by Mia James
She looked around her, the bustle and purpose of the doctors and nurses somehow rendered ridiculous by the broken patients around them, shuffling along in their backless gowns, pushing walking frames or trailing drips, not a trace of joy or hope in their faces.
‘What is this place?’ whispered April. Is this hell? The policewoman came and ushered them into a private waiting room and sat them down on wipe-clean plastic chairs.
‘I should be crying,’ she said flatly.
‘You are, honey,’ said Caro. April touched her face and found it was true. Tears were quietly rolling down her cheeks, wetting her collar.
‘He tried to tell me something, before he ... before ...’
Caro nodded and pulled her tight. ‘We know. We know, honey.’
‘What did he say?’ asked the policewoman.
April glanced at her; she was young, perhaps only a few years older than her and Caro, quite pretty in a scrubbed, pink-cheeked way, but there was a look in her eyes when she asked her question that put April, even in her numb state, on her guard. She was ambitious, eager to uncover some vital piece of evidence. April couldn’t blame her for that, but even through her fug she knew she needed to think, needed to work things out before she said anything else to anyone. She wanted to get it all straight in her own mind first. April felt a sob welling up in her throat.
‘That he loved me,’ she said, her voice cracking.
‘Of course he did,’ said Caro, hugging her tighter. ‘Of course he did.’
But April knew there had been something else in her father’s last words. Something vital he was trying to communicate in the serious look on his face when he had spoken to her: ‘There’s something I need to tell you ... your mum ...’ And had there been another half-word he was struggling to get out?
She shook her head. Her father’s last words. April felt a horrible sickness spreading from the pit of her stomach as she remembered her last words to him that morning: ‘I’ll never forgive you!’, ‘I hate you!’, her spiteful, selfish words. Words designed to hurt him, words she had meant, really truly meant. She had screamed that she hated him. Yes, she had said she loved him in those last terrible moments on the floor of the study, but she knew those horrible, childish, petulant words were the ones that would haunt her for ever.
‘Oh, God. Forgive me,’ she whispered, feeling as if someone was twisting a knife in her heart. ‘Please, Daddy, forgive me.’
The waiting room door burst open and her mother flew in, her arms wide, her face creased with concern.
‘Darling, darling!’ she cried, scooping April up, squeezing her tight, her arms wrapped hard around her. And then the tears came for real and April finally gave in to it, crying so hard she choked, unable to breathe, her body sick with the pain, her face contorted, feeling as if she could never stand it, as if she must die too. Why him? Why, God, why? Can’t you turn back time? I want my daddy back. And through it all, she clung to her mother like a rock in a storm, and Silvia cradled her like a baby, whispering soothing words, kissing and stroking the tears away, crying with her. Then, when April finally surfaced from her grief, completely wrung out, head pounding from crying so hard, Caro and the policewoman were gone. She wiped her eyes and looked up into her mother’s face.
‘Who would do that to him, Mum?’ she asked. ‘Who could hate him so much?’
‘I don’t know,’ said her mother forcefully, ‘but we’ll find them and we’ll make them pay. Believe me, they will pay.’
Her eyes were glittering and fierce and there was a look of determination on her face April hadn’t seen before.
‘Do you think it was something he was working on? Like an investigation?’
Silvia shook her head. ‘I really don’t know, but whoever it was, they will wish they had never touched that sweet man ...’
That was too much for April; she began choking on her tears again, to think of her kind, gentle father lying somewhere nearby, lifeless and cold. It was ridiculous, absurd and so very, very unfair. Silvia held her again, whispering soft, comforting words that could never help.
‘Has he really gone?’ asked April, finally looking up.
Her mother nodded slowly. ‘It’s just us now,’ she whispered, stroking the hair from April’s damp face. ‘We’ve got to be strong for him. He would have wanted us to be strong.’
April shook her head. ‘I’m not strong. I just want to lie down and die.’
‘No,’ said Silvia, lifting April’s chin and searching her eyes. ‘Never say that. You are so, so precious, my darling.’
She said it with such intensity, such passion, that April looked at her mother again. Her face was lined with pain, her eyes still bright with tears, and suddenly April felt ashamed. She had been so absorbed in her own agony that her mother’s hadn’t even occurred to her. Silvia had loved William Dunne long before April was even a twinkle in her father’s eye. She had lost her husband, her one true love, and she must be torn up inside. April hugged her mother fiercely.
‘You’re right, Mum,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to look after each other now.’
But in her heart, April Dunne had never felt more alone.
PART TWO
Chapter Nineteen
It was a beautiful morning in Swain’s Lane, for other people at least. April sat on the wall opposite the cemetery gates, watching the little spots of sunshine pushing through the trees swing and sway back and forth across the pavement, wishing she could enjoy the unusually good weather. Wishing she could enjoy anything. The wall was still cold under her legs and April knew she would be stiff when she got up. These days, though, she couldn’t bring herself to care too much about such things. She supposed it was Wednesday, which meant it had only been a week since she had found her father on the floor of his study, but since then, time had lost its meaning. Sometimes a minute would drag horribly, threatening to leave her stranded in the grip of a twisting, grating pain, but then sometimes she would look up and realise that an hour had passed and that the bath had gone stone cold.
An elderly couple walked out of the park and across the road, shuffling to the closed gates. They peered at the sign and the woman checked her watch. Seeming satisfied, the old lady produced a fold-out chair and sat down to wait.
April was fairly sure she shouldn’t have come here. It was basic first aid: before you can expect a wound to heal, you have to stop poking it. Stay well away from the area where your father was killed - no - the place where her father was murdered. The police had been pretty definite about that, so definite, in fact, that they had organised a press conference and read out a statement announcing that ‘Journalist and acclaimed author William Dunne had been attacked and murdered in his home’. They had described it as a ‘shocking incident’, which had angered April. ‘Shocking’ was something you said about the weather or a football result; it seemed a wholly inadequate word to describe the full horror of what had happened to her father. They had also called for calm and reassured the public that they were ‘doing their utmost’ to catch the killer. Their ‘utmost’ seemed to be knocking on a few doors in Pond Square and asking the Dunnes’ neighbours if they had seen anything. The answer, it seemed, was no. Consequently April had been ringing Detective Inspector Reece - the detective in charge of the case, the same one who had interviewed her in Mr Sheldon’s ofhce - bombarding him with questions, asking for updates on the investigation, but while he had been sympathetic and polite, he had told her nothing. ‘Trust me, April,’ he had said, ‘we will get whoever did this.’ But that was the problem: she didn’t trust them. She didn’t trust anyone any more. Her father had been killed in his own home - her own home - and no one seemed to know why. Was it because of something he was investigating, was it a burglary gone wrong, had he known the killer? April felt vulnerable and hunted, as if she was being constantly watched; which, in many ways, she was. The police were posted outside the house to discourage the ghoulish public and the unscrupulous press who had been camping out in the square all we
ek. The papers, predictably, had gone to town on the story: three violent murders in one week, all less than a mile apart, was juicy news. Her father’s paper, the Ham & High, had run eight pages on it, almost all speculation and supposition; they clearly had no better idea what William Dunne had been investigating than April or the police did. Unsurprisingly, the police had asked April and her mother to go into hiding. Not officially of course - the Metropolitan Police would never be so dramatic as to whisk them off to a safe house - but they had strongly suggested that ‘for the girl’s sake’ it would be better if they left Highgate Village. So April and her mother had moved in with Thomas; it wasn’t as if they had much choice. Her grandfather had been glad to have them, and April had been pleasantly surprised by how sensitive he had been, giving them space and defending them from press, police and well-wishers alike. He had even been kind about her father - prompting another storm of tears. Even so, the gothic splendour of the Hamilton mansion with its dark corners and narrow windows was not exactly helping April’s mood. What she really wanted was to go back to Edinburgh and see Fiona and all her friends, surround herself with familiar things and memories of happy times. But she couldn’t leave, not now. The police were keen to talk to her again, and appeared to be working on some theory that her father’s death was linked to the Isabelle Davis and Alix Graves murders. More importantly, April was worried about her mother. Silvia had held herself together just long enough to check that April was okay, then she fell apart. She had spent most of the last week in bed, refusing to eat, her skin grey, her hair unwashed. But worse, she was refusing to talk about it. Whenever April went into her mother’s dimly lit room, it was as if she was waiting for William to pop in to wake her up. It was as if she could wish it all away. So April had been forced to deal with it alone, sitting in the courtyard garden or wandering through Covent Garden Market, looking in the windows at the gaudy pre-Christmas displays, trying to distract her whirling mind with shoes and trinkets, just letting her feet take her where they wanted; anywhere so long as it was away from her grandfather’s gloomy house. Which is why she had found herself on the Tube, heading back almost by instinct to the one place that reminded her of her father: Highgate.
By now there were about a dozen people standing by the gates, clustering together in little groups of two or three. Apart from one young touristy couple in high-tech walking gear, they were all elderly and dressed in a combination of tweeds and M&S basics. Why do they come here? wondered April. Is it because they’re so close to the grave themselves? Of course, April could have asked herself the same thing and, if she was honest, she didn’t have a good answer either. Just then a portly, middle-aged lady in a floaty print dress opened the gate and beckoned everyone inside. April wavered for a moment: Is this really a good idea? she wondered. Am Ijust making things worse for myself? But once again, April found her feet making the decision for her, placing themselves in front of each other until she was through the gate.
‘Please pay the young man to your left,’ cried the woman with that unmistakable I’ve-been-teaching-in-an-all-girls-school-for-forty-years-so-don’ t-mess-with-me tone. Great, thought April as she joined the queue without really knowing why, it’s a tour with Enid Blyton. They were all shooed across a wide courtyard to a row of benches next to a war memorial where the schoolmarm introduced herself as ‘Judith’, although April could tell it killed her to use such an informal name. Judith greeted each of the tour party individually, asking where they were from.
‘Um, Edinburgh,’ said April haltingly, suddenly very conscious of the police warning her to stay away from the area.
‘Scotland indeed?’ said Judith, peering at her over the top of her gold-rimmed spectacles with disapproval then quickly moving on to probe the rest of her customers, clearly hoping for more civilised visitors. There was a trio from Esher and a couple from Norfolk; the blue-rinsed lady with the fold-out seat and her husband were from ‘a small village in Cheshire’; and the super-hikers turned out to be tourists from the Ukraine. The stand-out visitors for April were an old couple from Milwaukee who, despite being in their late sixties, wore denim and leather as if they’d just climbed off a Harley-Davidson. Perhaps they had. Either way, Judith clearly didn’t appreciate this deviation from the norm and directed her stern warnings against walking on graves, videotaping and ‘straying from the path for any reason’ at them. Rules clearly stated, money collected, Judith raised one arm in the air as if she was starting a Grand Prix and trilled, ‘This way!’, leading the slow-moving group up a marble staircase at the back of the courtyard. They crested the rise and, almost as one, the whole group gasped. The cemetery was magnificent, an almost perfect balance of menace and beauty. In front of them was a meandering path lined on either side with headstones, crosses and teetering caskets, all struggling to remain upright as the undergrowth clawed and choked them.
‘Wow!’ said Biker Lady. ‘That’s neat.’
April couldn’t have put it better herself. It was at once glorious, moving and frightening and, to April, easily the most wonderful place she had ever seen. And she immediately felt bad for feeling that way. Since her father’s death it felt wrong to be happy, any pleasure obscene. What right had she to enjoy looking at the view when her dad would never see another sunset or a spider’s web or a flower? He wouldn’t see anything ever again. April fought back the tears that were threatening to fall. Judith certainly wouldn’t approve of public displays of emotion. Instead, April concentrated on the cemetery and tried to view it as a detached observer. She thought of Miss Holden and her idea about the past - that to understand history, first you have to understand how the people in it lived. If this was the Victorians’ idea of remembering the dead, their way of life must have been spectacular.
Judith smiled in satisfaction at the open-mouthed reaction her baby had evoked.
‘Let me take you back, if I may,’ she began, ‘to the beginning of the nineteenth century. The population of London was one million. Twenty years later, it had jumped to two and a half million souls. We get headlines about unchecked immigration today, but a hundred and fifty years ago people were pouring into the city. Cholera was rife, families routinely starved to death and the graveyards were literally overflowing, contaminating the water supply. Something needed to be done and this—’ she swept a grandiose hand at the view‘—was the solution. Highgate Cemetery was built in 1839, one of seven cemeteries in key spots outside the capital, all opened between 1832 and 1841. Highgate was the smallest, but by far the most spectacular.’
Judith carried on in this vein, talking about notable graves - a coach-master, a boxer, a general - and pointing out the grandest examples of ‘funerary art’ - the pillars, the upturned torches, the urns draped in cloth - and explaining how, one hundred years before, the cemetery would have been alive with colourful flowers and plants.
‘It was a Victorian Disneyland, if you like, and fashionable ladies would come here to promenade and take the air.’
‘So why is this place so ...’ began the Ukrainian man, clearly struggling to think of the right word, ‘so ... dead?’
‘I believe you are referring to the “managed neglect”,’ said Judith with an indulgent smile. ‘We have attempted to strike a balance between what it was and what it became. The cemetery fell into disrepair after the First World War. All of the burial plots had been sold - fifty-two thousand of them - and as a result the money stopped coming in. By the late sixties, it had become badly neglected and vandalised and in 1973 it was closed altogether.’
Walking slowly up the hill, April wondered again why she had come here to surround herself with death. She had expected it to be painful, but it wasn’t. Quite the opposite, in fact. It was soothing somehow, as if she wasn’t alone in her grief. Thousands of daughters had suffered the same loss, not to mention the pain of broken parents who had to bury their children. Perhaps she was doing the same thing as her mother - avoiding looking the reality in the eye. If she looked at other people’s graves sh
e wouldn’t have to imagine the freshly dug hole for her father. She had been looking out for the family tomb, of course, but it was hopeless trying to spot a tiny name chiselled on overgrown stone in all this muddle. She didn’t really want to ask Judith about it either as she was sure the woman would make a big deal about it and April didn’t want to draw any attention today. Perhaps the truth was that she wanted to see the Circle of Lebanon again, stand in the spot where she had held Gabriel’s hand, feel that closeness again, even if it hadn’t been real. At least, while it had lasted, it had made her happy, made her feel alive. That was something to take comfort from. It went without saying, of course, that she hadn’t heard from Gabriel. There had been texts and messages from distant family, close friends and people she’d barely even spoken to at St Geoffrey’s, so many in fact that she had turned off her phone. Anyway, why would Gabriel call me when he has Layla to talk to? she thought with a dull ache. The truth was, obsessing over Gabriel seemed silly and pointless now she understood real pain. Gabriel didn’t even come close.
