by Rebecca Tope
Stanley was only accessible in the mornings. After that, he took himself off on mysterious errands, visiting relatives of the deceased, chasing up laboratories, beyond the reach of the telephone, ignoring suggestions that he carry a mobile with him. Stanley was a law unto himself, and as long as he satisfied his job description, nobody much complained.
Drew phoned and caught Stanley in the mortuary of the Royal Victoria, as he witnessed yet another post-mortem. Being the only person with blood-free hands, he picked up the receiver. ‘Sharples,’ he said.
‘Drew Slocombe here. Just a quick question – something that’s niggled at me about this body we’re burying tomorrow.’
‘Fire away,’ Stanley invited, his attention more than half on the catastrophically damaged liver being extracted from the corpse on the table.
‘Well – you’re sure there’s no chemicals or poison in her system, aren’t you? I mean – seeing as how we bury them so shallow, without anything to stop leaching – it’s as well to be sure.’
‘We didn’t find anything.’
‘You analysed her hair?’
‘We did, son.’ Drew held his breath. It was touch and go. ‘She’d bleached it white, you know. Funny thing, but that’s women for you. The roots hadn’t grown back so it must have been quite recent.’
‘Really? How odd,’ Drew said. ‘Well, bleach isn’t going to cause too much of a problem. Thanks, Stanley. That’s all I wanted to know.’
She was frightened, he told himself, with a certainty he could hardly account for. Hiding away in that bedsit, scarcely speaking to her neighbour. Encouraging people to think she was going off somewhere the other side of the world. Dyeing her hair white, not long before her death, when she’d always wanted people to think she was ten or twenty years younger than her actual age.
Now all we need to know is who was she afraid of, Drew concluded complacently. And he could only think of three possible answers to that.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The remainder of Thursday passed in comparative inactivity. Since Drew had reached the conclusion that he could weather the burial the following day in spite of not having concluded his investigations, his new-found confidence seemed to get stronger as the day wore on. He dated it from the moment when he realised that Genevieve had been there, with a dead phone line, all along when he’d tried to phone her. A silly irrelevant detail, perhaps, but it had strengthened something in him. Restored a faith that had been sliding away. There was more about Genevieve that he didn’t yet understand – but he hoped he would before long. She was hiding something, something deeper than guilt over her mother’s death. It could be guilt over the years of estrangement and it might well be part of the original impulse to try to find the truth about her mother – but he sensed it was somehow peripheral to the assignment she’d given Drew. That, he felt sure now, was an obligation Genevieve had chosen to delegate simply because she had other, more pressing, things to think about.
The burial began to look more like a catalyst and less like a deadline. Letting it go ahead without getting distracted by thoughts of missed chances and burnt bridges might well be the best line to take. As Genevieve had rightly reminded him, and Stanley had only that day confirmed, all the evidence was safely stored away in vials and on slides, waiting for the key that would unlock its secrets. Nothing would change that. Better to take a little more time and be sure of coming to the right conclusion, than to simply abandon the investigation or risk getting it wrong.
He could have gone to see Marjorie Hankey today after all, except that Stephanie might have been a nuisance and he felt he’d earned a quiet day in the office. And Stephanie had earned some quality time with him, too. Leaving Maggs to answer the phone, he took his daughter for a walk in the sunshine around the field, pointing out the primroses in the banks, the blossom on the hawthorn.
In one of the lower corners, where the hedge ran alongside the road into the village, his foot caught a piece of brown sacking, half-hidden under a low-growing bramble. At first he ignored it, intent on watching an early butterfly with Stephanie. Then something snagged his memory, and with a flicker of apprehension, he bent awkwardly and pulled at it with his free hand.
It came easily, falling open as he tipped it up. Something feathery rolled halfway out, and as he lifted the sack, a dead cock pheasant fell onto the ground. Drew sighed with premature relief. Somebody must have been poaching, and had thrown his kill over the hedge in panic when in fear of detection. Or they’d left it here deliberately, meaning to come back later. The bird hadn’t been dead for long, as far as he could tell, although there was a faintly unpleasant smell. Harmless country behaviour, he concluded. He didn’t begrudge one of the locals a bit of free meat. But there was something else still in the sack. With Stephanie’s eyes following every move, he upended it again.
A head fell out, landing on the stump of the neck, so it looked alive. It was a fox, the ears half-pricked, the lips drawn back in an ugly snarl. The eyes were open, though horribly glazed. Here was the source of the smell. In the open air, the stink was much worse, and Drew recoiled, clutching Stephanie close. He kicked glancingly at the head, knocking it sideways, and started back towards the office at a trot. How could he have let his child see such a thing?
‘What’s the matter?’ Maggs demanded, as he strode into the office and set Stephanie down in her corner.
‘More dead animals,’ he said shortly. ‘I’ll have to go and bury them. They stink.’
‘Wait a minute,’ she ordered, frowning. ‘What sort of animals? Is this another of those – things? Like the letters and the cat?’
He hesitated. ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ he said. ‘I thought it must be poachers.’
‘But what is it?’
‘A cock pheasant and a fox’s head,’ he told her. ‘In a sack, under some brambles. Hardly conspicuous. I assumed someone had just chucked them over the hedge.’
‘They wouldn’t be under brambles in that case, would they?’ she said reasonably.
He shook his head. ‘Christ knows,’ he said. ‘But I can’t just leave them. Especially not that head. It’s grotesque.’
‘Just when I thought all that stuff had stopped,’ Maggs sighed.
Drew looked at her. ‘You’ve been worrying about it, haven’t you?’ he realised.
‘Well, you must admit it isn’t very nice,’ she said.
‘It’s not worth even thinking about,’ he told her reassuringly. ‘Honestly, Maggs – I don’t want you to get in a state over it. It’s stupid and ignorant, but it’s not hurting us, is it?’
‘Not yet, no,’ she said. ‘But it might be the start of something really horrible. When are you going to do something about it?’
‘Like what? The police have already been here, over that black magic nonsense. They’re not going to be very keen on coming again, are they?’
‘They might be if you showed them those letters.’
‘I can’t do that. I threw them away,’ he said. ‘I decided they didn’t deserve any more of our attention.’
Maggs slumped back in the chair in exasperation.
‘And I’m going to bury those things out there, too. We can’t let such nonsense get to us,’ he repeated.
The funeral of the officially unidentified body lasted barely five minutes. The weather had changed completely; it was damp and drizzly, and the grave looked alarmingly shallow, even to Drew. Police Constable Graham Sleeman turned up, as did Fiona from the Council. The retired vicar from Bradbourne who conducted all the cheap and brief funerals, had been asked to officiate. ‘We should have a Minister,’ Fiona had said, when discussing the arrangements with Drew. ‘What if this woman was a devout Christian?’
Drew couldn’t tell her he was almost certain she wasn’t. ‘A minister’s no problem,’ he had reassured her. ‘We’re not consecrated, but we’re more than happy to have the usual prayers and so forth.’ He hoped Gwen wouldn’t mind.
Drew and Maggs stood, hands folded
, having assisted Jeffrey and Constable Graham Sleeman in lowering the flimsy coffin into the grave. Graham had been called into service with little notice. ‘What would you have done if I hadn’t been here?’ he demanded. ‘You’d never have managed with only three of you.’
‘We would,’ Drew contradicted him. ‘It would just have been a bit less dignified. It’s one of the things we’re trying to change – all that stupid ritual about getting the box into the hole. You’ll notice we haven’t got plastic grass, either.’
The earth from the grave was piled up two feet away, leaving space for people to stand at the edge of the hole. Because of the rain, Jeffrey had thrown a groundsheet over it, where normally he simply left it uncovered. So far, all but one of the families had elected to fill in the grave themselves afterwards, tramping it down as they went, seeing the whole process through to its natural conclusion.
Drew felt a pang of guilt as the vicar stumbled over the point where he should say the dead person’s name. Gwen Absolon he said silently, hoping it counted just as well as if spoken aloud, aware that he no longer felt any doubt as to who the body had been. He tried to imagine the woman as she must have been in life, but the blurred and blackened flesh that was her present reality was too vivid in his mind. The stink had hit him that morning when he went into his cool room, and the bottom of the coffin had been unpleasantly damp when he’d taken his corner to carry it out to the grave. She was a leaking putrifying mess of matter now, and it was hard to inject any sense of significance or awe in the disposal of her remains. Genevieve had been right not to come. What they were doing here wasn’t important, other than merely allocating the dead body of this woman her little bit of space on the earth, until the decaying process was complete and she melted into the soil. I’ll plant a little tree on the grave he thought. There was a burial ground in neighbouring Dorset which put a tree on every grave, so that the one-time field would eventually be a dense woodland, sprouting out of a hundred human bodies, albeit in unnaturally regimented straight lines. Drew routinely suggested it to all his customers, but few had embraced the idea so far.
As the final words were uttered, and Maggs shivered in the cold drizzle, Drew cast his eye around the field, surveying his domain from the railway at the top to the road at the bottom, trying to visualise it full of graves, a permanent memorial to himself, as well as to the occupants of the ground itself. He was in the vanguard, a pioneer of a new way of dealing with death. In spite of worries about Karen, perplexities over Genevieve, the knowledge of pain and trouble ahead, there was always a core of self-satisfaction at what he’d done in initiating this field. His zeal was undiminished, regardless of the financial constraints and the logistical problems.
An estate car came slowly along the road, heading towards the centre of the village. It slowed as it reached his house, and almost stopped. The hedge was high enough to obscure most of it. All he could see was a grey roof. Then it crept level with the entrance and he could see it properly. There were two people in it, their faces turned towards him. It was too far to recognise them, even with his long sight, especially through the rain-spattered windows, but the car seemed familiar. He supposed it was locals, curious about the little funeral going on so quietly and simply. Of one thing he was sure – it hadn’t been Genevieve. He knew that from the thump of disappointment that took place inside him.
He had half expected somebody from the press to turn up, despite a small piece on page three of the previous day’s issue, giving the brief facts that the body remained unidentified and would be buried in North Staverton, where it had first been found. Woman killed and buried, found, examined, and reburied, identity unknown. It wasn’t much from which to make headline news, he admitted to himself. A sad little mystery, that was all.
But that was wrong. Genevieve wasn’t a sad little person, by any means, and he didn’t think her mother had been either. It all came back to Genevieve. Every time he woke up in the night, or lifted his attention from work, the image of Genevieve Slater came before his eyes, luminously attractive, magnetically compelling. He could no more abandon the prospect of seeing her again than he could abandon Stephanie, his adored little girl. And the sudden awareness of this shocking truth almost brought him to his knees with guilt and fear.
The grey car moved away. Returning his attention to the final moments of the burial, he forgot all about it. The vicar had closed his prayerbook, and his head was bowed as he led the tiny gathering in a moment of silence. Drew heard Fiona sigh, and wondered what she was thinking. He knew her as an unusually concerned person, often letting herself become emotional about the solitary deaths in sordid bedsits for which she took responsibility. She did her best to ascertain religious denominations, family history, and any friends there might be. While relatives often behaved with grim callousness, apparently afraid of being made liable for hefty funeral costs, friends would remain diffidently absent, for fear of being seen as pushy. ‘I’m only a friend,’ they’d say, even when Fiona discovered they’d faithfully watched over and supported the deceased for twenty or thirty years. ‘If there’s one thing I’ve learnt,’ she told Drew some time ago, ‘it’s that blood ties are very over-rated. We pay lip service to family connections, but do bugger all about them. Give me a devoted friend any day.’
How was she feeling, then, about a body with no name? A person she couldn’t begin to get to know? She was clearly uneasy about this unorthodox and unceremonious funeral. The absence of a chapel, the sheer anonymity of the whole exercise, must be difficult for her, he thought – although many of her funerals had graveside services. When only two or three mourners attended, a full service in a chapel could be embarrassing, even grotesque. Even so, he supposed she would have liked the option.
It was over. Jeffrey was already shovelling the earth onto the coffin lid, and Drew hoped it would withstand the weight at least until nobody was watching. It was habit, he supposed, that still made him flinch from certain unsavoury realities of the business. Made him continue to want to protect families from having to witness what was really going on. Most coffin lids caved in within a few weeks of the burial, which was a curious fact, given the lengths some families went to, ordering solid oak and pretty linings. Please don’t let us have to dig her up again, Drew silently prayed, as he turned to walk back to the office, alongside Graham.
‘That the end of it, then?’ Drew ventured.
‘Can’t see it going anywhere now,’ the policeman replied. ‘Nothing much to go on. There’s usually one or two likely ones on the Missing Persons file – but not this time. Not a soul seems to have missed her. Sign of the times, I suppose. Asylum-seeker, maybe. Gang of louts going too far and panicking. Or a foul-mouthed old loony chucked out of a psychiatric ward and onto the streets. Plenty of likely scenarios like that to choose from.’
‘Maybe,’ said Drew, biting the inside of his lip. He hadn’t known how much he cared about Gwen Absolon, until he’d heard how she was regarded by the rest of the world. He didn’t want to let her lie there, labelled as a foul-mouthed old loony, or a lost and rootless foreigner.
‘Pity your man ever discovered her, really,’ mused Graham. ‘Just a lot of wasted time and money to put her back where you found her.’
‘Whoever did it must have had a conscience,’ Drew said, unable to stop talking about it.
‘How do you work that out?’
‘They could just have dumped her in a ditch, or the river. But they gave her a nice tidy burial instead. Makes you think.’ He stopped himself before he betrayed any more of his feelings.
Graham was inattentive. He turned to look back at the field. ‘What’s that new area for, over there?’
‘That’s our new pets’ cemetery,’ said Drew. ‘By special request.’
‘And good luck to you,’ grinned his friend. ‘I have to admit you deserve it.’
On his way to see Marjorie Hankey, he played a Paul Robeson tape on the temperamental machine in the van. The deep male voice provided a welcome a
ntidote to the embarrassment of females in his life. The songs might be sentimental, but at least they referred to nothing more complicated than manual labour, and simple aspects of existence. Women’s motives and emotional games were getting much too confusing for him. Once he had relished the warm fertility, the absence of competition, consequent on living and working with females. Now he was starting to find it cloying and confining. He tried to imagine Graham or one of the men from Plant’s getting embroiled as he had done. They wouldn’t have stuck with it for a minute, letting Maggs and Genevieve, Karen and Stephanie ensnare him with their conflicting needs and opinions. And now here he was on his way to see yet another woman, with emotion seeping out of her, no doubt, and a bagful of irrational demands.
He should have had more faith, especially after the phone conversation on Wednesday. Mrs Hankey was as brisk as ever, although he did notice momentary lapses of attention, a film across her eyes as if the truth were lurking at her shoulder, threatening to pounce if she relaxed her vigilance for a moment. Each time it happened, she clenched her fists tightly – an act that looked painful, given her swollen arthritic finger joints.
They sat side by side on a high-backed settee and Drew took notes. ‘I don’t want a lot of trivia,’ she told him. ‘I see your job as steering us down the narrow line between cold anonymity and slushy sentiment. I liked the things you said about death in your speech the other week. There’s something refreshingly robust in your attitude – your manner.’
He made an anxious face. ‘I hope I can get it right for you,’ he said.
‘You can’t be any worse than one of those crematorium ministers,’ she assured him. ‘I’ve been at funerals where they’ve obviously been thinking about something completely different. And I can’t abide those singsong voices they put on. Just speak naturally and keep it simple. My son said he’d stand up and give a little eulogy, too. And we’ll play a bit of music.’