I read Dr. Brady’s number off Lucy’s notes and punched it into my phone.
“Hello?” came the voice at the other end.
“Dr. Brady?”
“Yes?”
“This is Paddy Buckley from Gallagher’s Funeral Directors.”
“Hello, Paddy, what can I do for you?”
“I’m out at Michael and Lucy Wright’s place in Pembroke Lane, and there’s been an . . . incident. I was making arrangements with Lucy for her husband’s funeral, and when she went upstairs to get her husband’s suit, she dropped dead . . .”
“What!”
“She dropped dead. I heard a thump so I went up to see was everything okay and I found her lying there . . . dead.”
Dr. Brady’s voice was filled with levelheaded alarm.
“Are you sure she’s dead?”
I’ve been around dead bodies all my life, I think I’d know when one of them’s dead. “Pretty sure, Doctor, yeah.”
“Is there any other family there?”
“No, I’m here on my own.”
“Have you phoned for an ambulance?”
“No. You’re the first person I’ve rung. It literally happened a few minutes ago.”
“Okay, phone for an ambulance and wait there. That’s all you can do.”
“Okay, will do. Thanks, Doctor.”
I ended the call and noticed Lucy’s glasses and my handkerchief on the table. I put my hankie back in my pocket and looked around for anything else I might have missed. It had all happened so fast. My hands were shaking, and I was beginning to feel nauseous. A low panic was rising inside me. A little voice piped up in my head. It said, Keep moving, Paddy. It was her time, just like it was Eva’s time. Everything’s going to be okay. Just keep moving.
I phoned for an ambulance. Then I phoned the office and told Frank the same story I’d told Dr. Brady. Frank expressed his surprise and told me he’d free me up from any other work while I dealt with it.
Then, as I was sitting there waiting for the ambulance, a cat strolled in from another room and mewed hello. It was a long-haired gray Persian with yellow eyes. It brushed against my leg, purring furiously. I saw that the bowl in the corner was empty so I got up, opened a few cupboards, and found the cat food, which I poured into the bowl before filling a saucer with water and placing it down beside the food.
While I was still there on my hunkers, watching the cat tear into its meal, I heard the sliding glass doors open and close. I stood up just as a woman walked into the kitchen and stopped by the door.
My heart started to pound. I knew immediately that this was Michael and Lucy Wright’s daughter, Brigid. I remembered reading her name in the death notice, but apart from having registered to myself that she existed, I’d given her no further thought.
And now here she was.
I was sure it was her because of the resemblance to her mother, only Brigid was thirty years younger and even more attractive. She wore jeans, a blue T-shirt, and a tweed sports jacket. She had shoulder-length wispy brown hair, dark brown eyes, and a purity and savvy to her stare that froze the moment for me, stretching those small few seconds into what felt like minutes.
“You must be the funeral director,” she said.
“That’s right. Paddy,” I said, preparing myself to tell her of her very recent bereavement.
“I’m Brigid,” she said. “Is my mother here?”
“Yes . . . Brigid, will you sit down for a minute, please?” I gestured to the nearest chair at the kitchen table and we both sat down a few chairs away from each other. A little knot formed in my throat.
“Brigid, your mother went upstairs twenty minutes ago to get a suit for your father to be dressed in, and . . . there’s no easy way to say this . . . she collapsed and died while she was up there . . .”
Brigid brought her hand to her mouth as the blood drained from her face.
“I’ve been on to Dr. Brady and there’s an ambulance on its way. I’m so sorry to have to tell you. I can hardly believe it myself, I can’t imagine how hard it is for you to hear it like this . . .”
“Where is she?” She barely whispered the words as the tears began to spill down her cheeks.
“In her bedroom,” I said. Brigid got up from her chair and crouched down as if reacting to a searing pain deep in her solar plexus.
This was a first for me. Usually the family were the ones to tell the undertaker of their bereavement. I stayed sitting on the edge of my chair as Brigid stood up and walked around in confused little circles.
“Oh, God,” she said, holding both hands to her face now, leaning back against the wall and sinking slowly to her knees. I could see her hands were trembling. She looked into my eyes.
“Can I see her?”
“Of course . . . would you like me to bring you up?”
She nodded. I helped her up from the floor and led the way upstairs. I stopped just inside the bedroom door and gestured for Brigid to step in ahead of me. She moved past me and got down on her knees beside her mother’s remains. Instead of breaking down like I thought she might, she smiled at her mother with a serene sadness while tears streamed down her cheeks. I stepped into the bathroom and picked up a box of tissues, which I handed to her.
She pushed her hair behind her ear before pulling a tissue out and wiping her tears.
“Soul mates till the end,” she said, with a bigger, braver smile. “It’s so romantic.”
“I’ll leave you with your mum, Brigid. I’ll be in the kitchen,” I said softly, and walked quietly down the stairs, letting out a long soundless whistle.
Another dream over. Lucy had woken up. As I sat on the couch in the living room, I took in the large collection of photographs on the wall detailing Michael and Lucy’s life together. It had all the hallmarks of a charmed life.
The turnabout in the last hour had been surreal. And now here I sat looking at the gallery of two lives that had ended, just minutes ago in Lucy’s case. And her daughter sitting with her remains upstairs, thinking it was romantic. If she only knew the truth: that the man sitting downstairs, who’d presented himself as an innocent witness and caring facilitator, may as well be the grim reaper himself, not only dealing in death but bringing it everywhere with him as if it were an infectious disease.
I was torn on my culpability. On the one hand, of course, if I’d maintained a professional code of behavior, Lucy would be alive and well. But on the other, on a level not subject to roles and conduct and societal dictums, what had happened up to the point of Lucy’s passing had actually been quite beautiful and tender, maybe even healing. If she hadn’t died, it would just have been one of those spontaneous encounters in life that had been noncommittal and serendipitous. But she had died, and now I had a big fat lie to peddle.
The ambulance arrived and I opened the door to the paramedics. The driver was a middle-aged man with a gray beard and pudgy face. His partner was a raven-haired, freckled woman in her twenties with a lively intelligence in her eyes who was clearly the leader of the two. I recognized her face from a hospital mortuary somewhere.
“You’re from Gallagher’s, aren’t you?” she said.
“That’s right,” I said. “Paddy Buckley.”
“What happened here, Paddy?” she said.
“The woman who lives here, Lucy Wright, went upstairs to get some clothes and dropped dead while she was up there. I’ll bring you up. Her daughter’s with her,” I said.
“What’s the daughter’s name?” she asked.
“Brigid.”
As soon as we reached the door of the bedroom, the raven-haired woman took control. Like most paramedics, she had an impenetrable calm and a pragmatic bedside manner. Brigid was still seated by her mother’s remains.
“Hi, Brigid, is it?” said the raven-haired woman. “I’m Robyn, Brigid. Do you mind if I take
a look at your mam?”
“Go ahead,” whispered Brigid, and she got up from the floor and stood back while Robyn leaned down and checked for a pulse.
“Yeah,” Robyn said softly, “she’s gone.”
They brought in the stretcher and placed Lucy’s remains on it before covering her with a white sheet. Robyn explained that Lucy’s remains would be brought to Clondalkin hospital, and then Brigid and I stood by the door and watched them leave with Lucy. The low panic was rising again. I had to get out of there.
“Brigid, this has obviously changed everything for you, and you’ll want time to digest it. Is there anyone you’d like me to call for you?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Maybe I could come back later in the afternoon to discuss the funeral. Would that be okay?”
She looked like a little girl lost at a fair, shocked and aware that she’d been left alone, but secure enough in her own skin to be able to deal with it. There was nothing I could do for her.
“That’s fine,” she whispered.
And I was gone.
THREE
12:25 p.m.
I pulled up outside the mortuary at Clondalkin hospital, one of the biggest and busiest in Dublin. Because there were no autopsies done on Sundays, there was always a double load waiting after the weekend for Eddie Daly, the man who ran the mortuary and opened up all the bodies for the pathologists to work on. He was standing outside the front doors in his stained white coat, smoking a cigarette when I got out of my Camry. I nodded at him. As always, he wore a jaundiced, suffering smile.
“Eddie, how you getting on?”
“Struggling, and yourself?”
“Keeping busy. Listen, I’ve just come from a house off Wellington Road where I was making arrangements for a man with his wife, and when she went upstairs to get the clothes, she dropped dead.”
“Lucy Wright.”
“That’s her.”
“She’s inside.”
“I know you’re up to your bollocks here, Eddie, I thought I could save you and the pathologists some time. She had angina, she told me herself before she went upstairs, so no need for a postmortem.”
“She’s down to be posted in the morning, Paddy, and that’s the end of it. It’s not up to you or me anyway, you know that.”
“Who’s down to do it?”
“Norman.”
“Is he inside?”
“You don’t want to see him, Paddy, he’s like a bear with a sore prick.”
“Maybe I can cheer him up,” I said.
Norman Furlong looked like a bully chef. His flopping ginger mane and mustache lent a flamelike effect to his already fiery character, augmented by his pink skin and bulging gray eyes. Most undertakers I knew were intimidated by him to the point of staying well out of his way, but I hadn’t a problem with him. And despite the fact that I’d never particularly warmed to the guy, today I simply had to talk to him.
The PM room was off limits to nonstaff. Written in black and red on the door was: NO ENTRY—RESTRICTED PERSONNEL ONLY. I pushed the door open and stuck my head in. Norman was standing over a remains cut open from neck to navel.
“Norman,” I said, like we were buddies.
He looked up from the remains and focused on me with fire in his eyes.
“What are you doing in here?”
“Just passing by and thought I could save you some time. Lucy Wright had angina, so no real need for an autopsy.”
“Get the fuck out of here,” he said.
“I’ll leave you to it,” I said, and walked out of the room.
When I got back outside, Eddie was still there. “You didn’t come up here especially for that, did you?” he said, flicking the butt of his cigarette away.
“No, I’ve to visit my brother-in-law, he’s up in St. Michael’s. My jammer all right there?” I said, pointing to my car.
“Work away.”
“What time will she be done in the morning?”
“She’ll be clear at lunchtime,” said Eddie, walking back inside. I’d known well before I’d driven up there what I was going to be told, but I’d no choice but to try. With disgrace only a whiff away, I decided to walk around to the petrol station and buy myself a pack of cigarettes. My old reliable: Carrolls Number 1. I hadn’t smoked in three years—I’d even managed to stay off them while dealing with Eva’s death—but now that I was on the short end of the plank, I’d take whatever mercies I could get my hands on. With my DNA lining Lucy’s birth canal, and the postmortem scheduled for less than twenty-four hours away, the awaiting indignity felt more than a little disquieting. I sparked up a smoke and turned my thoughts to what they craved most: shelter.
FOUR
1:40 p.m.
The feeling of the upright oversize coffin around me was comforting. It felt like my own wooden cocoon, tucked away behind a hundred other upright coffins waiting to be lined up in the loft.
Since my father died, Frank Gallagher brought in the boxes, and Jack put the handles on and lined the insides with padding and white silk in between doing funerals and deliveries. I felt closest to my father up there in the loft. I’d spent countless hours with him there over the years. When I was a young boy, I used to sit up on his workbench amidst the tools and sawdust while he made the boxes and engraved the nameplates with a special little hammer and chisel. But everything had changed now. Gallagher’s outsourced its boxes; the nameplates were engraved by machine. And my father had long since left the loft, and Dublin, and life, for that matter. And now so had Lucy Wright. If there had been handles on the inside of the lid of the coffin I was sitting in, I would have pulled it shut, and probably wouldn’t have heard Christy calling my name from down below in the garage.
“Up here!” I shouted back.
He arrived at the top of the creaking old stairs, wheezing.
“Where are you?”
I walked out from behind the coffins and stopped by the dilapidated wardrobe. Nailed to the front of it was a print of an out-of-shape Grecian female nude, smiling out from the picture like a comely Mona Lisa. It had been there since my childhood, and probably long before it, but today, as I looked at it, I saw Lucy Wright’s face in there, beckoning me back to Pembroke Lane.
“What’s going on?” I said.
Christy had an arrangement sheet in his hand, and going by the shininess of his bald head, he was flustered. He cut a humorous figure: thick-lensed glasses, pear-shaped trunk, and an endearing overbite.
“This one’s coming in from England in the morning and I’ve never brought one in before. Will you give me a hand?”
“Sure,” I said, and looked over the arrangement sheet. Christy had graduated from the garage as a driver at Frank Gallagher’s suggestion and had been straddling both departments for a few months now. His inherent politeness made him eminently suitable for the funeral business, and after an endless stream of compliments about him from families when they paid their bills, sometimes months after the funerals, Frank decided to exploit Christy’s charms beyond the atmosphere he created in the limousine.
The remains in question was one Dermot Hayes who’d been living in Manchester, where he got hooked on heroin, ending up overdosing at the age of twenty-seven. As he was originally from Walkinstown, his family, who still lived there, wanted him brought up to Gallagher’s Walkinstown funeral home on Tuesday morning after his remains landed in Dublin airport.
“I’ve talked to the Hayes family but not the undertaker in Manchester,” said Christy.
“Then let’s give him a ring,” I said. I looked at the form and recognized his name. I phoned Kershaw’s Funeral Directors, and after being put through to the boss, Derek Kershaw, I traded the relevant information with him and ended the call. I ticked the applicable boxes and handed the form back to Christy. “Never as complicated as you think,” I said.
“You’re a pal,” said Christy.
I’d known Christy ten years, since his days as a chauffeur, when he drove for the Spanish and Australian embassies whenever they had visiting dignitaries. He used to drive with Gallagher’s in a casual capacity when he was in between jobs. After Christy’s three years of part-time work, Frank offered him a full-time position, and Christy jumped at it. He was without a doubt the best driver Gallagher’s had ever had: conscientious, dependable, polite, and mannerly. He was, as Frank often remarked, cut out for the funeral business like few others before him. Our friendship extended to our free time, too. We’d even organized a betting syndicate with a few of the lads from the yard, Christy and I being the horse-racing lovers in the group. Christy had a niece named Aoife, who was a stable hand in a prominent stud in Kildare, and for a slice of the action, she fed us inside information she gleaned from other stable hands, or grooms, or trainers, or even jockeys. Over a two-year period, we’d worked our seed money from two grand up to twelve. When we’d place a bet at the track, we’d generally lay down between five hundred and a grand, with our horse usually running at short odds, and we’d each take home between four and eight hundred on the day if we were lucky. There were five of us in the group: Christy, Jack and Eamonn from the yard, Aoife down in the stud, and I. Every month we’d have an outing, and more often than not, come away with our pockets lined.
The Last Four Days of Paddy Buckley Page 3