The Shadow Cabinet Minister got up to make his eulogy. He had escaped the Paper Bag scandal by the skin of his teeth. Like a camel passing through the eye of a needle (we were in church, after all) he had passed from the shore of the damned to the kingdom of the new righteous. He wore one of those broad pin-striped suits that only Englishmen, and then only those of Eddie’s fraternity, ever wear. And a striped shirt, although his tie was non-aggressive. I peered closely at it. Of course, his tie was black. It had to be black today. That was the form.
‘This reminds me of something,’ Gaia said to me, the minute he opened his mouth. ‘Many years ago, when I was filming. Luchino – you know Luchino, darling?’
I nodded frantically at the crucifix. I supposed she meant Luchino Visconti, but didn’t really give a damn. People behind us were starting to cough.
‘He wanted me for a project about the Austrian Empire. You know the story of Mayerling, darling? Crown Prince Rudi, who shot his young mistress, and then shot himself in the head. The top of his head was blown right off – very unsightly, but they put him in an open coffin. Anyway, they wanted me to play Marie Vetsera, the girlfriend. But Marie Vetsera is brunette, I told Luchino. Anyhow, it didn’t matter because the script never got off the ground. But I …’
She broke off as Percy Luckraft approached our pew from the side and bent down to Gaia’s ear. ‘Can I get you a glass of water, Mrs Kronenberg?’ he asked. And to me: ‘Will you be quiet!’ like a desperate teacher, losing control of his class. The Shadow Minister ignored the disturbance like the good politician he was.
‘No, go away,’ Gaia hissed back at Luckraft, who withdrew, passing his finger across his throat in an unmistakable gesture while trying to catch my eye. Oh Saviour, as Thou hangst upon the Tree, I turn my back to Thee but to receive correction. I muttered inaudibly in the direction of the altar. But Gaia had me by the sleeve.
‘Marie Vetsera would have been an excellent part,’ she said. ‘Brunette or not, I’d have worn a sky blue wig for that part, darling – it’s just that I was a professional blonde at the time, you know how it was? Anyway.’ She was clutching me tighter. ‘I thought about Marie the other night when Avgoost was doing my rose. Because she had a rose.’
At this, my resolution broke and I turned to look at her, catching Mafalda’s hatred in my peripheral vision. ‘Yes, Marie had a rose,’ Gaia continued, oblivious to the fact that the Minister had now given way to another of Eddie’s cronies, a businessman, who now ascended the pulpit. ‘He put a rose in her pubic hair.’
The church fell silent. The businessman, I guessed, was looking enquiringly our way. ‘In her pubic hair,’ Gaia repeated. ‘Yes, a rose. Crown Prince Rudi – good name for him too – rudy, no? He must have put it on her just before he shot himself. He kissed her goodbye then he planted the rose – a red rose too – so romantic, then boom! No head. What?’ she asked, finally registering my frozen rabbit gaze. She turned to the pulpit. ‘Oh, it’s him,’ she said. ‘I remember him. He came to dinner once and told me off for taking the pill. He calls himself a practising Catholic. Just practising, I said. That’s true, that’s what he does. He practises being a good Catholic.’
‘Perhaps you would like to come up and say a few words?’ the man responded, opening his arms. I heard Mafalda draw breath.
Gaia considered the offer. ‘Why not?’ she said, and, patting my rumpled sleeve, got up to take the floor. She did not go up to the pulpit, however, but stopped at the foot of the chancel steps, taking time to survey her audience. ‘Well, you’ve made a good turn-out,’ she said. ‘He’d have appreciated that. I have come here today because he was my husband after all and, all things considered, it seemed like the good thing to do. And also because, as you know, I am not having him buried or cremated so this service today will in fact be doubling as his funeral.’
I sneaked a look in Mafalda’s direction. She sat with her head bowed.
‘Eddie didn’t care for funerals,’ Gaia went on. ‘They made him miserable. Like most of us, he didn’t want to die. And he didn’t want death either, I mean what passes for death in this country, all this pomp and pontificating about who he was and who he wasn’t. You all know what Eddie was. I know what he was. I couldn’t stand him for it.’
The murmuring started again. I saw Percy Luckraft, stationed at the side of our pew, exchange glances with someone on the other side. Shall I stop her? his face seemed to say. But he didn’t make a move just yet.
‘In my country, historically,’ Gaia said, ‘they put the dead in the sauna. You know, sauna isn’t at all the thing you see in Swedish Massage parlours, at least not where I come from. But my family were originally from Finland. Sauna was the place where babies were born and the dead were – how do you put it? – laid-up.’
‘Are you saying you’ve put Eddie in the sauna?’ came a deep and fruity voice from the back of the church. I ventured a look behind me. It was Sir Anton Stockyard, looking surprisingly well, given August’s recent shenanigans.
‘No, no, no,’ Gaia said. ‘I’m saying that there are other ways of doing things, that’s all.’
‘That’s what my son said,’ Sir Anton rejoindered. Very daring of him, I thought, to admit to August here – although Sir Anton as likely as not owned everyone in the church, except Gaia and me. ‘I have to say I don’t always agree with him,’ the tycoon went on. ‘When in Rome and all that.’ Murmurs of approval came from all around.
‘I tell you, Eddie didn’t want to die,’ Gaia said, her voice rising. ‘He hadn’t made any plans. He didn’t even want to think about it. The doctor said it was instantaneous.’ This pulled me up. Who had phoned the PM report through to Gaia? Chas, Dr Fell, someone from the Coroner’s Office? Come to think of it, it could have been the doctor who certified Eddie dead at the scene. I remembered Chas’s opinion of Roving GPs. In some places, he said, it had been mortuary procedure to leave the stiffs sitting up on a chair for twenty four hours or so to see if they moved before carrying out an autopsy. He was dead all right, Chas had said, meaning Eddie. And again it hit me for six. This was no joke. Eddie was really dead. He had died exactly one week ago – time enough, I thought, for him to pass over. Eddie was beyond all this. Eddie was in Happy Valley.
Gaia was shouting now above the deprecations of her bad form. ‘Avgoost Stockyard should not have been arrested for what he did yesterday,’ she was saying. ‘He should not have been arrested. He did a very excellent job on my husband, and I applaud what he has done about those disgusting hospital doctors. And his secretary, Lise,’ she pointed to me. ‘Lise has helped me through this. She now works as a special embalmer for a very exclusive funeral home. Some of their artists train at the Max Factor studios in LA. So, you see, Eddie has been well-served.’
Mafalda was on her feet, coming over to me. ‘Is this true?’ she asked, and before I could answer: ‘How dare you!’
At that point, Gaia screamed: a sure-fire way of stopping the clamour. ‘Don’t cry for Eddie,’ she cried at the top of her voice. ‘Eddie wouldn’t have wanted you to cry. He’d have wanted you to have a good laugh, to have fun,’ she went on, her voice cracking. Percy, finally, pulled her off the steps. Pushing Mafalda aside, I went to prevent him from manhandling Gaia further. Something flashed at the back of the church. Of course, they’d have a reporter here, a specially-invited reporter to say something good about Eddie’s faithful friends in the right-wing press: carrying on the good work, taking up the torch – something of that odour. But it would be the tabloid press that would slaver for this: BODY UP FOR GRABS AT MP’S SEND OFF. I could see it now.
‘We’d better go,’ I told Gaia quietly.
‘No,’ she said, panting slightly. ‘You go, Lise. I’m staying here. Please, continue,’ she said to the businessman who had given up his slot for her and who still hovered near the chancel steps.
‘I can’t believe you had a hand in laying him out,’ Mafalda said to me, entirely without irony. ‘You won’t be hearing the last of this. An
d nor will your employer.’
‘Oh, be quiet. She did a very good job. Leave Lise alone,’ Gaia said. She was now back in her seat, rooting in her large handbag for a powder compact.
‘If you don’t mind, I think I’ll be getting along,’ I told her. Gaia nodded and waved her mirror at me. The businessman was back in the pulpit. He waited for me to tiptoe out via the side aisle before commencing his speech.
Sir Anton Stockyard was out on the steps, consulting with his chauffeur. They were both looking at their watches, as though some schedule had been interrupted. Knowing Sir Anton’s schedule, it probably had been. ‘Excuse me,’ I began, addressing the tycoon. ‘I heard that August was arrested …’
‘And you are?’ Sir Anton said curtly.
‘I’m an old friend of August’s.’
‘Yes, I remember you now.’ He appraised my True Blue suit. ‘Well, your report is only partially correct. He was arrested, but I bailed him out. If you have occasion to see my son, tell him I hope he’s worth it. At least this time there were no casualties.’
‘No, no dead bodies,’ I said, mistakenly attempting a smile.
‘It’s people like you who get my son a bad name,’ Sir Anton exploded. ‘I don’t know … You lead him on. People like you lead him on.’
I decided to beat it before he got his chauffeur on my case.
At the entrance to the Tube, I stopped to buy a local paper, sticking it gingerly under my arm as I went onto the escalator. LONDON HOSPITAL LINKED TO DUMPED ORGANS, the headline blazed. But Charity’s – and Chas – would have to keep till later. My head was still processing Eddie. It was unfair of Gaia to imply that Eddie was a personal coward. He was devious, certainly, but he had taken it well on the chin in court during the Paper Bag Affair. As for being afraid of death, that wasn’t quite true either. I remembered one occasion when we talked about his boat, second perhaps only in his affections to the Alfa Spider. He had told me he liked to sail across to France before his job in Parliament became too tedious. Letting the old boat go to pay towards his legal costs had well and truly gutted him. I had asked him if he wasn’t scared of squalls.
Squalls? he barked. I’ve been to sea when it’s been blowing your proverbial hoolie. I just put the old girl on autopilot and go below with a bottle of whisky. There’s no point in making a fuss about the sea. And on another occasion at work when I couldn’t put my hand on something he urgently needed under all the waste paper on my desk, he reminded me again of that take-no-prisoners sailing side. Sailors, he said, are neat and tidy. You can’t fuck about on a boat.
Fair sailing, Eddie, I thought, as the train came into the station. Safe crossing. I hoped he would cross over now, for the sake of his soul, as much as for mine.
There was one free seat and no invalids, veterans, or pregnant women to claim priority. Sitting down and opening the paper, I clocked a blurred picture of Chas taking off on the Harley. The bike had shifted so quickly you could hardly make out Chas’s features, but you did get an impression of a big man in leathers on a bike, a ponytail snaking out from under his helmet. The caption read: Hell’s Angels of the NHS? I liked the question mark, which neatly marked my own ambivalent feelings. The scanty tabloid would have made it into a simple statement, no questions asked. The accompanying piece was short but to the point. Did NHS Trusts believe they could persist for much longer in this culture of secrecy and cover-ups? They might not believe it, I thought, but they sure as hell would go down fighting. Guerrilla tactics, of course – no bare-knuckles. I looked at my watch, remembering for the first time in years that it was Eddie who had given it to me in the early days before the baby and what happened to the baby, and what happened after that with August and the paper bags. Maybe the watch was for my blind indifference to (actually, unawareness of) the blasted paper bags. I couldn’t remember. Furtively, so the woman sitting opposite wouldn’t see what I was doing and take me for a nutter, I pulled the watch off my wrist and slid it down the side of the seat where it stuck to something, probably chewing gum.
As I left the train, I promised myself I would not wait at home for Chas to call me. One unprincipled boss, I thought, was an oversight. Two constituted a plank in my eye. I had scrutinised Chas in bed for every flaw. Naked and uncontained, he had bared all before me. But then, so had Eddie, and look what he had become. You all know what Eddie was, Gaia had said. But what was Chas? The problem was, I didn’t know.
***
Chapter Seventeen
Unlocking my front door was like returning to base after some momentous event. The stately arguments of Eddie’s awful friends, not to mention Gaia’s tirade, had pulled Eddie even closer. Far from crossing the Styx, he was circling ever nearer, like the shadow of a bird of prey, a carrion crow, I thought, a thing that haunted gardens, terrorising songbirds. I wanted to put him away for good, out of sight and out of mind, to brick him up like the unwanted body of a wife, say, or a crazy nun. Nuclear industry sealing powers would be required to stop his skeletalised remains falling out of the hole in my mind some time in the future, but I would have to train myself to acquire those powers, I who had applied myself to business on the section table. You work in a morgue, I told myself. You can handle anything. Or, as Chas had put it: You work with the dead, Louise. You have nothing left to fear.
I forced myself not to look at the phone. Let it flash, I thought, if indeed it was flashing. Making straight for my bedroom, I changed out of the True Blue suit and put on my everyday black comfort clothes. That was another thing for which I thanked the dead, for when you work with the dead, the idea of fashion goes out of the window, notwithstanding the fact that black is the colour that death and the fashionistas hold eternally in common. Not the dead, though. The dead don’t wear black. When they came to us, they wore nothing at all. When they left us, we just zipped them up in a bag for modesty. It was left to Mr Byrne and Co to dress them up in inappropriate colours: pastel shrouds; or if the family had their say, their Sunday best, which Mrs Jury and Co, God love them, had to keep from staining before the coffin lid was screwed on tight. Because the dead are wholly incontinent. It is as though they just can’t wait to get away. Eddie had not got away. The combined forces of August and Mrs Jury had done their best to prevent his corpse from decomposing, and he was doing his utmost to fix his spirit in my own grey matter, where it was imploding now, making my mouth dry up and my heart burn in my chest.
There being nothing but an apple and a piece of cheese in my fridge, I decided to treat myself to lunch in the West End. This meant negotiating the Tube again, but I needed to go out. Although my body craved its rest, my mind was all on fire with flashbacks (Chas and Eddie) and horrible illusions regarding what might come. In particular, I tormented myself about Chas’s motivations, about why it had to work out between us. I wondered what he was up to at the hospital that morning; to whom had he assigned the five post-mortems and the ones stacking up at the Royal Free? There were two junior pathologists, whom Chas had named Mork and Mindy, although I rarely crossed paths with them since they were deemed too junior to merit much assistance from technicians. They can do their own cleaning up, Chas said. They make such a bloody mess of the most basic eviscerations. Then there was the new part-time technician, Julie. She had done some time in Holloway for pushing heroin when working as a prostitute – just the right sort of candidate, I thought, for Chas’s charitable attentions. The thought of her making me cold. Up till now Julie had worked only with the juniors, cleaning the floor mostly. She had never graduated to labelling or stitching jobs. But Yorkie was banged up and I was officially sick, and I didn’t believe that Chas would get much change out of the medical students with policemen and journalists milling around.
Forget it, I said aloud as I headed up the steps to the street. A ragged poster, advertising the Assisi Brigade, blew about the railings. At my feet, a patch of something which looked like blood snaked from the pavement and into the road where it had been blackened by tyres and exhaust fumes. Damn you, A
ugust, I said, clutching the rail for support. May you grow up and live to regret it.
‘Hello, Louise,’ said a voice I recognised, and looking up though the purple haze which was shrouding me again, I recognised Detective Harbin, the police officer who had interviewed me years ago, in connection with the Britfeed revelations and August’s part in that particular affair. Detective Harbin had searched my flat and found the screw of dope that had incriminated me. He had wanted to see August go down. I had wanted, so much, to help him with that, but Sir Anton’s brief had prevailed.
‘Have you found Eddie?’ I asked, not knowing what I was saying.
Detective Harbin gestured towards my basement. ‘Shall we go and have a chat?’ he said. His companion stepped forward, a woman officer in plain clothes.
There was no escape from this. I supposed I should have been relieved to be dealing with an officer I knew, who had, to all extent and purposes, been on my side in the old days. He had made Chief Inspector now, I noted from the ID he flashed at me for form’s sake.
‘And this is DS Scorer,’ he said. The woman nodded. I offered them black tea or coffee, the milk having turned during the night.
‘So where do we start, Louise?’ said Harbin. He refused the drink.
‘I heard that August was bailed,’ I croaked.
‘Not well, Miss Moon?’ asked DS Scorer. ‘Your boss seems to think you need a rest.’
‘Dr Androssoff is very supportive,’ I said, gulping a glass of water. ‘He’s a nice man to work for. He’s a friend to me.’
‘It certainly seems that way,’ said Harbin. ‘He’s convinced you had nothing to do with his missing specimens. You wouldn’t be letting him down now, would you, Louise?’
Remains of the Dead Page 14