by Rachel Green
As David let out the breath he’d been holding, Eden relaxed her feet against his rapidly diminishing penis and relaxed as well, looking up at the ceiling. She chuckled and pointed and a spot of semen near the light fitting. “I do believe that’s your personal record.”
Chapter 32
The funeral of Frank Dibben was at least well attended, if not actually quiet. Eden was pleased to see a couple of out-of-uniform-but-obviously-coppers had come along, partly to make sure he was thoroughly dead but mostly because they knew there might be fireworks. She was especially grateful for their presence when Frank’s wife and mother of his three teenage children met his other, younger wife and mother of his six-year old. Father Cullen from St. Pity’s had the presence of mind to press the button to lower the coffin when Mrs. Dibben the first threw a punch at Mrs. Dibben the second and Mrs. Dibben the elder, Frank’s mother, clumped Colin Birchall, Mrs. Dibben the second’s lodger, with her walking stick.
The wake was performed at the police station, accompanied by several uniformed officers and a number of solicitors. Eden wondered if David had become embroiled in the drama. Most of the mourners had left to follow the riot wagon but there were a few stragglers, old colleagues of Frank’s from his work at the racecourse, who owed loyalty to neither of the families and were happy to accept a cup of tea and a biscuit while they waited for the pub to open.
Emily knocked on Eden’s door a little before lunchtime and held up a plastic bag. “They’ve all gone, including Father Cullen. What should I do with the lost property?”
Eden stifled a groan. “What was left behind?”
Emily opened the “A handbag, a hearing aid, a pair of glasses, three mobile phones, a grubby patchwork doll and a pair of false teeth.”
“Oh dear.” Eden wrote the list on her telephone messages pad. “Box them up with a label and put it in collection storage. I’ll ring Mrs. Dibben to let her know.”
“Unless she’s been charged with a breach of the peace.”
“Even so, she’ll be out on bail by tonight.” She put the pen down. “There should be three deceased coming in from the hospital after lunch.”
“Three? Not contagious, are they?”
“I don’t think so. One’s a child, though, so be extra sensitive with the families.”
“Oh.” Emily’s face fell. “I hate it when kids die. It’s not right. Would you do that one, please?”
“Yes, of course. Let me know when it arrives, will you? I’m going upstairs for lunch.”
In her own flat, Eden kicked off her shoes and heated up a pot of instant noodles. She ate it on the sofa with her feet up and a tea towel in lieu of a bib, watching the news. When she’d finished her food she fetched her laptop and looked through the photographs she’d taken the night before last. Settling on an image of Hanna where the skin of her chest had slipped and split leaving an effect akin to lace curtains, she pulled out a pad of watercolor paper and began to sketch.
The rest of the lunch hour flew by as she drew, back-shading the lines and adding highlights and mid-tones as she blocked in the background of a brothel. Another hour passed before her phone rang, startling Eden out of her reverie. “Shit.” She grabbed at the handset. “Yes?”
“It’s Emily. There’s a huge truck just pulled up outside. I think it’s our digger.”
“Marvelous. I’ll be right down.”
Eden got outside to find Emily and Malcolm already watching two uniformed policemen unloading the backhoe from a flatbed truck. After laying down two steel ramps, one of them climbed into the cab and started it with a screwdriver and drove it onto the New Eden car park. He took his screwdriver back when he got out of the cab.
The other policeman handed her a clipboard. “Sign here, please.”
Eden dashed off her signature. “Where are the keys?”
“Keys? There weren’t no keys, Madam. We rigged it for you to just make the connection with a screwdriver. That should do you. It’s not like anyone’s going to pinch an excavator, is it?”
“Someone did. That’s why you had it in the first place?”
“Is it?” He shook his head as he tore off a carbon sheet. “They never tell us these things. Here’s your copy. You’ve fifty-six days to pay up.”
“Pay up?” “Eden stared at her copy of the receipt. Her mouth dropped open when she saw the figure buried among the small print two-thirds of the way down the page. “Four hundred and sixteen quid? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I’m afraid not, Madam. That’s transport both ways, storage and handling.”
“But…but…” Eden pointed to the bottom of the cemetery. “You picked it up from the canal. I could have just driven it home myself it ten minutes flat.”
The officer held his hands up. “Nothing to do with me, madam. You’ll need to get in touch with the complaints procedure department, but I advise you to pay the bill before the due date else you’ll get accumulated court costs, unless your appeal is successful.”
“I can appeal?”
“Yes, madam. If you ring through to the police impound unit, they’ll send you a form. If your appeal is successful they’ll wave some of the fees, but not the court costs if you’ve failed to pay on time.”
“But I’m supposed to be the victim here.”
He shrugged. “Nothing I can do about it, is there?” He pulled a wallet out and extracted a card. “That’s the number for the victim support unit.” He climbed into the cab and started up the truck, going around the building and out through the entrance. Malcolm pulled out a penknife and climbed into the cab of the backhoe. With a gout of foul black exhaust he trundled it off down the cemetery, heading for the plot she needed open for Friday.
Eden looked again at the paperwork, shaking her head. “Four hundred and sixteen quid.”
Emily patted her on the arm. “We’ve got three bodies coming in shortly. I’ll sell them all the deluxe package.”
Eden gave her a grim smile. “That’s the ticket. We can’t allow these little setbacks to upset us for long, eh? Oh!”
“What?”
“With all the commotion this morning I forgot to move Mr. Dibben to the freezer room.”
“That’s all right. I took care of it.”
“You did? Thank you.” Eden relaxed. “Can I have some peace for the rest of the day, please?”
Chapter 33
Meinwen spent the morning with a cup of tea and the computer. Every search she made about Edward Burbridge made her blood run cold. Why had no one ever arrested the man and thrown him into prison to rot for the rest of his life?
She soon had her answer. Pictures of a smiling Eddie giving gifts to the children, checks to charity, donations to good causes. Here was a photograph of him shaking the Lord Mayor’s hand, there one of him with the Chief Constable, there with Princess Diana. She wouldn’t put it past him to have been behind that, either.
There was a photograph of his marriage to Eleanor Chadwick, another with their son George, and a report about Eleanor’s tragic death by drowning in the pond at Hyde Park leaving George, six, and Beatrice, one.
Tempted as she was to turn the whole thing over the boys in blue, Meinwen soldiered on, pulling up news article after news article relating to the affairs and connections of Eddie Burbridge. Nothing solid, of course. Nothing to actually tie him to a crime with anything more than circumstantial evidence or motive. It was odd just how many businesses burned down when they refused a buyout bid from Burbridge and Associates. Several corporate executives met with sudden deaths, too.
The police investigated but generally ruled accidental death. The chairman and treasurer of Derwent Educational were both found electrocuted in the bath. It was a minor scandal since they were both married but not to each other. The owner-proprietor of Shelley’s Egyptian Cottons apparently tripped in her shop and strangled herself with her own thread-count and Peter Hillier, the Butcher of Baker’s Row, slipped into his own meat grinder. The latter was the most unfortunate, be
cause it was only when several people complained about finding fragments of butcher’s apron in their sausages did his employees suspect anything untoward.
Her printer working overtime, Meinwen shoved the two side settees to the edges of the room and laid the articles out consecutively. It showed Eddie to be a ruthless businessman who would use any means necessary to advance contracts in his construction company. She couldn’t help wondering how many skeletons were lurking not in his closet, but in the foundations of several landmark buildings around London.
He seemed to change when he moved to Laverstone after his first wife died. Gone were the shady construction deals and spate of accidental deaths. Instead the news focused on his altruism; his construction of a radio mast at the current site of Gaunt's Garage, his purchase of several acres of land near the canal and the erection of a Cleopatra-style needle at Dew Point. It continued with his entry into the world of local politics and his landslide victory over the incumbent mayor, Robert Beswick. As a gesture of goodwill, he’d even paid for a statue of his former opponent to be placed outside the council offices. His marriage to Shirley Enfield, heir to the Enfield estate, had occurred shortly after, closely followed by her parents’ death in a car accident.
Meinwen fetched a stool from the kitchen and stood on it to gain a better view of the dozens of articles. However you looked at it, Eddie Burbridge had not been a nice man. She was glad he’d drowned in the canal. Someone should be offered a medal for that, though ironically, it too had been declared an accidental death.
A teetotaller gets inexplicably drunk, waves away his driver and decides to walk along the canal towpath, then slips in and happens to drown right where old Joseph was killed. The story was about as likely as Winston being ‘a vulnerable minority.’
There were plenty of photographs to illustrate the articles. Most, in the tradition of newspaper photographers everywhere, showed pictures of empty buildings and pieces of waste ground with captions like ‘proposed site of new stadium’ or ‘a terraced house, yesterday.’
In some of the photographs, Eddie had a woman at his side. Not his wife, but a hard-faced woman who looked to know the business end of purchase ledger. A brief check furnished the name: Vera Shelton. This, then was the Vera who had been friend and confidante of Shirley Burbridge and had allegedly taken Michelle’s cake knife for later use in the murder of her employer.
She climbed down from the stool and picked up a candid photograph from nineteen eighty-three. It showed Eddie at a meeting somewhere, with Vera in the background wearing a voluminous coat, her hand in Eddies.
Meinwen sat on the stool. Eddie had been having an affair with Vera, but had still married Shirley when he moved to Laverstone. Why had Vera stayed? What did the huge coat conceal?
She returned to the computer and did a search on Vera. What labor it must have been before the digital age. Before the internet she would have been facing a trip to London and a trek around all the local council’s registries of Births, Deaths and Marriages to discover what a search query had revealed to her in under a second.
Vera Shelton had given birth to a baby girl, Beatrice, on the fifth of September nineteen eighty-three. Eddie Burbridge was listed as the father. That explained her remaining close to the family despite Eddie’s marriage to Shirley.
She picked up a magnifying glass and went through the photographs again, pausing at one of the earlier shots of Eddie and his work crew breaking ground on his first construction project in nineteen seventy-four. She frowned at one of the faces and returned to the laptop, going back through her search history until she found the page with the photograph. She recognized the face but couldn’t place it.
A new search brought up a Facespace application. Upload your photograph to see what you’d look like in ten, twenty, thirty years. She cropped the article and uploaded it. She chewed her lip as the faces changed until there was one she recognised standing just behind Eddie Burbridge. Tags appeared over some of the figures, courtesy of the applications ability to match photographs to profiles: Edward Burbridge, George Fletcher, Graham Glover. The one she was interested in had no tag, but she recognized the easy smile of the partially bald man she’d met only yesterday.
Malcolm, the gravedigger from the new cemetery.
Chapter 34
Meinwen stooped to pick up the post from the floor in front of the shop door. It accumulated far too fast when she didn’t open up and the stack in her hands included several ‘while you were out’ cards detailing parcels that had been returned to the sorting office. It was too late to collect them today since the place was only open until lunchtime. She carried it all to the back room where the kettle was just coming to the boil for her chamomile tea.
She sorted it into her usual three piles: junk mail and circulars, shop business and personal, the latter being the smallest. She dumped the first pile in the recycling bin without opening any of it then made her tea and sat at the little café table to open them. Of the three personal letters only two were serious, the third detailing some aspect of eternal damnation reserved especially for witches and pagans–at least the sender knew there was a difference. Of the others, one was from a teenager desperate to learn a love charm and the other from a young man convinced he was a werewolf. She added some of her free pamphlets on candle and natural magic to the first and dashed off a polite rebuttal of the second, urging the lad to speak to his mother about puberty.
When the pile of post had been reduced to a further three piles–rubbish, to deal with and file–she drained the remainder of her herbal tea and debated checking her email and webshop. Her business was kept alive by the internet. She sold more goods online in a week than she did in a month of the shop. People didn’t generally like to be seen entering a shop full of witchcraft paraphernalia. It could lead to awkward questions. She elected to leave the electronic mail for tomorrow and picked up the shop phone.
Eden answered on the first ring, prompt and businesslike, and Meinwen skipped over the pleasantries. “What do you know about Malcolm Glover?”
She recognised Meinwen's voice. “Malcolm? Why?”
“His name has come up in connection with Eddie Burbridge. How long have you known him?”
“Quite a while. He’s worked here since before it opened. He was always hanging about the site when the cryotorium was under construction and when I advertised for staff he was first in the queue for the maintenance gardener.”
“Are you happy with him?”
“I always was.”
“Was?”
“Until this morning I’ve never had a word of complaint about him.”
“What happened this morning? Apart from the body, obviously. I was there for that.”
“They found the keys to the digger beneath the body. Not with the body, as such, but in the compost heap. Malcolm seemed worried about it, somehow. Claimed he’d lost them weeks ago and had been hotwiring the tractor ever since. It was weird. His whole character changed. The funny thing was, when the tractor was delivered the officer said they’d hotwired it but it hadn’t been hotwired before.”
“So Michael was lying? He’d dropped the keys after it was stolen?”
“As far as I can see it means it was stolen using the keys. Either Michael borrowed it himself or he knew exactly who had.”
“Did he tell you where he’d worked prior to working for you?
“He’d been laid off from a steelworks, he said. Why? Do you know more?”
“Yes. Michael was one of Eddie Burbridge’s heavies in the seventies and eighties. He–” The bell over the shop door rang and Meinwen half-stood to look through the connecting corridor to the shop. “I have to go. I’ll call you back later.”
“Why don’t you drop in for a coffee?”
“Drop in? You’re a bit out of the way to be dropped in on unless I've been to Hobb’s Wood.”
“Right. I didn’t realize. Never mind, then. Talk to you later.”
Meinwen put the phone down, felling slightly
mean over her brusqueness. The poor woman was lonely, stuck out there with only the dead for company. What would it hurt to walk a roundabout way home? It was only a mile or two further than usual. They worked in complimentary fields, after all, and if she applied for a registrar’s license Eden would throw some work her way. It all helped to pay the bills.
She went through the curtains into the short, shelf-lined corridor to the shop. This was not a public area but where she kept spell components for all the spells she had access to, though their success or failure was neither hers to command or believe. She had testimonials from people who swore they worked exactly as stated. She had others threatening to expose her as a charlatan. She wasn’t worried. There was an indemnity clause on every receipt.
There was a tall gentleman in the shop. Mid-thirties, at a guess. He was browsing the shelves aimlessly, picking up a pendant here, a goblet there. He started at her voice as if he’d been caught with a wand down his trousers.
“Can I help you, sir? Or are you content to browse?”
“Er…” He gestured at the shelves. “My…friend is into all of this but doesn’t seem very interested in me.”
Meinwen smiled. “You want something to attract her love?”
“I suppose so. I won’t have to strip naked and walk backward around the church or anything?”
“Not unless you want to. And I’d avoid St. Pity’s for anything like that. There’s a wicked bramble patch by the north transept.” She winked to show she was joking and he gave a half-hearted laugh.
“So what do you suggest?”
“How about a nice piece of jewelry?” She led him to a display case of torques, diadems and pendants.
“Jewelry? I could get that anywhere.” He looked at a price tag. “And a lot cheaper, too.”