speaking to the vicar. It’s possible that our murderer used the church grounds to enter the woods at some point. Burying someone alive is a morbid thing to do. We are looking for someone with a thing for graves and the dead, and the graveyard would be a good place to check out. Who is the vicar or priest?’
O’Connor flicked through his notebook. ‘It’s a vicar, Sally Stevens.’
Gina made a note. ‘There’s also this road. I know it’s a back road, but to get the victim and the coffin to this location’ – she pointed – ‘our murderer or murderers would have wanted to park as closely as possible.’ She paced across the room and fixed her gaze on the squad cars parked up in the potholed car park below. A van to the one side caught her eye and a woman stepped out and began to talk into a microphone. Great, the press were about to make their job a whole lot harder. She turned back to the room. ‘Unless, the coffin was placed there beforehand and the victim was lured to this location. It’d be a struggle carrying a dead weight from this position to here.’ Back at the board, she traced a line with her finger from the road to the spot in question. ‘On the other hand, getting a coffin to this location would be tricky too. At the very least there would have to have been two people or one person using some sort of trolley. Wyre, can I task you with looking into how easy it would be to move a box the size of our coffin around? I’m hoping that we will have the weight and dimensions soon. I checked this morning and the crime scene crew are still there and it’s likely to be a long day. After the rainfall last night, they’re also buried up to their knees in mud. Oh, and to top it all off, the press have arrived and I’m sure they going to make a lot of a murder that involves the victim being potentially buried alive in the run up to Halloween.’
Wyre made a few notes. ‘I’ll get onto it, guv.’
‘Also, can you research all the funeral directors within a ten-mile radius, starting with Cleevesford and working outwards? This was a real coffin, not a box knocked together with any old wood – an actual all-singing, all-dancing, fully-lined coffin. Thinking about it, this would rule kids out. Coffins don’t come cheap.’ She paused. ‘I checked my emails this morning and there have been no manufacturer markings found on it yet. I want to know if anything like this has been stolen. O’Connor?’
‘Yes, guv.’ He shook the crumbs from his hands and swallowed the last of his croissant.
‘Continue with the door-to-doors. I know there was a lot of activity with kids hanging around everywhere last night and yesterday, but we need to keep at it. Someone must have seen something. The kids may have seen something. I could be convinced of a lot of things but one thing I’m totally convinced of is that this isn’t the work of a ghost. So someone, somewhere, will have seen something. Whether it’s a car pulling up at the side of the road or someone behaving suspiciously in the woods. When was the grave dug? Someone may have heard this happening or seen our perpetrator walking around with a shovel. Graves don’t just dig themselves, coffins aren’t easily transported into the middle of the woods and the same with bodies or people.’
O’Connor tapped his fingers on the table. ‘There are still a lot of houses to tackle and a fair few businesses.’
Gina leaned over the table and placed both hands flat on it. ‘Right, onto our victim. The basics of his description are in the file. The email that Bernard sent also confirmed that there was no identification on him. We haven’t found a phone on him either. That’s strange in itself. How many people do you really know who don’t carry a phone around with them? We literally have no idea who he is, but someone must be missing a relative. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring but that might not mean much. He could have a partner or children; a mother, siblings, friends.’
Gina thought back to the café and remembered the smell that he brought with him when he entered from the roadside. In her mind he either lived rough or didn’t look after himself. She thought back