A Market for Murder by Rebecca Tope Page A

retained the same name, many ordinary citizens had failed to notice the change of ownership – although Drew and Maggs wasted no opportunity to publicise it. Plants would almost certainly have been called to remove the body from the market square, and take it to the mortuary, the previous day. This would give them an automatic prior claim to handling the funeral, since the family would be directed to them by default. The fact that this was very unlikely to have met with Peter Grafton’s wishes was something that could not be relied on to guarantee the funeral came to Peaceful Repose. Not unless the grieving widow could somehow be alerted to the freedom she had to choose a different undertaker.
    ‘It would be better if we could get Karen to speak to someone who knows the family,’ Drew went on. ‘It would look more … casual.’
    ‘No it wouldn’t,’ Maggs argued, changing her original position. ‘It would look transparently sneaky. How do we know what the chap’s wishes were, anyway? Who says?’
    ‘Well … he’s sort of one of us,’ said Drew lamely. ‘He believed in our sort of thing.’
    ‘Lots of people still think cremation’s the organically correct way of doing things,’ Maggs reminded him.
    ‘True,’ he concurred gloomily.
     
    Den’s restlessness increased as the morning wore on. Knowing there was a murder investigation being conducted just outside his place of work was distracting. Most ex-police officers found their way into private security companies, or occupations of that sort. Some did actually become private detectives, although Den had never encountered such a person. Driven by a vague but insistent desire to ‘work with people’ and to utilise his hard-won skills, the local Social Services office had seemed an obvious point of call.
    The people there had been friendly, and cooperative up to a point, but the rigours of the bureaucracy involved in hiring new personnel meant that for a long time, Den had still not been employed in any officially recognised capacity. He was entered as an ‘anomaly’ in the files, paid as a special one-off payment every month, and given a handful of vaguely defined tasks to perform. The acute sensitivity to the potential for abuse of clients did ensure that references were sought and taken up with immense care, butthat accomplished, Den Cooper was instantly assimilated as one of the ‘support team’, albeit untrained and therefore poorly paid.
    He had quickly discovered that things only happened if he pushed for them, and that it would have been quite feasible to sit in a corner all day, doing almost nothing, and nobody would have felt it incumbent upon them to notice.
    As it was, he developed a strategy of simply putting himself forward for whatever needed to be done. The workforce was overwhelmingly female, a fact that worked in his favour. Regarded as steady, strong, experienced and willing, he tagged along on any procedure that threatened to be unpredictable or particularly untidy. After ten months, someone in personnel showed extraordinary inventiveness by labelling his job as ‘pre-police assessor’.
    ‘That means, you get to work out whether the case needs to be referred to the police, or whether you think we can handle it ourselves. Very useful,’ the woman had explained to him.
    With a proper job description, he was transferred to the permanent payroll, given a rise and his own telephone extension. Apart from that, he carried on exactly as before.
    Sometimes he wondered what in the world he thought he was doing. How could this pretence of a job be preferable to the structure and challengeof the police? As a Detective Sergeant he’d been required to use his brain far more than now. He’d had to collect evidence, conduct interviews, get to know people as intimately as he could, particularly on long investigations. Now he was just a sort of dogsbody, in an artificially created job, surrounded by people who were even more stressed and