‘Maybe. But she moved. She came back for just a moment.’
I crossed the room, and for the first time in years I looked directly at my mother’s corpse. It hadn’t kept well. She was shrunken and rotten.
‘Are you sure? Did you see it?’
‘Not exactly. But look, look at her hands.’
I did. ‘What?’
‘They were both on her chest. Now one’s at her side.’
I looked. I got down on my knees and looked closely. When my mother died, she was wearing a red dress, now faded to a shade of pink with black patches where the mould showed through. Stanley was right. She had moved, but I didn’t think it was for the reason he thought it was.
‘I think it just fell,’ I said. ‘Look at her side. The material from her dress has rotted through completely. I think we’re looking at gravity here.’
‘No. She moved.’
‘Okay,’ I said, not wanting to argue. ‘You want a cup of tea? Or something to eat?’
‘No, thanks.’ His eyes didn’t move from the coffin. ‘I’m going to wait here until she wakes up.’
I left my mother’s faithful hound and went back downstairs. It was glorious. There’s something about a nice clean house that is wonderfully relaxing.
I pressed a couple of headache tablets out of their blisters and washed them down with water straight from the tap. I made coffee, poured a generous helping into an oversized mug, and took it back to bed with me. Little ice crystals had formed on the inside of the window, and my breath was visible in the cold air. I took off my dressing gown only long enough to put on a jumper, then replaced the gown and climbed back into bed. I held the mug in both hands and sipped at it while I waited for the laptop to boot up.
Most of the Lipscombe’s records were paper based. Part of this was due to history—the Trust had been going for a long time. Another part was due to the expense of archiving all of it and splashing out on new and shiny computer systems, but mostly it was down to good old-fashioned paranoia.
The Trust had been party to a lot of secrets over the years, and we couldn’t afford to keep them all locked away behind a firewall that some hacker would consider nothing more than a fat challenge, or a thin one considering the state of our finances.
It meant that most of the good stuff was packed away in boxes. It used to be in boxes in the ballroom of the old building, but those were now mouldering in the basement in Croydon.
No one would give me a straight answer about Rosa Brannick. So I intended to find out for myself.
About eight years ago, before I’d been an employee, Patricia Stull had turned up on the Lipscombe doorstep looking for links in zombification rates. Obe had recommended I read her doctoral thesis after I’d joined the Lipscombe. While thorough, she hadn’t turned up anything new. But she had managed to cadge (expurgated) versions of the police files and had combined these with our reports. We still had the boxes in our archives, but I had no idea where to start looking. She’d emailed me a massive Excel spreadsheet, with zombies identified by number. I double-clicked.
The information was anonymised to avoid bias, so I couldn’t Control F ‘Rosa’ or ‘Brannick.’ But I could get a much better idea of where to look.
If she had zombified after dying from cancer, or a heart attack or fire or whatever the hell had killed her, she’d be on the spreadsheet somewhere, and that meant somewhere in the Lipscombe depths there was a police report on her death.
Adam was in his late twenties or early thirties, and he’d said his mother had died when he was fifteen. Which may have been the same year Annie got pregnant and Leslie and her son were supposed to have died in a car accident. I counted back, then filtered by date and by sex. Seventy women had zombified in the Greater London area in that time.
I filtered again by ages and discarded anyone under the age of thirty and over the age of sixty-two. That got rid of two-thirds.
Adam was pale and pasty enough that his mother had to have been white. I filtered again, this time according to race. And now I was down to twelve women. I looked at the columns again, looking for something else to narrow it down by but couldn’t see anything that might inadvertently exclude Rosa Brannick.
I took a screenshot of the filtered group and emailed it to myself, then reluctantly switched off my laptop, got out of my snug bed, and dressed for snow.
48
The snow had been trampled into brown slush on the roads and in the middle of the pavements, but some pristine white stuff remained at square intervals in front gardens, and I could tell just by looking who was out and who was in. I wondered if it was something burglars paid attention to, or whether, being largely self-employed, they were taking the opportunity to sleep in. I’d put my trainers into my backpack and was wearing a pair of yellow wellies that kept my feet dry and my calves chafed.
There were no protesters outside—perhaps they were taking a snow day—and ducked up into my office. No one else was in, not even Obe, although I imagined the females of the office were all taking aspirin and pouring large mugs of coffee. Last I’d seen Donna, she’d been necking tequilas, so I predicted a sickie there.
I switched on my PC, printed a screenshot of the numbers I was looking for, then headed for Obe’s office.
He had a not-so-secret safe under his desk where he kept all the important stuff. I entered the not-so-secret pin and opened it up. The keys I needed were hanging on a plastic hook stuck to the side with double-sided tape. I pocketed them, left Obe a note in case he went looking for them, then took the lift down to the basement.
Considering we shared half our office space, you might think it a bit expensive to rent the whole of the bottom floor just for old paperwork, but the basement was damp, lightless, airless, and possibly illegal in terms of health and safety hazards. So we got it thrown in for free.
The lift doors opened onto darkness. I stepped forward one step then turned and fumbled around on the wall until I found the light switch. Fluorescent lights flickered on one at a time along the ceiling until the whole room was illuminated. There were no dividing walls or cubicles down there, only supportive pillars at regular intervals and a bare concrete floor. The walls at the far end glistened in the light, and the smell of mouldering paper reached my nostrils.
The entire basement was large, around two thousand square feet, and filled from floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes in various stages of decay. Narrow pathways wound through the front third, where people had actually needed to look for something. The remainder was solid with old files and notes.
I’d received a quote from a confidential waste disposal company the previous year, but Donna had looked at the price, laughed at me, and binned it. It didn’t matter. It wouldn’t be long before everything in this room was completely unreadable anyway.
The boxes were uniform. Before, in the old ballroom, the paper had spilled out of dozens of different receptacles, each dated to a certain era, but with the move, everything was boxed up in plain brown rectangles.
I surveyed the room, headed for a likely stack, and opened the flap of the box at the top. It was filled with small rectangular receipts. The next was filled with old letters, mostly complaints. A neatly typed response, signed by Obe, was stapled to each one.
I worked methodically from left to right, opening and closing boxes as I went. I got lucky and found the ones I was looking for after only twenty minutes. Patricia had stacked them neatly in a row next to a bunch of out-of-date benefit application forms, and judging from the first box at least, they were in order of surname rather than number, which made things slightly more difficult. I looked under B for Brannick, just in case, but wasn’t that lucky. The paperwork was stuffed into brown paper envelopes, tied with elastic bands where there was too much to go in one, and each had a surname written on the front in black marker pen.
I looked at my printout. The numbers were varied, with the lowest at twelve and the highest at 240. There was nowhere to sit, so I stood with both pieces of p
aper held up against the wall and looked up numbers against names.
And found a Rosa in the second one I looked at: Rosa Agatha Baranowski. I’d seen the surname in the Bs while looking for Brannick. I pocketed my list, returned the names and numbers list to its original box, then pulled out the Baranowski envelopes. There was a solid stack of them, too many for just one person unless something really interesting had happened.
I pulled pages out of the first envelope and found the medical record of an Agatha Baranowski who had zombified after her death in a nursing home. The second was for Rosa. I skimmed her paperwork, found the name Neil Brannick, then stuffed everything back in the envelope so I could take the lot upstairs and peruse them somewhere that didn’t smell like the whole place was about to cave in and bury me in old paper.
Habi was sitting at her desk when I got back, and she gave me a rueful look. I didn’t really want to have a mutual misery session, so I settled for a sympathetic glance on the way to my office then stuffed the paperwork into my backpack and headed out.
I stopped off at the chippy since I was going past, but the suited ghost wasn’t there, and the few who were were focused on the Hollyoaks omnibus blaring out of the TV bolted to the wall.
I went to Starbucks instead and ordered a coffee. There was an independent coffee shop next door with the loveliest proprietor, but I am ashamed to admit I like the anonymity of the big chains. Nobody tries to be nice to me and ask how my day is or engage me in chit chat. I can sit on my own and remain undisturbed by the overly friendly. I also then don’t feel guilty if I sit for two hours, hogging a whole table on a single coffee.
I sugared my coffee, then spilled the contents of Rosa’s envelope onto the table. Patricia’s project had been huge in scope. Its official goal was to identify the reason a small number of people avoided immediate zombification, but I’d always suspected the real reason was to find a get-out clause, that Patricia thought if she just had enough information she’d find a way out of the inevitable.
It meant that she’d gathered every piece of information she could lay her hands on. And the fact that she’d then left it all to rot in our basement meant there was nothing to find. I could have told her that. Anyone could, but she’d needed to learn it for herself.
I stacked the papers in a neat pile and purposely read from the front to the back, not skipping anything or looking for the good bits.
A copy of Rosa’s birth certificate certified that she had been born human to Eric and Agatha Baranowski, both also listed as human. Agatha’s age was listed as forty-two. The name ‘Agatha’ was ringed in blue pen, and Patricia had written ‘carrier’ above it. Stapled to the back was an extract from the Necroambulist Register. There were four Baranowskis: two older brothers who had reanimated, as well as Agatha and Rosa, who were both still marked as living at the time the copy was made. I glanced at the cause of death for the brothers. Lung cancer in both cases.
Her full medical records were included, which I thought was probably a breach of data protection. Perhaps back then no one was as worried about that sort of thing.
I ploughed through random and personal pieces of a life. She’d become pregnant via IVF treatment and given birth to Adam at nineteen. A letter detailed the terms of a settlement with the hospital—a long and protracted birth combined with poor quality care meant that Adam would be Rosa’s only biological child.
I turned to the next page and found a full A4 photograph of Neil and a woman I could only assume was Rosa. I flipped the picture and confirmed the identification from the notes on the back. She’d been a bloodless-looking creature: pale skin, pale eyes, eyebrows so light they were hardly there. She was at least a head shorter than Neil and had Adam’s round face, but there was no puppy fat to it, just flatness. She wore her white-blond hair in a ponytail, scraped tight across her scalp.
I put the picture to one side. The next paper was a fifteen-year-old police report. I flipped to the bottom of the first statement and saw a familiar signature: Paul Ward, Haddad’s predecessor. He’d retired and moved to Spain, but I thought I had a phone number for him somewhere if I had any questions.
I read through the report carefully. Almost fifteen years exactly before Malcolm zombified, the fire brigade was called to number eleven John Line Terrace. I looked at the address again, and the penny dropped.
The neighbour who had called the police over Malcolm had lived in a house with bricks a slightly different colour to the rest in the street. At the time, I’d thought that was because of a wartime bomb, but a rebuild after a fire would do it too. Fifteen years ago, the Brannick brothers were neighbours.
The fire brigade had found fifteen-year-old Adam outside, alone and crying. The front door was barricaded from the outside with what looked like beams of wood nailed to the frame, and shards of glass were all that remained of the front window. Adam told them his father had broken the window when they couldn’t get out the front door. Neil had then gone back in for his wife.
The firemen smashed open the front door to find Neil unconscious downstairs, and Rosa, dead from carbon dioxide poisoning, in the bedroom. Dead, but already crazy with hunger as her body compensated for the poison coursing through it.
49
Until as late as 1958, it was perfectly legal to burn zombies without so much as a by-your-leave, and from then until 1964, you needed to apply for a permit because while it was still legal to burn the living dead, it wasn’t legal to burn their property.
Finally, the Protection from Necroambulism Act was passed and arson for any reason was banned, with anyone attempting to burn zombies looking at a hefty prison sentence. That’s when the Necroambulist Response Team was created, the first ZDC refurbished, and the emergency line introduced.
All so much more civilised, except for the zombies who were suddenly sentenced to spend their afterlives starving and shambling around in stinking darkness instead of a quick fiery death.
What had happened to Rosa had all the fingerprints of a zombie burning, except that she was still alive when the fire was started. It wouldn’t be the first time someone got the wrong end of the stick and tried to burn someone who was still alive, but Rosa actually was a zombie. That would be quite a coincidence.
I read through the medical report. The court ruling that forbade autopsies on the living dead without their express permission had only been made in 2008, and she’d had one whether she’d wanted it or not.
The report put her age at thirty-four and noted that she was showing signs of infected nasal passages, but had been in otherwise good health. Her height was given as 5’ 7” and weight as 130 pounds. It marked off a few minor scars and noted that there was evidence she had broken her leg in early life but seemed to have made a full recovery.
Cause of death was given as smoke inhalation, and it was noted her body hadn’t fully made the conversion from living to living dead. There was no doubt it was the fire that killed her and the reanimation came afterwards.
I took a sip of my coffee and made a face. Bleeurgh, cold. I ordered another one at the counter, keeping half an eye on my table in case anyone decided my backpack looked like it might have something interesting in it.
After the machine finished spitting and steaming, I collected my coffee and went back to the table, where I flipped over the medical report to see Patricia, bless her cotton socks, had inserted three neatly cut newspaper clippings.
The first was a rehash of the fire and showed a slightly yellowed version of the photo of Rosa I’d already seen, but didn’t provide me with any more information. The second was only a few lines and indicated that an arrest had been made in connection with a fire in Wimbledon. The last one was dated almost a year after the fire and confirmed a prison sentence for the arsonist. The name in the headline was familiar but unexpected. It read simply ‘Ogunwale Sentenced Ten Years.’
50
According to the newspaper report, Moses Ogunwale was a man obsessed with the living dead. He’d been six when an outbrea
k had devoured his village in a part of Nigeria I’d never heard of, turning both his parents into ravenous fiends. The boy survived by climbing a tree and waiting it out until help arrived. He was the sole survivor and was sent to live with the only family he had left—an uncle in Birmingham.
The older Moses was already known to the NRTs. He had thirty-four calls to the emergency line to his name, and each turned out to be nothing at all. Paul Ward had been sent to have a word with him about a year before Rosa died, and the calls stopped. On the day Rosa burned to death, both Adam and Per testified that he had asked Adam to check if his mother was still breathing.
A half-hearted defence was made, testifying to his history and the state of his mental health, but the jury was having none of it and Moses was convicted.
I recalled the old man I’d seen peering out when the NRTs were at the house. The face had looked nervous at all the police standing round, but I’d thought it was the standard guilt that most people got when confronted by police or other figures of authority. Now I was wondering.
I looked at the time on my phone. It was getting close to midday, and the coffee shop was beginning to fill up. I packed up my paperwork, glugged the last dregs of my coffee, and tried not to get annoyed at the people who sat down at the table before I’d even stood up. That would have been completely unfair considering how long I’d been sitting there.
I popped my head into the chippy on the way back to the office, but the suited ghost hadn’t returned. I’d had so much coffee I was sure I could hear sloshing as I walked. But I hadn’t had anything substantial and I was starting to get peckish, so I picked up a box of chips to soak up the caffeine. I sat at the back in my usual seat, taking care to keep my distance from Plague Girl. Not that she was contagious or anything, but dripping sores at close range put me off my food.
I drowned the chips in vinegar and salt then ate them one by one while I watched the ghosts. The Graveyard Theatre only renewed its billing once a week. The ghosts were getting restless. You can only watch Grease so many times before your non-brain implodes.
The Secret Dead (London Bones Book 1) Page 23