April skidded to a halt and turned back as a tall man in work overalls ran out of the house.
‘You do know you’re not supposed to be in here, don’t you?’ he called.
He didn’t come any closer, but April could see he was angry.
As if he had been caught doing something he shouldn’t have been?
she thought suddenly.
‘I was with the tour and I got a bit lost,’ she said.
He raised his eyebrows sceptically, but didn’t say anything. ‘Well, perhaps I’d better take you back before you damage something.’
He walked slowly up to her and April could now see the man was about forty, with untidy hair and the weathered complexion of someone who had always worked outside. He gestured along the path and she warily fell into step with him.
‘So what do you do?’ she asked.
‘Do?’
‘You work here?’
‘I look after the graves.’
‘Don’t you get scared?’
‘What of?’
‘Oh, you know, ghosts, that sort of thing - it must be spooky at night.’
The man looked at her sharply. ‘No one comes here at night.’
‘Really? Isn’t there any security or anything?’
‘Why would you want to know that?’
‘I’m just curious.’
‘Curiosity killed the cat.’
They turned left onto the main pathway and the man increased his pace, as if he was keen to get rid of her. He certainly wasn’t one for small talk.
Maybe doesn’t see many people in his line of work,
she thought.
‘Hey, what’s that?’ said April, stopping at the corner where the path twisted away. There was a waist-high stone vault and carved into the top was an exquisite sculpture of a woman, lying down, one ear to the grave, as if she was weeping, or listening for signs of life. It had a powerful air of melancholy and sadness. ‘What’s that one?’ she repeated.
The man paused before answering. ‘They call her the Sleeping Angel,’ he said quietly.
‘Whose grave is it?’
Curiously, she noticed that her companion seemed to be avoiding looking at the monument.
‘It’s the grave of a girl,’ he said. ‘She was about your age. Francesca Bryne, her name was, laid here in 1894.’
‘How sad.’
‘Is it?’
April looked at him. There was an expression of distaste on his face.
‘What do you mean? The poor girl was obviously loved if she was given such a lovely stone, wasn’t she?’
Before he could reply, they heard footsteps and puffing, and Judith charged around the corner, her face almost purple.
‘There you are!’ she cried. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you, I almost called the police out. You must never leave the tour! Never!’ April could tell she wanted to say more, but she had completely run out of breath.
‘I’m sorry,’ said April. ‘I was looking at an interesting head-stone and turned around and you’d all gone. Then I got a bit lost.’
‘In all my years I’ve never lost a guest, not ever,’ said Judith. ‘I’ve a very good mind to report this.’
‘My father just died,’ said April, stopping Judith in her tracks.
‘I, uh, well I ...’ she mumbled.
‘It’s been quite hard ...’ She tailed off and pretended to sob, brushing away an imaginary tear. She could see that Judith was completely thrown; she certainly didn’t want to get involved with an emotional teenager.
‘Oh, well. Perhaps we shouldn’t say too much more,’ she said. ‘I suppose we should just be glad you didn’t get completely lost.’
‘No, this man showed me the way back.’ April turned around to indicate her companion and found she was alone. ‘Oh. I met a man who showed me the way back, he was telling me about this grave, as a matter of fact.’
Judith looked even more perplexed. ‘The Sleeping Angel?’ she asked.
‘Yes, he was saying it’s the grave of a young girl named Francesca, very sad.’
Judith looked at her curiously. As if she had just realised she was dealing with a dangerous lunatic. ‘No, that can’t be true my dear. Now if you’d just like to step this way.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, no one knows who the Sleeping Angel was laid here for. There are records of who bought it, but not who is interred here. We speculate it may have been a child, but no one knows for sure. And Francesca? No, no. We have researched the cemetery exhaustively. There is no one of that name buried here.’
‘But he told me,’ said April, as Judith guided her back towards the gates. Her attitude was now more like someone steering a monkey towards a cage than a guest back to their tour. ‘He said he’d worked here for years. Tall man in overalls?’
Judith smiled indulgently. ‘I’m sure that’s what you think you saw, my dear, but let me assure you I have never seen anyone like that.’
‘He was in that little house ...’ She trailed off, knowing she had made a slip.
Judith tensed. ‘The gatehouse? No one has been in there. It’s been locked for decades, not even the police could get in when they were investigating that unpleasantness. You certainly shouldn’t have been over there.’
‘But he said—’
Judith was losing her patience. ‘Young lady, in the fifteen years I have been here, no one has worked when there’s a funeral,’ she snapped. They came down the steps into the courtyard. ‘Now, out of respect for the cemetery, I’m asking you to leave.’
‘I saw him, I did!’
‘Believe me,’ said Judith with mounting irritation, ‘no one who works at the cemetery fits that description.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Quite sure. There is no one else in this graveyard, and I will be locking the gates behind you.’
Chapter Twenty
The polystyrene cup had left a ring on the table. If she moved the edge of the cup very slightly, the cold tea would run around the bottom of it like a little river. By tilting it just the right way, she could make little bubbles.
‘April, don’t.’
She dipped her fingernail into the tea, watching the way the fluorescent lighting reflected on the milky surface.
‘April, will you stop doing that?’
She looked up and blinked, as if she was seeing the room for the first time. Not that there was much to see - the police interview room had bare off-green walls, one Formica-topped table and four chairs, that was it. Her mother was sitting next to her, shifting uncomfortably on her plastic chair. She had been irritable since they had arrived at the police station and that had been hours ago. She was swinging from listless to frantic and back again. April wanted to tell her mother to calm down; tutting and bristling wasn’t doing anyone any good.
‘It’s as if they think we’ve nothing better to do,’ said Silvia with irritation. ‘I’ve got to talk to the coroner again before the end of the day.’ She glanced at her watch for the second time in as many minutes and clicked her tongue. ‘It’s Friday afternoon, if we don’t get an answer now, we’re going to be sitting on our hands again all weekend.’
‘Calm down, Mum, fretting about it’s not going to help.’
‘But if I don’t fret about it, who will?’ said Silvia. ‘These people move at a snail’s pace - if we leave it to the bloody authorities they’ll spend weeks on the post-mortem, and then where will we be?’
April looked at her mother sadly. ‘Dad’s not going anywhere, is he?’
‘But how are we supposed to move on when we have this hanging over us?’ said Silvia, her eyes beginning to sparkle with tears. ‘We can’t even bury him, we can’t even say goodbye, I feel like we’re in total limbo.’
April put her hand on her mother’s. She knew what Silvia was going through, she knew she needed the funeral in order to let her grief out and that the delay caused by the post-mortem was driving them all mad, however necessary it was. At the moment, everything was bottled up inside her mother, all her pain and regret; it had nowhere to go. April could see the tension on her pale, lined face; despite spending most of the day in bed there were still heavy rings under her eyes. Not that April was exactly looking her best either. Since her off-piste visit to the cemetery two days ago, April had been plagued by bad dreams: faces at windows, sleeping angels that woke up suddenly and - the most disturbing, for some reason - an iron door with an upside-down keyhole which she couldn’t unlock. It hadn’t done wonders for her beauty regime; her hair had gone unwashed for the first time in years. There didn’t seem much point any more. It wasn’t like she had anywhere to be; she hadn’t been able to face school or anything else - in fact, she liked it better that way. The difference between April and her mother was that April was in no hurry to bury her father. Right up until the vicar threw that first handful of dirt onto his coffin, she could pretend to herself that he wasn’t gone, that he might be waiting for her when she got home, sitting at the breakfast bar, his nose stuck in a book. She didn’t want to move on, she didn’t want to face life without her dad. Yes, she knew he was dead. But to her, he wasn’t gone. Not yet.
‘Sorry to keep you waiting, ladies.’ The door to the spartan interview room opened and Detective Inspector Ian Reece came in, balancing two fresh cups of tea in one hand. He was followed by his sidekick, Detective Sergeant Amy Carling, wearing the same badly fitting dark green suit she’d worn that day they’d interviewed her at school about Isabelle’s murder.
‘Tea for you both, thought you could do with it.’ He spilled packets of sugar and plastic stirrers onto the table and pulled out a chair opposite them.‘Sorry for the delay, but you’ll understand that in our line of work, when something important comes up, we have to see to it right away.’
‘What I understand, Inspector,’ said April’s mother icily, ‘is that we arranged to come in to assist your inquiries into my husband’s murder. I had thought you would deem that “important”.’
The detective was in his mid-fifties, stocky, with short salt and pepper hair. And shrewd eyes which April guessed had seen most things there were to see.
‘Yes, you’re quite right, Mrs Dunne,’ he said kindly. ‘I do apologise and we’ll try to make this as quick as possible - I’m sure you have other things to be doing and we do appreciate your assistance at this difficult time.’
Silvia looked as if she was about to say something more, but April raised her eyebrows at her meaningfully and she just nodded instead.
‘Fine, well, let’s start, shall we?’ The female officer set up a tape recorder and opened a large notebook.
‘Now, obviously we’ve spoken to both of you before about William’s death, but I wanted to get April in for a more formal chat to see if there’s anything we’ve missed. I understand that going over this all again will be difficult for you, April,’ said Reece gently, ‘but can you tell me in your own words what happened that day? Tell us everything you can remember, and don’t worry if it seems trivial or silly. We need to know as much as possible so we can find whoever hurt your dad, okay?’
April had been dreading this moment. She glanced at her mother who smiled reassuringly, but it wasn’t reliving the day that was worrying April: she hadn’t told Silvia about the fight with her dad yet. Her mother had left the house unusually early that morning to visit Grandpa Thomas, so she had missed the shouting match and April would have preferred that her mother never knew. It hadn’t escaped April’s notice, either, that she had no way to prove where she had been for that whole morning on a day when the police were going to find any change to her routine suspect. But that hardly mattered when, above all, April wanted to avoid recounting that horrible argument with her dad, to avoid explaining what it was about, making her look like a bitch and her father like a lunatic; she certainly didn’t want that being the last thing anyone remembered about him. But April knew she was trapped - they were bound to have spoken to the school - so, haltingly, she began.
‘I left the house at the usual time, I suppose,’ she said, looking hard at the teacup, ‘but then I walked down to Highgate Ponds. I didn’t get to school until gone eleven, and when I got there I went to the library.’