The Discourtesy of Death

by William Brodrick

  ‘The tide will come in, Jenny,’ said Michael, eyes squeezed tight shut.

  He was sitting on the grass beside his daughter in the shade of wide oaks and slender alders. They’d come for a jaunt after a follow-up consultation at the hospital, six weeks after Jenny had returned to Polstead.

  ‘And when it does, they will float again,’ said Jenny. ‘They will rise slowly off the sand. They’ll drop their sails, catch the wind and sail out to sea, away from the wrecks and rusting—’

  ‘The tide comes in,’ interrupted Michael. ‘It always comes in.’

  ‘But not for me, Daddy. Not for me. Because I can’t move.’

  Michael ground his teeth, screaming inside his exploding mind.

  ‘Even if I ever felt better again, wanted to smile again, I’m still stranded. And so is everyone around me. None of the barges with their big sails can head off anywhere without having to head back here again. Someone always has to stay behind, moored to me.’

  ‘I’ll stay, my darling.’

  ‘I know, Dad. You’re always there. But it’s not enough. You’re not enough. I’m sorry, but you’re not. I want to go out to sea again, on my own. That’s what it is to be alive, to feel alive and love living. It’s to be free, moving in and out with the tide.’

  They were both crying – the most awful, calm, brutally simple tears. Michael’s hand reached out for Jenny’s and when she took it, he realised, with shame and self-hatred, that it was she who was keeping him afloat and not the other way around. She was by his side in this moment of unbearable anguish. He was going under and Jenny was holding tight, leaning over the edge of her wheelchair.

  ‘Dad, do you remember when I was a child, I sometimes tied my laces too tight?’

  Michael sniffed and nodded.

  ‘I couldn’t undo the knots and my feet were swollen?’

  ‘Yes, I remember.’

  ‘You’d carefully pull the laces apart?’

  ‘Yes, by a basin of cold water. And when you were free, you’d stick both feet in and sigh.’

  ‘That’s right. It felt lovely, really lovely. A relief.’

  Jenny looked down at Michael from her chair, black hair held loose in a bun, her strong black eyebrows arched with a curious knowing. She had a slightly tilted smile.

  ‘Would you do it now?’

  Michael frowned. He didn’t want to say what had almost tripped off the end of his tongue – ‘But you can’t feel anything’ – so he deepened his frown as if this unsettling exchange were some parlour game of wits and illusion.

  ‘I don’t mean here, this minute. But some time when I’m not looking.’

  ‘Darling, I’m just not following you.’ He shifted around onto his knees.

  ‘Untie the knots, Daddy. Let me go. No one will miss me.’

  Michael gazed into his daughter’s slightly open mouth, not believing that he’d heard such words, words that had entered the pulp of his soul with the heat of a radiant poker.

  ‘No, no, no, Jenny, no, no, you can’t think like that … ever, never, not now, not tomorrow, not—’

  ‘Daddy, I’m trapped in here’ – she touched her legs as if they didn’t belong to her – ‘like I was trapped in those shoes. Take them off, like you used to; let me feel that cool, refreshing water. Let me walk away.’

  She nodded at Michael as if she were reassuring a frightened child just before she turned out the bedroom light. Then she moved her serene face towards the family of boats. It was as though parent and child had made some sort of pact, only Michael hadn’t had his full say. Which was how it was meant to be. He had no say. None at all. Nor did Emma, or Peter. Or Nigel and Helen. Not even Timothy. This was about Jenny’s life. Her independent, sovereign existence. All at once, his heart seemed to tear open and a hole appeared, vanishing into some darkness of unimaginable dread: if he didn’t do what Jenny was asking, then someone else might. Out of a love and kindness seen to be greater than his own.

  The rigging and cables rattled against the tall masts. Small triangular flags fluttered. The sea wind was bringing home the tide.

  On the way back to Southwold, Michael purchased a box of toothpicks from a corner shop, surprising the girl on the counter when he asked for a plastic bag. Half an hour later he bought an old armchair from a second-hand furniture dealer whose shabby goods had spilled onto the pavement. After a lot of manoeuvring, he managed to fit the chair in the back of the car, on top of the tarpaulin, the cabbage and the sprouts. The garrulous dealer gave Michael some string because, try as they might, they couldn’t quite shut the boot.

  24

  Securing an appointment with Doctor Bryan Ingleby was easier and quicker than Anselm expected. The mention of Jennifer Henderson’s death no doubt accelerated matters because after a long, freezing pause, the general practitioner proposed they meet the following day when he would be visiting the Grove, a hospice in Leiston. He suggested they convene at the nearby abbey ruin – a place where they were likely to be afforded both seclusion and privacy. That arrangement in hand, Anselm put down the phone and settled his gaze upon the expectant Sylvester.

  ‘How’s it going, then?’ said the old man, with a conspiratorial grimace.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘You do.’

  The Nightwatchman beckoned Anselm closer with a bony finger. ‘I’m the only monk in Larkwood who knows how to load, fire and clean a Lee Enfield .303,’ he confessed, his frail white hair almost standing on end with menace. ‘The kickback’s a real shock first time round. Almost knocked my shoulder out of joint. But you get used to it. You have to lean into the bang. Left foot forward, head down and lean—’

  ‘It’s not that kind of case, Lantern Bearer,’ said Anselm, in a calming voice. ‘But if I need armed protection, I’ll come to you.’

  ‘I know about knives, too.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And hand to hand.’

  ‘Like I said, it’s not that sort of investigation.’ Anselm regarded the man fondly. If he’d ever fired a .303, it was in his imagination; the knives and hand to hand had been boy’s stuff under canvas. ‘The battle is in the mind, Leaping Wolf,’ he said. ‘The dangers are in the shadows. Among what people think or might have thought. Whether the light should be shone towards the darker corners.’

  Larkwood’s Doorkeeper sniffed.

  ‘Doesn’t sound much fun.’

  ‘It isn’t.’

  ‘Well, remember what Baden-Powell used to say: “Be prepared.” Anything can happen. And it usually does. Especially to the unwary.’

  Anselm made a low bow of obeisance and shambled off, heading along the West Walk side of the cloister. Reaching the end, he tugged open the arched Processional Door that led to the church. Entering the cool of the nave, he breathed in the scent of wax and fading incense.

  ‘Be prepared,’ he said, dryly.

  It wasn’t a bad motto. Pulling up his cowl, Anselm slid onto a bench.

  He hadn’t been prepared. Either for Mitch’s warning or his ultimatum. The jazzman seemed to speak again, this time out of the vast silence.

  What if Jenny chose to die … why should you expose the fact and expose the man who helped her? Think of the son, Timothy. Does he need to know? And even if she was murdered, pushed under before the cancer took her to pieces, does it matter any more? What’s the point of finding out? Because life’s sacred? Because someone always has to pay if a rule gets broken, regardless of the circumstances?

  These were Mitch’s questions and Anselm would have to reply at some point. But it wasn’t now. His approach was to find out the facts first and then appraise the implications afterwards. Mitch was operating the wrong way round: working backwards from what he feared; he didn’t want to know the facts. But those very facts, never presented to the court, had put Peter Henderson behind bars. They couldn’t be ignored, even if Mitch thought it best to look the other way.

  ‘Help me.’
>
  Anselm listened to the quiet echo of his voice in the empty nave.

  ‘Help me find out who killed Jennifer Henderson.’

  The smell of beeswax was warming. Incense lingered from the night before. Colours of evening streamed through the stained glass, sending paths of red and blue light along the shining flagstones.

  ‘Help me find out what happened and why.’

  Jenny had wanted to talk with the pastor in the family, a man whose job it was to speak out for hope in the worst of situations. She’d died before she could open her mouth.

  ‘Exauce-moi.’

  Anselm often slipped into French if he wasn’t sure he’d been heard. His voice was so quiet it barely sounded outside his cowl. He closed his eyes and took a slow, deep breath.

  A door opened and shut.

  Someone tiptoed up the nave. A heavy presence sat down beside Anselm. A man coughed secretively.

  ‘The Force Research Unit,’ came a dark whisper. ‘Shady outfit according to some of my sources. Pay attention. It’s complicated.’

  Anselm let his head fall back in disbelief. He looked at the horizontal beams, great wooden arms extended across the benches far below. He’d asked for help and it had come in the form of Bede. He should’ve been prepared.

  ‘Undercover work in Northern Ireland was carried out by the SAS, 14 Intelligence Company and the FRU. The first two were controlled by the Royal Ulster Constabulary. But not the FRU. Got it?’

  Bede waited for Anselm to react. Getting nothing, he came slightly closer.

  ‘The FRU worked outside the normal structure of command. Minimal operational control. Few restrictions. Underhand and under the carpet, some might say. They handled informers. Mainly from within the Republican community. Recruited people to infiltrate the IRA itself. To keep one step ahead of the bombers. Only it gets a bit murky. D’ye hear or what?’

  ‘I do, Bede.’

  ‘Pull your cowl down, then.’

  Anselm obliged and turned to face the wrath of the archivist.

  ‘Do you know what their motto was, these handlers?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘“Fishers of Men”. Matthew chapter four, verse nineteen.’

  ‘“Come follow me and I will make you …”’ cited Anselm, quietly.

  ‘That’s the one. The weight of opinion, scholarly and otherwise, is that some of these fishermen got carried away in the eighties. Sacrificed one agent to save another. Set up killings.’

  ‘Authorised assassinations?’

  ‘Well, once you’re inured to violence and killing, you can see the logic of it in a grubby war, can’t you?’ Bede dried his top lip with a quick swipe from a habit sleeve. ‘If the Army would shoot a certain bloke if they caught him armed on the street – because they know he’s already shot one of ours and will shoot another as soon as he gets the chance – then why not skip past the rules of engagement every once in a while? Why wait until he’s tooled up? The IRA did just that, all the time. No hanging around on their side of the fence. I’m not saying I agree, I’m simply telling you how some minds in the FRU must have been working. Seems a few handlers passed on information to interested parties, knowing the details would be used to organise an ambush … end someone’s life. All it took was a leaked address, a location and a time. After that the fishermen sat back and let some other crew chuck their nets overboard.’

  Bede stared at Anselm, trying to see past his mask of cold concentration.

  ‘It’s all part of the madness of killing for a cause,’ he continued, giving his voice a driving whisper. ‘If one group intends to kill the other anyway, then why not give ’em a helping hand if it suits your own purposes? Saves time, money and manpower.’

  Anselm didn’t respond.

  ‘What do I think?’ said Bede, as if in reply. ‘I think well-meaning people got sucked away from a simple understanding of right and wrong. Thought the rules didn’t match the situation on the ground, so they dumped ’em. Believed they could act outside of the law for the sake of a greater good. I think the fishermen forgot that one day the lion would lie down with the lamb and that the sheep would be separated from the goats’ – for a split second Bede faltered, like Noah wondering what the hell he was going to do with all the animals, but then he got back to the Role of Man – ‘which, I imagine, is where you come in. It’s judgement day, isn’t it? You’re the Terminator.’

  Bede waited for Anselm to confirm his suspicions, but Anselm looked ahead, thinking of the broken man with his head lowered in all the photographs. This, then, was Helen’s theory that she couldn’t bring to Nigel: his brother, the Army man, shattered by his FRU experience in Belfast, had killed his own daughter. How could he have done such a thing? Because he’d done it before. He’d crossed the line once already. He’d been involved in killing for the greater good twenty-five years earlier. Faced with Jenny’s final crisis, what had he done, this man who knew how to make impossible decisions?

  ‘Does that help?’ ventured Bede, crouching forward, sending a rush of blood to inflate his round, conspiring face.

  ‘A great deal, thank you.’ Anselm was remote, following Vincent Cooper’s ghost into the blurred area between the red and blue.

  ‘You’re investigating collusion?’ asked Bede, as if he promised not to tell.

  ‘Yes,’ muttered Anselm.

  ‘Well, you’d better be careful,’ murmured the archivist. ‘I’ve done the reading and I’ll put the books outside your cell. The people who were involved in that old game are still capable of anything. Wouldn’t think twice of setting up another ambush if they thought it would tilt things in their direction. You might need to start checking under your car. An “up and under”, that’s what they called them. A bomb in a Tupperware with a magnet. Under the car and up into the seat well. Should have been called an “under and up”. That’s how they got Airey Neave.’

  Anselm returned to himself, blinking at the shadows.

  ‘I’ll be fine, Bede. It’s not that kind of case.’

  Part Three

  The Diary of Timothy Henderson

  14th July

  My mum’s gone but I still have my memories.

  My first is sitting in a pushchair in the rain. Rather than buy something, my mum had made this cover out of an old jacket and some wire. In the middle she’d cut a big hole and sewn in a plastic window. There was a blanket over my legs and I felt like I was driving a car. I was all warm and dry but she was out in the rain. I’ve thought about this loads of times but it was only last week that I realised while I was nice and dry she was getting wet.

  Another is getting into trouble. I was walking in the middle of the road. She went mad and shouted that I could have got killed and then I started crying because I realised if I died I’d never see her again. Mum told me that two minutes later I was in the middle of the road again.

  I don’t remember much of my dad. Just crawling around his feet when he was sitting in the armchair. That’s what he was. A pair of shoes, the bottom of some trousers and a big open newspaper.

  21st July

  There are too many of them, these memories. My dad was working all the time whereas my mum was just there like the house and the trees. When I got up in the morning she was there. When I came home from school she was there. When I woke up at night she’s the one who came if I got scared. We were friends. I told her everything. That’s why I’m blocked up now because I find it hard to say to anyone else what I used to say to her.

  28th July

  I never saw my mum as a dancer even though she’d won a prize in Switzerland. She showed me photos and everything but I still didn’t think it was her. Then one day I asked her to do Swan Lake in the sitting room. She said no and laughed but I pushed her into it. All she did was lift her arms and look across the room in a sort of miserable way but I was completely gobsmacked. She’d totally changed. I can’t describe it. She looked like she was floating on water. She looked beautiful. My mum wasn’t the same after that.
She wanted to dance again.

  4th August

  Granddad thinks it was his idea but Mum opened the dancing school because of me. We talked about it every night. She was worried I’d mind, because she wouldn’t be around as much as before. But I told her to do it. I wanted to see her floating again.

  11th August

  Victor Cooper moved to Sudbury and offered to help out. He said he’d had enough of London. He was very friendly but I didn’t trust him. He was trying to fill the space left by my dad. He said I should try dancing and I told him I wasn’t Billy Elliot. I didn’t like the way he did anything my mum asked.

  21st August

  My mum kept saying sorry that she was going to the school in the evenings. Same for Saturday. But I didn’t mind. She was full of ideas for the future. And then she broke her spine. I don’t remember exactly what happened even though I was there. All I can see now is my mum in the sitting room before she went back to dancing, with her arms lifted up, pretending to be upset.

  25

  Anselm ambled among the bold remains of fourteenth-century dressed stone and flint flushwork, passing through an arch into what was once the south transept of the monastic church at Leiston. Standing there, hands behind his back, examining a crumbling clerestory window, was a tall man in a long dark green overcoat. Anselm came alongside.

  ‘This enchanting place was founded by the Lord Chief Justice of England,’ said Doctor Ingleby, after a glance at Anselm’s habit. ‘Happier days, I suspect, when law and theology went hand in hand. When medicine played beneath their vaulting majesty, guided by the precepts of each.’

  Doctor Ingleby gave Anselm a melancholy smile. He was in his early seventies. Both gentle eyes were like late moons, with a soft waning light. His collar was up, his neck protected by a bright-yellow scarf.

  ‘I love this kind of spot,’ he confessed. ‘They’re the vestige of something good that speaks to me, a hunger and yearning for the great answers, the pillars reaching up to the sky. Traces left on the ground of former certainties. There’s a comfort in all that. I find humility in what’s left of the attempt.’