. We’re missing two of the carpals – the hamate and capitate. If you happen to come across them, one is a cuboid bone with a hooklike process, and one is a bit like a miniature half-carved bust. They’re small, but quite distinctive. We’ve also lost some of the tarsal bones from the left foot, but otherwise the extremities are mostly intact. And of course the hyoid bone is gone.’
‘Why “of course”?’
‘The hyoid is located just above the larynx, where it anchors the muscles of the tongue. It’s the only bone in the body that doesn’t touch any other bone. So when the tissue around it disappears, the hyoid drops away and can be lost completely. You’re lucky to have the incisors, since they have only one root. When the soft tissue decomposes, there’s nothing to hold them in the jaw.’
‘Doctor, isn’t the hyoid bone the one that sometimes gets broken when a victim is strangled?’
‘Yes, that’s correct.’
‘And with skeletonized remains, damage to the hyoid bone might be the only indication we have that the victim died of strangulation?’
‘I shouldn’t really comment on that. But it’s true that, without any soft tissues present, we can only look for trauma. Unless there are signs of fractures or nicks to the bone from knife wounds, the condition of the hyoid might well be crucial to an assessment of the cause of death. But only if the cause was manual strangulation.’
Cooper