A Market for Murder by Rebecca Tope

defended Cooper, as he always did. ‘He’s not afraid to get his hands dirty, and see if he can do his bit for justice, like the rest of us. Why are you always so down on him?’
    ‘I’m not,’ she snapped. ‘I just don’t see what you and Maggs obviously do. I think he’s wasting his time, when he could be making so much more of himself, that’s all.’
    ‘You sound like his mother.’
    ‘We don’t know his mother.’
    ‘No, I mean, you’re saying the sort of things a mother would say. How did we get onto this, anyway? I’ve got to open the office. Maggs isn’t here yet. We’ve got Miss Lincoln at two, and the grave’s not dug yet.’
    When he and Maggs had started out on Peaceful Repose, they’d had a gravedigger working with them. When he had left, in a certain amount of disgrace, they’d persuaded themselves that they could do without a replacement. Drew would dig the graves. Unlike those in churchyards and municipal cemeteries, his were barely four feet deep, and the ground was generally soft. It took a surprisingly short length of time. But when it was raining, like today, he rather regretted his failure to delegate the job.
    Maggs arrived two minutes after he opened up the office, very apologetic. ‘The car wouldn’t start,’ she explained. ‘It doesn’t like wet weather.’
    ‘You’ve still got the bike, haven’t you?’ Maggs had been renowned locally as being the girl on the motorbike, until she met Den and started to travel by car instead.
    ‘The bike?’ She blinked. ‘Yes – but it’s not taxed any more. Maybe I’ll use it again this summer, though.’ She turned wistful. ‘I liked the bike.’
    ‘It had its uses,’ Drew agreed. ‘But I suppose people grow out of things.’
    ‘I haven’t grown out of it. I just like to ride with Den now. We talk in the car. It’s nice.’
    ‘I’m sure it is,’ he said, trying to placate her.
    ‘Miss Lincoln at two, then,’ she went on briskly. ‘Better get digging. I’ve marked the spot.’
    ‘So I see. What’re you doing today?’
    ‘Chasing up the late payers. Chasing up the printers about those leaflets. Maybe phoning Gary to see if there’s any word from the mortuary on the Grafton bloke …’
    ‘Too soon for that,’ Drew interrupted her. ‘Much too soon. And insensitive, probably. We have to wait till the wife or someone calls us.’
    ‘No, Drew.’ She was firm. ‘We might let himslip through our fingers if we don’t stake our claim. We know he’d want to be buried here, but maybe he never said anything to his wife. If I call Gary, and he says something to Stanley while they’re doing the post-mortem, it’ll all help to sow the seed. Stanley’ll be seeing the family as soon as they’ve finished. It could be any time now, come to that.’
    Post-mortems mostly took place in the early morning, and even a murder victim was unlikely to have necessitated the summoning of the pathologist from his normal afternoon routine the previous day. Particularly since the cause of death in this instance was hardly a topic for much deliberation. Anyone could see that the severance of the man’s windpipe and cervical vertebrae, along with the carotid artery for good measure, would lead to rapid death.
    Gary was the mortuary attendant at the Royal Victoria Hospital, and Stanley the Coroner’s Officer – liaising between police and the dead person’s family. An inquest would be quickly opened, and then adjourned, pending further police enquiries into what exactly happened to the unfortunate Peter Grafton.
    Drew had some years of experience of this routine, and the individuals involved. The delicate business of contacting specific undertakers at the time of a sudden death wasfraught with competition and ill feeling. Three years earlier, the main Bradbourne funeral director, run by a certain Daphne Plant, had sold out to the multinational conglomerate known as SCI, and had accordingly become a very slick operation. Since Plant & Son