by Clare Carson
She stuffed all the bits of paper back in the envelope, glanced at the doodled feather, looked over her shoulder involuntarily and tasted stale vomit in her mouth. For the love of God, why had she swiped the envelope from Jim’s haversack? She might as well have picked up a live hand-grenade. She might not think its contents were particularly revealing, but someone had been prepared to kill for it. Wet-worker. Hitman. She should have just left it where it was. Maybe Jim would still be alive if she hadn’t taken it. She certainly wouldn’t be in this mess. She’d really dropped herself in it, one way or another. She had to dispose of the information, pass the package on before some pistol-toting secret agent came creeping into her room in the darkness. Before Odin and his wild hunt chased her down. Jim had been right; she wasn’t professionally trained to deal with the consequences of her smart-arsery. She shoved the manila envelope, the purple envelope and the scrap of paper back inside the shoebox. Wiped her clammy hands on her jeans. Tried to formulate a plan. She had to hand the package over to the Commander. That was obvious. It was what Jim had been intending to do. If she passed the package to the Commander, then he could deal with the Watcher. The problem was she had no idea how to contact him. She didn’t even know his name. She would have to locate him, make discreet enquiries, without drawing attention to herself and giving herself away to the Watcher. Easier said than done. She needed a clear head to think about it and at the moment her brain was numbed with grief. Exhaustion. Fear. She would have to deal with it after the funeral. Once she had buried the dead.
Time dragged. Sleep eluded her. Kept awake by noises, bangings in the house, footsteps in the garden. Dark and light, day and night, merging. Turned upside down. She hung around the house. Listless. Uneasy. Fearful of going out. Unable to settle indoors. Incapable of making decisions. Jumping every time the doorbell or the phone rang. Haunted by images of the morgue. Jim’s face staring up from the slab, hands reaching out to clutch at her, pull her down, underground, ghosts whispering in her ear. Bury the dead. Bury the dead. The mortuary assistant’s words playing on her mind. Wouldn’t want my name on their list. That’s for sure.
Monday. Two days after the crash, the solicitor phoned and informed Liz that he had recently received a letter from Jim containing a sealed envelope with instructions to open it in the event of his death. The envelope turned out to contain notes for his funeral. Sam recalled, with a start, Jim telling her that he had already made his own funeral arrangements. So he hadn’t been joking then. It was, the solicitor observed, quite a coincidence that the letter had arrived shortly before his unexpected and untimely death. Jim; always three moves ahead. Liz had gripped the receiver tightly and calmly asked the solicitor to relay Jim’s wishes. Jim had, his notes revealed, already reserved a burial plot in an out-of-the-way graveyard on the edge of the periphery. According to the solicitor, Jim’s letter indicated that he wanted a small and informal ceremony. Family and friends only. He definitely did not want any coppers, current or ex, to attend. Liz shook her head despairingly as she repeated Jim’s strange instructions. He had always had such odd ideas about death, she said. Odd ideas about everything, in fact. Still, she wasn’t going to question his last wishes.
Tuesday. The day after the solicitor phoned, a welfare officer from the Force pitched up to return Jim’s belongings, recovered from the scene of the accident, and to deliver the official explanation for Jim’s death. According to the officer, the fast-tracked coroner’s report indicated that Jim had been driving south over Vauxhall Bridge in the early hours of the morning. Too late for the straggle of all-night revellers wending their way home from the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Too early for the thin stream of commuters spewed up daily by the tube on the hard embankment slabs. No witnesses then, apart from the cormorants plying the river for fish. Nonetheless, the crash investigators were able to surmise the events leading up to Jim’s demise. There had been a momentary lapse of attention, apparently, as he drove across Vauxhall Bridge, during which he jumped a red light and swerved into a brick wall on the far side of the junction underneath the railway arches carrying the trains to Waterloo. By the mouth of the Effra, Sam noted. Right next to the last remnant of the old Vauxhall pleasure gardens, a desolate void on the edge of north Lambeth. A place where no one would be around to hear the shot of a pistol. Or linger too long even if they had. The welfare officer droned on: the Cortina had been completely trashed. How? Sam thought. By whom? Somebody, somewhere had been doing a lot of fixing, she heard the mortuary assistant saying.
The explanation whispered by the welfare officer, as he looked over Liz’s shoulder and eyed Sam warily, was that Jim had been drunk at the wheel. The pathologist had recorded a high level of alcohol in his blood. Jim was a car crash waiting to happen, the welfare officer said. Drink driving, the mortuary assistant’s voice interjected in Sam’s head; that’s what they always say when it’s a hit job. The welfare officer added, in sympathetic tones, that they would of course do everything possible to ensure that Inspector Jim Coyle was buried in a manner appropriate to his rank and standing, albeit a bit quicker and a bit quieter, just to have it all done and dusted without any embarrassment or undue attention from the local press. Liz told him, politely, to get stuffed. There was no reason, she said firmly, to sweep anything under the carpet. She intended to proceed with the funeral arrangements herself, exactly in accordance with Jim’s final wishes.
After the welfare officer had been shown the door, Liz and Sam had emptied the contents of Jim’s haversack onto the kitchen table: his beloved Swiss Army Knife, clean and ready for use, binoculars, a smutty cotton snot rag that reeked of musky fungus, and a short piece of white chalk. Sam didn’t bother to tell Liz that his rag-wrapped Walther and his dog-eared copy of The Orkneyinga Saga were missing. She did suggest that they should place Jim’s Swiss Army Knife in the coffin alongside his body. Just in case. Liz agreed it was appropriate. Always good to be prepared.
Wednesday, and there was an unexpected kerfuffle. The phone had rung. Yet again. Liz had picked it up and had a heated conversation with the unidentified person on the other end.
‘The Commander,’ she had announced after she had replaced the receiver.
Sam’s heart had raced – she saw her lifeboat passing. Was the Commander trying to contact her? Had he surmised that she might know something about the information Jim had been sent to collect from Orkney? Was this her opportunity to hand over the envelope? Dump her burden. Liz relayed the details of the exchange peevishly. The Commander had asked if he could attend the funeral in an unofficial capacity, as a friend, not a fellow police officer. He had been quite insistent. But Liz had been equally unwilling to budge. Jim’s last orders were clear: nobody from the Force to attend. Frankly, Liz said, she thought he had a cheek. In all those years of absence and anxiety he hadn’t bothered to call. Not even once. There had been absolutely no reassurance, no concern for their welfare, no offers of help, no support whatsoever. Nothing. So she wasn’t about to do him any favours now.
Sam’s heart sank as she saw her chance drifting away, just out of reach.
‘But the Commander was a good friend of Jim’s,’ Sam asserted. ‘Perhaps he should be at the funeral.’
Liz, though, wasn’t having it.
‘Did he leave his number?’ Sam enquired.
‘No.’
‘A name?’
‘I didn’t ask. I’m surprised that you, of all people, are so keen to have a policeman breathing down your neck at your father’s funeral.’
Her, of all people. What was that supposed to mean? Liz didn’t give Sam a chance to contest. She left Sam feeling dismal as she went out and closed the door behind her.
Thursday. The day before the funeral. Sam was in the kitchen killing time with Jess. The phone rang. Jess picked up the receiver. Asked who it was, pulled a face when she heard the reply. Jess put her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Tom,’ she mouthed silently.
Sam shook her head furiously, made chopping signs in the air with
her hands.
‘She’s out,’ Jess said into the phone. ‘All day.’
Jess nodded as Tom said something on the other end. ‘I’ll tell her. Yes. I promise.’ She replaced the receiver. ‘He was a bit insistent.’ Jess eyed her little sister quizzically. ‘He said he had something to tell you. Maybe you should phone him. Find out what he wants.’
Sam tutted.
‘Sounded intense,’ said Jess. ‘He said it was really important and you should call him back.’
‘I’m sure it can’t be that important.’
‘What did you do to him,’ Jess said, ‘to make him so desperate?’
‘Nothing,’ said Sam. She walked away.
18
Friday at last, and the relentless sun was giving everything a hard edge and a dark shadow. They had followed Jim’s instructions and had located his burial plot in a yew-bordered graveyard attached to a squat Norman flint church in the furthermost reaches of the suburbs. The dirty tidemark of the metropolis. No weeping statues here. No service either. The coffin, lid tightly nailed, had been carried from hearse to churchyard and lowered straight into the freshly dug grave on two beige webbing straps. Without ceremony. There were, however, selected ritual trimmings: a Tupperware pot of dust held by a shifty-looking vicar. Lord only knew, Jess had whispered loudly when she saw him, how Jim had persuaded a Church of England Reverend to comply with his unconventional funeral arrangements.
As Jim had wished, there was only a small congregation – Liz, Ruth, Sam and her sisters, and a smattering of their close friends. What’s more, Sam noted as Becky and Paul stepped up to the graveside to release their handfuls of dust, his ban on coppers had left him with a motley crew of left field mourners – pinko academics, bikers, night-clubbing outlaws, pot-smoking suburban rebels. The enemy within, she said to Jim in her head. Somewhere in the distance she heard somebody scoff – your lot, call yourselves subversives? What a bloody shambles. Bunch of buffoons. She instinctively glanced over her shoulder, checking to see whether Jim was lurking behind a gravestone, taking notes. But he wasn’t there.
There was a slight pause in the proceedings, a respectful gap between friends and family. In the ensuing heavy silence, the soft brushing of beating wings made Sam look up to see the dark streak of two advancing heavy-billed ravens. As they passed overhead, the pair flipped in unison, flew upside-down momentarily before rolling and righting themselves again.
‘The birds,’ she whispered to Helen, ‘they’ve come to pay their last respects to Jim.’
‘Or crap on his coffin,’ Helen muttered.
Jess moved closer to the grave, holding her crash helmet in one hand, wiping her eye with the other, head bowed in silent contemplation for a moment before she scattered her dust on the coffin and moved back to join the congregation. Helen’s turn next, her spiked heels sinking down in the loose graveside earth as she briskly chucked a fistful of dirt at Jim.
‘What a bastard,’ Helen muttered as she returned.
Liz threw her eldest daughter a reproachful look.
‘But we loved him,’ Helen added quickly.
Uncouth. That’s what you lot are, said Jim’s voice in Sam’s head. Bloody uncouth. Sam sniggered nervously. Helen jabbed her in the ribs with a sharp elbow. Sam stepped back and trod on Jess’s boot.
‘Ow,’ said Jess, caught unawares because she had her eyes down to glance at her watch, checking whether there was time for a swift round before lunchtime last orders. Liz frowned.
‘It’s what Jim would have wanted,’ Jess said. ‘A quick drink.’
Liz almost smiled.
Sam offered her godmother an arm and helped her shuffle over the uneven earth. The vicar held out his Tupperware pot nervously, and rapidly removed himself when they had both dipped in. They stood silently on the lip of the pit together. The skittish breeze rippled the gold embroidered edging of Ruth’s sari, flicked Sam’s hair around her face.
‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,’ Ruth said softly. ‘All good children go to heaven.’
‘Eenie, meenie, miny, moe,’ Sam said, completing the familiar verse. ‘I wonder where the others go.’
Ruth jabbed her curved thumb decisively heavenwards. ‘He was never passive in the face of evil. He’s going up,’ she said.
‘Maybe. But I’m not convinced they’ll let him in when he gets there.’
‘Well, he’s bound to have arranged for someone to leave the back window open a crack,’ Ruth retorted. She peered cautiously down into the chasm. ‘I find the idea of burial quite disturbing.’
Sam looked over the edge of the pit now too, shuddered at the sight of the varnished lid of the coffin and imagined Jim lying just below.
‘I know what you mean. It does seem quite callous leaving him down there alone, while he’s still…’ she couldn’t think of a fitting word, ‘whole.’
Ruth nodded. ‘Cremation would have been better; it shortens the period of limbo. The danger,’ she added.
‘What do you mean?’
‘When a person dies, their flesh becomes contaminated with the evil of death. And that means the corpse is polluted. It is wise to keep it away from the sacred natural elements – earth, fire, water – in case the evil spreads. That is why it is Zoroastrian custom to leave corpses in the open for the carrion birds, the vultures, the crows, to take away the flesh. They are the birds that have been created by God for this purpose, to deal with the evil of death.’
Sam stuck a hand in her coat pocket and felt the barbs of the raven’s feather she had carried with her from Orkney. Raven. Carrion bird. Dealer with death. Odin’s companion.
‘But where open burial is not permitted,’ Ruth continued, ‘then cremation is better than burial, because the fire consumes the flesh quickly and reduces the dangerous time of contamination. Still, I suppose it can’t be helped. But you will have to be careful.’
She dug her flat, black lace-up into the graveside earth, drew a circle with its tip. ‘In the end we all return to dust, one way or another. We come from the elements and we return to the elements. We may have a second of consciousness, but even that vanishes in the gentlest gust of wind.’
Ruth uncurled her arthritic hand as she spoke and let the breeze whip the particles away. Sam followed suit and broadcast the grains she was holding. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Death and the regeneration of life.
She watched the last specks fall back to earth, and was about to retreat from the graveside when Ruth seemed to stumble. Sam reached out an arm to steady her. Ruth clutched at Sam’s coat, pulled at her for support. Sam leaned in to prop up her godmother.
With an unexpected swiftness of movement, Ruth stretched up and whispered in Sam’s ear. ‘By the way, that day the other week when you came round with Jim, I had a quick word with him while you were sorting through my things. I said I was worried about you, thought you might be in some kind of trouble, putting yourself at more risk than you realized with all your protesting. He said that he thought you were smart enough to keep yourself out of difficulties, but he promised he would make sure you had a number to call anyway. Just in case you needed help.’
Sam nearly choked. ‘What? What was he talking about? What number?’
‘It’s no good spluttering at me,’ Ruth hissed crossly. ‘I’m only repeating what Jim said. I’ve no idea what number he was talking about. I’m just passing on the message.’
Liz interrupted impatiently from behind. ‘Have you two finished yet?’
Sam tried to catch Ruth’s eye, but Liz tugged her back, away from the grave. Ruth kept sight fixed firmly on the green sward of the distant golf course.
Liz was the last to step up. She heaved a final sigh in the presence of her husband before brushing her hands together over the coffin, wiping away the lingering motes. ‘All over.’ She turned to leave the graveside.
The vicar picked up her cue and scuttled off like a cockroach back to the sanctuary of his church.
‘To the pub,’ said Jess.
>
‘I’ll catch you up in a minute,’ Sam said.
Liz led the strange procession of mourners away, winding between the angels with their prayer books and the greening jam jars of wilting flowers. Out through the lychgate. Roger was the last in the line, his bouffant quiff lifting in the wind like a billowing sail propelling his large frame forwards. What was he doing here anyway, Sam thought to herself crossly. He wasn’t a friend of Jim’s. Jim thought he was a tosser. Full of bullshit. Telling people he had been in the SAS. He wished. She glared at his back as he strode breezily down the path, passed under the shade of a wilting rowan, turned and pulled what she presumed was supposed to be a sympathetic face, a drooping lettuce leaf of a smile. Prat. He could piss off. She gave him the evil eye. He recoiled from her stare, disappeared down the lane.
Alone now in the lengthening shadows of the advancing afternoon, she felt uneasy. A black moth flitted past her face, brushing her skin, making her shudder. The back of her neck bristled. She checked the corners of the graveyard through the swaying branches of the yew trees. Searching for Watchers. Spooks. Crackpots. Psychos bearing grudges or firearms. Nobody visible. She gazed down at the coffin in its muddy hole, straining her eyes, as if she might still be able to see through the solid lid of the wooden box and commune with Jim, ask for his forgiveness for pilfering his information, solicit his guidance about passing on the poisoned chalice now she had it in her possession, find out the meaning of his peculiar parting message to Ruth. But Jim was silent. And the sight of the freshly dug gash in the wet soil made her think of rotting corpses, slow putrefaction, worm-eaten flesh. Ruth was right, Jim’s death was incomplete, unfinished. Dangerous. She had an urge to pull out the nails, wrench the lid free, open the coffin so the crows and the rooks could clean his bones and hasten the process of decay. She leaned over the edge of the pit. A rustle in the undergrowth behind, the snap of branches, made her panic. She twisted. Heard the soft tread of shoe on earth. Turned again too quickly. Head spinning. Eyes darkening. Nothing but blackness and warm breath behind. She jabbed her elbow blindly in an effort to fend off her attacker. Too late. Her foot moved the wrong way. She was slipping over the edge. A split-second plunge into paralytic fear. The dank pit reaching up to engulf her, to bury her in its earthy embrace.