We move house and, excited to collect the key, never consider who else has a copy. We tell the chemist our address without heed to who is queuing behind. We banter with the window cleaner, meter reader, we give the plumber the alarm code. We leave doors unlatched to nip out for chocolate we shouldn’t have and we express horror at a murder in the local paper, never thinking that we ourselves may die that way.
Standing amongst tall reeds on the eyot, Jack whispered on the breeze.
‘Have you seen the cold-hearted shadow who waits so patiently for a chance to know you better?’
Jack knew, it takes one to know one.
Chapter Seven
December 2019
Stella
Since she’d moved to Tewkesbury, Stella was appreciating that she worked for someone else. She could do the job, and leave. Today had begun by cleaning the Abbey tea shop, an auctioneer’s office on the High Street, then a couple of domestic visits, before ending with deep-cleaning a probate house for sale that was opposite the secondary school.
This last, a favourite activity, raised Stella’s spirits and, having resolved not to return to the Death Café – last night had been worse than her worst fears – Stella changed her mind. The session had hardly started so she hadn’t yet kept her promise to try out a Death Café. Remembering Joy was allergic to dogs, and in case there was cake, Stella went without Stanley.
The clock struck five fifty-five. She sheltered from the rain beneath the vast flying buttress on the abbey’s south wall. Pale light from the tearoom tinged the grass. Through steamed up windows Stella could see several figures and felt mild relief; not just her then.
It was like a repeat of the night before. Again, Stella hesitated outside the door and was startled as it was flung open. Although the man who ushered her in was not Clive.
‘Twice in two days, we can’t go on meeting like this, Beverly.’ Collar of his combat jacket up, Roddy March flicked back tumbling locks of ebullient blond locks and, raising an Abbey Gardens mug to Stella, tossed the rest of a piece of cake into his mouth. ‘Thank God you’re here, these others are dodo dead.’
It was the man from the tomb of the starved monk. The man in the beanie to whom she had said that her name was Beverly.
‘Have you come about cadaver tombs?’ In confusion, Stella said the first thing that came into her head.
‘You remembered.’ March looked pleased as he shut the tearoom door. ‘That’s what I told that Felicity, she was already antsy that I’ve started on the nosh.’ He gestured to the table where Stella saw a coffee and walnut cake, a large chunk missing, had been placed on the stand. Irrelevantly, she wondered what had happened to the rest of the sponge from the previous night. ‘And for God’s sake don’t ask for biscuits, Clive said he was in the dog house last night.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ Stella snapped. Although, seeing the cake, she realized that she was.
‘Is March your friend?’ Felicity asked when Stella went to fetch her coffee.
‘No. I don’t know him.’ While this was strictly true, Stella felt she had lied.
‘He’s a gatecrasher, come for the free cake.’ Felicity looked furious. ‘I had to say he could stay.’
‘That was nice of you,’ Stella said for something to say. She wondered why anyone would gatecrash a Death Café for any reason. Roddy March had sat next to what last night was her chair. She would move.
But when she brought her coffee to the table, Stella found that Gladys had saved the seat for her. Irritated to have March beside her, Stella was nevertheless touched that Gladys had done so. Everyone had placed themselves in the same chairs as the night before. Joy was opposite Stella with Clive to her left, on his left was Andrea then Gladys, Stella, Roddy and finally Felicity.
‘I never said what I hate yesterday.’ Joy had swapped her tunic for a thick knitted cardigan which, Stella saw, depicted more deer and rabbits.
‘I never actually asked you to—’ said Felicity.
‘What do I hate? Well,’ Joy held up a fragment of walnut, ‘I utterly loathe that ghastly euphemism for death, “passed on”. As if life is a conveyor belt. We do not “pass on”, we die.’ A hunter swooping on its prey, Joy snatched up a morsel of cake and popped it in her mouth.
‘Joy, who encouraged you to feel this hate?’ Roddy was smoothing out a new page in a notebook.
‘We are avoiding the personal, please stick to death,’ Felicity cautioned him. ‘Joy, your point about euphemisms for mortality is cogent. We’re here tonight to stare death in the face.’
‘Are we?’ Gladys gave a nervous laugh. ‘I’m not dressed for that.’
‘Waves roll in and level the sand until there’s nothing to show you were ever there.’ Clive tapped his fob watch pocket. Stella saw he was wearing the same tie as last night. The same shirt too. ‘We kill time, we waste time and we fill in time. Beware, we cannot defy time.’
‘Nice.’ Roddy March wrote it down. Felicity’s expression darkened. Stella supposed taking notes was discouraged.
‘It was my turn when our host received a text from an admirer who couldn’t wait.’ Clive sucked in his cheeks. Stella felt for Felicity – yet again the evening was slipping from her grasp.
‘It wasn’t a… Oh never mind, go ahead. Introduce yourself.’ Felicity pulled out her Death Café crib sheet from a leather doctor’s bag.
‘I am an horologist.’ Clive rolled the r. ‘Should you suppose I can read your stars, don’t. I can’t tell me Virgo from me Piss-cees. My vocation is to serve Old Father Time. I construct clocks, watches, automatons, those that tell the time and those with no face, the pendulum swings, but we are none the wiser. The secret keepers of time.’ He was flicking a brown plastic thing along his fingers, back and forth. ‘For me, as the big hand approaches eighty-two, time ain’t on me side. However, time is a construct, hours and minutes are the petty invention of man.’ He produced his fob watch from its pocket in his waistcoat and, tapping the face as if, like a barometer, this would tell him, said, ‘I will live for ever.’
Everyone laughed except Stella who suspected Clive wasn’t joking, and Joy who hadn’t yet smiled.
‘Secret keeper of time, love it.’ Roddy March was writing.
‘Children are our legacy, new life to replace old.’ Felicity was back on script.
‘Not if you don’t have kids,’ Andrea said.
‘“Flesh perishes, I live on, projecting trait and trace through time to times anon”,’ Clive intoned, then, in his ordinary voice, ‘Never married. My family face dies with me.’
From where she sat, Stella noticed his fob watch was an hour slow. It was a month since the clocks had gone back; in his business Clive couldn’t have forgotten. The plastic thing he was playing with was a spoon from the lid of an ice-cream pot like those sold at the tearoom during the day.
‘…dead parents, dead brother, dead neighbours. It’s a chain, one leads to the next. Dead. Dead. Dead.’
‘Yes, Clive, we get it,’ Joy said. ‘We will all die.’
The Death Café was in free fall. Stella wanted to chair it, set an agenda, objectives, allocate actions, but she’d left Clean Slate and didn’t chair anything. Her own free fall was when Roddy March found out that Felicity and the rest of the group called her Stella when he thought her name was Beverly. It never paid to lie.
The abbey clock chimed six fifteen. The meeting finished at seven thirty. Stella couldn’t hope for Felicity to get another text and send them away two evenings running.
‘Thomas Hardy said our face lives beyond us. Family is legacy.’ Felicity flicked a look at Andrea whose own face was behind the snood. Stella wondered why Andrea had come again, she looked as if she was on detention.
‘I have three kiddies, but seeing as they all take after Derek my face will perish when I die.’ Gladys Wren flicked droplets of rainwater off the sleeves of her silver jacket. Stella noticed Gladys had redone her nail varnish cerise. Stella, in the black suit she used to wear for client meeting
s, felt better turned out than the night before.
Cheered by this, she said, ‘I started a cleaning company called Clean Slate, I guess that’s a legacy.’ Stella saw Felicity’s rictus expression and realized it could be construed as promotion. Hastily, ‘I have nothing to do with it now, so that’s that, I suppose. I do have stepchildren… had…’ Jack had wanted her to consider Justin and Milly hers, but his twins already had a better mother than Stella could ever be.
‘Death is part of life.’ Felicity was reading from her crib sheet.
‘That implies a nice natural end.’ Roddy March turned his head this way and that, easing his neck as if it was stiff. ‘What about having the life strangled out of you in an empty house or, say, your skull stove in and gouts of blood leaving a trail as you crawl to the phone only to die inches from the receiver? There is no euphemism for murder.’
‘Bumped off. Rubbed out. Offed.’ Andrea pulled down her snood. ‘It’s sick how some people are obsessed with it.’
‘Murder is part of life.’ While not acknowledging that Andrea had effectively contradicted him, Roddy March wrote down what she had said. ‘Anyone can be murdered.’
Stella was propelled back to the lonely dark lane, the lights of the white van extinguished. The stillness. If another car hadn’t drawn up behind her would the van driver have attacked her. Or worse? Taking a large swallow of coffee, she saw the fire was dying, the café had grown cold.
‘Let’s hope not, my boy.’ Clive was winding his watch. Perhaps he’d seen it told the wrong time.
‘Children kill.’ Andrea disappeared back behind her snood. ‘What about that kid who shot his father? Children can be evil.’
‘He’ll be branded a killer for life, poor lad,’ Clive said. ‘Murder is one disease time cannot heal.’
‘It was an accident.’ Stella joined in unintentionally. Boy Kills Dad – the Gloucestershire Echo had reported how a local gamekeeper’s son, mistaking his father for a poacher, had shot him, clean through the heart. Nothing clean about it. The story had saddened her. If time could heal grief, it could never heal guilt.
‘He was eight, quite old enough to know better.’ Joy pursed her lips. ‘Children of that age know right from wrong. They get up to all sorts, blackmail, robbery, murder.’
‘Eight-year-olds know exactly what they’re doing.’ Andrea’s voice was blurred by the snood.
‘We were all young once.’ Felicity offered round more cake. Roddy March was her only taker. ‘Andrea, as a gardener, you’re used to being around dying organisms, tell us your impressions of death?’
‘Who says I’m a gardener?’ Andrea looked hostile.
‘Probably your get-up.’ Roddy smirked. ‘That fabulous outdoor look.’
Stella took in Andrea’s soil-encrusted nails – the opposite of Gladys’s manicured hands – ruddy cheeks, hair tousled from the wind and rain. Glancing at March’s pad, she was disturbed to read: Andrea, loose cannon, Worzel Gummidge, needs a wash. A cruel summary.
‘It’s the signature on your email. Gardener at Tewkesbury Abbey.’ Twitching inverted comma forefingers, Felicity looked impatient. ‘OK, folks, let’s sum up what we have so far. We’ve agreed to dispose of euphemisms. Certainly, in my past life, we told death as we found it.’
‘You’ve had another life?’ Joy looked thunderous as if this was cheating.
‘We could have a séance,’ Gladys said.
‘She means before she retired.’ Andrea sighed.
‘I was a pathologist, a renowned one, actually. Death really was all around me. My name, Dr Felicity Branscombe, aka Cat Woman, and the villain’s enemy, will trip off the tongue to those of you who follow great murder trials.’ Felicity flushed pink.
‘Yes.’ Stella sat up. She’d never heard of Felicity – although as a child she’d liked Cat Woman – but felt bound to rescue her from the table of blank faces. Felicity’s autopsy analogy when she was serving drinks yesterday now made sense. As did her Rod Stewart ringtone which showed Felicity had a sense of humour… The first cut is the deepest...
‘Cool. You and I need a chat.’ Roddy nodded at Felicity who didn’t nod back.
‘Andrea, my dear, this must be familiar territory for you, the abbey gardens is jam-packed with the dead.’ Clive patted Andrea on the shoulder which made her recoil.
‘I don’t see dead people when I’m gardening – flowers and plants are alive,’ Andrea said. ‘My discussion point is what’s best: burial or cremation?’
‘Cremation is warmer.’ Clive said.
Unable to bear the cold any longer, crossing to the fireplace, Stella rattled the handle under the grate and urged dying embers into flames. She laid another log on the fire.
‘…want burial, you’d better book pronto,’ Clive was saying. ‘My great-grandfather invested in a mausoleum in the abbey, and one day they’ll prise off the marble slab and shove me in. With your talents, my girl, you can dig your own grave.’ To Stella’s surprise Andrea smiled.
‘I’d like a woodland burial.’ Andrea shot a look at March. ‘Better than being in a tomb.’
‘Lovely.’ Stella hoped to goodness Andrea hadn’t seen his notes about her. Andrea mentioning tombs, it occurred to Stella that perhaps she’d heard March’s podcast on cadaver tombs. She had earbuds around her neck, she might listen to podcasts as she gardened. When cleaning Stella preferred to feel present with no distractions. Now she regretted that, after meeting March in the abbey yesterday morning, assuming she’d never see him again, and what with the van on the lane and the Death Café experience, she’d forgotten about his podcast. The trouble with small towns was people could come back to haunt you. Brushing the starved monk gently twice a week, Stella felt a responsibility to him, so March’s cadaver tombs podcast interested her. Keeping to the subject of disposal she felt bound to add, ‘In our family we’re cremated. With the Co-op.’
‘Cremation is horrible.’ Joy stroked one of the rabbits on her cardigan. ‘By the end you’re nothing but hip joints and fillings and don’t be thinking you can take your teddy or some cuddly toy with you into your coffin.’ Her stern expression took in Stella whose own teddy had come with her to Tewkesbury. ‘That’s illegal. Stuffed animals pollute the atmosphere and kill off the rest of us.’
‘Burial uses up space, but it is so much nicer than incineration.’ Felicity clamped a hand over her mouth. ‘Damnation, I’m not allowed to voice an opinion.’
‘Why not, Feli-ci-tee?’ Roddy March’s eyes twinkled. ‘There’s so much you could tell us, all those murderers you’ve chopped up, bottled, sliced and placed between glass slides. We’d love to hear your thoughts.’
‘That’s not why we’re here,’ Joy said. ‘We could all talk about our lives. It’s death that matters.’
‘Mea culpa, Joy, was it?’ Roddy clasped his hands in prayer. ‘Me, I don’t want to slide through the curtains into the flames as if into Hell. Although, with my past, maybe I’m headed there anyway.’ He guffawed.
‘That’s a myth,’ Joy said. ‘Your coffin comes off the turntable through a hatch into a room where it’s received onto a gurney. When it is your turn you are wheeled to a cremator that is affixed with your name tag. The door is flung wide and your coffin shoved into the oven with a huge metal poker. It takes an hour or so to be consumed by the intense heat. Your ashes are raked onto a tray and left to cool. Even in death we queue. That’s right, isn’t it, Felicity?’
‘Why should I know?’ Felicity was consulting her notes.
‘I expect Joy means because you’re a pathologist.’ Andrea’s lip curled.
‘What happened to the deceased’s remains after I was done was not my business. Unless a re-examination was required. One good reason why I’m not in favour of the fire,’ Felicity said. ‘Introduce yourself, Stella. In your email you claimed to be a cleaner.’
‘Stella Darnell, aged fifty-three, and I am a cleaner.’ With the discussion in full swing, Stella had dared be confident she’d get away without saying her
piece. The Death Café website had stated it wasn’t mandatory to speak. ‘Offices, people’s homes, institutions.’
‘How interesting.’ Felicity was encouraging. Everyone else looked blank.
‘Not forgetting the abbey.’ Roddy March had written, Joy by name, horrible by nature!!! next to Joy’s name.
‘You know each other?’ Andrea asked.
‘No.’ Stella was worried that Felicity would think she had lied earlier. ‘I was cleaning. Roddy, Mr March, passed by.’
‘Passed, did he?’ Clive wheezed at his joke.
‘Dad died on Monday the eleventh of January 2011. Heart attack. Outside the Co-op. He was a detective in the Met CID—’ Thinking of Roddy March’s excoriating jottings on Andrea and Joy, Stella shifted to avoid seeing what he’d written about her.
‘Is this relevant?’ Andrea suddenly said. ‘I thought we couldn’t mention personal stuff. That’s what you said.’ She jabbed a finger towards Felicity.
‘Stella is setting the scene,’ Felicity said.
‘Did you want to tell us about your father, Andrea?’ Roddy March waited with apparent fascination. Andrea ignored him.
‘Yes, I am setting the scene.’ Stella’s own patience had worn thin. Since leaving London, she was easily overtaken by a volcanic rage that surged up from nowhere. Right now, she pictured pushing Andrea’s face into the remains of the cake. What right had the woman to be so rude and unpleasant? ‘This café is about death. My dad’s death is why I’m here. It was eight years ago so, like Gladys with Derek, I won’t cry.’ She wished Jack was there to hear her, he was always encouraging her to express emotions. ‘I inherited Dad’s house but even now, it’s like he’s just left the room.’ Stella didn’t say how when she and Jack solved one of Terry Darnell’s cases, a newspaper headline had read, Cleaner Follows Detective Dad’s Footsteps.
Or that two months ago her world turned upside down when her mum remarked that Terry was dead and gone. Stella had, on some level, been storing up her achievements to tell her dad when he came back and, in that moment, had understood deep in her heart that she had no footsteps to follow. He was never coming back.
The Distant Dead Page 5