‘Do they have such a thing as a deluxe cremation?’ he said. ‘What you might call la crème de la crem.’

‘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 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 Cooper, but your unsupported claims of the existence of Heaven would be thrown out of court by any judge.’

‘A Hell, but no Heaven? So you reckon the equation is a bit out of balance, then? How did that happen, Gavin? Some kind of design fault in Creation?’

‘You shouldn’t say things like that,’ said Murfin, wagging a sugar-coated finger. ‘You’ll upset God.’

The phone rang, and Murfin answered it.