‘What about your adultery case?’ Hannah said.
Part of Jenny couldn’t believe the world was still turning after last night. She’d presumed they would get caught. How can you just walk into a cemetery and dig someone up and no one even notice? The way they’d left the grave would be noticeable if anyone paid close attention. They’d cut the turf and laid it to the side first, then when they’d filled the hole back in they’d stamped it back down over the earth, but the cuts in the sod were easy to see. Maybe it was only a matter of time until someone saw it and twigged, the groundskeeper or a relative. Then there would be an appeal for information in the local paper, a disgusted husband or brother standing next to the grave. Maybe they would dig it up again to make sure she was still in there. Maybe there was CCTV they hadn’t spotted. Maybe that bloody owl would blab to the world about what it saw.
She realised she hadn’t answered Hannah again.
‘He’s innocent,’ she said.
‘Really?’
‘I think so.’
‘Some men are OK, then.’
Jenny shrugged, thinking of Liam’s eyes, those paintings. ‘Maybe.’
‘So is the case closed?’
‘She was setting up a sting on him. She hired an escort to seduce him while I was on his tail.’
Hannah’s eyes were wide. ‘Wow. But he didn’t bite?’
‘Wasn’t interested.’ Jenny scratched her neck. ‘There’s more. His wife is the one sleeping around. I saw her with a landscape gardener.’
‘Have you told him?’ Hannah said.
‘Not yet.’
‘Are you going to?’
‘I don’t know. Technically, I’m off the case and it’s none of my business.’
Hannah looked at her. ‘But?’
‘I should tell him.’
‘What’s stopping you?’
Jenny got up, stared at the boards, all the death and deceit, all the secrets and lies. ‘It’s not always easy to do the right thing.’
She thought about her mum holding Barbara’s skull in her hand, about some faceless man strangling Mel to death, about Orla sharing an orgasm with her gardener. She thought about Archie and his condition, thinking that he was dead. Then she remembered something from the other night, something she’d forgotten until now. The piece of paper. When she was comforting Mum, Archie had slipped a piece of paperwork onto the floor right here in the kitchen. Then when she looked again it was gone. She hadn’t realised at the time, but after last night it suddenly came to her. It was another burial from ten years ago.
She pushed her chair back and headed towards the door.
‘Mum?’ Hannah said behind her as she took the stairs, down to reception, where Indy was manning the desk.
‘Is Archie in?’
Indy shook her head. ‘He’s at the Western General on a pick-up.’
Jenny went to the embalming room. Empty. She walked through to the workshop where Archie made up the coffins, no one around. She went to his desk, tools and wood scraps, swathes of material for coffin linings. She looked at the mess, the shelves of paperwork. She saw Archie’s jacket hanging up and went through the pockets, just cigarettes, a lighter, breath mints. She pulled out the first drawer of the desk, rummaged through the junk in there, no paperwork, then the next drawer down. She looked again at the shelves, folders of invoices and receipts, years of stuff to go through. It could be anywhere.
She turned and looked around the workshop. Stood thinking. There were three coffins on workbenches in different stages of completion. The nearest was very rough, just four sides, no bottom attached yet. The second was a complete structure but had no lining. The third was lined on the inside with silky white fabric. She stared into it for a few seconds then ran her hand around the material, from the head down to the feet. Felt normal. Then she ran her hands around the sides, from the bottom back to the top. It felt different along the headboard. Not rough wood underneath, something smoother. Paper.
She pulled at the material, ripping staples out of the wood, tearing the sheer fabric until she had the underneath exposed. She recognised the yellowing lined paper as she lifted it out and unfolded it.
Ailsa Montgomery, buried in Piershill Cemetery.
The date on the piece of paper was the day after Barbara Worth’s funeral.
50
HANNAH
Xander’s flat was on Clerk Street above an old man’s pub called The Grapes which everyone called The Sour Grapes due to the faces of the regulars smoking outside. The street was a main route south, maroon buses queuing up at the stops, the pavements cluttered with a mix of students, locals and tourists who’d lost their way.
The guys from The Grapes eyeballed Hannah as she pressed the buzzer for Shaw, one of four surnames on their panel.
A voice came on the intercom. ‘Yeah.’
‘It’s Hannah.’
The door clicked and she went up the dark stairwell, posties’ elastic bands piled at the bottom of the spiral stairs, two clarty bikes chained to the banister.
She knocked on the door and waited. She was about to knock again when Xander opened the door looking blurry. He’d sounded hungover on the phone and he confirmed that with bleary eyes and the smell of stale booze.
‘Can I come in?’
‘No.’
Hannah looked past him and he tightened the space between his body and the door.
‘Got another girlfriend already?’
‘What kind of person do you think I am?’
‘I don’t know, that’s why I’m here.’
Xander looked at her with loathing. ‘You don’t have a monopoly on grief. Or anger.’
‘I never said I did.’
‘Well, you’re fucking acting like it.’
‘I just want to find out what happened.’
‘Join the queue.’
Hannah put her hands out in appeasement. ‘Look, can I come in so we can talk?’
‘Say what you have to say here.’
‘You’re acting very uncooperatively for someone who wants to know what happened.’
That made him straighten up. ‘Fuck off, Hannah. The police interviewed me at the station and took a DNA sample. I had to get a solicitor. Then I find out Mel was sleeping with Longhorn. Then I find out she was pregnant, it wasn’t Longhorn’s and it wasn’t mine either.’
‘It wasn’t?’
‘So you don’t know everything.’
‘The baby wasn’t yours?’
Xander slumped and breathed out like a deflating balloon. ‘Which means she was sleeping with someone else.’
‘A third guy.’
‘A third guy,’ Xander said, like a zombie. ‘A third guy who probably killed her. And she was my girlfriend. So stop acting like an avenging angel out for the truth, like you’re something special, when we all want to know, we all want to get the cunt who did this.’
Hannah rested a hand on the doorframe and thought about a third guy. Bradley Barker, Darren Grant, Faisal McNish, someone else walking about out there with a guilty conscience, or maybe not feeling guilty at all, maybe thrilled or proud or turned on by the memory of what he did.
‘And you had no idea?’
‘None.’
A flicker of something on his face made Hannah pause. ‘What?’
He shook his head. ‘It never occurred to me there were other guys, but…’
‘But what?’
He looked awkward. ‘She had an appetite.’
Hannah squinted at him. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Sex. She was, you know, full on. Like, she wanted to do some crazy shit, but I wouldn’t.’
Hannah felt another part of her image of Mel crumble. Was it this easy to keep so many sides of yourself secret?
She felt herself deflate just like Xander. This was sucking the life out of her. Maybe she didn’t have the stomach to be an investigator, if that was even what she was. She had exams coming up, coursework, she wanted to sit in the sunshine right now wi
th Indy flicking through a no-brain magazine full of opinions on people’s dresses or diets. But that was a lie too. She would get bored doing nothing, and frustrated that someone was out there who hadn’t paid for what he’d done. Mel and her family deserved answers. The police would do all they could, but they didn’t care like she cared, it wasn’t personal for them. Plus they had to obey the law, follow due process. But she could do what she wanted, if only she knew what that was.
‘I know you mean well,’ Xander said. ‘But I’m not the enemy, we’re on the same side.’
Hannah wished she could know that was true.
‘Here,’ he said, ducking behind the door. He appeared with a bin bag of stuff, nothing heavy from the way he held it out to her. ‘Take this, it’s Mel’s clothes that she left here.’
‘Didn’t the police want this?’
Xander shrugged. ‘They never asked. Anyway, I trust you to find out what happened more than I trust them.’
She took the bag and opened it. A couple of T-shirts, some nightwear, a sweatshirt and an old jacket. The smell of Mel’s perfume came off the clothes and made Hannah feel sick.
‘Thanks,’ she said, slinging it over her shoulder.
Xander swallowed hard. Maybe she was wrong about him, maybe he wasn’t hungover, maybe he was just sad. Or both.
‘Find the bastard who did this,’ he said.
‘I will,’ Hannah said, but she wasn’t convinced by her own words.
She went downstairs and along Clerk Street and was turning into Hope Park Terrace when her phone rang. Thomas.
‘Hannah.’
‘Have you got something?’
‘The phone you gave me,’ he said, ‘it’s a dead end. She only called one number but it’s another burner, not registered. Whoever it was, they were being careful. We tried the number, of course, but it’s dead. And we tried a physical trace, nothing. I’m sorry.’
Hannah watched the traffic clogging up towards the Meadows, people crossing on the green man, getting home to loved ones, their lives without mystery, and she longed to be one of them.
She got up and walked around the kitchen, arching her back and rubbing at her shoulders. She’d been looking at the footage from the Glassman house for two and a half hours with nothing to show for it but a crick in her neck and a pain across her forehead. But she needed the distraction. She hadn’t got anywhere with Mel, with the dizzying array of arseholes who seemed to have been circling her when she died, and there were only so many times you could confront someone on their doorstep and hope to get anything out of it except a restraining order.
So she’d thrown herself into this. Gran had a funeral on today and she’d asked for help to keep on top of the data coming in from the spy cameras. Hannah told her how to Dropbox them over to her so she could scan them at home.
But so far, nothing. Gran had explained about the cleaner as well as the carer, but that hadn’t been any use either. And the rest was just mundane stuff, Jacob trying to make a cup of tea on his own with shaking hands, him watching University Challenge and talking to the television set. The cameras didn’t have audio, so she didn’t know whether he was getting any of the answers right.
She went back to the laptop and sighed, sat down again. Opened a new file, from late yesterday evening, the camera that she’d placed in the wardrobe of Jacob’s bedroom. He was obviously aware of the camera there, walked over to check it was still in position, stared blankly into the screen, then left the room with pyjamas in hand, presumably to get changed in the bathroom. It must be strange, Hannah thought, having your every move watched. Well, not every move, thankfully she didn’t have to see his bare butt.
The footage jumped to him re-entering the room and climbing slowly into bed. He found reading glasses and flicked through an old paperback for a few minutes before placing the open book on the covers, removing his glasses and turning the light off. The camera switched to low-light mode with the bedside lamp off, but there was nothing to see, just an old man asleep in his bed. Hannah imagined him getting up and sleepwalking, or a jump-scare from a horror movie, the face of a terrible demon screaming into the camera lens, or the pale shadow of a ghost standing at the foot of the bed pointing at Jacob.
But instead the footage just clicked forwards on the time stamp to a few hours later, Jacob rising to visit the bathroom, then returning and settling in again. Then another jump, another visit to the toilet, another return, then it was morning and Jacob was waking up.
God, this was boring.
She went to check the other cameras for the same period through the night. She presumed Dorothy hadn’t looked at any of them yet, there was no note of it in the file where they logged what they’d watched.
She opened a file for the kitchen-cam, the one that started at midnight.
And almost fell off her chair.
A young woman walked calmly into the kitchen, went to the fridge and started making a sandwich. She pulled a bottle of red wine from a rack and unscrewed it, getting a glass from the cupboard. She knew her way around.
Hannah gazed at the screen as if it was the best movie she’d ever seen.
The woman was wearing joggers and a loose T-shirt, but she had her back to the camera while she spread butter on bread, added cheese and ham, put it all together. She had blonde hair, long with a fringe.
Hannah checked the file on Susan Raymond that she’d put together for Dorothy. It wasn’t her, totally different body shape and hair colour. Then she went online, searched for Monika Belenko and Home Angels, came up with a Facebook profile of a glamorous young woman. The hair colour was right, but the wrong style. Maybe she’d had the fringe cut recently.
The woman cleared her sandwich stuff back into the fridge and left the room.
Hannah clicked on another file, opened it, and there was the woman in the living room, the television on a comedy channel. She was playing with an iPad, sitting on the sofa, eating the sandwich and sipping her wine. The glow of the iPad lit her face a little better, and she didn’t look much like the Facebook profile, but Hannah wasn’t sure. And anyway, if it was the cleaner, what the hell was she doing in the house in the middle of the night?
Hannah opened more files, not closing down the previous ones, so that umpteen windows cluttered her laptop screen. There was nothing on the dining-room one. The kitchen one showed the woman coming back in to fill up her wine glass, take a sip while standing at the window, then leave again. She was picked up by the living-room camera, this time on her phone, scrolling through with her thumb.
Hannah checked the final camera, the upstairs hall, and she froze.
The first bit of footage showed a hatch in the ceiling gently opening from above, then a ladder from the attic unfolding down to the floorboards. When the ladder was fully extended, the young woman came down it, checking that the coast was clear. She had bare feet on the ladder rungs, and Hannah could see more clearly now that her clothes were nightwear.
‘Holy shit,’ Hannah said. ‘She’s living in the attic.’
51
DOROTHY
She was glad Arthur Ford was being cremated, she couldn’t stand the sight of an open grave today. She stood outside Mortonhall Crematorium watching the mourners trickle inside, a few stragglers smoking last-minute cigarettes before paying their final respects.
The crem building was a modernist concrete construction like giant garden slabs piled up at random angles, but it did the job of hiding the industrial chimney of the incinerator. The place had been spruced up in the recent renovation, after it almost burned down three years back. That accident had at least drawn attention away from the baby ashes scandal before that. That had knocked the city and Dorothy was still fielding questions about it from customers, even though it was the council and nothing to do with Skelf’s. She pictured herself standing in the grave last night, and wondered about the scandal of that.
There were three funeral cars pulled in behind the hearse. Six frail old men in threadbare suits lifted
the coffin out of the hearse as Dorothy watched, her brain wired from lack of sleep, haunted by visions of a skull staring at her from the mulch of a grave.
She led the way, the six men with the weight of the world on their shoulders behind, then Archie bringing up the rear. She walked into the building, felt her shoulders relax when she heard the hubbub die and the rumble of a hundred people rise to their feet. There was safety in familiarity now, something to grasp hold of.
Once the coffin was on the plinth, she stood back and let the minister do his thing, try to bring some meaning to Arthur Ford’s death. Dorothy lingered at the door and Archie joined her. She tensed up, couldn’t help herself. A tremor ran through her body and she felt so tired suddenly that she thought she might throw up.
A string of relatives got up and said nice things about Arthur, ways that he had been kind in the world, examples of his sense of humour, his charity, the Rotary Club, bowls, three children and four grandchildren. Dorothy wondered who would get up at her funeral, what they could say to cast her in a good light. Maybe she would bypass the whole thing like Jim did, get Jenny and Hannah to throw her in a skip on the outskirts of town. Save everyone the bother of lying and saying she was a good person, a person who didn’t destroy the last resting places of the innocent.
Eventually Arthur was lowered into the plinth via the motorised mechanism, down into the fiery pits of hell. Or the incinerator. The pine coffin would be sparking into life, splintering and burning, his body cooking inside, water vapour turning to steam, skin shrivelling to old leather then crisping and bursting into flames, fat from his body dissolving, a million chemical reactions that would transform him into something else.
The congregation filed out and dispersed, Arthur’s wife stoic but shellshocked by the whole thing, three daughters by her side crying into handkerchiefs.
Then they were into the funeral cars and away to a modest reception at the bowling club, to raise a glass of something to his memory.
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