‘There’s been another call.’
‘From the same man?’
‘Sounds like it.’
‘Have you got a trace on it?’
‘What do you think I’m doing?’
Fry folded her arms and waited.
‘Yes?’ shouted Hitchens into the phone. ‘It’s where? OK, yes. I’ve got it. I want units there now. They’re to seal off the area around the payphone, and make sure no one leaves.’ Hitchens listened, raising his eyes to the ceiling. ‘Yes, I realize there’ll be a funeral going on. I’m not asking them to wade in with their batons out and lob CS gas at the mourners. They can be as discreet as they damn well like. They can take flowers and hand out sympathy cards, if they want. But no one leaves until we’ve had a chance to talk to them.’
He slammed down the phone and pulled on his jacket.
‘Not another funeral?’ said Fry.
‘Yes, another funeral,’ said Hitchens. ‘This time, he called from a public payphone in the visitors’ waiting area at Eden Valley Crematorium.’
‘You think our man is actually attending the service?’ said Fry in the car on the way to the crematorium.
‘He’d be conspicuous if he didn’t. Have you ever been to the crem, Diane?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Well, this is quite different from the situation at Wardlow. There’s no way you can give the impression you’re just passing. Our man will have had to drive through the crematorium grounds to the visitors’ car park and then walk up to the chapel entrance. And it’s not as if you could pretend you were visiting the crematorium for some other reason. There’d be other mourners there. They might well notice someone who turned up, then went away again.’
188
‘What if he was making a delivery or something?’
‘A delivery of what?’
‘I don’t know - they must bring in supplies of some kind. Aren’t there offices at the crematorium?’
‘At the back, but there’s a separate entrance. Delivery drivers don’t mingle with the hearses and mourners. You’ll see.’
The public payphone was in a small foyer on the far side of the portecochere from the chapel entrance. Beyond the foyer were toilets and a quiet room containing a book of remembrance.
‘We’ll have to get Forensics to give it the works. If we’re really lucky, they might lift a print to match one from the phone box at Wardlow.’
‘The prints were all very indistinct at Wardlow. No one would be willing to swear to a match. There’s no way they could find enough points of similarity.’
‘We can hope, anyway,’ said Hitchens.
‘The good news,’ said Wayne Abbott when they arrived, ‘is that this payphone has been cleaned more recently than the phone box at Wardlow. So we have fewer prints, less overlay, less smudging. We’ve found a few latents for you already, and we’re dusting the walls for more. We may not be able to match anything up with Wardlow, but some of these prints are clear enough to make an ID if you can produce a suspect.’
‘It always comes back to us, doesn’t it?’
‘Hey, it’s your job to provide the bodies, Inspector. We’re not CSI: Miami, you know. We do our bit, then we go and sit in the van and have a cup of tea while we wait for you blokes to make the arrest. That’s real life, that is.’
‘What funeral was going on here?’ asked Fry.
A PC was standing nearby with a notebook. ‘This was the cremation of a child,’ he said. ‘A thirteen-year-old boy who was killed in a road accident in Chesterfield.’
189
‘Why didn’t they take him to the crematorium at Brimington?’
‘I don’t know, Sergeant. Perhaps Brimington was too busy. Or maybe this one’s cheaper.’
‘Don’t let anybody hear you making remarks like that,’ said Hitchens.
‘Actually, I think it might be a space question,’ said Abbott. ‘This was a big funeral - about two hundred mourners, I’d say. They have a bigger chapel here, and facilities for relaying the service to the waiting room if there’s still an overspill.’
‘OK. Who was the funeral director?’
‘One of the big Chesterfield outfits.’
Fry looked at the mourners waiting in the chapel. This was what the caller wanted. He’d enjoy the thought of the police waiting for a body to turn up; he’d planned to leave them helpless and frustrated. For now, he was in control of the situation. He’d even told them what he was going to do. Soon there will be a killing. Some people really got off on playing God, didn’t they?
Cooper carried the urn into the CID room and put it down on his desk. Gavin Murfin eyed it suspiciously, dipping his hand into a bag of jelly babies hidden in his desk drawer.
‘What have you got there, Ben?’
‘About seven pounds of bone ash.’
Murfin gazed at the urn, chewing reflectively on a jelly baby. ‘Well, while you’ve been out collecting ashes, we’ve had background checks done on the crematorium staff.’
‘Did the list come through from Christopher Lloyd?’
