06.The Dead Place Read online

  ‘We’re going to visit a few people at home. If any of them were involved in what happened to Audrey Steele, we’re going to make them feel a little bit more uneasy.’

  Fry saw straight away that Christopher Lloyd’s home was a modern detached house that was pretending not to be. Cooper turned the car between two carriage lamps on to a cobbled parking area, and they came to a halt near an imitation village pump. It was Mrs Lloyd who let them in and led them through the house.

  ‘Naturally, it’s all reproduction,’ she said. ‘But it’s very well done, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes, very convincing, madam.’

  ‘It’s a great advantage to have something that looks old, but is actually new. You don’t have the same maintenance problems.’ She laughed. ‘Not to mention the insurance premiums.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And if an item gets damaged, you can simply replace it with a new reproduction, and it’ll look just as old as the original did.’ Mrs Lloyd beamed proudly at them. ‘The house itself is period style, so it’s very appropriate.’

  Period style? Fry wondered briefly what that meant. Probably whatever you wanted it to mean. Despite the coffee table and the TV in the corner, there was something about the mock Victorian mantelpiece and tiled fireplace, the framed hunting prints and the mustard colour of the walls below the dado rail that made her feel she was in the back room of a pub.

  Christopher Lloyd himself was outside, sitting on a stone slab at the edge of an ornamental pond. In the background, water gushed from the mouth of a large ceramic frog. Fry had vague memories of a foster family in Halesowen who’d kept fish, and had given her the job of feeding them for a while. In this pond, she recognized several red-blotched koi carp and a few tench scavenging on the bottom. There was also a single, paler fish about two feet long, which she thought might be an albino sturgeon.

  ‘I hope the records I had faxed to you were what you needed,’ said Lloyd.

  ‘Very helpful, sir.’

  ‘So you’ll understand that our procedures at Eden Valley Crematorium are beyond reproach. Nothing can go wrong in our system. Nothing did in this case.’

  Cooper and Fry stood by the side of the pool, drawn by their reflections and by the sight of the albino fish ghosting through the water. A few feet away, it broke the surface, and Fry glimpsed a long snout and dead eyes.

  ‘Are you interested in fish?’ asked Lloyd.

  ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I was just being a police officer and wondering how much they’re worth. We’ve had some thefts of koi carp reported recently, and I was surprised at the value claimed for them by their owners.’

  Lloyd grunted. ‘The real enthusiasts pay thousands and thousands of pounds for koi. Some of them fly out to Japan to buy direct from the breeders. I can’t see the point in it myself. These fish didn’t cost anything like that. The sturgeon is worth a couple of hundred, perhaps.’

  ‘An albino, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lloyd. ‘But unfortunately the albinos don’t like direct sunlight. They’re dusk-to-dawn creatures, and much prefer the dark.’

  Fry glanced at him. ‘I know quite a lot of people like that.’

  ‘I’m sure you do. In a way, a police officer is a bit of a fisherman, I suppose. You know where the fish are, but you can only catch them when they come to the surface.’

  ‘That’s an interesting comment, sir.’

  Lloyd laughed. ‘I think I read it in a novel once.’

  Fry shivered involuntarily.

  ‘Perhaps it’s getting a bit cool out here,’ said Lloyd. ‘Come into the house. Have a cup of tea or something.’

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Fry. She didn’t intend to get too friendly with Christopher Lloyd, but wanted him to feel uncomfortable if possible. Lloyd seemed to read the message, too.

  ‘You want me to tell you I was involved in this business in some way, don’t you?’ he said.

  ‘We don’t want you to tell us anything unless it’s true, sir.’

  Fry turned away from the fish pond and leaned towards Lloyd, until she was close enough to smell the dampness and decay from the weeds he’d been pulling out of the water.

  Lloyd shook his head. ‘I think this may be the point where I insist that I’m not saying anything else until I have a solicitor present.’

  ‘Certainly, sir. In that case, we’ll ask you to come with us to the police station, and we’ll wait there for your solicitor to arrive. We must follow procedure, mustn’t we? No matter how embarrassing and inconvenient some of us may find it.’

  She watched Lloyd swallow nervously and glance towards the house. ‘I didn’t … I wasn’t involved in anything. Not really.’

  ‘So what did you do? Really?’

  Lloyd gulped again. ‘I told a lie. I was asked by a friend to tell a lie to help him out, and I did it. That’s all.’

  ‘All?’ said Fry. ‘There’s a great deal more to it than that, isn’t there, sir?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just did what I was asked. No more than that.’

  Fry glanced at Cooper. He hadn’t taken his eyes off Lloyd while she’d been talking to him. If he’d been following her line of thought, he should be ready with the next question, the one that would unsettle Lloyd that little bit more.

  ‘This friend that you told the lie for, sir,’ said Cooper. ‘That would have been Melvyn Hudson, I expect?’

  Lloyd’s eyes flicked nervously to Cooper, and back to Fry again. He wasn’t sure now which of them to worry about most.

  ‘If you’re thinking of lying again, sir,’ said Fry, ‘I would strongly advise against it.’

  He looked down at the water of the pond for a few moments, then at the house. Whatever he was thinking, it was making him uncomfortable. Then a calculating look came into Lloyd’s eyes. He turned his head away towards the water, trying to avoid Cooper seeing his face. But Fry was on the other side of him, and she saw it.

  ‘Actually, it wasn’t Melvyn, it was Richard Slack,’ he said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘He wanted me to sign some paperwork. He said there had been a bit of an administrative mix-up at the firm, and he thought I’d be willing to help him out.’

  ‘And did you?’

  Lloyd shook his head. ‘Normally, I would have helped him out. Richard was a friend, and we should be able to feel we can call on each other. But this would have been highly irregular. The rules are very strict on the documentation. He put me in an embarrassing situation, and I had no option but to refuse. I could have lost my job.’

  ‘What exactly did he want you to do?’

  ‘He wanted me to sign off a job without the disposal certificate.’

  ‘Is that the certificate that’s issued by the registrar?’

  ‘Yes. We can’t do a disposal without the formal authorization. It’s the funeral director’s job to make sure it’s presented. Richard said it had been lost. He tried to blame Melvyn, actually, but I’m not sure I believed that.’

  ‘And you refused?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘So the cremation couldn’t go ahead?’ asked Fry.

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘What happened to the funeral, then?’

  ‘There wasn’t one. Well, not as far as I was concerned. I don’t know how it was resolved, and I didn’t ask. In any case, I understood there wasn’t to be a funeral service in our chapel, just the cremation.’

  ‘I don’t understand. No funeral service?’

  ‘It isn’t all that unusual. Sometimes the family don’t want to come to the crematorium. They have the service elsewhere, then the funeral director conveys the coffin for cremation.’

  ‘In that case, there would be no one to witness the arrival of the coffin?’

  ‘Just the driver of the hearse, and perhaps a colleague to help deliver the coffin. It comes straight into the cremation suite, in that case. But we still need the paperwork, obviously.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now
and then we have a job where there’s no service of any kind. No family, no mourners. Those are the homeless people, the sad cases where someone has died and their identity can’t be established, or where no relatives can be traced. The local authority meets the cost of those disposals. Everyone is entitled to proper disposal.’

  Fry looked at Cooper. It was his turn.

  ‘Mr Lloyd, do you remember the name of the person Richard Slack wanted you to sign the documentation for?’

  ‘No, he never told me that. And I didn’t ask.’

  ‘There was a lot you didn’t ask.’

  ‘Sometimes that’s the best way.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you have reported this incident to someone, if you were being completely scrupulous?’

  Lloyd sighed. ‘It was very difficult. But Richard was a friend, as I said. I suppose I thought that if I didn’t co-operate with his scheme, he would have to do the right thing and take the blame. I know it’s a problem for a funeral director to get a bad reputation, but he must have bitten the bullet and owned up.’

  ‘When was this exactly?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘Well, I’m not sure, but it can’t have been many weeks before Richard died.’

  Fry closed her notebook. ‘Thank you, sir. You’ve been quite helpful.’

  Before they left, she looked into the pond for a last glimpse of the pale fish, but it was being too elusive.

  ‘I wish I could afford to breed these sturgeon,’ said Lloyd. ‘Somebody told me their eggs are where Iranian Imperial Caviar comes from. That’s the caviar with a golden colour, not black like the Russian stuff.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  Lloyd leaned over the water and stretched out a hand. Fry thought at first that he was reaching to scoop out one of the fish. But instead he skimmed a handful of dead leaves off the surface and flicked them on to the stone paving.

  ‘I’ll need to net the pond soon. You mustn’t let leaves lie on the water in the autumn. When they decompose, the oxygen level drops, and your fish die.’ He looked at Fry as he stood up. ‘It would be a stupid way to lose your fish, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘What do you think, Diane?’ asked Cooper, on the way to the Hudsons’ home. ‘Is Christopher Lloyd telling the truth?’

  ‘I think it’s very convenient for him that Richard Slack is dead. He’s useful for taking the blame, isn’t he?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, what if Mr Lloyd was telling us part of the truth, but not quite all? What if it was Melvyn Hudson who approached him, not Richard Slack? By telling us that story, he might be hoping we don’t question Hudson too closely about it.’

  ‘But it was Richard Slack who was his friend, not Hudson.’

  ‘Was it? That’s only what Lloyd tells us.’

  ‘And if it was Melvyn, then…’

  ‘Then Lloyd might actually have agreed to sign off the job. He could be hoping to put us off the scent by shifting attention to Richard Slack.’

  Cooper nodded. ‘You know the other thing that’s worrying me about what Lloyd said?’

  ‘The cremations that take place without a service in the crematorium chapel?’ guessed Fry.

  ‘Right. There must be a period of time when the coffin is in the sole charge of a couple of funeral director’s men, en route between the church and the crem.’

  ‘Giving them the chance to swap the body?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘What about Audrey Steele’s funeral? Was it at the crematorium chapel?’

  Cooper thought back to his interview with Vivien Gill. ‘You know, I don’t think her mother ever said. And I never thought to ask.’

  ‘You’d better ask her, then.’

  ‘Won’t a detail like that be in the records we took from Hudson and Slack?’

  Fry looked at him. ‘You’d still better ask her.’

  The Hudsons had a marble fireplace, but no fire. They had brass candle holders without any candles. And they had pine bookshelves, but very few real books nestling among the ivory paperweights and Chinese vases.

  The house reminded Cooper of a flat he’d once visited in North London. The place had belonged to a friend of a friend, someone who worked in the hotel business. As soon as he walked in, he’d found himself open-mouthed with astonishment at the size of the kitchen. It had been tiny – even smaller than the bathroom. Big enough to brew coffee and make toast in, perhaps, or to heat something in the microwave. But far too small to cook a proper meal. To Cooper, it hadn’t been a kitchen at all, but some other room that no one had thought of a name for yet.

  Barbara Hudson was in jeans and a sweatshirt, with her hair loose, and she couldn’t have looked less like a funeral director.

  ‘Do you need me?’ she said. ‘If not, I’ve got things to do.’

  ‘We’ll let you know, Mrs Hudson.’

  She disappeared and left them waiting in the hall. Cooper noticed a large, ornate mirror hanging at the foot of the stairs. It was in an odd position, not where you’d readily see yourself in it. He stooped to look at the edges of the glass. There were no fingerprints, not a single smear or smudge. It had either been polished to within an inch of its life, or just never used. He wondered if this was the sort of mirror that stood reflecting life silently to itself, like a camera without a subject.

  Cooper straightened up, and found Melvyn Hudson standing in the doorway. He ushered them in silently, with a practised gesture of his right hand, as if inviting them to view the deceased. In his case, the casual clothes didn’t seem to make any difference.

  ‘Mr Hudson,’ said Fry, ‘we’ve been talking to Christopher Lloyd, the manager of Eden Valley Crematorium. You know him?’

  ‘Of course. Well, in the way of business, you know.’

  ‘He tells us that your partner, Richard Slack, asked him to do something illegal, but he refused. Do you know anything about that?’

  ‘No. I have no idea what Lloyd means. But Richard knew him better than I do. They were both members of the Rotary Club.’

  ‘This would have been shortly before Mr Slack was killed in the road accident.’

  ‘Yes, that was last May.’

  ‘How exactly did the accident happen?’

  ‘He ran off the road late one night, on his way to do a removal. There was an inquest, so you can read all about it, if you want to.’

  ‘He was alone at the time?’

  ‘So it seems.’

  On the surface, Hudson seemed composed and relaxed. But the look in his eyes didn’t match either his voice or his manner. It was more difficult to control the expression in the eyes. Ben wondered if Fry had noticed it.

  ‘Where were you at the time, sir?’ asked Fry.

  ‘Here at home, with my family. Why do you ask?’

  A door closed somewhere in the house, and Hudson seized on the distraction.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘That will be my daughter. I must have a word with her.’

  ‘He’s going to lie to us,’ said Fry when Hudson left the room. ‘Just like Christopher Lloyd did. But he’s buying a bit of time to decide on his story.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Probe him. But gently.’

  ‘You want me to do it, Diane?’

  ‘He’ll take it better from you.’

  ‘OK.’

  But it wasn’t Melvyn Hudson who came through the door. A dark-haired woman of about thirty hovered on the threshold.

  ‘Hello. Dad asked me to tell you that he’s just had an urgent call. He’ll be back in a few minutes. Can I get you anything while you’re waiting?’

  ‘No, but you can stay and talk to us,’ said Fry.

  ‘Oh, well, I’m not sure Dad would like that.’

  ‘Sorry, your name is …?’

  ‘Natalie.’

  ‘Do you work with your father?’

  ‘No, I’m an aerobics instructor.’

  ‘You’re not interested in the family business, Miss Hudson?’

  Natalie shuddered. ‘Cer
tainly not. The very thought!’

  ‘And there’s no son to follow in your father’s footsteps?’

  The woman hesitated. She took out a packet of cigarettes and lit one, not bothering to ask whether they minded, or to offer them one. It was her home, after all. She could do what she liked. But Cooper noticed her fingers trembling slightly as she used the lighter and took the first drag of nicotine into her lungs.

  ‘There was a son,’ she said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘David. My younger brother. He would have followed in Daddy’s footsteps, all right. That’s exactly what he was born for. It was all planned out.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He was killed.’

  ‘Do you mean he was killed, or that he died in some other way?’

  ‘He was abroad, travelling in Indonesia,’ said Natalie. ‘They think it was bandits. A robbery that went wrong – that’s what you’d call it here, isn’t it? But I’m not sure it would apply to David’s death. I think they probably intended to kill him. He was twenty-two.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘The worst thing was that he liked to send postcards from wherever he got to. David thought in images, and he always chose the picture carefully when he sent one. His postcards took a long time to arrive from the countries he visited. They kept arriving for weeks after David died. They were postcards from a dead person. At first, it was wonderful, and I cried to think that he was still communicating with me. It was as if he was still out there somewhere, thinking about me. But then I began to pray for them to stop. I think we all did. We needed an ending.’

  ‘How long ago did this happen?’

  ‘Ten years, four months. Dad was devastated when it happened. For a long time, we thought the loss would kill him. That’s the phrase everybody used: “The loss will kill him.” Ironic, really, for a man who spends his life dealing with other people’s grief. The consummate professional. The person to call on in your hour of need.’

  Natalie’s voice had become more bitter. When she blew out a cloud of cigarette smoke, her mouth was twisted into a sardonic smile.

  ‘The truth comes out at times like that, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘Dad made no secret of the fact that he thought the wrong child had died.’

  Natalie released more smoke and watched it drift in a lazy cloud before dissipating in the breeze from the open window.