Human Remains

think you need to be talking to Media Services, don’t you, rather than me?’
    ‘I tried Media Services; I know that’s how it’s supposed to be done. They had no knowledge of it at all. Either that, or they just didn’t want to talk about it.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘You may not realise this, but your organisation’s media relations policy is pretty restrictive. They only tell you things they want you to hear. Which isn’t very much.’
    ‘Oh,’ I said.
    ‘I went to school with Ryan Frost. Andrew Frost is his dad. I see Ryan all the time – we still go out some weekends. Last Saturday I was round his house and Ryan’s dad – sorry, I find it really hard to think of him as Andrew – was there, so I asked him about the bodies. I’ve been looking at it for a while, in fact. I did a Freedom of Information request to get the numbers, talked to the Coroner’s Office as well.’
    I looked at him. He was flushed, leaning across the table towards me. Excited about it all.
    ‘How many did you find?’ I asked him. ‘I haven’t seen today’s paper.’
    ‘Nineteen,’ he said.
    ‘I found twenty-four, including the one last week.’
    ‘This is bad,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think this is really bad? All those people. There has to be something linking them.’
    ‘That’s what I keep looking for, but I haven’t found it yet.’
    ‘I mean, they’re all so different – different ages, different social backgrounds, family, no family. I can’t find anything about them that’s similar.’
    ‘I thought it might be something medical. I wondered if they were all at the same doctor’s surgery, or they’d all been seen at the hospital, or they’d – I don’t know – engaged with Social Services, or something.’
    ‘Have you heard of the
hikikomori
?’
    ‘No, what’s that?’ I said.
    ‘It’s a phenomenon in Japan. A whole section of society – usually teenagers, specifically male teenagers, withdrawing. They shut themselves up in their rooms and don’t come out for years.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Lots of theories, but nobody really knows. They reckon it might be a backlash against the high-pressure educational system in Japan. These kids are generally high-functioning, wealthy backgrounds, stable home life – no apparent reason why they should want to rebel. It’s like they just give up on life. But there are so many of them now that they’ve actually given it a name. Estimates vary as to how many of them there are, but it’s probably somewhere around three million. Out of a population of 127 million.’
    ‘But they don’t stay in their rooms till they die?’
    ‘Usually their families keep feeding them, or they go out in the middle of the night to a
konbini
– a sort of convenience store. But it’s the choice they make that intrigues me.’ He took a drink from his coffee, which was growing cold on the table in front of him. I’d finished mine, drunk it in a couple of gulps.
    ‘The choice to withdraw?’
    ‘Yes. The choice to withdraw – for whatever reason. Maybe apathy, or as an act of rebellion. Maybe our cases are similar.’
    ‘Rebellion against what, though?’
    ‘I don’t know. It might just be a side effect of the recession: economic meltdown, depression, despair. Or else it’s something in our society they don’t want to engage with. Which is why you might be right to look at public services, the medical system, Social Services, that type of thing.’
    ‘I can’t get access to all that,’ I said. ‘I’ve tried.’
    ‘Isn’t there anything on the case files?’
    ‘There aren’t any case files, that’s the problem. These aren’t murders. They aren’t even, for the most part, suspicious deaths. They are just people who have died. Once they’ve been collected by the funeral directors they’re no longer a police matter. The families, if we can find them, are informed, and that’s the end of our involvement in it. Nothing is recorded – there’s no point. For the people who do have families, I have next to no information at all – it’s only the ones who are unclaimed that still remain of interest.’
    He was leaning forward in his seat, frowning. Listening.
    ‘You know it was me who found Shelley Burton?’
    ‘Really? I didn’t know that.’
    ‘I live next door to her. I could smell something. I thought the house was empty, but she was in there the whole time.’
    ‘That must have been a very traumatic thing to see,’ he said.
    ‘It was horrible. She was