Standing by his BMW, the professor gave a little bow.
Fry stared out of the window at the streets of Edendale.
‘Lawyers are just the same. Why do these people have to make their jobs sound like some kind of arcane mystery the rest of us couldn’t possibly understand?’
‘Maybe it’s insecurity …’ Cooper paused. ‘Why didn’t you let me listen to the tape of the phone calls before I went to see the professor?’
‘You never asked.’
‘It would have helped a lot. As it was, I only had partial information.’
‘Yes, OK, Ben.’
The BMW closed up behind them as they stopped at the traffic lights before the relief road.
‘Those sarcophagi he showed us,’ said Fry. ‘They’re not even in our target area.’
‘Yes,’ said Cooper. ‘I know.’
Robertson was right about one thing, though. Cooper had seen the watch house built at Bradfield to guard against men who might come by night to dig up freshly buried bodies from the churchyard. And here in Edendale was that massive block of sandstone carved in the shape of a coffin. There was no logical reason for its size and weight, except to prevent access to the grave beneath. And yet the body snatchers had never come to Edendale, or to anywhere else in Derbyshire.
Then Cooper remembered Audrey Steele, and corrected
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himself. Body snatchers had never come to Derbyshire - until now.
MY JOURNAL OF THE DEAD, PHASE TWO
And the biggest unknown is death. We’d rather not think about death at all. We fear our own dead, we believe that corpses pollute the living. To acknowledge death is to accept our own mortality, so the dead have to be hidden away, shielded by rites, prayers and superstitions. Even in death, we fear the final battle with evil. We’re afraid to face our angry gods.
That’s why we’ve produced all our myths and folklore, all our rituals and deceptions. It means the thing we have to face is only a fiction of our own creation, and not the inconceivable reality. We’re like a flock of chickens running around a yard until the day the axe falls on their necks. The only difference between us and the chickens is that we know the axe is there from the start. If you think about that too much, you might start to envy the chickens.
What happens after death is unspoken, and sometimes unspeakable. But we have to see the truth. We can close our mouths and ears, but we can’t avert our eyes. Remember those visions of death that cross your mind as you enter into sleep f Your subconscious is trying to share the knowledge that you deny.
From the Buddhist Sutra on Mindfulness - Nine Cemetery Contemplations:
And further, a bhikkhu sees a body thrown on to the cemetery reduced to disconnected bones, scattered in all directions - here a bone of the hand, there a bone of the foot, a shin bone, a thigh bone, the pelvis, spine and skull. So he applies this perception to his own body thus: ‘Verily, my own body, too, is of the same nature. Such it will become, and will not escape it.’
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13
A manila envelope lay on Ben Cooper’s desk on Friday morning. At first, he didn’t want to touch it. It reminded him too much of the envelopes he saw at the hospital. There were always stacks of them behind the nurses’ station, full of medical records and test results. A manila envelope would contain a patient’s diagnosis and prognosis, a plan for their discharge or their disposal after death, the discreet arrangement of their living and dying, all wrapped up in brown paper.
He got himself a coffee from the machine in the corridor and finally felt able to rip open the sealed flap. The contents slid out on to his desk. Dental records, and it was good news. Or at least, he supposed he ought to consider it good news. He had a confirmed ID for his human remains.
Cooper tried to feel elated as he looked at the photographs of Audrey Steele again. But it seemed very tough on Audrey that she should have ended up like this.
There was a lot of talk these days about the dead speaking from beyond the grave. People usually meant the remarkable amount of forensic evidence that could be collected from a dead body. It was a way that murder victims could help investigators to achieve justice against their killers. But in Audrey’s case, her voice was silent. The examination of her remains
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had revealed nothing useful, as far as he could tell. And how could it, when she’d died of natural causes? Audrey’s mother had the death certificate. Brain haemorrhage, confirmed by a second doctor prior to disposal by cremation.
But that didn’t feel right to Cooper. From the moment he’d seen Suzi Lee’s reconstruction in the Sheffield laboratory, he felt as though he’d been able to hear Audrey Steele speaking to him from the woods at Ravensdale. The fact that she hadn’t told him anything crucial to the enquiry seemed to be his fault, not hers. From now on, he ought to listen a bit more carefully.
A few minutes later, DI Hitchens was rubbing his fingers together thoughtfully as he listened to Cooper run through the available facts.
‘This woman was supposed to have been cremated eighteen months ago?’ he said. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Yes, sir. As far as her family are concerned, she was cremated.’
‘And yet her remains turn up in the woods ten miles from the crematorium. I’ve never heard anything like it, Ben.’
‘There seems to be no doubt she died of natural causes. I’ve got copies of the certificates.’
‘All done properly? Signed by two doctors?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK. Then we’re looking at an offence of unauthorized interference with a body. God knows what the penalty is for that. I’ve never come across a case of this kind before.’
