Weep a While Longer

by Penny Freedman

  ‘That’ll be Jamilleh,’ Scott said. ‘Have you spoken to her?’

  ‘Dah! I can’t speak Arab, can I?’

  ‘She speaks English.’

  ‘Huh!’

  Scott walked over and stood looming over her. She shrank back into the sofa. Scared of men for all the bravado, Paula thought. She watched as Scott moved some clothes from the sofa and sat down beside her. He spoke quietly.

  ‘Did you hear that she got attacked – over at the university? She’d just dropped her little boy off at the nursery.’

  She looked at him sideways but didn’t meet his eye. ‘I heard someone got attacked. I didn’t know it was her.’

  ‘The thing is,’ Scott said, ‘we think the same person may have attacked her as killed Karen and Lara.’

  Her head came round and she stared at him. ‘What?’

  ‘We think Karen and Jamilleh both knew this guy and we need to find out who he is.’

  Leanne turned away and Paula took a breath to speak but he gave her a warning look. ‘We know Karen was worried about something in the days before she was killed, Leanne. We think she had some information – knew something that worried and frightened her. She was your sister. You saw her most days. I think you know what frightened her. I think what frightened her is the reason why you have all those locks on your door.’

  She looked at him, her face white and startled with its black-ringed eyes. Then she gave a wobbly little puff of ridicule. ‘Bollocks,’ she said. ‘That’s all bollocks.’

  *

  In the afternoon the investigation proceeded as follows:

  Paula Powell and Sarah Shepherd went house-to-house up and down Kendal Way and Keswick Rise. Have you noticed any strangers lurking around? was their question, but they were picking up as much information as they could about youngish men living at these addresses. The responses they met at the door ranged from guarded to garrulous. They were all unhelpful.

  *

  Steve Boxer continued to trawl for connections but found that his luck had run out.

  *

  Darren Floyd picked up his jacket from his girlfriend’s flat, put it on, regained his swagger and took a circuitous route back to the station in order to give his brand new Audi TT Roadster a spin.

  *

  Steve Boxer learned that the Garda in Kilkenny had picked up an associate of Doug Brody’s, wanted by the Merseyside force, and were returning him to them.

  *

  David Scott paid a visit to Estelle Campion at her home, where she confessed, charmingly, to knowing Karen Brody and withholding that information from DS Powell. Under polite but relentless pressure, she admitted to having spoken to her on four occasions as a Samaritan caller but insisted that Karen had refused to divulge details of the information she wanted to have relayed to the police for her own safety. On the whole, Scott was inclined to believe her.

  *

  Sarah Shepherd reported to Scott Jamilleh Hamidi’s retreat into unhelpfulness and was puzzled at being told that this was actually very helpful, confirming as it did the view of this case that he had now arrived at.

  18

  Saturday 28th July

  Mourning’s Work

  My mother’s letter has me chasing thoughts round my head like a coked-up hamster on a wheel, but I do eventually doze off into semi-sleep for a couple of hours, before waking, dry-mouthed and panicky, just after five. I decide to make a virtue of the early start and catch the first train to London, thus avoiding Annie and whatever emotional extravagance she may produce at the news of her grandmother’s death.

  I shower and conscientiously eat a bowl of cornflakes; I drink tea rather than my usual coffee, sensing that a caffeine rush might just undo me. Then I dither lengthily and ridiculously over what to wear. It has been hard enough finding the right clothes during this unsummery summer, but factor in some concession to mourning wear, a visit to an unknown solicitor and the likelihood of a tramp round a muddy graveyard and the problem seems, to my befuddled mind, insoluble. I somehow get hooked on the idea that a skirt is called for but I need flat shoes for the graveyard and the skirt/flat shoes combo looks frumpy in the extreme. And, besides, it has settled in to rain again and I would end up spending the day with folds of wet cloth flapping round my legs. So trousers it is, which means sewing up the hem of my black linen ones, but once that’s done, and I’ve got my grey jacket on, I decide that will do. My outfit lacks the éclat I usually go for, with varying degrees of success, but dreariness is, perhaps, what is called for now. I depart, leaving the chaos of discarded clothes for later.

  I cycle to the station, stopping for cash at the bank cashpoint in the high street, and get myself onto a seven fifteen train. I am outraged to find that this hour on a Saturday doesn’t qualify as off-peak but I have no heart for making a scene. I buy myself a Guardian but can’t concentrate, even on the crossword. I wish I’d bought a cup of coffee to take on the train with me.

  I lean back and close my eyes and remember suddenly that yesterday evening I had a theory about the murders of Karen and Lara Brody. Well, theory is too strong a word; I had a glimmer, a thought lurking in the outer shadows of my mind that I was reaching for and I had to go home to think clearly and pin it down, but home turned out to be no place for thought, clear or otherwise. For this, the absconding from rehearsal, the dereliction of duty, I was sacked, wasn’t I? I had completely forgotten all this. I am on a train to London on the day of the dress rehearsal without even thinking that my sacking has turned out to be timely, leaving me free for whatever weirdness I’m about to encounter today. I am shaken. This is not the woman I am. I don’t forget things. I seem to have lost myself and I want myself back.

  In pursuit of finding myself, I decide to text David. I have not forgotten my vow not to communicate but since I’m not going to catch hold of yesterday’s elusive thought any time soon, I had better pass it on to him and see what he can do with it.

  Had a thought about the murders, I type, but lost it due to circumstances beyond my control. Involves shoes, pronouns and idiolect, with something about Odysseus, I think. Will try to think further. Meanwhile, find out the name of Karen’s sister’s boyfriend. G

  At St Pancras, I buy a modest latte and an apricot croissant and sit watching people as they come off their suburban and provincial trains ready for a day of excitement in the capital. Do I look as though I’m one of them? I rather hope so. I hope, at least, that I don’t look as bewildered and disoriented and, frankly, crazy as I feel.

  When I get out of the tube at New Cross, I ring Margaret, awarding myself a small nod of approbation for having her number stored in my phone. She sounds a bit bleary and I realise that it is still quite early, so I decide to walk the twenty minutes to the flats and give her some time. She opens the door to enfold me in a plump, spongy hug. ‘Such a lovely lady, she was,’ she says. ‘Such a lovely lady.’ I hug her back, envying her uncomplicated grief.

  She gives me a cup of coffee – ‘Decaffeinated all right?’ – and goes through the events of the previous afternoon, such as they are. ‘Just sitting in her chair, she was. Quite peaceful. So like her, isn’t it? No bother. Bless her.’ I ask the question I have to ask but feel absurd asking.

  ‘So, where is she now, Margaret?’

  ‘Oh, not over there, bless you,’ she says. ‘The ambulance took her.’

  ‘So she’ll be at the hospital?’

  ‘I suppose so, love.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Well, Queen Elizabeth, I suppose.’

  ‘Right.’ I feel more helpless than I remember feeling ever.

  She is looking at me, head on one side, as though she has only just really noticed me. ‘You’ll need an undertaker, Gina,’ she says gently.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I will. And then there’s the solicitor – I hope he’s there on a Saturday – and the funeral. A church funeral, would you believe? And letting everyone know. And then the plot in the churchyard and – did you know about that?’
r />   ‘About what, dear?’

  ‘About Christopher?’

  ‘Christopher?’

  Relief of a sort; not a secret kept just from me then.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I say. ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  She gives me that examining look again. ‘I don’t want to butt in,’ she says, ‘but would you like me to find an undertaker for you? Once you get that settled, you know, they’ll do a lot of the work for you.’

  ‘Would you?’ Gratitude brings tears to my eyes. What is the matter with me? I’m a woman who is equal to anything, aren’t I? How come organising a funeral seems such a mountainous task?

  ‘You leave it to me,’ she says. ‘You look peaky, and no wonder. I’d offer you a brandy but it’s a bit early for that, isn’t it?’

  It is, and it’s the last thing I need. The cotton wool in my head needs no encouragement to expand.

  ‘It’s nearly ten now,’ she says. ‘You go off and see the solicitors. You know where to find them, do you?’

  ‘I do.’ My self-esteem picks itself an inch or two off the floor. I have googled Hart and Lyman and I have an address and a map. I give her another hug and go across the hallway to my mother’s flat.

  There is an absence, of course, but what actually hits me more is how scruffy the place has become. Without my mother to focus on I see what I have missed before: the patch of carpet worn bare in front of her chair, the chipped paint on the doors where her stick has hit, a strip light hanging by its flex in the kitchen, a missing handle on a chest of drawers. And I can hear her voice, Not worth replacing it at my age. I haven’t really come to see the place; it’s her address book I’m after. Tomorrow I shall have to start letting people know. I find it in the drawer where the unopened bills were tucked away. Farewell cruel world, I think.

  Outside I look at the map, decide that I’m not, after all, up to navigating my way to the solicitors and walk back towards New Cross, where I find a taxi and am dropped outside a small, discreet slip of a house, squeezed between strident shop fronts like a prim, elderly spinster at a rather brash party. It takes a while for the door to be answered and I realise that I should have phoned ahead. When I announce my business, the receptionist is pleasant enough, however, and sits me in a pale green waiting room with copies of Country Life. In Lewisham? Really?

  After a while, a young man comes in, shakes my hand, introduces himself as Roger Aggleton, and takes me into his office. I realise at this point that I have been harbouring a completely inappropriate picture of my mother’s solicitor. Too much literature again. Without really thinking about it, I have been picturing the old family solicitor so beloved of golden age crime novels: the silver-haired, plummy-voiced gentleman who has known the deceased since she was a girl – possibly carried a torch for her at one time – and will now give wise and fatherly advice to me. This is stupid, of course. My mother didn’t have a solicitor looking after her affairs; she didn’t have affairs. She sold a house and bought a flat, and she made a will. That was it. Roger Aggleton clearly never met her and knows nothing about her.

  He has the will in front of him, but instead of reading it out in time-honoured fashion he pushes it across the desk to me. Maybe this is because there is only me; it requires the gathering of eager would-be heirs to justify the solemn reading aloud, I suppose. I pick it up and scan it. No surprises in the first paragraph: five thousand each to Ellie and Annie, and five thousand to be kept in trust for Freda. Nothing for Nico, but then the date is 2008. The residue goes to me – just the flat, I imagine, once the girls have their legacies. But it’s the next bit, of course, that I’m really interested in:

  Instructions for my funeral: I wish to be buried in the plot reserved in St Olave’s churchyard beside my son, Christopher. I have no views on the nature of my funeral.

  The tone is instantly recognisable and the content unenlightening; I knew Christopher was her son, didn’t I?

  ‘What happens now?’ I ask Roger Aggleton.

  ‘There will be a delay until we get probate, but your mother’s estate seems to be very straightforward, so that shouldn’t take long.’

  ‘Have you any idea where St Olave’s Church is?’

  ‘I haven’t.’ He flushes slightly. ‘I don’t live round here, and I don’t really do churches.’

  ‘Me neither,’ I say.

  The receptionist, Claire, tells me where St Olave’s is, however, and kindly calls a cab to take me there. Solid and rather squat, it stands marooned on an island, with roads running all round it. I walk through the churchyard, looking to left and right, and realise that it will take me forever to find this grave without help. I look into the church in search of someone who looks as if they belong. A verger? A churchwarden? The extent of my ignorance embarrasses me. Anyway, the place is empty. A July Saturday and no wedding? Well, its position hardly makes this a prime venue, I suppose.

  Outside, on the large notice board that declares this to be St Olave’s Church, I find the vicar’s phone number. I hesitate, but if I’m going to ask him to conduct the funeral I’d better get onto it, hadn’t I? The phone rings and rings and I imagine it trilling away in a cavernous vicarage somewhere. Eventually, I get a message to say that my call is being transferred, a voice answers, and I explain my mission. ‘So it’s the funeral,’ I sum up, ‘but I would also like to see this grave, which I knew nothing about and don’t know how to find.’

  ‘We keep a plan of the graves in the vestry,’ he says, and his voice is young but has the appropriate warmth for a vicar. Good casting, I think. ‘Our verger’s laid up with a back problem, otherwise he could show you. You’re up from Kent, you say?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Give me five minutes and I’ll come over.’

  ‘Oh that’s r—’

  ‘No problem.’ And he’s gone.

  Five minutes later a motorbike roars up the path to the church door and Peter Michaels, vicar of St Olave’s, jumps off and removes his helmet to reveal a buzz cut and bright blue eyes in a thirty-something face. No clerical garb, not even a dog collar, I notice. Perhaps arranging this funeral will be less excruciating than I feared. He shakes my hand, dashes into the church, emerges with a rolled document and leads me round to the back. He moves at speed and I have trouble keeping up with him, weaving among the graves, even with my sensible shoes on. He is wearing trainers, I notice, which reminds me of something and makes me wonder whether David has read my text yet.

  Peter Michaels stops eventually, in a far corner, near a nicely ancient bit of mossy wall, and unrolls his plan. He glances around, moves a bit along the wall and stops. ‘Here we are,’ he says.

  I join him and am furious to find that my heart is thumping. I look down and there it is, a small gravestone with a simple message:

  In loving memory of Christopher James Sidwell

  b. 6th May 1949 d. 17th January 1950

  ‘Grief fills the room up of my absent child’

  I stand in the cold drizzle with hot tears running down my face. The quote must have been my father’s choice. It’s from King John and he was the Shakespeare buff, not my mother, who had no time for fiction of any kind. 1949. I had a brother born in 1949 – a baby boomer, really. Aeons away, it seems to me, from my birth in heady 1962. Twenty-six my mother would have been, newly qualified and newly married, ready for her grown-up life.

  I look at Peter Michaels, making an attempt to wipe off the worst of the tears, noticing that some have dripped down to make stains on my pale grey jacket. ‘Where will she go?’ I ask.

  He squints at the map. ‘Just here,’ he says, indicating a patch to the left of the headstone. ‘Your father is here, you see.’

  And I do see, to the right of the headstone, an urn and a plaque:

  Harold James Sidwell

  15.11.17 – 4.8.74

  In loving memory

  No quote for him, then, though if she had asked me I probably could have come up with one. I was twelve, after all, and had read quite a lot. Did I
know he was here? I don’t think so. I remember the crematorium, the coffin sliding behind the curtain, my mother’s hand on my arm, but I don’t remember what happened after that. I suppose my mother came here alone to place the ashes and commune with Christopher.

  ‘Would you like me to leave you alone?’ Peter Michaels asks.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘That’s all I need to see.’ In spite of the giveaway tears, I am aiming for bright and businesslike, and I turn briskly away to accompany him back to his bike. ‘I suppose there’s plenty of room in your church?’ I ask as we go. ‘She was a GP locally and I think there’ll be quite a turnout.’

  ‘Oh, yes, she’s quite a monster,’ he says. ‘The church, I mean,’ he adds as he sees my startled face. ‘Have you any idea of the day you would like?’

  ‘Soon,’ I say. I have thought about this. ‘My daughter will be up in Edinburgh but she’ll be back on Thursday. Would Friday be possible?’

  We go into the church and while he goes to check the diary I take in its chilly grandeur. Victorian, designed to impress and intimidate, I think. God, Mother, what have you got me into here? He returns, we agree on Friday afternoon, he shakes my hand in both of his, and I watch him roar away. I remember an Indian friend saying to me once, ‘Whenever I meet an only child, I always think, Who will walk beside you behind your parents’ coffins?’ Well, Ellie and Annie will be with me won’t they? I might have expected David to be there too, but not now. Too bad. And, anyway, do I really have to walk behind the coffin? Does it have to be that theatrical? I have led a sheltered life. I’ve reached the age of fifty without having to think about funerals. Now I’m going to have to think fast, and this bit, at least, I shall have to do on my own.

  I realise, standing outside the church door, that I am getting very wet. The rain didn’t seem heavy enough to warrant getting my umbrella out but it is persistent and penetrating and I’m beginning to feel clammy inside my jacket. I go into the porch and fish my mother’s address book out of my bag. Dawn is the person I’m looking for; Dawn might just be able to tell me about Christopher. She is the daughter of Betty, who was my mother’s receptionist for years. Betty is dead but she, if anyone, was close to my mother. I can’t remember Dawn’s surname but I find it eventually – Reilly, so it takes a while – and I call her.