by Ed O'Connor
Dexter walked across the empty car park, hunting for an answer. If she had fallen, there would have been no sound.
She was alone.
76
The garden was already overgrown. The dead cannot be contained.
Violet Frayne’s laburnum tree was awash with beautiful yellow flowers. They fluttered and danced for the sun under the benevolent sky.
Tangled roots divided and stretched down into the crowded soil, pushing aside stones, sucking in water and nutrients, drawing in the elemental goodness that would fuel the tree’s blind reaching for the heavens. Oxygen, water, carbon dioxide: salts and sugars and memories.
77
They drove around the edge of the town centre. New Bolden became impenetrably clogged with shoppers on a Saturday morning. Dexter was wise to this and swung her Mondeo around the ring road as if she was some mad comet circling the sun. She spoke continuously: she found the silences trying. She spoke and John Underwood listened. Dexter talked about Crowan Frayne, about how she had made the connections that led her to the computer terminal and about how she had been a few seconds from becoming a barbecued sausage – or an angel.
Underwood was only half-interested. He found himself drifting in and out of focus. Sometimes he was absorbing the details of Dexter’s recital, sometimes he was walking in the Yorkshire Dales with Julia and sometimes he was at the bottom of the blackest hole his mind could conjure. The sunlight glanced brightly off the car windows as Dexter turned off the ring road and headed towards the cemetery. His mind was cluttered with images.
Take a glass of water. That is a symbiosis that neither party understands because neither party has the capacity to understand. Squint, limit your field of perception and the glass of water appears as a single entity. A dog will just see a hole in its field of vision. Take the glass and pour out the water. Its molecules never mix with the glass but some cling to it: thick viscous blobs that hang like barnacles.
Why do some linger like memories and others fall away? All matter exploded from an infinitesimally small particle. All the atoms in our flesh, in the ground we walk on, in gas giants a billion light years away, in comets and the red-hot centres of planets, once coexisted in a single whole. Perhaps the atoms in the water recognize atoms in the glass that they were once bound to, once torn apart from. Perhaps they don’t want to let go again.
Underwood didn’t want to let go.
Dexter parked at the entrance to the cemetery and they both got out.
‘Are you sure you don’t mind, sir?’ she asked.
Underwood shook his head. ‘No, it’s a nice day. The exercise will do me good.’ He placed his mobile phone on the passenger seat and slammed the car door shut behind him. ‘I’m not sure I understand why you want to do this, though.’
Dexter walked alongside him, more slowly than usual. ‘I want to make absolutely sure the bastard’s in the ground.’ It was half true. She also wanted to scare Underwood into looking after himself. She hoped the grim finality of the headstones might help.
Birds swooped and cut the sky above them as walked. It didn’t bleed, as he thought it might.
‘Magpies?’ asked Underwood.
‘Don’t ask me,’ Dexter laughed. ‘My bird knowledge begins with the pigeons in Trafalgar Square and ends with turkey on Christmas Day.’
‘When did they bury the body?’
‘Three weeks ago,’ Dexter said. ‘It’s not really a body any more, though.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘He hacked his own eye out.’ The memory still made her uncomfortable. ‘He said “Is this not the triumph of the will” as he did it.’
‘Imagine the will-power it takes to cut your own eye out.’
‘You sound like you’re impressed.’
‘Frightened is closer.’
‘Try being there.’
Underwood smiled thinly. ‘You’ve done well Dex. You’ll be Chief Inspector in a couple of years. You’re an irrepressible force.’
‘What about you?’
‘They might make me a sergeant, I suppose. If they don’t lock me away in some funny farm.’
Dexter frowned. ‘That’s only going to happen if you lose the plot. You’re feeling better, aren’t you?’
‘I don’t know. At the moment I feel pretty shitty. It’s like every mistake, horror and bad memory happening at the same time.’
‘Will-power, sir. You have to make yourself better. You have to want to fight.’
Underwood laughed humourlessly. ‘Fight? Why? What for?’
‘For yourself.’
‘I’m not sure I’m worth the effort.’
‘You are.’
Underwood looked at her but Dexter stared straight ahead. She was getting angry with him. She had heard the rumours: that Underwood had lost it, that he was on a diet of happy pills and was seeing the police shrink at Huntingdon, but this was the first time she had seen the evidence at first hand. Her concern just outweighed her irritation.
‘Are you religious, sir?’
‘You don’t have to call me “sir” any more.’
‘Are you religious?’
‘I’m not a Mason, if that’s what you mean.’
His joke fell flat. ‘You know what I mean.’ She was quietly insistent.
‘No. I’m not religious. I do not believe in God. I do not believe in heaven. I believe that this –’ he gestured vaguely around and at himself ‘– whatever the fuck it is, is it.’
‘Then that’s why you have to survive,’ Dexter said simply. ‘Because there isn’t any point in you dying.’
Crowan Frayne’s headstone was plain: black text on granite. ‘C. A. Frayne 1967–2000.’ There was no inscription.
‘Who paid for the headstone?’ Underwood asked, ever suspicious.
‘Some distant relative. A cousin, I think.’
‘Not much of an epitaph,’ said Underwood, looking at the grey stone.
‘Not much of a person.’
‘I guess not. So Heather Stussman thinks he was writing a kind of poem. A celebration of beauty, an argument that ugliness could be transformed into beauty.’
‘Something like that. It’s mad shit.’
He had changed Julia into an ugliness. She had been beautiful in body and spirit. He had made her ordinary and afraid. Mad shit. Somehow, Paul Heyer had made the ugliness beautiful. Underwood knew that he had become a monstrosity: half alive and half sane. His mind bounced like a ball on a piece of elastic; flying at impossibly absurd trajectories before rolling back to stasis. Your thoughts have no value. Do not pass go. Go directly to jail. Do not collect two hundred pounds. Mad shit. Mad shit.
‘Look at this, guv.’ Dexter gestured at him to come over. She was kneeling by a headstone a few yards away. It was plain grey marble. The black text read: William Eric Gowers, 1917–94, Rest Eternally. Underneath the engraving a four-letter obscenity had been aerosoled onto the stone.
‘Gowers was married to Violet Frayne,’ she said. ‘Not much of an epitaph, is it?’
‘I don’t suppose she sprayed it.’ Underwood managed a smile.
They waited for a minute or two and then walked back slowly towards the car. They didn’t say anything.
Underwood felt a sudden rush of anxiety. What if Dexter was right? What if this was it? What if there really was nothing else? What would his epitaph be? They passed a young woman carrying flowers. She looked them over with soft, sad eyes.
The sun seemed exceptionally bright now. Underwood sought order in his thoughts:
Life is a tightrope of perception with darkness on either side, darkness behind and darkness underneath.
He had hacked most of the rope from underneath him. Maybe Dexter was right. Maybe staying on the tightrope was the only point. The darkness had seemed appealing, a relief from the hard light of reality. Sometimes he had wanted to let go, to embrace the peace of annihilation. But maybe his spirit was like the water in the glass. Maybe he couldn’t let go. Suddenly, Underwood was
uncertain and afraid.
‘Survive,’ said the Magpie.
Dexter unlocked the car and they climbed in. Underwood picked up his mobile phone from the seat before he flopped down.
‘I’m hungry. Do you fancy some lunch?’
He thought for a second, pushing the darkness to one side. He had to take his heart pills with food. ‘That’d be nice.’
‘Fry-up?’
‘I shouldn’t, really.’
‘Neither should I. How about scrambled eggs as a compromise?’ Dexter asked.
‘Good enough.’
Dexter ground through the gears and they accelerated towards the town centre. There was a greasy spoon behind the police station. Scrambled eggs with Alison: the simplicity almost overwhelmed him.
Underwood looked at the LCD display on his mobile phone and saw that there had been a missed call. He pressed a button and the phone displayed the identity of the caller: ‘Julia’.
Survive.
About the Author
ED O’CONNOR is thirty years old and The Yeare’s Midnight is his first novel. He studied History at Cambridge and then International Relations at Oxford. After university he worked in London and New York for five years as an investment banker at Credit Suisse First Boston. In 2000 he left the city to concentrate on writing.
Ed lives in Hertfordshire and teaches History at St Albans.
Copyright
Allison & Busby Limited
12 Fitzroy Mews
London W1T 6DW
www.allisonandbusby.com
First published in 2002.
This ebook edition first published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2015.
Copyright © 2002 by ED O’CONNOR
The moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–0–7490–1809–2