by HRF Keating
Chapter Nineteen
It had been decided, at very much the last minute, that the funeral should take place in Birchester rather than in London. The Faceless Ones had got hold of, or claimed that they had, information that indicated the group who had ‘claimed responsibility’ for the bomb behind Notting Hill police station was planning to attack the London crowd expected at St Paul’s. So Birchester Cathedral had been hurriedly pressed into service.
Harriet was taken aback by finding the funeral was upon her. John had made himself responsible for all the arrangements that fell to them both, including, she was just aware, informing all the people who had written the letters of condolence he had not so far let her read. Immersed until recently in the therapeutic task Mr Brown had given her, she had hardly given a thought to the actual date.
So it was in a curiously dazed state that she found herself standing outside Birchester Cathedral at some minutes before half past ten on what had turned out to be a nastily cold morning, swirling with thin but clammy fog. They were, she had just about taken in, waiting for the arrival of the Metropolitan Police contingent who were to take part. Among them — this she did know — would be Malcolm, pronounced fit enough to attend in a wheelchair. Bemused, she looked up now at the elaborately decorated building, a nineteenth century self-tribute to the city, and thought how, on the rare occasions she had been inside it, it had deeply depressed her with its dull red glossy stonework, its narrow shape, its far-distant arched roof, and, too, its faint lurking atmosphere of there being, somewhere up there, a God threatening, at any edict disobeyed, eternal hell fire.
And, she added to herself, I’m not going to feel today any of the sentiments proper to the mother of a young man dead before his time. I just don’t see why I should. If I am going to feel for Graham, and, by God, I have done, then I’ll do it in my own time and in my own way.
She looked at the queue of people waiting for the closed doors to open, a TV crew off-handedly filming them. Well wrapped up though they were, they all looked pinched with cold. Noses were red. Hands, those that were not gripping open umbrellas, were being surreptitiously rubbed together, as if it was somehow letting down the side to admit to being affected by the damp and dismal air.
‘For God’s sake,’ she muttered to John beside her. ‘Can’t they open up? It’s freezing out here.’
‘We’ve got to wait for the dignitaries from the Met,’ he said.
‘Fuck the Met.’
‘Language, language. Your Mr Brown’s not far away.’
‘Oh God, sorry.’
She looked behind her. Mr Brown, a pillar figure in brass-buttoned police-blue coat and sternly worn braided cap, was, mercifully, at enough of a distance not to have heard her sacrilegious words. She gave him a tentative smile. And received, despite his rigidly Scottish bearing, a look back that was a good deal warmer.
Well, she said to herself, one good thing about all these past few days, I’ve come to have a lot of admiration for the ACC. Not many other senior officers would have had the toughness and the compassion, yes, compassion, to have given me work to do. And hard work, too.
Work — she allowed herself a jounce of pride — that I accomplished. To the full.
John leant towards her and murmured.
‘And, let me remind you, we, both of us, for this one day or this hour and a half, or whatever it turns out to be, count as dignitaries. Just like the Assistant Chief Constable waiting over there.’
‘All right. I’ll do the proper thing. But I wish the London lot would get a move on.’
‘Fog on the motorway, I expect. No. No, here they come.’
A cavalcade of impressive motorcars swept into the cathedral forecourt. The patiently waiting three-abreast queue shifted about in relief.
From the leading car, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police himself stepped out. A figure Harriet recognised from dozens, if not scores, of newspaper photos and television interviews.
Mr Brown, plainly by arrangement, immediately crossed over to him. They shook hands. Mr Brown said something, inaudible from where they were. But the Commissioner gave him a grave nod and visibly squared his shoulders, yet more heavily braided than the ACC’s cap. Then the two of them came heading towards John and herself.
‘Harriet,’ Mr Brown said, and she was grateful again for the forename, ‘Sir Frederick would like a word.’
‘Mrs —’ Momentary pause, evidently occasioned by his abruptly realising that the Detective Superintendent Martens he thought he was about to speak with was not wearing police uniform but her one and only funeral-going black outfit. ‘Er — Mrs Piddock, allow me to offer the deepest sympathies of every one of my officers for the terrible act of which your son was victim.’
She managed a noise that indicated gratitude.
‘I would like you to know,’ the Commissioner went on, ‘that we consider the ceremony here today to be a sign for the whole nation to see that we will not be intimidated by terrorists, of whatever stripe, as long as we have officers as brave and resolute as your son to keep the Queen’s Peace.’
Another somewhat confused pause.
‘That is, of your two sons, I should say. Police Constable … er … Malcolm Piddock also suffered terrible injuries at the hands of … of those —’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Harriet said, loudly and clearly.
Thank you for nothing, she allowed herself disrespectfully to think. Damn it, I’m not here because I want to be part of the conveying a message to the great British public.
No, I’m here, in the shape of Hologram Harriet, briefly revived, because a Mrs Piddock ought to be here. A dummy figure.
But, if there’s any message Real Harriet wants to convey, it’s the one I produced during that awful interview on television. Not that we must not be intimidated, but that we should be asking ourselves what in the past we did that has aroused so much anger against us. Yes, even in India, however misguided the people who planted that bomb in Notting Hill.
John, as the Commissioner still escorted by Mr Brown moved towards the now opened doors of the cathedral, leant towards her and, tugging from his pocket one of the terrible little pieces of paper — sometimes even a soft restaurant napkin — on which he scrawled any quotation that particularly struck him, whispered:
‘“The honourable justification of violence will always be to me the greatest evil because it makes men-blind.” Wonderful Irish novelist, Jennifer Johnston.’
She felt a flush of gratitude. John, clever John, connecting the Commissioner’s words with hers in the studio, and finding, scrumpled in his pocket, reassurance.
Then she saw that Malcolm was being lifted, in his wheelchair, out of the adapted police vehicle that had brought him up to Birchester.
She hurried off towards him, seeing with every step nearer that he did look much fitter than she had feared. There was — she had been able to make out even at a distance — still an ominous patch of white plaster at the side of his head where the piece of flying metal had entered. But otherwise there was only the rug over his legs that perhaps predicted long days of wretchedness ahead.
‘Malcolm, are you all right?’
‘Oh yes. Yes, I’m fine. Look at me, new uniform brought to St Mary’s last night, all bright and shining. And —’ He heaved his upper body a little more forward, dropped his voice to a near-whisper, ‘guess what I’ve got, too. A Policeman’s Friend. Really. I didn’t know they existed any more, thought they were just a training school joke. But I’ve got one tucked away here in my trousers. Good idea, really. I’m not in total charge of things down there yet, and if I get wheeled up to where I’m to do my bit and drip pee all over the cathedral, it won’t look too good.’
‘Malcolm, you’re incorrigible.’
But, she thought, no, he isn’t. He’s wonderful. Tough, not to be beaten. Not by terrorists, not by life.
‘Incorrigible? Expect that’s what my boss thinks, too. He’s over there, heading the lot from the Met, that
little shrimp of a fellow.’
Harriet looked. So that’s deep voiced, ponderous Superintendent Robertson, I’d never have thought it. And somehow now that fearful telephone message doesn’t seem to have been so — what’s it? — portentous.
John had joined them in time for the naughty tale. He grinned at his son and went to the back of the chair.
‘We’ve got to go in. All set in orders. Commissioner goes first. The Bishop’s entering by his own special door. And then we take our places in the front pew, on the left as we approach.’
‘Quick march then,’ Malcolm said.
They set off.
When they had gone about ten yards Harriet realised something. Something she actually found rather comforting. In motion, Malcolm’s chair screeched abominably.
Squeak, squeak, squeak, they went over to the cathedral. There, she found, two burly officers of Greater Birchester Police had been stationed — had they been concealed just inside? — waiting to lift Malcolm in his chair up the steps and into the porch.
Then off they went again up the broad central aisle.
Squeak, squeak.
I will not giggle. I will not giggle.
At last they reached the front pews. John ushered her in first, manoeuvred Malcolm’s chair a bit, slipped in beside her, pulled the chair back till Malcolm was level with them, applied its brake.
Behind, from the organ loft, there came now subdued and all but tuneless music.
John put his lips close to her ear.
‘How I hate that moaning noise,’ he muttered. ‘Always makes me want to jump up and shout why cant you give us something a bit cheerful?’
She nodded quick agreement.
Now the main body of the congregation was entering. The sound of discreet words of greeting to and fro came to her ears. Soon to be replaced by the clonking of police boots as the contingent from the Met and a body of officers of the Greater Birchester Police made their way to their allocated pews.
Then the Bishop emerged from his hidey-hole, mitred and crozier-wielding, took his place on his throne.
Now the music-less music dropped in volume and from the open doors at the far end — Harriet in a moment knew what must be coming — there sounded the leaden march of solid feet, the pallbearers bringing in the coffin. She sat, rigid, where she was, looking straight ahead. At nothing.
But soon, all too soon, she knew that the coffin on the shoulders of its four solid police officers was beside her.
Graham, she thought. Graham is in it. There. But is it Graham? That — it must be — dreadful bundle of broken bits? My Graham. My son. The boy that I bore with Malcolm. The body they mutilated.
Up the two steps and through the gates in the chancel rail the coffin was carried. At last, abruptly transformed into so many ungainly human beings, the bearers contrived to lower their burden on trestles which, hitherto, Harriet had not noticed. They regrouped, solemn once again, dipped their heads as one, moved away.
And there was what the whole elaborate ceremony was about. The body of Police Constable Graham Piddock.
The organ swelled up into a louder version of what had been played earlier. Then was stilled. Coming down to the altar rail was a figure Harriet recognised from various similar occasions in the past, the Greater Birchester Police chaplain.
‘Friends,’ he intoned reedily.
I just wish he’d call us something a bit less sloppy, she thought with a small spurt of anger.
And at once wondered whether her rage was, in fact, an attempt to keep at bay some deeper true emotion.
‘Friends, let us begin by singing what was Graham’s favourite hymn, to the words by John Bunyan and music by Sir Edward Elgar, “He who would valiant be”.’
The organ boomed off again.
How the hell does he know that was Graham’s ‘favourite hymn’, Harriet asked herself. I don’t know that it was. I very much doubt, in fact, if Graham had a favourite hymn.
She leant forward to look at Malcolm. Had he been responsible? But he was sitting blank-faced.
Behind, the congregation, bit by bit, took up the words.
And they came back, in full force, to Harriet. The words that had been embossed on her mind from schooldays, memory-loaded, if not strictly Bunyan’s own, at least his thoughts adapted to a more singable shape. Let him in constancy follow the Master. Well, I don’t think Graham followed in recent years any Master of that sort. But whoever, whatever, he followed, he did so in constancy. And, yes, he was valiant. He was valiant when, with foolish impetuosity, he approached that parcel in Ladbroke Walk. And met that horrible end. At the hands of those deluded idiots who believed by killing other people they could threaten their way into achieving altogether ridiculous ends.
Up at the altar the service droned on.
Harriet still felt totally unaffected. This was something other people had to do, or wanted to do. To register some sort of alliance with dead Graham, Graham the dead victim of just one of those murderous causes.
She hardly listened.
Then suddenly she heard the words, ‘will be read by the victim’s twin brother, Police Constable Malcolm Piddock.’ Jesus, Malcolm. Malcolm’s going to take part. That’s what he must have been talking about outside when he said he would do his bit and then went on to produce his joke about peeing.
But John had leant forward and released the brake on the chair, and now he was slipping out of the pew and beginning to push Malcolm forward. Squeak, squeak, squeak, to be for a few moments the central point of the whole ceremony.
But what’s he going to read? I knew nothing of this. I suppose it’s part of the arrangements John so decently took off my shoulders. What could he have to read? God knows, he’s never been much of a reader himself. Except college stuff. Got him a fair degree. But this … What can it be?
Now, however, squeaky chair safely braked squarely in the chancel with John standing a little back from it, Malcolm raised his head in the hushed silence.
And then came the words. Shakespeare’s, often and often said aloud at funerals and never tarnished by that.
‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun
Nor the furious winter’s rages.
Thou thy wordly task hast done,
Home art gone and ta’en thy wages.’
That was all. All, presumably that John had thought Malcolm, still wracked by weakness and not a little pain, could manage. But they were enough.
Harriet knew that down her cheeks soft tears were now quietly falling.
Yes, now all this, the big echoing cathedral, the people massed into it, the Bishop, the Commissioner, the Chief Constable, the Lord Mayor, Superintendent Robertson, now they all mean something. Now I can do more than rage internally, as I’ve done ever since I heard that Graham was dead. Now I can mourn. I can start the mourning that, I know, will go on, go quietly on, for the rest of my life.
Some other words of Shakespeare’s came into her mind.
After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well.
Treason has done its worst, nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing
Can touch him further.
Whose epitaph had that been? King Duncan’s? Yes, think it’s that. But it applies with time-proofed strength to poor Graham, too. Nothing can touch him now. He’s safe from all the threats that fly about our world. He is safe. Poor Graham. Safe Graham.
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