Lost Souls by Jenny O'Brien (android e book reader txt) 📕

All he could think about was trying to keep busy, and awake, until the hands of his watch shifted to five. Being stuck in the office meant that he’d have to catch up with Ellie’s disappearance when Gaby got back but there was little he could do about that. Her terse reply to the quick phone call he’d made to her was warning enough of the pressure they were under to find her.

With every available team member taking part in the search, he had the incident room to himself and the temptation was to rest his head in his arms and take a quick forty winks. Instead he took a detour to the most important piece of equipment in the office, the cafetiere, and poured himself a mug, adding a heaped spoonful of sugar for good measure. He didn’t have a sweet tooth but caffeine and sugar were the next best things to the solid seven hours’ sleep that he wouldn’t be getting anytime soon.

He felt guilty at not being involved in the hunt for the girl but, with a dearth of clues, the rest of the team was as stumped as he was as to what could have happened to her. He was partly placated by the fact that a detective had to hang around within shouting distance of the station – it might as well be him and, in the meantime, he could continue working on what was going on at the crematorium.

There were only two secretaries for the whole building to type up victim witness statements and reports but Owen’s near one hundred per cent recall meant that he didn’t have to wait. Opening up the lid of his laptop, he cleaned the dust off the screen with his sleeve and logged on to the system. It didn’t take him more than a few seconds to create a new spreadsheet, his mind working through everything that Martin had told him, fact by gruesome fact.

The obvious answer was that Martin hadn’t cleaned the cremator properly between funerals but that was also the most convenient and Owen had been around too long to settle for the convenient answer. The direction he was leaning towards was murder. What if someone had hit upon a cremator being the ideal method of body disposal? He had to admit that it was a pretty spectacular way of getting rid of clues. They could have been doing it for years. In fact, apart from that slip, it could be viewed as the perfect crime.

Killers usually got caught by being sloppy. They were either seen entering or leaving the scene of the crime or traced because of clues left on or near to the body. If the murderer had found a foolproof way of beating the system, they’d markedly reduce the risk of getting caught. His fingers hovered over the keyboard, his eyes trained on the screen, while he read back over what he’d typed, his mind going off on a tangent. If they’d found the perfect formula for murder, why stop at one victim?

He picked up his mug and, after draining it in one, pushed it to the side. He’d get in touch with the undertaker in charge of yesterday’s cremation and take it from there.

H Prince and Sons funeral directors was situated only a five-minute drive away in a small lane behind Chester Street, which was as good an excuse as any for Owen to shift his bottom off his chair and visit them in person. His reasoning was twofold: the sensitive nature of the inquiry and the lack of impact the caffeine and sugar combo was having on his ability to keep his eyes open. Sitting behind the wheel of his car, he spent a minute to check in with Kate but, apart from a request to pop into the supermarket for a few things on the way home, everything was running as well as could be expected under the circumstances.

H Prince turned out to be Hayley, a diminutive brunette with an attractive face and an overexuberance when it came to the application of make-up. In her mid-to-late thirties or so, Owen could only assume that the sons were a work in progress.

After enduring the heat of the mid-morning sun from inside a stifling car, he welcomed the cool interior of the funeral home and the offer of another coffee, in the vague hope that an extra shot of caffeine was what he needed.

‘Do take a seat, Detective Bates. I’ll be back with you shortly,’ she said, directing him into her office, a room dominated by a large mahogany desk, a couple of easy chairs and a squidgy sofa pushed up against one wall. The thick, mushroom-coloured carpet muffled the sound of her heels as she strolled towards the door, leaving a lingering trace of some perfume he didn’t recognise but thought Kate might like. He hadn’t gotten around to buying her a gift yet but perhaps a bottle of scent might be a nice gesture until he could take her to help him choose something special. He’d learnt the hard way how fussy she was with regards to jewellery. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the necklace he’d bought her, to commemorate the birth of Pip, anywhere apart from in the bottom of her jewellery box.

He was pulled out of his musings by the sight of Mrs Prince pushing the door open with her elbow and, leaping to his feet, he divested her of the tray, which held white bone china cups and saucers and a plate of biscuits.

‘This is very kind of you, Mrs Prince. I’ve never met a detective yet who’s turned down an offer of coffee.’

‘You’re very welcome. My brother’s a copper in Whitstable and I’ve heard, on more than one occasion, what a tough gig it is.’

She joined him on the plain, mushroom-coloured sofa and crossed one ankle over the other, her slim hands neatly folded, a thin yellow