‘All right. Do you conduct all the funerals here, Mr Hudson?’

‘My wife Barbara does some of them.’

‘And I suppose the fact that the Eden Valley Times stopped printing lists of mourners means your staff no longer collect the names,’ said Fry.

‘That’s correct. We don’t do it as a matter of course any more. Only if a customer specifically asks us to.’

‘And at Wardlow church yesterday?’

Hudson shook his head. He accompanied the gesture with his sympathetic smile, suggesting that he understood her distress, and she had his condolences.

‘No names at all,’ he said. ‘I’m very sorry.’

Back in the CID room after his unexpected trip to the funeral director’s, Ben Cooper wondered why Fry looked so distracted. Worried, even. But whatever was bothering her, at least she had time to take an interest in his forensic reconstruction, shuffling through the photographs he’d brought back from Sheffield.

‘They’re not bad,’ she said. ‘Are we going to get these into the papers?’

‘I delivered them last night. Media Relations have already set it up.’

‘Good. You might get an early result. Have you got any other ideas, Ben?’

‘I thought I might take copies round to show Mr Jarvis.’

‘Who?’

‘The owner of the property nearest to where the remains were found. His name is Tom Jarvis. We don’t know how she ended up down there, but it’s possible Mr Jarvis may have seen her around the place while she was still alive.’

‘No indication of how she died, right?’

‘Not so far.’

Fry handed the photos back. ‘Bear in mind, if it turns out she was killed, this Mr Jarvis might become a suspect.’

‘Of course,’ said Cooper. ‘But in that case, if he denies all knowledge of her now, it could be the thing that catches him out later on.’

‘Forward planning. I like that.’

For a moment, Cooper thought she was going to pat him on the head or give him a gold star. But she began to move away, already thinking about something else. She went back to her desk and began to open a package that had arrived from Ripley, suggesting she’d forgotten about him already. Cooper called across the office.

‘Have you got something interesting on, Diane? The visit to Hudson and Slack this morning – and I heard there was a tape of a call to the Control Room …’

‘It’s probably nothing,’ she said. And she picked up her phone, a sign that the conversation was over.

Cooper laid his photographs alongside the forensic anthropologist’s report. There were also a series of scene photos from Ravensdale. They showed the remains half-concealed by vegetation that had grown up around them, the long bones turning green with moss, like the roots of some exotic tree. When the tangles of bramble and goose grass were cut away, they revealed the skeletal hands folded carefully together, the legs straight, the feet almost touching at the heel, but turned outwards at the toes.

Dr Jamieson had an opinion on the feet. He felt it was only the tugging of scavengers at decomposing flesh that had moved them from their original position. They had been neatly closed together at the moment of death, or some time after.