Authors: Rebecca Tope
Drew waited for the little storm to pass. It wasn’t long in doing so. ‘You’ve got it nice here,’ the man continued. ‘Gwen’s lucky.’ Then he remembered. ‘But they put her here before, didn’t they? The bastards who killed her. Jumped the gun, according to the papers, and buried her before the place was hardly open. And now you’ve put her back again.’ He shook his head painfully, and rubbed a hand down one side of his neck, under the ear. ‘Ouch,’ he groaned. ‘Must’ve slept awkwardly last night. Damned sore.’
‘Do you know Genevieve?’ Drew asked suddenly, having been careful not to deny or confirm the man’s analysis of Gwen’s fate. Trevor looked at him, frowning. ‘Genevieve Slater,’ Drew repeated more loudly.
‘You mean the bitch daughter? Never met the bloody cow and hope I never do.’ He fixed his
eyes on Drew’s, his look hard and bitter. ‘She broke Gwen’s heart.’
Drew couldn’t bring himself to pursue this line of enquiry. ‘Your letter,’ he said hastily. ‘The one in Gwen’s things.’ Trevor watched his face intently, in the effort to catch his meaning. ‘You said a man had been bothering her. You said you’d “settle his hash”, if I remember right.’
Trevor sucked his upper lip, thinking hard. ‘That’s
right
,’ he said slowly. ‘The Gliddon chap – Sarah’s husband. Some nonsense about suing her for dereliction of duty. He started on about it even before the body was back in the UK. Bereavement takes some people like that, of course.’
Drew raised his eyebrows. ‘You know,’ Trevor persisted. ‘Anger – it’s a natural response to pain or grief. Quite irrational, of course. Nobody could blame Gwen for what happened to Sarah.’
Karen’s mood seemed to alternate between anger and a flat depression that Drew had never seen before. On the whole, he preferred her angry. ‘You’ve been back for over an hour, and never even bothered to pop in to see how I was,’ she accused, the moment he stepped through the door. ‘I saw the van, and assumed you’d come here first, before the office. Stephanie’s been grizzling for most of the afternoon, and my back’s worse, if anything. Thanks for asking.’
She was lying stretched out on the sofa, with Stephanie in the crook of her arm, fast asleep. The sense of being doused in cold water combined with the increasingly familiar blanket of guilt,
paralysed him in the doorway. He couldn’t deny the truth – he had forgotten all about her. The relief of an afternoon without his daughter, not to mention the dazzling success he’d made at the funeral, had outweighed any worries he’d had over Karen’s strained back.
‘It didn’t occur to me,’ he told her truthfully. ‘When I got into the office there was a man visiting the new grave. I could hardly risk missing the chance to talk to him.’
‘The new grave?’ In spite of herself, she showed interest. ‘It wasn’t the murderer was it? Revisiting the scene of the crime?’
‘Who knows?’ Drew knew better than to rush things. ‘He certainly seems to have known her pretty well. Knows the daughter, too – or
of
her, at least.’ He was treading carefully now.
Karen leant her head back. ‘You know this business isn’t going to do us any good publicity-wise, in the long run. People are going to associate the field with something unsavoury, if they remember the story at all.’
‘Believe me, I wish it hadn’t happened as much as you do. I’m going to give it another week or so, follow up one or two ideas, and if they don’t lead anywhere, I’ll tell Genevieve I can’t do what she wants. I don’t think she’ll be very surprised.’
‘She won’t ask for her money back, will she?’
‘Not if I can convince her I’ve done everything
possible. When her baby arrives, she’ll be too busy to worry about it any more. At least she’s got a grave to visit. And if she does decide to talk to the police, she can probably establish her mother’s identity from the samples they’ve taken. It only needs her to provide a hair or bits of old skin or clothing or bedding.’
Karen wrinkled her nose. ‘And wouldn’t that land you in real trouble with the police?’
He put up both hands, palms outwards. ‘Let’s hope not. Now – change the subject. Ask me about the funeral this afternoon.’
She was contrite then, her own forgetfulness as culpable as his had been. And although his excitement and self-satisfaction had mostly evaporated, he gave her a full account of his first outing as an officiant, including the approving words from Marjorie Hankey.
Drew expected Wednesday morning to drag, but the reality turned out very differently. Karen insisted she was well enough for work and drove off determinedly, leaving Drew and Stephanie frowning at each other over a stack of unwashed dishes and toast crusts.
Before he could even open the dishwasher, Maggs let herself in through the back door, eyes wide with excitement.
‘Have you seen what’s happened?’ she demanded.
Drew stared stupidly at her. ‘What are you talking about? And didn’t we agree you wouldn’t use this door? Karen wants the office and house kept separate—’
Maggs shook her head impatiently, and pointed out of the still-open back door. ‘Look!’ she ordered.
A crude wooden cross was visible, halfway up the field, decorated outlandishly with a variety of apparently slaughtered animals. It stood perhaps five feet high, rammed into the ground where the grass had been left uncut, some distance from any graves. As if magnetised, Drew went outside for a closer inspection.
A dead hare hung from one arm of the crosspiece, and a crow from the other. The top of the vertical was crowned by a roughly woven wreath, and below it dangled a badly damaged rabbit, tied to the stake with a tight cord. All the bodies seemed to be seriously mangled and at least one was unpleasantly smelly.
Maggs followed close behind. ‘Yuk!’ she said. ‘It’s much worse when you get near it. Do you think it’s more black magic? Didn’t you hear anything in the night?’
He shook his head, trying to remain rational. ‘Not very clever magic,’ he said critically. ‘I thought they usually put their crosses upside down.’
Maggs tutted. ‘It’s
serious
, Drew. What if somebody sees it from the road? We’ll never live it down. How could they do it, with you just there in the house?’
‘We sleep at the front of the house,’ he said. ‘And it wouldn’t necessarily make any noise pushing a stake into the ground.’
‘They must have come in a car,’ she pointed out. ‘Unless it’s the neighbours.’ The neighbours were a very ordinary family, twenty-five yards away. Beyond them, the village centre started, comprising four dwellings, a church and a straggling farm. Drew shook his head.
‘Not the neighbours,’ he said with certainty.
‘What’re you going to do?’ she asked.
For reply, he gripped the lower part of the offending object and yanked it upwards. It came out of the ground easily, and he found himself holding it upright as if in some bizarre religious procession. He threw it hastily to the ground, and left it there. ‘I’ve got to get back to Stephanie,’ he said. ‘Let me think about this. There has to be some reason behind it. Some kind of message.’
‘Will you tell the police?’ He was already striding back to the house, and she was trotting to keep up with him. He gave no answer to that question for some minutes.
‘If I report it, it’ll get into the papers,’ he said finally. ‘And the police can get themselves in a
bit of a twist about this sort of thing. They link it up with all kinds of nonsense, and the whole thing can get blown out of proportion. At worst, it’s someone who thinks there’s some special significance to a burial ground, which makes it a good place for some highly unpleasant practices. But I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s a sort of protest from some religious nutter. It’s probably the same people who left that sack under the brambles, and sent those letters. They were probably going to hang up the pheasant and the fox’s head as well as this lot.’
Maggs was not mollified. ‘Horrible,’ she shuddered.
‘They haven’t disturbed the graves or done any damage,’ he pointed out. ‘It could have been a lot worse.’
‘And it might be yet if you don’t stop them,’ she warned.
‘They’ll stop,’ he said with confidence, ‘if we don’t give them any sort of satisfaction. Ignoring it is by far the best strategy.’
‘Well, I think it’s scary. Where did they get those poor animals from?’
‘Roadkill, I expect,’ he said, thinking about the flattened crow and mangled rabbit. ‘Though I admit it’s unusual to see a hare killed by a car.’
‘I saw one last week,’ she remembered. ‘The day of the burial. It looked as if it’d just been
hit. It might be the same one. It was on the dual-carriage, a mile this side of town.’
‘They must have picked it up that same day – otherwise magpies and things would have cleaned it up in a few hours.’
‘They must be mad,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you scared?’
‘Not a bit,’ he said bravely. ‘But I’ll tell you what – we can fix up some security lights and fit a lock on the road gate. We should have done that before, I suppose.’ Busy with Stephanie and all her equipment, he sent Maggs ahead to open up the office. At least they’d have something to do that morning – phoning for prices and options on security systems.
But the prospect was a depressing one. He had wanted his cemetery to be open, available to visitors at any time, a place of peace and sanctuary. Intrusion and desecration hadn’t entered his head as a potential hazard. Security lights would pollute the natural peace of the field, masking the night sky and implying a defensiveness he did not want to feel.
Puzzlement over the source of the sinister crucifix, combined with gloom over the compromises he was being forced to make, made for a restless morning. The only relief came from an intriguing piece of news gleaned from another phonecall from Fiona at the Borough Council
Offices. She called to say she had confirmed her decision to refer all the Council funerals to him, apart from those which specifically requested cremation. This was a coup for Peaceful Repose, and would seriously upset Daphne Plant.
‘At least, it was never really a formal contract with Plant’s,’ Fiona told him. ‘Just custom – or habit. We haven’t made any real commitment to use them.’ Drew knew already that it was deemed advisable to use an undertaker based outside the town where most of the deaths took place. A ‘contract’ funeral was done cheaply, at unpopular times of day, and the complex sensitivities of the business meant that local undertakers preferred not to be seen performing them too close to their own sphere of operation. Hence Plant’s, from Bradbourne, five miles outside the city where Fiona worked, had been ideal. Drew was acceptable for similar reasons. ‘As long as you’re sure it won’t reflect badly on your own business?’ Fiona added.
He paused for a moment. He would be burying homeless addicts, tramps, solitary hermits with no locatable families. Bodies found under hedges, dead of exposure and neglect. The detritus of society, unclaimed and unfunded when it came to the disposal of their mortal remains. ‘No, I’m not worried about that,’ he told her. ‘It’ll be a privilege.’
‘I’m going to enjoy working with you, Drew.’ She laughed as if she’d just thought of a good joke. ‘Incidentally – there’s another reason I phoned you – you know that woman you buried for us last Friday? Well, someone’s sent us five hundred pounds to pay for the funeral. Anonymously. A wad of twenty-pound notes in a plain brown envelope, delivered by hand. It says
For funeral costs re: unidentified body at Peaceful Repose Cemetery
. Plain enough.’
‘But that’s—’
‘More than your account comes to. I know. Embarrassing, isn’t it. But you’ll have to take it. Get a few trees or something with the change.’
‘Have you told the police?’
‘No – that never occurred to me.’ He could hear her tapping a pencil against the desk. ‘I suppose I ought to, now you mention it. She
was
murdered, after all. Or so we’re assuming.’
‘She didn’t bury herself, as Maggs keeps reminding me. A crime was committed – we can’t get away from it. Who on earth would send a large sum of money like that?’ He wasn’t asking Fiona, but himself. And only one answer came back.
Genevieve Slater
. The bitch daughter with a guilty conscience and some crazy mixed-up ideas about making amends. Surely, it had to be Genevieve. Trevor Goldsworthy looked as if he
couldn’t spare even one twenty-pound note, let alone twenty-five, and he couldn’t see any reason why Dr Malcolm Jarvis should start throwing money about.
Stephanie spent most of the day in her usual corner of the office. The moment Karen came to collect her, Drew was pulling on his coat, and unhooking the keys to the van from their place by the door.
There was no sign of anyone else in the house apart from Genevieve. She let Drew in before he could ring the doorbell. He’d forgotten how tall she was, how straight-backed and regal. She smiled widely, meeting his eyes in a long gaze, but he was not so carried away that he missed the lines of strain around her mouth.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
‘Oh, yes. As well as can be expected. I’ve got the bugger of a backache, that’s all. Had it all day, and can’t get comfortable. You’ll have to take my mind off it.’
She led him into the living room, and eased herself down into a corner of the sofa. The bulge of her pregnancy seemed like a separate entity, perversely clinging to her, spoiling her shape. She let her legs flop open, ungainly and untidy, so the unborn child appeared to sink into the space between.
‘Did you want a cup of tea?’ she asked with a little frown.
He could see that she had no intention of getting up again. ‘I’ll go and make some for both of us,’ he said. ‘I expect I’ll be able to find everything.’
‘Give me a shout if you can’t,’ she told him, her words broken off with a little moan. ‘Christ, this is getting beyond a joke. I won’t sleep a wink tonight if it doesn’t ease up.’
Drew hovered in front of her, trying to remember what he and Karen had done to alleviate late pregnancy aches and pains. All that occurred to him was that she’d slept on a bizarre arrangement of pillows, which allowed her to lie face down, as she preferred. He couldn’t recall any actual back pain.
‘When exactly are you due?’ he asked.
She shook her head irritably. ‘Oh, I don’t know. We keep changing our minds about precise dates. It’s this month sometime, I think.’
‘What did the scan say?’
‘I never had a scan.’
He wasn’t surprised. ‘Well – the midwife usually has a pretty good idea, from the way the uterus grows. I never quite mastered all the details, but I seem to remember a whole lot of dating tricks.’
She looked at him in bewilderment. ‘Are you
telling me you were a
midwife?
I thought you were a nurse.’
He laughed. ‘That’s right – only a nurse. But we all had to do a few weeks in Maternity. I’ve forgotten most of it now. When Stephanie was born, it all went out of my head. Seeing my own baby being born wasn’t anything like the textbooks, or any of the deliveries I watched.’
‘Oh well,’ she tried to smile. ‘Never mind all that now. Make some tea and we’ll get down to business.’
In the kitchen, Drew wrestled with something odd in her manner. Was it normal for a woman within days of delivery to dismiss all discussion of the subject? Although understandably nervous, especially if this was her first, it struck him as peculiar that she should be so evasive. Maybe she just didn’t think it was relevant to the business between them. And she was probably right about that.
She took the mug of tea from him with a trembling hand. He sat at the other end of the sofa, twisting to face her. ‘So – how do I earn all this money you’re giving me?’ he said. It crossed his mind to ask her directly about the five hundred pounds handed in to the Council offices, but it seemed somehow rude. Insensitive – like asking how much a present had cost. She probably hadn’t expected Fiona to mention it.