‘Assault is still assault.’
She could see his laptop screen, at least it looked like actual work, equations and diagrams, a graph demonstrating some fundamental truth about the universe.
He saw her looking. ‘What, you were expecting porn?’
Jenny raised her eyebrows. ‘That sounds like a guilty conscience.’
‘I don’t feel guilty,’ Bradley said.
‘You must be worried about the DNA match.’
‘What DNA match?’
‘Between you and Mel’s baby.’ She was out on a limb here, but you never know.
He paused at that. He was right in her face now, and he reached out a hand and placed it on the open door next to her. He smiled.
‘You’re a sad little cow, aren’t you? I looked you up online, mid-forties, divorced. Is this how you fill the emptiness? Wandering around making false accusations about innocent people? I feel sorry for you.’
Jenny felt her face flush and looked down at her hands.
‘Oh, that hit home, didn’t it?’ Bradley said. ‘The truth hurts.’
He grabbed her upper arms and squeezed, stood there looking in her eyes.
‘Get off me,’ she said, pulling away.
‘Not so fucking brave now, are you? How about if I did to you what you did to me? What if I grabbed your cunt right now?’
Jenny stared at him, tried to find some truth in his eyes, but it was just hate and disgust, she’d seen those a million times before.
She was ready with her knee, about to lift it into his crotch when he thrust her out of the door so hard that she smacked her head against the opposite wall. She breathed hard, legs shaking.
‘Don’t come back here if you know what’s good for you,’ Bradley said, and closed the door.
48
DOROTHY
The front gates were locked but she expected that. The adjoining house, built into the high cemetery wall, was dark, everyone asleep at this time of night. She drove the van down Milton Road, turned right at the end into Brunstane Mill Road and parked in one of the spots at the bottom. The path beyond led to fields in one direction, Newhailes House stately home in another, Brunstane Burn to the right. That was the way in.
She turned to Jenny twitching in the passenger seat.
‘Ready?’
Jenny shook her head. ‘No.’
‘Come on.’
She got out and went to the back of the van, took out the holdall containing shovels, picks and torches. She heard Jenny’s door open and close then locked the van and walked over the burn into the darkness of the park. She led Jenny along the burnside path, past the private golf holes at the back of millionaires’ houses, then too soon they were at the back of Portobello Cemetery. The burn was narrow and shallow here, a fallen tree making an easy bridging point. They crossed then scrambled through undergrowth to an old chain-link fence full of holes, several posts leaning askew. It was easy to squeeze through.
She took out the torches and handed one to Jenny.
‘Go that way,’ she said, pointing up the hill. ‘I’ll go left. Remember it’s Barbara Worth we’re looking for.’
Jenny looked petrified and Dorothy didn’t blame her. Part of Dorothy couldn’t believe they were here, but she had a sense of fate. From the moment she found out about the payments to Rebecca, she had been heading here.
She shouldered the holdall, felt the weight against her muscles, the strap biting her skin. She patted Jenny’s shoulder then shooed her away, began checking the graves as she walked. The headstones here in the bottom part of the cemetery were less than ten years old, some very fresh, so she didn’t waste much time, just cursory glances as she passed. She walked up one row then down another. She did ten rows then moved up to the next regiment of graves, the death dates getting closer to Barbara Worth’s. As the graves got older there were fewer flowers propped against the stones. How quickly we forget. The cliché was that we live on as long as we’re remembered by those we leave behind. But that wasn’t long.
Dorothy tutted under her breath at every headstone that wasn’t Barbara Worth. She sensed movement above her head and saw bats flitting from tree to tree, frantic wings against the glow of the sky over towards the road. She heard an owl calling and another returning the call, and she thought about her and Jim, until death parted them.
Another row of dead ends, then another as she circled back to where she’d left Jenny. She could see Jenny’s torch in the distance, angled down, careful not to attract attention. Not that anyone could see, there were small copses of trees breaking the sightline, more trees along the burn behind them, high walls at the front, as well as to the left where the railway line ran, and to the right where the posh houses were. No one wanted to see a graveyard when they were on their decking sipping Prosecco.
She was beginning to lose her nerve. The bag ached on her back, the adrenaline being replaced by doubt and shame. Because what they had planned was shameful. But then she remembered how Jim lied and paid out thousands of pounds over the years, how Rebecca presumed it would last forever. How Simon disappeared, a mystery she had to solve for the sake of her sanity.
Her phone rang in her pocket and she jumped. The sound of it sliced through the darkness. She answered.
‘I’ve found her,’ Jenny said.
Dorothy flashed her torch three times like they agreed, then she saw Jenny’s torch do the same. She walked in that direction, pulling the strap on her shoulder as she went.
She found Jenny standing with her back hunched, a hangdog expression on her face.
‘There.’
And there she was, Barbara Worth, 1940–2010. Something satisfying about the neatness of the dates, three score years and ten wasn’t so much these days but it was enough for Barbara. Beloved wife, mother and grandmother, the outline of a winged figure carved into the black granite. No flowers or tributes, just a clutch of dandelions sprouting from the grass.
‘We don’t have to do this,’ Jenny said. ‘There’s still time to turn back.’
Dorothy stared at the gravestone for a while then crouched and touched it, running her finger along the engraving. There was a shadow of moss along the bottom edge of the dates and Dorothy scraped it away. Then she touched the grass beneath her, felt the dampness and the earth underneath, the beating heart of the planet, the thrum of the city echoed in tremors that sank to the centre of the Earth, way past the few feet Barbara occupied.
‘If you want to go, that’s fine,’ Dorothy said.
Jenny stared at her.
Dorothy dropped the holdall and undid the zip. ‘But I need to do this.’
She pulled out a shovel, ran a finger along its edge, and looked at Jenny. The way Jenny’s torch was pointing, her face was mostly in shadow. Dorothy saw her eyelashes illuminated like some fantastical night creature. Eventually Jenny held out a hand, her mouth tight.
Dorothy handed her a shovel then placed the blade of her own shovel against the earth. She put her heel against the shoulder of the shovel and pushed until she felt the earth break underneath her.
‘Sorry, Barbara,’ she said.
She could smell her own sweat mingled with the stench of mulch and loam, the earth damp and clinging to the blades of their shovels. They’d been at it for two hours, setting the turf to one side then digging out the soil on the other. Dorothy’s back was aching, her shoulders hunched, but she kept on, stopping for an occasional swig from a water bottle.
She paused and looked at Jenny. Digging in a solid rhythm, dirt smudged across her cheek and caked on her hands, like a prisoner digging to escape.
Dorothy looked at the hole. She was surprised how far down they’d got already, the earth easy to shift, worms shrinking from the air when exposed, that owl still hooting in the trees somewhere. At one point a fox came padding along the path, spotted them and calmly headed away. The night was still dark, the sky black, only their torches propped against the headstone to see by.
They were properly in
a hole now, a few feet below ground level, and Dorothy began digging again, the earth flying behind her shoulder as she heaved each shovelful out of the earth. The secret was rhythm, and she understood how those working songs came about for slaves in the cotton fields or building railroads. Jenny was digging like a woman possessed, maybe working out aggression from something else, her anger and grief at Jim, or the adultery case, or everything with Melanie.
They shifted more shovelfuls, Dorothy’s shoulders bending to the work. She pictured the Earth spinning through space at thousands of miles an hour and tried to think how irrelevant all this was, but the truth was it mattered to her more than anything. And it would matter to Barbara Worth’s family, but she couldn’t help that.
Jenny’s shovel thudded into the ground beneath them and Dorothy felt the reverberations through her feet. It felt different from solid ground, it was wood.
Jenny looked round, panting. Dorothy breathed heavily as she leaned on her shovel, then she reached out of the grave and grabbed one of the torches, played it over the blade of Jenny’s shovel as she scraped at the earth, spooning it out to expose the grubby oak casket underneath.
They redoubled their efforts even though Dorothy didn’t want this to end. As long as they kept digging, she would never have to find out. If they dug all the way to New Zealand she could stay blissfully ignorant about what they were doing, what Jim had done.
Much of the casket was exposed now and the thunk and scrape of their efforts shifted more earth every second. Soon they had the entire lid of the coffin exposed and Dorothy recognised it as the Lindisfarne model, solid oak, not veneer, upwards of a thousand pounds, the most expensive casket they sold. So Barbara’s family had money to spend. And money to sue if it came to that.
Jenny stopped digging. The six brass turnkeys along the sides of the coffin lid were exposed, a dull gleam where the torchlight hit them. Dorothy placed her shovel out of the grave and Jenny followed suit. They stood there on the coffin, Dorothy thinking.
Jenny shook her head. ‘We don’t have to.’
‘We’ve been through this.’
‘Are you sure?’
Dorothy nodded. She got to her knees, felt the dampness of the remaining dirt against her trousers, and tried to unscrew the first key in the top left corner. It was tight and she scraped earth from the thread, squeezed the screw between thumb and forefinger and pressed. Finally it started to budge anticlockwise, stiff to begin with then faster as the dirt was pushed aside and the thread caught better.
She turned and saw Jenny doing the same at the bottom end, first one screw, which came easily, then another, which she had to lean into, sticking her elbows out, to get it moving.
Dorothy went back to her own end, started on the second one, scraping away the dirt, feeling the rawness of her skin, the breeze around them, the rustle of leaves on the trees above, that bloody owl and its mate still calling back and forth. Why couldn’t they just get it together?
She had the second key out and into her pocket, then moved to one of the middle ones as Jenny crawled from the other direction to do the final one. They were turning the keys at the same time, squeaks as the threads unravelled, the shanks of the keys rising as they turned. Then they were out.
Jenny rose and helped Dorothy to her feet. She shunted herself out of the grave backwards, sitting on her bum at the side of the hole, then helped Dorothy do the same. Dorothy got the pickaxe from the holdall and leaned into the grave, jammed the point of the axe between the lid and the body of the coffin, and waited a moment.
She shared a look with Jenny but couldn’t work out what she was thinking. She thought of Jim’s shard of bone in her pocket, she carried it everywhere now. She thought of letting go of the pickaxe, leaning back, producing the bone and stabbing herself in the heart with it. Or at least cutting at her wrists. But that was even more crazy than digging up Barbara Worth.
She pursed her lips and swallowed, then levered the pickaxe tip between the casket’s lid and body. They separated easily with a pop, the seal broken after a decade of peace. She got her shovel and reached into the hole, stuck the blade under the coffin lid and lifted it up.
Jenny pointed her torch into the grave.
There was Barbara, or what was left of her, a sagging pile of bones, decayed flesh and disintegrated material forming a thin mulch on the floor of the coffin, her skull intact, wisps of flesh and skin still hanging off, worms and slaters hiding from the light, crawling between collar bone and shoulder blade.
‘Christ,’ Jenny said.
Dorothy stared for a long time then slipped into the coffin like she was sliding into a swimming pool. She landed with a squelch and thought she might be sick.
‘Mum.’
Dorothy looked up. She wondered how she must appear to Jenny, wild-eyed, covered in mud, standing amongst human remains in an open grave.
‘I have to check,’ she said. She put a hand against the wet earth on the side of the hole and crouched down, lifted Barbara’s skull with her fingertips. A large earthworm slid out and burrowed away. Dorothy felt some of the coffin base give under her foot, solid earth below.
There was nothing underneath Barbara’s skull except more of her decomposed scalp. Dorothy saw a glint of an earring in the mud. She shifted the shoulders and ribcage, lifting them and peering underneath. More of the same, fragments of cloth and skin yet to be returned to the planet. She scanned the rest of the coffin, lifted Barbara’s hips, obviously a woman’s hips. Nothing there.
She looked round the rest of the grave, the stink of decomposition in her nose, sweat cooling on her brow, her fingers shaking, her nails clogged with dirt and God knows what else. Finally she stopped examining the casket’s contents and looked up at Jenny pointing her torch on this horror scene.
‘It’s only Barbara in here,’ Dorothy said, hands on hips. ‘I was wrong.’
49
JENNY
‘You look like death warmed up.’
Jenny turned to see Hannah in the kitchen doorway. She came in, switched the kettle on and sat opposite Jenny at the table.
It was already afternoon, Jenny sleeping late after last night. It felt like a fever dream, as if it hadn’t really happened, or happened to someone else in a parallel universe. But the feel of the dirt was still under her nails, the smell of wet earth was still in her nostrils. To Jenny’s amazement Dorothy was downstairs working, arranging a funeral with the husband of an elderly lady who passed away in the night. How could she be functioning, physically and emotionally? Jenny just wanted to curl up and make the world go away.
‘How did it go last night?’ Hannah said.
Jenny waited for Hannah to tell her that she somehow knew her mother and grandmother spent the night desecrating a grave. It had taken them less time to fill the hole back in but it was still hard work, especially clouded by Dorothy’s disappointment about the lack of a second body. The whole escapade was pointless.
She realised she hadn’t answered.
‘How do you mean?’
The kettle clicked off, the rushing boil of water dying away.
‘Speaking to Bradley?’
Jenny switched lanes in her mind, thought for a moment. ‘I didn’t get anything. The police have spoken to him, I presume they have his DNA.’
Hannah began making tea. ‘Just because Peter Longhorn wasn’t the father of Mel’s kid, doesn’t mean he didn’t kill her.’
‘But it makes it less likely.’
‘I don’t know,’ Hannah said, bringing the mugs over. ‘Maybe he killed her because he found out she was pregnant by someone else.’
‘But he knew she had a boyfriend.’
Hannah shrugged. ‘Who knows what she told him, or what he figured out?’
Jenny looked at the whiteboard. ‘So what now?’
‘I’m heading round to speak to Xander.’
‘Didn’t you find him yesterday?’
Hannah shook her head. ‘No, he was still at the police station.
But I tracked down his flatmates.’
‘And?’
‘They might not be guilty, but they knew her, and they’re misogynist arseholes. I flagged them up with Thomas.’
Jenny sipped her tea. ‘Are you sure this is all a good idea? Shouldn’t we leave it to the police?’
Hannah shook her head. ‘I don’t trust the police to do this. I need to keep investigating.’
Jenny looked at the board again. Hannah had added Faisal McNish and Darren Grant to it. ‘All these guys circling around Mel. I’ll never understand men.’
‘Me neither.’
Jenny gave a rueful smile. ‘As my own failed marriage demonstrates.’
She wondered where Schrödinger was, maybe out trying to mate or hunting birds. Something macho, anyway.
‘What Dad did to you was shit,’ Hannah said. ‘I’m not stupid, I don’t worship him.’
Jenny looked out of the window at the new buildings of Quartermile glinting in the sun.
‘Women have strange relationships with their fathers,’ she said. She reached out and held Hannah’s hand. ‘Your gran is convinced my dad was lying to her for years.’
‘But there’s no proof apart from the money, right?’
Jenny remembered Dorothy in a spotlight, standing in a grave, sifting through bones to get to the truth. But there was no truth, at least not the kind she was looking for. ‘No, there isn’t.’
‘Well, then.’
Jenny sipped her tea. ‘We think our dads are perfect but we know what men are like in the real world. And dads are just men, after all.’ She looked at Hannah. ‘You made the right choice with Indy.’
Hannah frowned. ‘It’s not any different. Men and women, straight and gay, we’re just trying to get along, not hurt anyone, but it doesn’t always work like that.’
Jenny smiled. ‘How did I have a daughter so wise?’
Hannah got up and looked at the whiteboards. They were updated, new lines drawn, names scored out, funerals conducted, suspects added.
A Dark Matter Page 23