My lovely sister Susie
Always in my heart
Forever sleeping in paradise.
As well as these personal messages, there were others that were more formal in nature. A classic arrangement of white and pink carnations caught her eye, marked with the message:
Susan Alison Slade
May Your Soul Rest in Peace
Remembered with sympathy and respect
the family of DC Alan Paine
Oxfordshire Constabulary
The involvement of the Oxfordshire Constabulary suggested that there must have been something sinister or tragic about the girl’s death. She was clearly a victim. Celeste began to feel anxious and looked around the graveyard nervously while she arranged her own bouquet in amongst the other tributes.
There was something ‘off’ about this booking. It was more impersonal than most. Clients of Celestial Headstones.com were usually quite specific in their choice of flowers and messages. For this order, however, the least expensive option had been selected. The bouquet featured on the website was called ‘Loving Memories’ and was a simple arrangement of white roses and miniature lilies in a hand-tied bouquet. It had taken Celeste less than twenty minutes to design. And, whoever had placed the order had written the shortest of messages to go with the flowers:
With best wishes
The phrase was oddly inappropriate for a memorial tribute. Perhaps, the sender had difficulties with social communication?
After Celeste had finished tending the grave, placing the bouquet and taking photographs to email to her client, she began to feel hungry. She had picked up a lunch box from the deli before driving out of London. She sat down on a memorial bench thoughtfully placed in a sunny and sheltered spot behind the south-facing wall of the nave of the church, overlooking the graveyard. She smiled at the dedication on the brass plaque nailed to the top rail of the bench:
Thomas Handley of this Parish 1933–2014
His legs gave out but not his heart
As she bit into her chicken and avocado wrap, she reflected that Thomas must have been blessed with a GSOH (as per the dating ads) as well as a positive outlook on life to have inspired such a quote. If only descriptions on dating sites were so authentic and so revealing! She amused herself with the absurd thought that dating the dead on the basis of their memorial dedications would be so much more straightforward than trying to pick the perfect match from profiles on Tinder…
She closed her eyes and tilted back her head, enjoying the glow of sunlight warming her eyelids. The churchyard was peaceful but not silent. With her eyes closed she became aware of the orchestra of sounds filling the air – birdsong, and insects buzzing and the relentless hum of traffic from the motorway that dissected the countryside a few miles to the north of the village.
All at once the soundscape changed. A peal of bells rang out from the tower – she guessed it must be the weekly bell-ringing practice. The sound of chimes filled her with nostalgia for times when as a little girl she would occasionally accompany her grandfather to the bell-ringing practice in the village church and every once in a while, as a special treat she would be given the chance to ring one of the bells. She remembered the scratchy feel of the rope burning against the soft palm of her hand. It required concentration to keep up with the sequence of the bells in the chime. And it required so much more strength than she had imagined tugging down on the rope to swing that heavy bell. She would throw her whole body into the movement as if she were on a seesaw or a fairground ride.
She opened her eyes and was for a moment dazzled by the brightness of the idyllic English country scene. The cherry trees growing next to the dry-stone wall were at their best – in full blossom at that point in the season where the slightest breeze would cause them to shed their petals like pastel flakes of snow. For now, the sunlight on the petals clinging to the branches made them shimmer with light.
Celeste began to wonder about the life of the young girl whose grave she had been tending. There were so many tributes on her grave, from members of the public as well as her family and friends – but somehow an aura of sadness seemed to cast a shadow over the headstone. She took out her phone and googled the name. The search pulled up a number of entries including recent items commemorating the tenth anniversary of the girl’s death and some old press reports. The Birmingham Post and the Birmingham Advertiser had both run the story. ‘Susie’ Slade was a murder victim.
It was uncanny but Celeste had sensed the bad vibes surrounding this grave. Suddenly the breeze in the cemetery seemed chill and Celeste shuddered as she bit into her apple. All was quiet now. The bells had stopped ringing and she had heard the parishioners leaving the church, calling out cheery goodbyes as they headed off home. Now she was alone in the graveyard. She put on her sweatshirt and began reading obsessively through all the information she could find online about the girl.
The press reports from the trial of Mark Packham, the nineteen-year-old charged with her murder, were distressing. The girl in the press photographs was slim and attractive, with fine features, light hair cut into a bob, and a wide smile – not unlike her own appearance at the same age. Celeste learnt that Susie’s body had been found on 23rd April 2008 buried in a shallow grave in an area of scrubland along a remote stretch of the Grand Union Canal between Birmingham and Oxford. The victim had been found with severe bruising around her neck, suggesting that she had been strangled. An autopsy of the body had revealed that she had been three months pregnant.
According to the prosecution case at the trial, Susan’s superficially sunny appearance and disposition hid a troubled life in and out of care. She had first met and entered into an abusive and coercive relationship with Mark Packham when she was fifteen years old during one of her stays in a care home. Packham was two years older than her and had been a long-term resident of the care home. While in residence she became a drug addict under the influence of Packham on whom she depended for her supply of crack cocaine and other substances. Packham was said to be ‘controlling to an obsessive and excessive degree’. A witness from the care home testified that he was verbally and physically abusive towards her:
‘Packham used to hit her all the time. He was always ordering her about and swearing at her. She was scared of him. The care staff turned a blind eye. They didn’t want to have to call in the police.’
The prosecution case was that eighteen months later when they were both living out in the community, she had met another man, Angus Bridstock, an ‘associate’ of Packham’s. She had entered into a new abusive relationship with Bridstock (also a convicted drug dealer) and become pregnant. Bridstock had proposed to her. Accompanied by Bridstock, she had then arranged to meet Packham in a pub in the suburbs of Birmingham to end the relationship with him once and for all. But when Packham found out about the pregnancy there had been a fight between him and Bridstock and he had subsequently strangled Susie in a fit of jealous rage.
The police evidence included CCTV images of Susie following Packham out of the pub after the fight. This was the last reported sighting of Susie who had been reported missing by her sister at 09.34 GMT the next morning. Forensic evidence matching Susie’s DNA had been found in the back of a truck belonging to Packham’s father who was the owner of a scaffolding company.
The prosecution concluded that seventeen-year-old Susan Slade had been killed by her violent ex-boyfriend sometime between 18.53 GMT on 15th April, when she was last seen on CCTV camera outside the Charrington Arms and 06.25 GMT on 22nd April, when he was caught on a speed camera driving his father’s truck on an approach road to the Grand Union canal. During that one-week interval, the police had launched a ‘missing person’ inquiry but according to evidence given by the family at the trial, the police had been slow to mobilise their full resources for a murder inquiry because the disordered background of the young girl in care led them to believe that she would probably turn up within a few days of her own accord.
In the event, Susie’s mutil
ated body had been discovered by a dog walker on 25th April 2008 when the murder inquiry had been launched. The prosecution case was that Packham had killed Susie sometime between 15th and 22nd April before he transported her body in his father’s truck and buried it in a shallow grave in woodland near to the stretch of the canal where he used to go fishing with his dad when he was a small boy. It had not been possible to establish the exact moment of death.
‘So that explains the absence of the date of death on the headstone.’ Celeste sat there on the bench, shocked at the harrowing details she had just been reading. There seemed so little connection between this idyllic spot and the violent end of Susie’s life. Her flowery grave in this peaceful country graveyard was a painful contrast to the life that the troubled teenager had lived and the careless brutality she had been subjected to at the hands of two aggressive young men, which had ended with her untimely tragic death. She felt overwhelmed with a sense of sisterhood, solidarity and empathy towards the girl who lay buried just a few feet away from where she sat.
Celeste began to wonder who had placed the order on the CelestialHeadstones.com website and what that person’s connection had been to the young murder victim. She took out her phone again and went on to her website to check the order details. The payment had been made by bank transfer, which was unusual as most users simply gave their credit card details or used PayPal. She sent a text to Meghan at Seventh Heaven and asked her to look up the details online in the company bank account.
Fifteen minutes or so later, Meghan sent through a screen shot of the online business bank statement including the relevant entry for the order. She scanned down the image. There it was:
FASTER PAYMENT RECEIPT ON 2018 04-13, REFERENCE B. WARE: £38.50
‘REFERENCE B. WARE’ – was this a genuine reference or was it supposed to be a sinister joke? If so, it wasn’t even remotely funny. Was someone mocking her? Was someone trying to warn her or more likely to frighten her? Was it someone who knew about the trauma and tragedy she had lived through herself? Among her new friends and acquaintances, not many people were aware of the dreadful events that had engulfed her aged seventeen, the same age as the murder victim at whose headstone she had knelt arranging the ‘Loving Memories’ bouquet. Celeste had done her best to keep her past hidden. But it seemed as if someone was trying to intimidate her, and whoever it was, had to be someone who knew her well. She stood up and glanced around the graveyard.
Suddenly she had that prickly feeling she was being watched.
As if on cue, she heard the throaty engine purr of an expensive car approaching up the single-track lane leading to the parking area behind the church. Her eyes were drawn to the sound and she watched a patch of red moving behind the trees. Even before the car pulled in to view and parked up next to the Seventh Heaven van, she knew who it was.
Of course, it had to be him! she thought bitterly. Ben must have placed the order. He wants to have it out with me for what I did to his car the other night… What an idiot, to have fallen into his trap.
She grabbed her things from the bench and entered the church through the west porch. The heavy oak door closed behind her with a loud scraping of wood against the stone flagstones and a clanking of hand-forged ironmongery. She ran down the nave of the church past the rows of ornately carved box pews, beyond the pulpit and into the chancel in search of a place to hide. Lit only by small stained-glass windows, the interior of the church was dark after the brightness outdoors and it took time for her eyes to adjust to the gloom. Short of trying to conceal herself beneath the benches of the pews or behind the curtain of the altar, there was nowhere to hide away in the main body of the church.
She spied a door behind the pulpit. She tried the latch. It opened into the vestry – a small side room containing a desk and chairs (used during marriage, and other ceremonies, no doubt, for the signing of the registers) at one end of the room, and at the other, a large slatted built-in cupboard running the full length of the wall where the choristers and the clergy hung the robes and vestments used in the services. It was big enough for her to step inside and flatten herself against the back wall behind the long red and white robes.
Straining to hear, she made out the muffled sound of the solid oak of the church door creaking on its hinges, then scraping the flagstones as it closed with a clunk. The tapping of footsteps on stone neared the vestry door. She shuffled along the back of the cupboard behind the clerical garments that smelt of musty linen, lavender and mothballs. Her foot clattered against a large metal box. In the dim light from the slats she made out an assortment of cleaning materials and tools – hammers and screwdrivers and the like, for use by the church caretaker, she supposed – as well familiar floristry items that she assumed must belong to the flower arrangers in the church.
She heard the latch of the vestry door releasing and sank down silently to the floor, huddling in amongst the cleaning fluids and mops. Without thinking she took a hammer from the box and crouched there gripping it tightly and praying that her pursuer wouldn’t see her through the gaps or rifle along the whole length of the cupboard.
Feeling as if her lungs must burst, at last she heard the latch of the vestry door closing followed by retreating footsteps. She waited a few more minutes before sliding back the cupboard door and creeping out. Cautiously she ventured out of the church, scanning the churchyard before making her way back across the grass to collect her floristry workbox, which she had left behind Susan Slade’s headstone. Heading for the van, she saw a man crossing the village green in the direction of the shops and the pub. She recognised his silhouette and upright gait. He must be going in search of her. She watched him disappear into a café. Maybe he thought she’d gone to the village to pick up some lunch.
The red car was still parked beside the van. The scratch was gone. Had she imagined the scene the other night? Or had the paintwork already been repaired? If only it were as easy to paint over the scars that disfigured her soul and her skin! The empathetic anger roused by Celeste’s research into Susie’s life story seemed to explode as the Ferrari’s deafening alarm screeched out across the village. Any second now, he would come running to check on the commotion. She flung open the door of the van and threw in her workbox before jumping in behind the wheel. She dared not turn her head. But the car’s windscreen was clearly visible in her rear-view mirror as she accelerated down the lane.
The bright spring sunshine set the windscreen gleaming with three sparkling starbursts of shattered glass that called up in Celeste’s agitated state of mind an image of celebrations and popping Champagne corks and spraying bubbles.
As she drove along the country lanes back to the motorway, she was overtaken by a strange, reckless euphoria like a delinquent schoolgirl bunking off classes. She hurtled round the bends at speed, her foot almost flat on the accelerator.
‘This is better than cocaine! I could get hooked on this feeling!’
Halfway back to London she had to pull off the road to fill up the van with diesel. It was only when she reached into her workbox for her purse that she realised she had acquired a new tool.
She must have forgotten to leave behind the hammer when she legged it out of the church…
In addition to her credit card, she took out the little cardboard sympathy card that Ben had left for her at Seventh Heaven.
Before she set off again, she punched out the number scribbled on the back of the card and typed out the message:
For Susie and all the women in the world who suffer abuse at the hands of men.
And #MeToo
PRESENT
30
Something’s changed. You don’t speak to me anymore. Not a smile or a nod when you pass me in a corridor – I might as well not exist. After all the work I did for you, setting up your stupid website, your behaviour is not just unfriendly, it’s fucking uncivilised!
You’ve only got yourself to blame for what I’m doing.
Out of sight but not out of mind. That’s the
only way I can get close to you.
You look far too happy when you’re going about your business without me.
You need to learn some respect.
My father kept a Rottweiler and this is what he liked to say as he kicked the dog into submission.
‘Make them love you or fear you. It doesn’t matter which. Either will learn them to respect you.’
‘Love or fear?’
He used the same method with me. Kicked me into submission. In the end, I gave him my respect.
‘Love or fear?’
I’m coming out of the shadows.
It’s your choice.
*
Celeste was sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop open. Anya leaned over and plonked a large glass of gin and tonic down on the table in front of her.
‘Got a lot on this week? You’ve been working late every night.’
‘Yes, I’m preparing for a big wedding at The Chelsea Register Office in two weeks’ time. It’s a last-minute job, American bride, she’s very sweet but such a pain. She won’t leave me alone, and she wants the best of everything. Meghan’s made me drop all my other work – just to focus on this wedding.’ She flipped through her notebook to show Anya her pages and pages of copious notes about the order. ‘Look, that’s just from my meeting with her yesterday.’
Anya sat down beside her. ‘Well it’s good to see you’re back in the land of the living for a change,’ said Anya. ‘I was beginning to think you were ghosting us – all that time disappearing off to graveyards.’ She smirked at Celeste.
‘Ha, ha… very witty. Well, you’ll be pleased to know, Meghan’s banned me from any new orders on CelestialHeadstones.com for a while. She was furious because I pranged the van and picked up another speeding ticket on my way back from Astridge.’
‘Oh my God! Celeste,’ said Anya. ‘You need to slow down. Or we’ll be the ones putting flowers on your grave.’ Celeste knew Anya’s fears for her welfare were not too deep even though both she and Jessica had been voicing their concerns about her mood swings the past few weeks – one minute she was hyper, verging on mania, the next she was down in the dumps, scarcely able to speak.
No Smoke Without Fire Page 16