‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything.’
She drank her gin, ice clacking against her teeth, the lime sharp on her lips. ‘And why did you say you were coming to see me?’
‘To say sorry. I was a dick on the phone the other night. You and Hannah are going through a hard time, I should’ve been more supportive.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I think it’s great you’re helping Dorothy, she must love having you close.’
‘I hope so.’
‘How is she coping?’
The truth was Jenny didn’t know how her mum was coping. The business with the money and Dad’s lies, and the Lawrence woman, what was that? A diversion, something to focus on that wasn’t Jim’s death, or was it a real mystery to be solved? And the Glassman case, just another diversion? Maybe life is just a succession of diversion tactics, moments to keep you busy, stop you thinking about the big stuff. But death brings the big stuff into focus.
‘She’s OK, considering.’
‘And you?’
‘Fine.’
‘And Hannah?’
Jenny spotted two women Hannah’s age at a nearby table. They looked Scandinavian, good bone structure, blonde hair, tanned skin. She was aware Craig hadn’t looked at them, not even a glance. Was he deliberately not looking or had he really not noticed? She was annoyed at herself for noticing he hadn’t noticed, which made her smile.
‘Hannah is more sorted than any of us,’ she said.
‘True dat.’ Craig’s tone was self-mocking, using a phrase too young for him. There was so much history between Craig and Jenny, so many in-jokes, insignificant knowledge that no one else shared with her. That was the worst thing about divorce, not the separation or loneliness or stepping back into the putrid swamp of dating, but the little shared quirks and foibles, the things that only one other person knew about you, the stuff that would be gone when you both died. She thought ‘like tears in rain’, just like Rutger Hauer at the end of Bladerunner, and she knew Craig would get that reference because they watched that movie lying in bed post-sex, eating chow mein, drinking some dreadful schnapps they’d picked up somewhere, quoting lines to each other and marvelling over Daryl Hannah’s hair and that other actor’s pockmarked face.
Craig smiled. ‘I don’t know how we managed to make such an amazing human between us.’
‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’
He smiled in recognition. ‘We tried our best to do that, for sure.’
‘Yet look how she turned out.’
A cloud flirted with the sun in the west.
‘Any news about her flatmate?’ Craig said.
Jenny thought about those pictures. The police would have spoken to Longhorn by now. She thought about Xander and Bradley.
‘She hasn’t shown up,’ she said.
‘It’s not just a student bender?’
Jenny shook her head. ‘Kids don’t do that anymore, not like we did. They don’t go on drug-fuelled adventures for days, especially not young women. They can’t afford to, for a start, every day at uni costs hundreds of pounds. And the world is a more dangerous place now for women.’
‘You think?’
‘Definitely.’
The Scandi girls were checking Tinder profiles on their phones and giggling, swiping away the arseholes one by one. If only it was that easy in real life. Craig looked at them laughing and Jenny was happy he’d finally acknowledged them. When she and Craig were together he would’ve commented on them, something innocuous, to let her know he was a man who noticed pretty girls, but that they weren’t a threat to Jenny. But that turned out to be another lie, of course. Once you know a man is capable of sleeping around, you just presume he is sleeping around. She wondered how Fiona dealt with that.
‘Well,’ Craig said. ‘I hope she turns up soon.’
‘Me too.’
Craig’s pint glass was empty and his hands were flat on the table in front of him. Jenny leaned forwards and placed her hands on top of his. He didn’t flinch, looked up and gave her a quizzical look.
‘Thanks for being here,’ she said.
He shrugged like it was nothing.
She squeezed his hands then lifted her glass and finished her drink.
‘And I’ll have another double, thanks,’ she said.
31
DOROTHY
She pushed her glasses onto the top of her head and rubbed at the bridge of her nose. Her eyes ached from staring at the laptop screen so long and she was bored rigid from watching the mundanity of Jacob Glassman’s contained life. She thanked whatever higher powers existed that she still had her health and mobility at the age of seventy, and she worried like hell that she would live to ninety and be housebound and dependent on help.
She and Hannah had gone to visit Jacob first thing that morning, swapping SD cards and batteries on all the cameras. Jacob seemed more vague about the whole business than he had been two days ago when they fitted the cameras, which made Dorothy worry. He said that he hadn’t noticed anything odd around the house, or going missing, in the last forty-eight hours, which didn’t add to Dorothy’s confidence that anything was even happening in Hermitage Drive at all.
Back at home, Hannah had showed her how to access the files on the cards, which filename related to which camera at which time. There was a lot of material to go through. This surveillance stuff was the bread and butter of the investigation business, Jim had told her more than once, but it was long, boring work. At least she didn’t have to sit in a car all day outside a home or office, waiting to catch sight of someone up to no good. But she still had to trawl through hours of this footage, even with motion-activated cameras.
She’d started checking the footage from the kitchen and study for the time periods Susan had been in the house, but there was nothing obviously suspicious. She then checked the living-room camera and the upstairs ones for the same time period. The downstairs cameras had a lot of footage for that time slot, but it was standard occupational-therapy stuff, exercises and so on, as well as boring things like Susan putting the kettle on, Jacob flicking through an old book. He had to go to the toilet often, and Dorothy would see him shuffling off screen with his walker, returning ten minutes later, sometimes with his fly still down. She was glad there wasn’t a camera in the downstairs bathroom.
For the same time period, the upstairs cameras had nothing, so it looked as if no one had been up there. Dorothy thought about what Jacob said, that an old television had gone missing from an upstairs bedroom. She should’ve checked to see if there was a dust shadow where the TV had been when she was at the house, but maybe the cleaner had been in since. That’s if it was even stolen in the first place. Dorothy wondered about the cleaner.
She paused the screen and closed her eyes. Tried to centre herself and opened them again. She picked up the two sheets of paper Hannah had printed off for her earlier, research on Susan Raymond. There was her LinkedIn profile, lots of praise and an apparently exemplary record as an occupational therapist since she graduated five years ago from Queen Margaret University and finished her training. A pretty normal Facebook profile and no presence on Twitter or Instagram, according to Hannah. But then, Dorothy was learning that people who seemed simple and innocent on the surface could have all sorts of hidden secrets.
She made a mental note to ask Jacob when the cleaner would next be in. She still had to check each of these cameras for other times of day, and there would soon be more footage from the new SD cards. She didn’t know how she was going to keep on top of it, as well as everything else.
There was a soft tap on the door to the office, and Archie was standing there.
‘Are you all right?’ he said.
Dorothy rubbed at her face and nodded.
‘What are you doing?’ Archie said, nodding at the laptop screen. There was a frozen image of Jacob, book open on his lap, eyes closed.
‘Just spying on an old man,’ she said.
‘OK.’ Archie straigh
tened up in the doorway. ‘I’m heading out on a pick-up and I could use the help. Do you want to come?’
Dorothy closed the laptop screen and threw the printouts onto the desk.
‘Yes, I do.’
There was nothing left of Erin Underwood. Dorothy wanted to bundle her emaciated body in her arms and hug her, but she feared the bones might break under the pressure. Leukaemia, surgery, chemo and radiotherapy had left the teenager a human husk, hairless and with skin like rice paper, shrunken into herself like a voodoo doll.
They were in the mortuary at the ERI. Really Erin should’ve been in a hospice or at home for the last stretch, but sometimes there wasn’t time, sometimes people just gave up in front of your eyes. There were big banks of body fridges here, a phalanx of gurneys laid out like dead soldiers on a battlefield, post-mortem tables and toolkits, plus all the paperwork that went with the NHS.
Archie was sorting that paperwork and swapping small talk with the young mortuary worker in his overalls, tall and skinny with a goofball smile and wild, curly hair. Dorothy imagined this kid in the pub tonight, talking about what he did at work. It was hard for anyone in this industry to socialise outside of it. It often didn’t go down well when people found out what you did for a living. They either presumed you were morbid or they had their own creepy questions about how it all worked. Or they recoiled from conversation completely, refusing to think about mortality. She tried to imagine this affable lad dropping it into conversation as he chatted up someone at the bar.
Jim hadn’t been working in the funeral business when she met him, he was a young lad himself, carefree and enjoying life, only to get sucked into working with the dead after his father had died. But he hadn’t resented it, had found his calling, and so had Dorothy, although she wondered about that now. She’d allowed her life to be subsumed by her husband’s. Such a common story for her generation, but what do you do once that’s gone? Disconnected from Jim’s influence and with everything she was discovering, she wondered whether she was ever cut out for this in the first place. What if she’d got together with Isaac instead, who now worked as a movie producer, or Adrian who retired recently from his hotshot legal firm. Or if she hadn’t allowed Jim to talk her back to Scotland, if she’d stayed in a duplex in Pismo Beach with divorced Lenny, surfing in the mornings and barbecues in the evenings. There were an infinite number of pathways your life could take. How do any of us really know what to do with our lives? And how, after seventy years, do we know whether it was all a waste of time?
She looked at Erin’s face, framed by the body bag. How little time we have. These were the hardest ones, teenagers and kids, the death of potential, the death of possibility. Erin was younger than Hannah, would never go to university or get a job, never find a husband or wife or go travelling or sleep with a hundred men or women, she would never just sit in a quiet room with a book, staring at the sunlight coming through the window for a moment and realise how lucky she was to be alive.
Dorothy swallowed hard and zipped up the body bag just as her phone rang. She pulled it out. Thomas, the DNA results.
‘Hi,’ she said, her voice catching.
‘Hello Dorothy, I tried calling Jenny first but she didn’t answer.’
‘Jenny?’ Dorothy was confused. ‘What’s this about?’
Thomas cleared his throat. ‘I’m afraid I have Hannah here, she’s being detained on possible assault charges.’
Dorothy put a hand out to steady herself and touched the chilled arm of Erin Underwood through the body bag, so thin it felt like a twig ready to snap.
She paced around the reception of St Leonard’s Police Station feeling Jim’s bone in her cardigan pocket, pushing her thumb against the point like it was a tattooing tool. She imagined inking her body with elaborate Maori shapes and curls, testaments to ancestors, a link to the dead. But what if your dead didn’t deserve their stories told, what if they were disgraceful?
The door to the business part of the station swung open and Thomas held it with a spread palm as Hannah ducked out.
‘Thanks,’ she said, then spotted Dorothy and came in for a hug.
She smelt of sweat and adrenaline, mingled with her shampoo, apples and something sharper.
‘Where’s Mum?’ she said, stepping back.
Dorothy shook her head. ‘She’s not answering her phone.’
Thomas stood behind Hannah, waiting to engage.
‘What’s the story?’ Dorothy said to him.
Thomas nodded to Hannah as if to say it was her story to tell.
‘I was stupid,’ she said, shaking her head.
Dorothy rubbed her arm. ‘I guessed that.’
That brought a smile.
‘I went to Longhorn’s house and waited while the police spoke to him. They didn’t arrest him and I kind of flipped. I hit his wife.’
She swallowed and tears came, her shoulders shaking as she wiped at her nose with a tissue.
‘I don’t know who I am at the moment,’ she said between breaths.
Dorothy hugged her again. It was painful seeing her granddaughter like this, it scratched at her heart.
‘I’ve spoken to the Longhorns and squared it away,’ Thomas said. ‘Hannah’s only getting a warning this time, but she needs to stay away from them.’
‘Of course,’ Dorothy said.
‘I’m sorry,’ Hannah said.
Dorothy held her. ‘It’s stress. This is a hard time for everyone.’
She looked at Thomas. ‘What did the officers say?’
Thomas shook his head. ‘There’s just no evidence, the pictures don’t count because of how Hannah got them. They have good cause to say Hannah is pestering them, and they say that’s what Melanie was doing too.’
‘It doesn’t seem likely,’ Dorothy said.
‘I know,’ Thomas said. ‘But until we have more to go on, that’s all we can do.’
Hannah released herself from Dorothy’s embrace and straightened her collar, put her tissue away.
Thomas raised his hand and Dorothy saw a piece of typed paper. His look confirmed what it was.
‘The results,’ she said.
‘I was about to call you anyway.’
‘And?’
‘It’s not a match,’ Thomas said, handing the paper over. ‘There’s no DNA connection between Jim and the Lawrence girl.’
Dorothy stared at the paper. Technical phrases, a line graph, some numbers, it might as well be hieroglyphs.
Hannah looked from Dorothy to Thomas. ‘What does that mean?’
Thomas deferred to Dorothy. He always let her speak, such a small thing but an important one.
The paper quivered in her hand.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
32
JENNY
They leaned against the wall, body language like teenagers after a nervous first date. She was reminded of that, being walked home from pubs by boys while still at school, snogging their faces off out of sight of the house. Not that she would’ve cared what Dorothy and Jim thought back then, grunge nihilist that she was. Stumbling through the door in the early hours, sometimes staggering into the viewing rooms to chat to one of the bodies about the meaning of life, once or twice going through to the workshop and climbing into an empty coffin just to see what it was like. And once, really hammered, climbing onto a tray of the body fridge and sliding herself in.
She was drunk enough now, energised by the booze and the familiarity of easy conversation with her ex-husband. It was painful being reminded of the best friend she’d lost when they split. Husbands and lovers come and go, but she and Craig were friends back then, comfortable knowledge built up between them, and he threw that away. She tried to remind herself of that as he stood here smiling. It was his fault. But she found herself softening as they shared a joke about a slouching emo kid passing by, then an elderly man in red cords, beige jacket and fedora.
‘This is me,’ she said, angling her head towards the house over the wall.
She wondered how drunk he was.
Woodpigeons cooed at each other in the pine tree looming over the wall, flapping wings as they flitted from branch to branch, one following the other as they moved in a coy dance.
‘Will you get in trouble?’ she said.
He frowned. ‘From who?’
‘Fiona.’
‘For what?’
Jenny splayed her hands out. ‘For getting drunk with your ex-wife.’
Craig smiled and shook his head. ‘She’ll understand.’
Jenny raised her eyebrows. ‘Must be a change for you, having a nice doormat to get back to.’
He gave her a look as if to say, come on. ‘That’s not fair.’
‘Hey, I don’t know anything about your current marriage and I want to keep it that way.’
‘Fine by me.’
The woodpigeons flew out of the tree and onto the wall above them, one strutting after the other, the female flapping, edging away in small bursts, keeping a short distance between herself and the male bird. Schrödinger appeared at the end of the wall having leapt up from the other side. He hunkered down and began stalking the birds, but they spotted him and fluttered into the top of the tree, making the uppermost branches sway. Schrödinger skulked along the wall then disappeared back into the garden.
‘That your cat?’
‘Mum’s. It’s called Schrödinger, Hannah’s idea.’
‘She’s some girl.’
‘She is.’
Jenny closed her eyes for a moment longer than a blink, felt her head spin.
‘I better go inside,’ she said eventually. ‘Find out how the dead are doing.’
Craig leaned his weight into the wall. ‘Are you really a funeral director now?’
‘Someone has to help Mum.’
‘You’re a good daughter.’
‘I don’t know about that.’
‘And a really good mum.’
Jenny laughed. ‘How drunk are you?’
A Dark Matter Page 15