‘It did. They’re all clean, apart from one who had a couple of minor convictions for taking without consent when he was a teenager.’
‘Taking cars without consent, presumably, rather than bodies.’
‘Yes, I think you can presume that. Also, I found this - a
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job advert for a crematorium technician with one of the local councils. You know, those blokes are pretty badly paid. A lot of people wouldn’t leave the house for this sort of salary, let alone deal with dead bodies all day.’
Bereavement Services are looking for a self-motivated and enthusiastic individual to work alongside our experienced team of cremator operators. The successful applicant will perform cremations in accordance with the Code of Cremation Practice, and will undertake chapel attendant duties, ensuring that services are conducted in a dignified, orderly and caring manner. Applicants must be willing to undertake the Cremator Technicians Training Scheme.
‘But this is a vacancy at a local authority crematorium,’ said Cooper. ‘Maybe operators in the private sector earn better money.’
‘I doubt it. No qualifications needed, you see. There aren’t many jobs like that these days. The sort of job a kid could go into straight from school, with no A levels.’
‘What’s this Cremator Technicians Training Scheme, then?’
‘On-the-job training, like. You learn the ropes from your workmates as you go along. Maybe there’s some kind of NVQ you can get.’
Cooper tried to picture the sort of teenager who’d want to leave school after his GCSEs and become a crematorium technician. There must be some, but he didn’t think he’d ever met any. A career spent burning dead bodies wasn’t one he’d ever heard recommended by a career advisor at High Peak College.
He studied the advert again. ‘It looks as though the cremator operators are the same people who act as chapel attendants. I never realized that. I always thought the men in black coats were the undertaker’s people.’
Murfin took a sniff of his coffee and put it down on his
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desk, where it joined two more cups half-full of cold, scummy liquid.
The, too.’
‘That’s a bit tough, isn’t it? I mean, you might get used to the burning part. The bodies would mean nothing, after a while. It would be just a way of earning a living. But before you do the cremation, they make you mingle with the bereaved family …’
‘What are you getting at, Ben?’
‘It seems to me that would make the job quite different. Much more human. It’s the human aspects that are most difficult to deal with.’
‘I know what you mean,’ said Murfin. ‘I’d much rather view a dead body at a murder scene than break the news to the victim’s family.’
‘Exactly. People find emotions in others difficult to deal with. You never know how they’re going to react, whether they’re going to burst into tears at the wrong word. It would make you see a crematorium job quite differently.’
Now an image was starting to form in Cooper’s mind of that elusive school leaver. He saw a tall youth with bad skin, awkward in a black suit that was two sizes too big for him. A bright enough lad, but lacking in confidence and social skills, frightened of other people and their unpredictable emotions. He would be acutely embarrassed among strangers, averting his face and refusing to make eye contact. But the awkwardness would drop from him like a cloak when he found some task that interested him, something he could do well.
‘You know this crematorium,’ said Murfin, taking the bag of jelly babies from his desk and peering inside to see what was left.
‘Yes, Gavin?’
‘Do they have such a thing as a deluxe cremation?’ he said. ‘What you might call la creme de la crem.”
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That’s not funny, Gavin.’
Cooper called up his list of missing persons from eighteen months previously. He’d already eliminated those who’d turned up in the meantime, either dead or alive. He didn’t have many names left to play with. Seven, in fact. And that was a good thing, he supposed.
His favourite possibility was a woman from Middleton who had failed to collect her seven-year-old from school one day and hadn’t been seen since. Two years she’d been gone now, and there had been no confirmed sightings of her, nor any communication with the family, or so they said. The husband had been looked into fairly thoroughly at the time. There were no indications of depression or any problems in her life that might have caused her to do a runner or harm herself. The difficulty was that she’d already been missing for six months before Audrey Steele’s funeral. Where could she have been during that time?
The other mispers belonged to different age groups from Audrey, and all but one were male. Not that it made any difference. The cremator made no distinction between genders, except for the amount of bone ash that came out of the pulverizer. Perhaps he should be looking at them by weight rather than by age or gender, and getting an estimate of their bone mass. There were no other clues to follow, as far as he could see.
Losing concentration, Cooper looked across the desk at Murfin. He was calculating his back time. He always kept a careful record in his diary of how many days and hours he was owed. Not that he ever made any attempt to take the time off - he just enjoyed complaining about it.
‘Do you believe in Heaven and Hell, Gavin?’ asked Cooper.
Murfin didn’t look up. ‘Have a jelly baby, Ben. It’ll make you feel better.’
‘No, seriously.’
‘What, you mean like the stuff they teach the kids in Sunday
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school? A lot of flames, and devils with toasting forks? Eternal damnation for having naughty thoughts?’
‘Well, any sort of Hell you like, Gavin. And any sort of Heaven, too.’
Murfin chewed for a minute and wiped some white dust off his hands from the bag of sweets.
‘The former I believe in,’ he said. ‘But I’ve never seen any evidence of the latter. I’m sorry, Detective Constable
