by Robert Innes
Harrison sighed as gave up on his tie and let it hang loosely around his neck. “Of course I do.” His memories of his ex, Daniel, were still fresh in his mind, even though he had died nearly two years ago. “Can you sort this?”
Blake turned around and chuckled, then took Harrison’s tie from around his neck, placed it around his own, and then tied the tie loosely before putting it back on Harrison and tightening it. Harrison’s eyes could not help but wander down his boyfriend’s bare torso.
“We’ve got a little while until it starts though, haven’t we?” he said pointedly, tracing a finger down Blake’s chest.
He was surprised to see Blake’s expression falter slightly. “No, not really.” He tapped Harrison’s hand away and then turned back to the wardrobe to put his shirt on. “We have to be there in about half an hour.”
“The church is around the corner,” whinged Harrison. “It won’t take us that long to get there.” He walked across the room and wrapped his arms around Blake’s waist. “I haven’t seen much of you lately.”
Again, Blake wriggled free. “Yeah, well I’ve been working. You know that. And besides, you’ve been spending all your time with Tip Tap Tom.”
Harrison rolled his eyes. “Stop calling him that. Just because he’s a dancer, there is more to him that that.”
“Why don’t you tell me then?” Blake replied as he tightened his own tie. “All I know about him is that he’s funny, amazing, so cool, so interesting and knows how to do a tango. Oh yes and he went to university. Not exactly a detailed description.”
“Oh, so that’s what all this is about,” Harrison said, folding his arms. “You’re jealous?”
“I’m not jealous.”
“Oh, really? And you not being jealous is why you’re flinching whenever I touch you and acting like a sulky child whenever I bring up Tom’s name?” Harrison asked. He had been all too aware of Blake’s strange behaviour for the past week and it seemed as good a time as any to finally bring it up. As Harrison could have guessed, Blake was dismissive.
“There is nothing to worry about, you know,” Harrison pressed on. “You do know that I would never do anything like that to you?”
He saw Blake’s eyes briefly glance to him in the reflection of the mirror on the wardrobe, before returning to his tie. “Of course I do.”
“Well then, what the hell is wrong with you? You’ve told me that I have to get used to the fact that there are times when your work is going to take priority, so I’ve now got a mate who will keep me entertained while you’re at the station till God knows when. That’s not a problem, surely?”
Blake sighed heavily and turned around to face him. “It’s not that. It’s got nothing to do with Tom.”
Harrison looked at him concerned. “Then what?”
There we a few moments silence as Blake looked at him intently. Just as he was about to open his mouth, there was a loud knock at the door.
“Blake, wait,” Harrison said as he watched Blake hurry towards the stairs.
“It’ll keep,” Blake told him and disappeared out of the bedroom.
Harrison shook his head in disbelief. When he had put on his suit jacket he followed Blake out of the bedroom, feeling spectacularly irritated.
When he reached the top of the stairs, he was surprised and pleased to see Tom standing in the doorway. He was wearing a similar suit to Blake and looked, Harrison had to admit, extremely handsome.
Blake stood in the doorway, looking like it was taking all his effort to be friendly. “Tom. Come in. I take it you’re going to the funeral?”
“No, actually,” Tom said, stepping inside the cottage. “I’ve got a job interview in Clackton. But I wanted to pop in and invite you both to dinner some time this week. Mum’s been going on about you nonstop, Blake.”
“We’d love to, wouldn’t we, Blake?” Harrison said pointedly.
“Absolutely,” Blake said. “We’ll let you know when we can make it. You know what work’s like. I’ll have to check my diary.”
“Okay, cool,” Tom said, smiling. “Well, good luck with the funeral, if luck’s the right word.”
“And you with your interview,” Harrison replied. “I’ll text you later, you can tell me how it went.”
“Will do,” Tom said, looking nervous. “See you later. Bye, Blake.”
“Take care,” Blake replied and closed the door behind him.
Harrison stared at him, unable to comprehend why Blake was having to use such effort to be his normal, cheerful self.
In return, Blake picked up his ecig from where it was charging on the counter and placed it into his pocket. Without even looking Harrison in the eye, he simply said, “Shall we go then?”
Harrison was pleased to see that Blake’s worries about the funeral having a low turn-out were unnecessary. When they arrived at St Abra’s church, they were greeted by what seemed to be half the village. Most were people that Harrison was convinced were only there to get an update on the gossip that surrounded the event, and by the disapproving expression on Blake’s face, he felt the same.
Blake pushed their way through the crowd until they arrived at the church entrance, where Angela was greeting people that Harrison could quickly tell were mostly people she barely knew. She was dressed all in black, her hair cascading down her back. As she looked up, her face lit up slightly when she saw Blake.
“You came,” she said, ignoring an outstretched hand offered to her by someone she had been about to greet and hurrying over to Blake. “And Harrison. Thank you so much. It seems he was more popular than I thought.”
“See?” said Blake, though Harrison was sure he threw a disparaging look at the crowd of entrees to the church. “How are you feeling today?”
Angela nodded. “Free. I think after today I may well be able to make a fresh start on my life.”
“Good,” Blake said. “That’s really good to hear.”
“Oh, here he comes,” Angela said nervously. “I checked him over myself this morning. He’s wearing his favourite suit. Considering his injuries, I think David and I have made him look quite at peace.”
They all turned to see a horse drawn carriage with a large glass window in the centre of it making their way slowly towards them. The horses, black in colour, their coats shiny and sleek, had magnificent plumage fastened around their bodies. The coffin, accompanied by a large wreath, was a deep glossy brown colour.
“Wow, it looks fantastic, Angela,” Harrison said in awe.
“Only the best for Patrick,” Angela said grimly. “He made sure of that.” She turned to the admiring crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen, if you could make your way inside. Mr Coopland has arrived.”
To Harrison, the service felt more like a show of what the Cooplands believed a funeral should be like rather than an event designed to celebrate and remember Patrick’s life. Lots of distinguished looking men, all who claimed to be upstanding and respected members of the undertaker’s profession all spoke at length at what a loss Patrick’s death was. Harrison was surprised that Angela did not chose to say anything, but he assumed that it meant she could simply not face it. He could hardly blame her – he had been unable to say anything at Daniel’s funeral either.
Unfortunately, for the now rather bored looking occupants of the church, once all the pomp and circumstance of the main service was over, they were then led outside by Patrick’s coffin to where it had been arranged for him to be buried.
As his grand looking coffin was lowered gently into the ground, Angela appeared to be able to take no more. She threw her programme down on the ground, and quickly slipped away while the vicar was still speaking.
“I better see if she’s alright,” whispered Blake as they watched Angela walk towards the gate.
“I think we can both do that,” Harrison replied. “I don’t need to stay at the funeral of a man I didn’t know.”
Blake appeared reluctant, but nodded and ignoring the murmuring from the crowd around them, they followed
Angela out of the churchyard and down the road towards the undertakers.
“Hello, Angela?” Blake called, knocking on the door sharply. “It’s Blake and Harrison. We can leave you alone if you want, we just wanted to make sure you were alright?”
“She probably does just want to be left alone,” Harrison said quietly. “She has just buried her husband. I mean, even if he was horrible to her, it doesn’t change how long they’d been married.”
“I know that, but she’s been through a huge amount this past week,” Blake replied. “All I want to do is make sure she’s coping.”
“So, are you going to tell me what you were going to say earlier?” Harrison asked as Blake peered through one of the windows.
“I don’t think now is really the time, Harrison.”
“When is then?” Harrison asked, narrowing his eyes. “Something’s wrong with you Blake. You’ve been acting weird all week, ever since that crash happened. What aren’t you telling me?”
Blake was saved from answering as the door opened and a stern looking man with grey hair tied back in a ponytail greeted them.
“Hello, David,” Blake said. “Has Angela come home? She didn’t make it all the way through the burial. We just wanted to check on her.”
“I do believe she is in the upstairs flat,” David replied, staring down his large hooked nose at them. “I heard her come in about ten minutes ago, but then I thought I heard the door go again, so I presume she’s gone out again.”
Suddenly from the windows above them, there came a loud scream of horror.
“Angela?” Blake called.
He pushed past David and disappeared into the house.
“Blake!” Harrison cried. He followed Blake through the door, much to David’s annoyance who found himself being pushed aside again.
As Blake and Harrison ran through the parlour and through a door leading to a corridor that took them to the living area for the Cooplands, another loud scream sounded out around them.
“It’s coming from upstairs,” Blake said urgently.
As they sprinted up the stairs, arguing became audible.
“…try to kill me off, you stupid woman!”
As they finally reached the end of the corridor, Blake practically kicked the door down and then recoiled with an expression of shock on his face. When Harrison saw what Blake was staring at, he found himself doing exactly the same.
Angela was lying on the floor, choking as a pair of hands were released from around her neck. Through the gasping for air, she stared up in horror at her attacker.
Patrick Coopland was standing over her, his face contorted in rage. For a few seconds, nobody moved as both sides took in the sight before them.
Then, without another word, Patrick turned and wrenched open the bedroom window. Before Blake could stop him, he had hauled himself out.
“No!” exclaimed Blake. They hurried to the window only to see Patrick landing safely on the not too far down grass below. Once back on his feet again, with a level of sprightliness that he looked too old for, he jumped over the garden wall and into the backstreets of Harmschapel, finally disappearing around a corner.
As Harrison stared out the window, his mind frantically trying to make sense of what he had just seen, Blake dropped to his knees to attend to Angela.
In the doorway, David was looking shell-shocked. “That was Mr Coopland, wasn’t it? That was Patrick?”
“It looked like it, yes,” Blake said. “Come on Angela, look at me, you’re safe now. Breath in slowly.”
“How?” Angela whimpered. “How is he alive? How was that him?”
“Are you sure that was Patrick?” Harrison asked, though he knew full well that who he had just seen was who he had seen lying unconscious in the driving seat of the car.
“Of course, I was married to the man for thirty years!” Angela gasped. “That was him. Patrick’s alive! I don’t understand what’s happening! He won’t leave me alone!”
She began to sob into Blake’s shoulder. As Harrison watched Blake wrap his arms gently over her shoulders, they both exchanged baffled looks.
“How?” Harrison murmured over the sound of Angela’s wails. “How is that man alive? Blake, I watched him die. The whole village watched him die.”
“That’s not the main question here,” Blake said as he prised Angela off his shoulder.
“Seems like a fairly sizable question to me!” David exclaimed from the doorway. “Myself and Mrs Coopland have spent the entire week seeing to the body of Patrick!”
“Oh, it’s a question, certainly,” Blake said as he looked at Angela with a serious expression. “But the main question here is if Patrick Coopland is alive, then who has just been buried at the church?”
6
“An exhumation?” Angel repeated, his eyebrows raised. “That’s your recommendation?”
“I don’t think we have a lot of choice, Sir,” Blake replied. “If Patrick Coopland is still alive, then who exactly did they have such an extravagant funeral for?”
Angel exhaled, looking unhappy as he sat down in his office chair. “You have Mrs Coopland here I assume?”
“Yes, Sir. Interview room two.”
Angel scratched his chin. “And she’s insisting that she spent the morning putting the final touches on the body of her dead husband?”
“Exactly, and she’s not the only one. We also have the Cooplands’ assistant, David Penn, who claims to have also been working on the body. He’s in interview room one.”
Angel looked up at him. “I’ll make some calls. We’ll try and get it done tonight if possible. You’re right, DS Harte, I don’t see how we’ve got a lot of choice. Just go and make sure that we have all the facts before it happens.”
“Yes, Sir.” Blake immediately turned on his heels and strode out of the office. “Right everyone,” he said to the meeting room. “Michael, Matti, I want you to speak to David Penn. If he’s saying that he has seen the body of Coopland, then either him or Coopland is lying.”
“Sir,” Mattison said as he briskly left the room followed by Gardiner, whom Blake was pleased to see offered very little argument.
“Mini, you’re with me,” Blake said to Patil. “Are you alright?” he added, glancing at her. She looked quite pale.
“Yeah, I’m fine, Sir,” she said, shaking her head. “I just feel like I want to be sick all the time.”
Blake glanced around them then leaned into quietly say “You’ve been feeling sick for quite a while, Mini. And you’ve been saying it starts in the morning. I hate to ask…”
Patil’s eyes darted to the ground. “I know. I have a test in my bag.”
Blake smiled at her sympathetically. He remembered the conversation the two of them had once had where Patil had revealed to him that she had Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, a condition that made getting pregnant extremely difficult.
“I don’t want to get too excited, Sir,” she murmured. “It could just be a bug. It’s not like with my condition I can rely on a certain event happening once a month. And even if I am…”
“I know,” Blake said quietly. “But there’s no guarantees in anything in life. But not taking the test isn’t going to change the result.”
As soon as the words came out of his mouth, Blake felt another pang of guilt as his own advice came back to bite him yet again.
“I know. I’ll do it when I next need the loo.” Patil said, smiling nervously.
“Good. Right – shall we?”
Angela looked like a broken woman, sporting the most disturbingly haunted look Blake had ever seen.
She stared up at them as they entered the interview room. “Have you found him?”
“Not yet,” replied Blake, sitting down opposite her. “We’ve got a team searching for him though. He can’t have gotten far. Angela, you do realise that this is a police investigation now? There’s some things that aren’t making sense to us at the moment, and we need to find some answers if we’re going to catch the man who
attacked you earlier on. Okay?”
Angela nodded, her eyes widening slightly.
Blake leant across the desk and pressed the recorder on. “Interview commencing at 15:37, present in the room are Detective Sergeant Blake Harte.”
“Police Constable Mini Patil,” Patil said.
“And Angela Coopland,” finished Blake. “Okay, Angela. I need you to take me through exactly what happened this afternoon, before we arrived.”
“Everything that vicar was saying at the funeral,” Angela murmured. “I couldn’t stand it anymore. All that rubbish about dust to dust, it was just too much, so I left.”
“And we followed you,” Blake added. “What happened when you got to the undertakers?”
Angela began fiddling with a tissue she had pulled from her sleeve. “I just wanted to lock myself away from it all. I’d spent all week trying to put my husband in the ground in the most dignified way and I had just had enough of it all. I’ve been surrounded by death for so many years. There’s only so much a person can take. So, I ran upstairs and straight into the bedroom. There was a man in there. At first, I thought he was a burglar, he was rummaging through the drawers. Then, he turned around and all of a sudden, I’m faced with someone who I thought I had just buried. There’s no doubt about it, it was him. Which means all the other times I thought I’d seen him, he must have been there. But that’s impossible, because I’ve tended to his body myself. This very morning, I was brushing him down, straightening his tie. David will say the same. The only explanation is that I’m going mad. I must be.”
“Leading up to the car crash, it was your husband driving, you argued, he took his eyes off the road, and crashed the car. Your husband died at the scene, pronounced dead by paramedics and witnessed in the car by many villagers that knew him. There’s really only one question I can ask you here, Angela. Are you certain that the man who died next you in that car was Patrick Coopland?”