‘Oh? Who this time?’
‘The anthropologist that we sent the cremains to for analysis.’
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‘Surely he can’t have produced a report yet, Gavin?’
‘No, just an initial finding that he thought we might want to know about.’
Fry felt her heart sink. ‘What?’
‘Well, apparently he sifted the ashes and found a few teeth.’
‘But that’s what we were hoping for. It gives us the possibility of an identification through dental records, like the one we got for Audrey Steele.’
‘Yes, but that’s what he was so keen to let us know. A bit too keen actually, if you ask me. Cheerful, he was. Like he wanted to rub it in.’
‘Spit it out, Gavin. There aren’t enough teeth left intact for us to use, I suppose?’
‘Plenty of them. The trouble is, these teeth aren’t human.’
Cooper recalled that he had never actually been inside Tom Jarvis’s house. He wondered if he was going to be invited in now, to get out of the wet. But he only got as far as the porch, where a couple of old beech carver chairs stood near a window. From this elevation, he could see a small mound of fresh earth to the side of the house, dark from the continuing rain.
‘Hudson and Slack was already in trouble by then, you know,’ said Jarvis.
‘Financial trouble?’
‘Aye. They couldn’t compete once the Americans starting buying up funeral directors in Derbyshire.’
‘Is that what Melvyn Hudson and Richard Slack fell out about? They did fall out, didn’t they?’
Jarvis nodded. ‘Hudson wanted to compete by being different, selling the firm as local and traditional. He’d worked in the USA, and he knew what the American approach would be.’
‘But Mr Slack?’ ‘He was always the financial brains, so they said. He ran the business side, while Hudson organized the funerals. But
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as soon as things started to look bad, Slack had only one solution - he wanted to sell up.’
‘Sell out to one of the American groups?’
‘He’d already been approached, I reckon. No doubt there would have been a nice back-hander in it for him, if a deal had gone through.’
‘But I suppose his partner wouldn’t agree.’
‘Not likely. Hudson cared about the firm, like his father did. And the way old Abraham Slack did, for that matter. Melvyn said he wouldn’t see Hudson and Slack end up that way.’
‘Was this general knowledge among the staff?’
‘Oh, aye. You can’t keep things like that quiet in a small company. It’s why some of us bailed out, while the going was good, like.’
‘I see.’
‘Hudson kept saying that his father and old man Slack had built the firm up from nothing, and he wasn’t going to throw it away. It was a family business, and it ought to go on for generations. But Richard Slack thought the firm was dying on its feet. Rotting on the branch, he called it. We all knew what he meant by that.’
‘And what did he mean?’
‘Well, how could the business go on for generations? Hudson had lost his own son, and all Slack had left was Vernon. Of course everyone understood what he meant by rotting on the branch. The fruit had died.’
‘I don’t suppose Mr Hudson took that very well.’
‘No. Losing David had hit him very hard. But he knew what Slack said was true, all the same. They had a blazing row after that.’
‘Did they get on well normally?’
‘Not so as you’d notice.’
Jarvis’s dogs emerged from the rain and pattered up the steps on to the porch. They shook themselves vigorously, one
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after another, showering drops of water on the boards. Cooper was just congratulating himself on standing far enough away to avoid being drenched, when two of the dogs brushed themselves against his legs and lay on his feet.
‘They’ve taken a shine to you, for some reason,’ said Jarvis.
Cooper nodded. He could feel the water from the dogs’ coats soaking into his trousers, as if drawn in by a sponge.
‘I gather you didn’t like Richard Slack any more than Mr Hudson did?’ he said.
‘I never could get on with him. Hard-nosed bugger, he was. Ruthless.’
For a moment, Cooper was confused. He wondered why Jarvis was suddenly talking to one of his dogs. Perhaps there had been five of them, after all. Graceless, Feckless, Aimless, Pointless and Ruthless. But no. He meant Richard Slack.
‘The old man always had a bit of a ruthless streak, too, by all accounts,’ said Jarvis.
‘Abraham?’
‘Aye. Richard was a chip off the old block, so to speak. Cared for nothing but money. He thought he could pay his staff peanuts, but it wouldn’t wash with me. I was a craftsman.’
