by Rachel Green
“And well it might. You make the disposal of a body seem almost sanitary.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen the one that came in this morning.” She made a face to express her disgust. “I swear the people at the coroner’s office have no sense of decency sometimes.”
He folded the surplice and took off his cassock. Underneath he wore a simple shirt, jumper and black trousers. He put both items in his case. “That’s me done for the day. I’m off to put my feet up in front of the telly.”
“All right for some.” Eden walked with him to the door. His little car was dwarfed next to her hearse. “I’ve got another couple of hours before I can finish.”
“Rather you than I.” He turned at the door to grasp her hand. “See you…Friday is it?”
“Whitechapel and Coombs, yes.” Eden quoted the firm of funeral directors in lieu of the name of the deceased, which she couldn’t remember offhand. “Eleven o’clock.”
“Let’s hope for a dry spell, eh?” Reverend Dodgson grinned and hurried to his car, waving a goodbye without turning around.
Eden closed and locked the door. It was already after four, thanks to a delay in the arrival of the mourners and a further delay at the graveside when Mrs. Peterson swore her husband wasn’t dead. They’d had to pause the proceedings and open the coffin to prove her husband had well and truly left the mortal coil.
“Have you finished Mrs. Pilgrim?” she asked Emily when she saw her. “I want to get Edward Burbridge through tonight.”
“She’s all done.” Emily was just buttoning up her coat. “It was the plain pressing they wanted, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, Standard beech presentation casket. It was on the system, wasn’t it?”
“If that’s what was on the system, that’s what she got. There was an artificial hip too. I’ve packed that to go up to the hospital.”
“Thanks.” Eden yawned. “Have the police been in touch about the missing backhoe yet?”
“Not that I’m aware of.” Emily pulled on a beret and used the mirror to check it was set at the right angle. “That’s a funny business. Who’d pinch a backhoe from a cemetery?” She turned back to Eden. “And how did they get it out?”
“And why didn’t I hear them?” Eden checked her phone. “It’s only quarter past. I’ll give them a ring before I transfer the body across to the unit.”
“See you tomorrow.” Emily left through the back door, her cream mac and beret visible for only a moment before she was swallowed by the night. She appeared briefly again when she was illuminated by the interior light of her car.
Eden exchanged her jacket for a lab coat, collected a cup of coffee from the kitchen and went into the office to phone the police station again.
“Ah, Mrs. Maguire.” The officer on the other end of the phone sounded as tired as she felt. “We found your construction equipment.”
“Thank goodness for that. “ She breathed a sigh of relief. “It wasn’t damaged was it?”
“Not as far as I know. It’s in the impounded vehicles yard at the moment, waiting to be processed.”
“Processed? You mean for fingerprints and the like? How long will that take?”
“It depends on the scene of crime boys. I don’t know how backed up they are.”
“Will it be done tomorrow, do you think?”
“Couldn’t say. I can make a note of your urgency, if you like.”
“Yes please.” Eden felt as if the world were conspiring against her again. “I need it to dig graves. People will go without burials without that backhoe.”
The officer sounded suspicious. “Why would you be digging graves, madam?”
“Because I run the New Eden cemetery?” She clenched her fist. She was used to people being dense, particularly when she told them about her cryomation process, but this was an official currently in charge of an essential piece of equipment. She wondered if they’d be as slow to process a police van. “Honestly, officer, I need it for my work. Where did you find it anyway?”
“By the canal. Someone had been using it to dredge the mud from the bottom.”
“Whatever for? Surely the waterways board does that?”
“I wouldn’t know.” The officer coughed. “Will there be anything else, madam?”
“No. If you could note the urgency I’d be grateful.”
“Right you are, madam.” The phone went dead and Eden stared at it, shaking her head. If she treated people like that not only would they take their business elsewhere but the council would rescind her license.
She sat at the computer and caught up with the paperwork she hadn’t managed during the day and set herself reminders to check the balance due on the Peterson funeral was paid by the end of a calendar month. The paperwork done, she sat back to finish her now-tepid coffee and on a whim pulled up a map of Laverstone. It took her only a moment to trace the canal and was surprised to find it came as close as fifty yards to the cemetery, on the other side of the railway sidings which were so full of rusting trucks she’d been surprised to find it was still in use. She picked up the phone again and called Malcolm. “Are you still filling in the Peterson grave?”
“No. Finished ten minutes ago, why?”
“Could the backhoe have been taken out through the railway sidings? The police said they found it by the side of the canal. I’d assumed they meant the tow path but looking at the map I’m not so sure.”
“It’s possible. Want me to have a look?”
“In the morning, when it’s light. See if there’s any damage, would you?”
“Will do. Anything else before I finish for the day?”
“No. You get off home. Goodnight.” Eden went to the cold room and pulled out Edward Burbridge. His face looked better now he was deep-frozen but he was too far gone to have been the subject of a memorial photograph. She frowned. He’d been fished out of the canal, too. Was there a connection between Eddie Burbridge and someone dredging the mud? Was there another body down there the police hadn’t found? How would she find out?
She wheeled him though to the cryomation room and started up the machine, then slid the coffin with the body still inside into the belly of the freezing unit. The family had paid for the full service, which included the coffin. She switched it on and headed upstairs to her studio. She’d get an hour in the studio before David was due back.
Chapter 11
Eden was still painting when David arrived home from court. She’d only intended to stay in the studio for the length of a coffee but she was still there almost two hours later. “Up here, love.”
His measured tread pulled her from her fourth attempt to repaint the corner segment of her portrait of Hannah and she met him at the top of the stairs, still holding her palette in her left hand. She leaned forward to accept a kiss, holding her paint-smeared hands well away from his suit. “How was your day?”
“Fine, fine. Nothing too taxing. I got lumbered with the pro bono work this afternoon, of course. I was hoping to get off early. I’ve booked next Tuesday off. I thought we could go out for the day.”
“Tuesday?” Eden frowned. “I’ll have to check the calendar but I can’t remember anything urgent. Emily’s pretty competent, anyway. She can manage.” She remembered the couple from this morning. “Most things, anyway.”
“Good. It’s a date.” David grinned like a schoolboy on a promise. “Would you like to go to the theatre? I’ll see what’s on in Salisbury.”
“There’s a John Updike on at the Bristol Playhouse. I had a brochure somewhere.”
“Splendid. I’ll see what I can do.” David stepped further into the studio. “How was your day?”
“Pretty busy, actually. You haven’t got any pull with the police, have you?”
“A bit, why? You’re not in trouble or anything?”
“No. Not exactly, anyway. Someone stole the backhoe last night. The police have found it but they won’t release it until they’ve checked it for evidence. They wouldn’t tell me when
I can have it returned.”
David was silent for a minute, shaking his head and open-mouthed. “The backhoe?” Drops of spittle flew from his lips. “How can anyone steal a backhoe? It must weigh a ton.”
“They must have hotwired it and driven it out.”
“But…” He shook his head again. “We were in all night. Why didn’t we hear them?”
“I think I did, actually. I woke up about two thinking I heard a noise.”
“And then went back to sleep instead of waking me?”
“You were snoring.” Eden shrugged. “I thought it was you.”
“I’ll see what I can do to expedite its return.” He sighed heavily. “You know they’ll charge us for every day it’s in their yard? It’s in their interest to make the release slow.”
“If anyone can get it back you can.” Eden turned back to her canvas. “There’s something else you can help me with, actually. This painting doesn’t look right.” Eden stepped forward and indicate the top-right quarter. “It looks distorted here, as if her left shoulder has dislocated.”
David frowned. “I think I see what you mean. It’s difficult to be sure. Your paintings are so far removed from their subjects it’s difficult to remember they’re figurative.”
“This bit.” She pointed more precisely, her fingers an inch away from the wet paint. “It’s been driving me crazy for the last hour and a half.”
“That long?” David grinned. “I don’t know what to suggest. Could you go back to your source material? Perhaps she really has got a dislocated shoulder.”
“It’s possible.” Eden crossed the attic room to gaze out of the window onto the cemetery below. “Would you mind? I won’t be long and I’ll make dinner afterward.”
“No. Go play with your specimens. Art before arteries.” He grinned. “How about if I make dinner?”
“You?” Eden raised an eyebrow. “You know no-one will deliver here, don’t you? They always think we’re hoaxers when we ask them to deliver food to the cemetery.”
“I shall cook personally.” David stoked his expansive stomach. “How do you think I got this size without learning to appreciate fine food?”
Eden grinned. “Subsidized meals?”
“I can go off people, you know.” He made shooing motions. “Go and play Burke and Hare and I’ll have something hot for you when you get back.”
“Promises, promises.” Eden wiped the paint off her hands and took off her painting jacket. “I’ll be half an hour. There are vegetables in the fridge and meat in the freezer.”
“Super.” David followed her down the attic stairs. “The freezer in the kitchen, I hope. Not the one in the mortuary.”
“No. That one’s only for zombie guests.” She grinned as she put on her warm coat and picked up her cameras.
“What should I make?”
“Anything you like. I’m sure it will be wonderful. Doubly so, if I haven’t had to make it. Honestly, darling, you could give me a jam sandwich and I’d be happy.”
“I think I can do better than that.” David lifted an apron from the peg and made a show of putting it on. “They didn’t call me master chef in college for nothing, you know.”
“Ooh! Does this mean cheese on toast?” Eden laughed as he threw a pair of oven gloves at her. They fell short by several feet.
“Scoff if you will, but I shall be the great provider.” He picked up a knife in one hand and a steak mallet in the other. “Point me toward the forest, would you? We’ll have venison and wild boar.”
“I’ll scoff when I get back.” Eden opened the door, paused and came back for her mobile. “I’ve got my phone if you need me.”
“Onward. To the freezer!” David waved goodbye as she closed the closed the door. She was still smiling as she clattered down the stairs. At the bottom she turned left into the cryotorium rather than directly out through the front door. It had been one of David’s conditions when she mooted the idea of living above the shop that they have a separate entrance. He hadn’t wanted to come home from work every night and have to wade through dead bodies to get to the upstairs flat. The front door was served by a second driveway, though it had taken the local funeral parlors several weeks to stop blindly following the satellite navigation systems to the house instead of using the other gate to the cryotorium.
She checked on Edward Burbridge. The cryo-machine had already finished the vibration cycle and switched to freeze-drying the remains, sending the resultant dust into the collection hopper. There would be bones to grind in the morning but the only metal she could see was the remains of the coffin furniture. There was usually some in the skull, too. He’d had good teeth and good teeth generally meant pins and crowns.
She left the machine and went to the garage where the hearse and tractor were kept. She should consider building a second garage for the backhoe if it was in danger of being stolen again. If she ever got it back. She fished her keys out of her pocket and opened the cupboard. Inside were her tools of the trade. Wireless webcams, time-lapse cameras, brushes, pulleys, blocks and tackles, shovels, crowbars and a small hydraulic jack. She selected some tools and dropped them into a shoulder bag.
Outside, she pulled her coat closer against the cold and headed out to Artist’s Corner, a small section of the cemetery marked by a slowly rusting abstract structure. It had been a source of contention during the summer. The sculptor, Elizabeth Trader, assured her the polymer coating on the steel had been weatherproof. It hadn’t been and the color began to flake off before a year passed. Now it was covered in rust and although Eden didn’t mind it personally, since her whole life was built around the concept of decay, her patrons were often less than pleased to be reminded of their impermanence.
Around the statue were several unremarkable graves, most of them showing nothing more than a small brass plaque over a body-length slab of granite. Of the five, three were clients and two were her personal projects, bodies left unclaimed at the municipal morgue and sent to Eden for disposal. She treated them as well as she could and revered them in the best way she knew how.
Working by feel, she found the indentation in the slab that fitted the edge of her crowbar and levered it up far enough to insert the edge of her hydraulic jack. The smell of corruption wafted out. There was no embalming on these bodies, nor coffins to encase their decay. She took a few breaths to get used to the smell before levering the slab to a forty-five degree angle, sufficient to view the body beneath. Flies speckled the surface, lethargic in the November chill but the warmth of the body was home to a myriad of maggots, worms and beetles.
“How are you doing, Hannah?” She used her torch to inspect the state of decomposition. Most of the skeleton was visible now, with the skin stretched like a drumhead over the bones, marked like a colander thanks to the holes maggots had made as they burrowed in and out. “Well look at you.” Eden picked up her camera and took several photographs of the girl’s left shoulder. Just as David had predicted, the bone had fallen out of the socket, probably as a result of early-onset osteoporosis brought on by childhood trauma. Had she lived, Hannah would have been in agony until she’d had the shoulder surgically strengthened.
The mass of maggots were concentrated in her torso, cleaning the last of the internal organs and muscle in the area. Hannah had been here three months, the cold weather accounting for the slow rate of decomposition, and would remain until the spring. When she was eventually reduced to bone, Eden intended to gather her up and cryomate her remains, re-burying her in a corner of the cemetery she’d already reserved for David and herself.
Satisfied with the numbers of pictures she’d taken, she closed up Hannah’s grave and opened John’s. Like Hannah, John had been an unclaimed body who’d died of a drug overdose in one of the flats in Chervil Court, an area of maisonettes to the north-east of Laverstone. Unlike Hannah, he’d been exposed to a full autopsy before his arrival, which had left him, like Francis Dibben this morning, without the top of his head.
Eden shooed
away the flies. Fragments of bone gleamed in the light of the torch. The skin had sloughed away from John’s face leaving his teeth exposed against darkly festering gums, the bottom jaw open to reveal the bulbous black mass of his tongue balled into his throat. The stitches on his autopsy wound had split from the combination of decomposition gasses and insect activity, leading to a spill of maggots down his bronzed abdomen.
She pulled on a pair of latex gloves and climbed inside the shallow grave, careful to avoid treading on any body parts. Lifting the corpse’s arm, she shone the torch beneath to check the paper he’d been laid upon. The whole sheet was damp and liable to tear the moment she moved it but the stains had litmussed across the weave faster than ink on tissue. Fat had melted from the flesh and made whole areas of the paper semitransparent and other fluids had left a thick blackish paste over the surface. It was, she thought, reminiscent of Marmite.
She began photographing the body from a height of six inches. She’d print them all out and assemble them in a process derived from the joiners of David Hockney in the eighties, though she doubted he’d ever used a similar subject. She’d never exhibit the photographs since the act would break the bond of trust a mortician had with the people in her care but it would serve as a good basis for a future painting. She smiled as she photographed the skull. “You don’t mind, do you, John?”
The corpse didn’t answer. Indeed, it seemed rather to relish the prospect.
Back in the house, she put away her tools and stripped off her clothes, grateful there was no one but David and the dead in the whole building. In the robing room was an industrial washing machine she used when the corpse had to wear the clothes it died in. It came in useful when she’d been working, too. There was a shower room as well, a necessity when she came in from a grave site but it was for the use of all staff and therefore industrial and impersonal. She’d rather use the one upstairs, given the choice.
She headed up and was enveloped by the scent of hot cheese and bacon. She hugged David from behind as he stirred a pot of white sauce. “That smells delicious.”