The Waking That Kills (2 page)

It was a Daimler hearse. My father had bought it from a local undertaker when I was seven, and for more than twenty years he’d used it as his everyday transport, as his workshop and even as a place to sleep when he was away from home. My mother had hated it, but he’d insisted it was both useful and distinctive, appropriate for his line of business. Now it loomed out of the garage, as though it had been swelling and bloating in the darkness, pressing against the walls and the door to get out. I eyed it with a curious mixture of dislike and irresistible nostalgia. It was ridiculous, the embodiment of my father’s pig-headedness, and yet it was a real, tangible piece of my childhood and adolescence.

Sure enough, when I slipped onto the worn leather of the driver’s seat, turned the ignition key, waited for a moment and pressed the starter button, the engine stirred into a lazy, rumbling rhythm. It ticked over almost silently when I took my foot off the throttle. I eased the car out of the garage and into the alley, left it running while I went around and opened the back door. The smell hit me straightaway, and I blinked into the gloom of the space that my father had converted for all his tools and materials, a place to rest and read, even a little stove on which he’d made soup and brewed tea in a hundred cemeteries from one coast of England to another. It was the smell of my father, of my youth, of well-oiled tools, well-worn raincoats, work-gloves and work-boots and pipe tobacco: the smell of all the days and nights he’d spent in and around the hearse and the times I’d spent with him. His tools were there, a mahogany chest of hammers and chisels and brushes, the rags and oils he’d used to maintain them, and a cardboard box full of old newspapers. He’d installed a couch for himself, now with its rugs and pillows neatly folded. There were books and maps, and the floor was covered with a green carpet.

I slung my bag inside, the only luggage I’d brought across the world with me. A few minutes later, the hearse was rolling through the town centre.

A dull, squally Sunday afternoon. Grimsby, on the north-east coast of England. Along the prom to Cleethorpes, grimmer than Grimsby.

A gust of wind from the estuary slapped into the side of the hearse. It creaked and swayed, and a spatter of spray fell on the windscreen. People turned to look as I drove by. An elderly couple, arm in arm for a bracing walk, swivelled their heads and stared, a look of sullen resentment in their eyes. A group of youths simply guffawed, a horrid braying noise. A very fat, middle-aged man, drinking beer on his own in a seaside shelter, pulled himself to his feet and stood, head bowed, in mock respect. And when I stopped at the traffic-lights at the end of the promenade, two small boys who’d been kicking a football on a patch of waste ground ran up and pressed their faces to the back window, curious to see if there was a coffin inside. When I accelerated away, they left smeary fingerprints and a mist of hot breath on the glass.

Lawrence Lundy. The name was lodged in my head too. I’d arranged to meet him the following day. I had a night to kill.

I manoeuvred the car back into town, and with some difficulty reversed it into the garage. Six o’clock, that dreadful, deadly hour on a Sunday evening. When a church bell started to ring, and the gulls screamed around the rooftops more defiantly than ever, I slipped into a pub and tucked myself into the darkest, deepest corner I could find.

The beer was flat and warm. The place filled up with people determined to ward off the looming approach of another Monday. Suddenly very tired, after an eighteen-hour flight and then six hours on the train from London to Grimsby, I stayed where I was, now and then struggling to the bar and into my corner again, and I let the beer salve the itch of being back in England. When I emerged at eleven o’clock, the chilly air hit me, I swayed unsteadily and looked around to find my bearings, and I realised I hadn’t found anywhere to stay the night. I’d left my bag in the hearse.

It was raining. I had the uncomfortable feeling that someone was following me as I turned into the alleyway and crossed to the lock-up garage. I fumbled with the lock and snicked it open. When I pulled the door up and over and the enormous chromium grille of the hearse gleamed in the darkness, I saw the shadowy movements of three or four figures hurrying down the alleyway towards me. I ducked into the garage. Swinging the door shut behind me, I managed, in a slit of light from the wet cobbles outside, to ram the bolts into place. Just in time. There was a cannonade of fists and boots, hammering on the door, rattling it on its hinges.

I backed away, into the dark depths of the garage. My pursuers couldn’t get in, although they bellowed and hammered for a few minutes. At last they gave up, urinating long and noisily onto the door before they moved away and the alleyway outside fell quiet.

A soft green light came on, when I opened the back of the hearse. I climbed inside. It was warm, and the familiar smells were a comfort to me. I sat on the couch, meaning to wait and listen for a while until it was safe to go out and try to find a side-street bed-and-breakfast. But when the silence grew around me and every bone in my body ached with tiredness, I kicked off my shoes and lay down, pulling my father’s blankets over me.

Twenty-four hours. From one side of the planet to the other, from one world to another. From the balcony of my spacious, sun-filled house in Sarawak, to a couch in the back of a hearse, in a lock-up garage in Grimsby...

The weight of sleep folded around me. My eyes closed and my head pressed deeper onto my father’s pillow. His face came to me. He was struggling to speak, gagging and grimacing, mouthing a name whose meaning he was powerless to explain.

Chapter Two

I
ARRIVED AT
Chalke House at noon the following day. It took two hours to drive there. The countryside changed and softened as I drove inland from Grimsby, away from the bleakness of the coast, across the plains of Lincolnshire and into the wolds.

I’d decided to use the hearse after all. After a night of untroubled sleep, I’d stepped outside, into the cool sunshine of a May Monday morning. Over a bacon sandwich and a mug of tea in a cafe next to the bus station, I considered the advantages of taking the ridiculous machine, as my transport and as a base in case things didn’t work out with the job: the hearse was working, it was comfortable, it would save the expense of hiring a car or the inconvenience of public transport.

I regretted my decision every mile of the way. People stared, from one border of Lincolnshire to the other. Everybody, every single person who happened to see the hearse go by, took a lingering second or third look. It was a relic of all the graveyards it had sat in: blistered by the seasons it had endured, weathered and worn down, not so much a car as a tomb on wheels. It had carried hundreds of coffins, but now it seemed, when I glimpsed its reflection in the window of a shop or a car showroom, as though the hearse itself was doomed to its final resting-place. Hollow, vacant, it was ready to be rolled into a barn and colonised by chickens, or crushed in a breaker’s yard.

I came closer to Chalke House, in the wolds. The lane narrowed and twisted, dipping deep into a wooded valley. At last I saw the sign at the foot of an overgrown drive. I had an impulse to roll the car into the shade of the trees and conceal it. How? More and more eccentric, all but impossible, to hide such an enormous, incongruous thing in the dappled sunlight of a Lincolnshire woodland... I turned into the drive and drove very slowly, crunching over gravel. The car wallowed through long grass. Thistles swished along its flanks and belly.

There was a tremendous crash on the windscreen.

The glass imploded. I felt a spatter of splinters onto my face, as something big and very heavy thumped into the soft leather of the passenger seat.

I jammed my foot on the brake. Swiping at my forehead, sensing a smear of blood on the palm of my hand, I opened the driver’s door and tumbled out.

I’d stopped in the shade of a Scots pine. There was a cry from overhead. The sunlight dazzled through the branches, and as I squinted upwards a figure dangled into view. Like an elf descending on a cobweb in a children’s pantomime, a woman slipped silently to the ground and stood there, blinking, staring at me and the car, brushing the hair from her eyes.

Neither of us spoke. When she stepped forward and the look in her eyes suggested that she’d guessed who I might be, she reached to my face and touched my forehead with one fingertip. Her touch was very cool. She withdrew her finger, with a tiny drop of my blood on it.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, a bit out of breath. ‘How awful. I think it’s just a scratch, but I’m so sorry. Are you Mr Beal? Christopher Beal? I’m Juliet Lundy, Lawrence’s mother...’

She wiped my blood onto her shirt, brushed again at the hair which fell over her forehead. Without realising it, she left a smudge of bark and proceeded to smudge and smudge the rest of her face by running her hands around her nose and mouth – as distractedly and naturally as a kitten cleaning itself. She was tiny, in a man’s shirt and a pair of faded blue jeans, with a pointy, questing, twitchy face and a shock of foxy-russet hair. Now that her skin was smeared with the dust of the Scots pine, she had the look of a whiskery wild animal, a squirrel or a marten which had skittered to the ground from high in the branches.

‘Your car,’ she said, and she bent inside it to pick up the thing she’d dropped out of the tree. It was a claw-hammer. She hefted it from hand to hand, and her face twitched and puckered as she looked at the broken windscreen. ‘I was up in the tree, trying to fix Lawrence’s tree-house. Your car kind of startled me, the hammer fell out of my hand...’

‘Your hammer kind of startled me too,’ I said. ‘Yes, I’m Christopher Beal. Don’t worry about the car right now. Can I leave it here?’

For a moment, a queer shadow seemed to pass across her. She shivered and glanced up into the tree from where she’d appeared. She craned her neck, shaded her eyes with her hand and peered up and up to the very highest branches – back down to the car, then back up again, as though, for some reason, she was measuring the distance and angle between the two points – perhaps the trajectory of the claw-hammer. At last she said, with another shudder of her narrow shoulders, ‘Yes, leave it here. A good place. Come along to the house, and we’ll get you cleaned up...’

I followed her through the garden... or rather, a piece of woodland through which the ghostly outline of a long-ago garden was just discernible. Beech trees, their scarred grey trunks towering into the foliage of early summer. A pond the size of a tennis court, a mirror of peaty, unfathomable water. A derelict greenhouse, built against an overgrown chalk cliff, from which an ancient vine forced its tendrils through broken panes, crumbling and lifting the brickwork with its roots. Everywhere, a dense cover of bramble and nettle and cow-parsley.

Once or twice the woman glanced over her shoulder to see that I was following her. I heard her saying indistinctly that she was glad I’d come, that she’d been worried I might not come, that I might have changed my mind about coming... I was going to say I’d never thought of not coming, that I had nowhere else to go in the whole of England, no friends or relatives and only the prospect of staying in a bed-and-breakfast in Grimsby or sleeping in the back of an old hearse... but I nodded back at her and, ducking through the low branches of ash and silver birch, followed her slim, quick figure through the glade.

She was thirty-something, five or eight years older than me: a pixie-woman who’d dropped out of a tall, dark tree, all scuffed and smudged by twigs and moss and lichen. When we broke out of the shade and into the light of a lawn, when she turned to me again and said, gesturing with a sweep of her arm, ‘Let’s go in and I’ll get us a drink...’ a flicker of cloud ran the length of the building in front of me, so that it seemed to shudder as the shadow passed over it. Chalke House: an old hunting-lodge, chalky white and gently rounded like a slab of boulder which had tumbled from the ridge of the wolds and come to rest in the deep, wooded valley. I had time, before we stepped from the lawn and through the wide-open French windows, to look up at the house and see its curiously angled roofs, an eccentric parapet and a kind of tower with crumbling battlements. The shadow of the cloud crawled up and up the tower like a live thing and moved higher and higher across the woodland behind the house. For a second, there was a movement in the window of the tower, the flash of a white face pressed to the glass... and then I was inside, blinded by the darkness of a big, dusty living-room.

The curtains were drawn. In the gloom, she was a fragile, fey figure. She had the advantage, as I dropped my bag and tried to make out the shape and dimensions of the space around me, to press an ice-cold glass into my hand and then sit me down on a soft shabby sofa. One taste of the drink – a gin and tonic – and she was perched so close to me that our knees were almost touching... and she was opening the envelope I’d handed her, my CV and a couple of references, murmuring, ‘Borneo? How extraordinary...’ and then she was reading aloud, line after line, glancing at me from time to time to see if the impressive, glowing words matched the reality of the person who’d just arrived at her house...