An Untidy Death

by Simon Brett

  ‘And you know, dahling, that I’m really a London person …’

  She kept saying this, even though her husband Kenneth, the solicitor who funded her extravagant lifestyle, was firmly based in Chichester.

  ‘You know, I bloom in London. I feel refreshed by the polluted air. Just wandering through the West End energizes me. I love revisiting the scenes of my former triumphs. All those First Nights, all those backstage memories … And the bars and the cafés and the restaurants and the shops … Scenes of so many liaisons … London is just me!’

  I still didn’t say anything, waiting to see where all this was leading.

  ‘Anyway, dahling Jools … my girlfriend Jools’ – I knew it would come – ‘understands me.’ With the unspoken implication that I didn’t. ‘She’s a London creature too … and realizes how much my soul is nourished just by being in the place … and Jools knows how disappointed I feel when I have to curtail my metropolitan delights by needing to catch the last train back to dreary old Chichester … and so she – the little angel – has said that, whenever I want to … there’s a spare bed I can use in her bijou little flatette!’

  ‘Well, that’ll be very nice for you,’ I said, somewhat drily.

  ‘I assume Jools has made the same offer to you,’ insinuated Fleur, knowing that she hadn’t.

  Maybe it was talking about the child with whom I didn’t have a relaxed relationship made me think about the one with whom I did. Or at least I always had had in the past. Though now I wondered. Insecurity about Ben was niggling away at me.

  I don’t know if it was a gender thing, but I’d always felt closer to him than Jools. As a little child, she had always been a ‘Daddy’s girl’, but drifted away from Oliver in the year before he died. And when he did die, she seemed almost indifferent to his absence. I knew she couldn’t really be, but she had found a very efficient way of damming up her emotions and, coincidentally, shutting me out. I sometimes worried what would happen when the floodgates opened. Currently, though, her self-constructed dam showed no signs of fracture.

  I knew it was too soon after my last attempt to contact Ben. I didn’t want to sound like a worried mother. Tough, of course, because that was exactly what I was. I rang the mobile and got his voicemail again. Of course I did. He was a student, it was term-time, he was in a lecture or a seminar or at the library. I left no message. I stopped the call.

  But I couldn’t leave it there. Instead, I texted him. The minimum. ‘All OK? Love, Mum.’

  The moment I’d sent it, I felt stupid and overreacting. I returned sheepishly to the invoices.

  Almost as quickly as he could possibly have done it, my mobile pinged with his returned text.

  ‘Take a chill pill, Ma. No red hair issues. X B.’

  It made me smile. When Ben called me ‘Ma’, it was always in a slightly joshing manner, as though he had put the word in quotes. The use of ‘chill pill’ was also slightly sending me up. He had a habit of addressing me in old-fashioned slang.

  The ‘red hair’ was also reassuring. And it did answer the question I’d really been wanting to ask him. Ben was quoting his father. I don’t think Oliver had ever used the expression directly to him, but he’d said it often enough to me and I must have passed it on to Ben.

  It concerned the depression that father and son shared. There are many theories of what causes the illness. It can be triggered by a trauma like bereavement or abuse. It can hit someone suddenly in the middle of their adult life. For others, their entire lives have been bedevilled by low moods.

  Oliver was in the latter category. He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t suffered from depression. As he often told me, ‘It’s genetic. It’s like having red hair.’

  Ben knew his shorthand would have reassured me. But I wished he’d called rather than texted. I really wanted to hear his voice. I wanted him to tell me about Tracey.

  These bloody invoices are never going to get finished, I thought, as the mobile rang again. The hope that it might be Ben, having changed his mind about talking, was quickly dashed.

  ‘Good afternoon, Ellen. This is Cara.’

  ‘Hello.’ I didn’t sound encouraging. I’d got the feeling the day before that Cara Reece was a talker who I didn’t want to get too involved with. She may have been instrumental in making Edward Finch contact me, but he was the client, not her.

  ‘I just thought I should give you some background to Eddie’s situation,’ she said.

  ‘Oh? Why?’

  ‘Because he does sometimes say some strange things about Pauline and how she died.’

  I’d already experienced the ‘strange things’ but, of course, Cara didn’t know that. ‘What kind of things?’ I asked warily.

  ‘The fact is that she died in the bath. She drowned.’

  ‘Was there a post-mortem?’

  ‘Yes. She was found to have had a heart attack.’

  ‘So that killed her rather than the drowning?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t see the documentation for the post-mortem, so I couldn’t be sure of that. It wouldn’t be regarded as my business, would it?’

  ‘No,’ I agreed, trying to invest the monosyllable with the implication that her contacting me again about Edward was not really her business either.

  My deterring tactic didn’t work because she went on, ‘Eddie told me, though, that Pauline had a heart attack because she thought she was about to be drowned. It was fear that triggered it. Because he had said he was going to drown her.’

  ‘And do you think that’s true, Cara?’

  ‘If it isn’t true, why would he tell me that’s what happened?’

  ‘There was no investigation from the police? They didn’t suspect foul play had been involved?’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’

  ‘Hm,’ I said. ‘Well, look, I’ve arranged to go and see Edward tomorrow. I’m not going to change my plans. If he tells me that he drowned his wife in the bath, I may feel differently.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Cara. ‘It is rather worrying, isn’t it?’

  ‘How long had you known the Finches?’

  ‘Oh, a long time. We all taught at the same school. And all retired round the same time.’

  ‘And would you say Edward and Pauline’s was a happy marriage?’

  ‘Outwardly,’ Cara replied. And she relished the note of mystery that she put into the word.

  I don’t always watch the television local news in the morning, but I had it on in the kitchen as I was getting my breakfast together on the Wednesday.

  There was a report of a fire that had gutted a top-floor flat in Brunswick Square in Hove. One person was believed to have died.

  They didn’t say it was Ingrid Richards’ flat. Perhaps the identity of the owner had not yet been confirmed.

  But I kind of knew.

  EIGHT

  ‘Meek’ was the word. Meek was how I would describe Edward Finch, particularly on second acquaintance. The idea of him as a murderer was totally incongruous.

  He certainly didn’t mention it again and I wasn’t about to raise the subject. Even with the further detail provided by Cara Reece, I still didn’t believe his claim. But I was intrigued to find out why he had made it. The psychological effects of bereavement I find endlessly fascinating. And I thought, spending time with Edward sorting out his practical problem might enable me to find out what made him tick psychologically.

  But working with him that morning I have to confess he didn’t have my full attention. Part of my mind was in Brunswick Square, waiting for the inevitable confirmation of the fire victim’s name.

  I didn’t take anything from the Yeti into the bungalow with me when I arrived that morning. I hoped by the end of the session to be leaving with some of Pauline Finch’s clothes to take to a charity shop, but I didn’t want her widower to feel threatened by my coming in loaded with boxes and bin bags. Talk first, then action.

  I suggested moving the boxes from the hall and he did not object.
Indeed, he helped me fill the Yeti’s boot with them. It was just general household rubbish, destined for the dump. The hall was clear within ten minutes and then he offered me a coffee.

  Edward went through the same ritual of making the drinks in the kitchen and we sat down in the sitting room to drink them. Someone – he, Cara? – had actually made an attempt at tidying there. The scattered books on the floor had been straightened up into piles. The magazines and the out-of-date newspapers had been removed. As I had thought on my previous visit, most of the bungalow’s rooms just needed a brisk tidy-up. It was in the bedroom at the back that the real problem lay.

  I started by checking some of the basics. ‘Edward, how long ago is it that Pauline died?’ I always prefer the words ‘die’ and ‘death’ to any of the popular euphemisms. ‘Passed’, ‘passed away’ are just attempts to sanitize the reality.

  ‘Ten months,’ he replied.

  ‘And did you stop sleeping in the back bedroom immediately?’

  ‘Yes. There were too many memories. I couldn’t …’ He couldn’t finish the sentence, apart from anything else.

  ‘I fully understand.’ I didn’t spell out how fully by mentioning Oliver’s death. It wasn’t appropriate. My grief was my own, not to be shared with strangers. If I got into a deeper relationship with a client, I might talk about it. Sometimes that had proved helpful in cases of bereavement. But my dealings with Edward Finch were at a very early stage.

  ‘And when,’ I went on, ‘did you put her clothes all over the bedroom?’

  ‘That’s relatively recent,’ he said. ‘The last couple of months, I suppose. It was the first time I’d been in there since … since …’

  ‘But it was quite clean,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When you showed me the room on Monday, yes, it was covered with clothes. But it wasn’t as dusty or cobwebby as a space would be if it hadn’t been entered for eight months.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you sweep it up, hoover it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who did then?’

  ‘Cara.’

  ‘Ah. Cara did actually ring me, after I’d come here on Monday.’

  ‘I know. She told me.’

  ‘She told me that all three of you, Pauline as well, taught at the same school.’

  ‘Yes, we did.’

  ‘Cara clearly helps you a lot.’

  ‘You could call it helping,’ he said rather petulantly. ‘You could call it interfering, not minding her own business.’

  I didn’t comment. I thought Edward Finch was being ungrateful to someone who clearly had his welfare at heart, but I wasn’t about to take sides in what was probably a long-running disagreement.

  ‘What you’re experiencing, Edward,’ I said gently, ‘is something that is quite a common reaction in cases of bereavement. Lots of people find it exceedingly difficult to clear up the dead person’s belongings. Doing that has such an air of finality about it. It can be like finally admitting to yourself that they’re really never coming back. Was that how it felt to you?’

  ‘Maybe. A bit,’ he mumbled.

  ‘And you’ve only tried clearing up Pauline’s stuff on your own?’

  ‘How else should I do it?’ he almost snapped.

  ‘With someone else to help you. I thought Cara might have—’

  ‘Cara did suggest that she should help me. Typical, yet again muscling in on our lives.’

  The use of ‘our’ was interesting. And, again, very common. Many of the bereaved find it takes a long time to take on board that their plural lives have become singular. Even though it’s more than eight years since Oliver died, I still sometimes find myself slipping into the ‘we’ usage.

  ‘Well, look, Edward, what I’m suggesting is that I should go to the bedroom with you and see if the two of us can impose some order on the chaos. Or would you regard that as me “muscling in”?’

  ‘No. We could try.’

  ‘We’ll take it at your pace. I’m not going to rush you into doing anything you don’t want to do.’

  ‘Right. Thank you.’ He swallowed down the last of his coffee. ‘I’m prepared to give it a go.’ He rose to his feet. ‘So, what – we put everything back in the wardrobe and the drawers?’

  I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry, Edward. That’d just be kicking the can further down the road.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Pauline’s clothes will still be in the bedroom. It’d be just as if you’d never even started to move them.’

  ‘So … where are you suggesting we put them? This bungalow doesn’t have a cellar or an attic. Or a garage, come to that. And the garden shed would be far too damp. The clothes’d get ruined in there.’

  ‘Edward, this may sound very cruel to you, but what I’m suggesting is that we move them out of the house.’

  ‘How?’ He responded as if I’d suggested moving the Tower of London. The idea was incongruous to him. It was a feat beyond his imagination.

  ‘We’ll do it gradually,’ I said. ‘I’ll get some boxes and we’ll put some of the stuff in them.’

  ‘And then what? Burn the clothes? Send them to landfill?’

  ‘I’d rather not do either of those things. I can see there’s some lovely stuff there. Hardly worn, a lot of it. Some of it might have resale value.’ I made that sound unlikely. Second-hand clothes had to be a lot older and more individual to be of interest to the vintage retailers.

  ‘I’m not looking to make money out of my dead wife,’ said Edward Finch, almost insulted.

  ‘No, that wasn’t what I was suggesting,’ I quickly assured him. ‘Of course, it’s your decision, Edward, but my solution would be to take the best of the clothes, the stuff that’s still wearable, to a charity shop and then someone else could benefit from wearing them.’

  ‘What?’ He didn’t like the idea. ‘So, I might be walking round Lancing one morning and see other women wearing Pauline’s clothes?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t take it to a charity shop on your doorstep. And a lot of the garments, I could see, were high-street brands. Other women will have bought the same styles as Pauline did, so you’d see them anyway.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Edward Finch anxiously.

  ‘Let’s give it a try,’ I said.

  I was there a couple of hours that morning and achieved a modest level of success. Progress was slow. Each of his dead wife’s garments prompted some memory, where and when it had been bought, the events she had worn it to. But I’m used to hearing that stuff and I respect it. The past is important to people and I would never deny anyone the right to their own reminiscences.

  By twelve o’clock, we’d got two cardboard boxes full of clothes out of the bedroom and into the hall. And when I say ‘we’, I mean it. I consulted Edward Finch on every item before he agreed that it should be transferred.

  There was still a lot scattered over the bedroom, but I felt we’d made a meaningful start. The Yeti boot was full of the stuff from the hall. I was tied up with other clients the next day, but I proposed coming back the same time on the Friday morning to take the boxes of Pauline’s clothes.

  He was agreeable to that. He seemed more relaxed than he had when I’d arrived. Perhaps actually starting to move his wife’s possessions made him realize that, though a painful process, it was achievable.

  We were making progress.

  In the car on the way back to Chichester, I heard the one o’clock news. The body found in the burnt-out flat in Brunswick Square Hove had been identified as that of the legendary war reporter, Ingrid Richards.

  NINE

  The Thursday was kind of an average working day for me – no clients I had not had previous contact with, just continuing support for the existing ones. Which is what I spend a lot of my time doing.

  First, I paid another visit to Mary Griffin. I could have asked her on the phone, but I wanted to see for myself how she’d progressed with turning her devastated house back i
nto a home. And, more importantly, how Amy had reacted to her changed environment.

  Somewhat to my surprise, as I parked the Yeti, I saw a familiar 1951 Morris Commercial CV9/40 Tipper outside the house. When Mary led me into the kitchen (which now looked like a kitchen), I found Dodge there with a cup of coffee. He didn’t look relaxed – I’ve only ever seen him look relaxed when deeply involved in his construction work – and he didn’t make eye contact with either Mary or me, but I was intrigued by his presence there.

  Surely there couldn’t be any romantic interest between him and Mary …? I had gleaned over the years I’d known him that the breakdown which turned Gervaise the consumerist City whiz kid into Dodge the recycler had also involved the ending of a relationship. And, though he’d never said as much, I’m fairly sure that relationship had been with a woman. At what level, though, whether they had been married or cohabit-ing, I hadn’t found out. And it wasn’t my business. I never pushed Dodge for information about his past. Anything I did know was stuff he had volunteered. Sometimes reluctantly. Like the fact that he helped out young people in a drug rehabilitation programme. He’d also implied that drugs might have been a contributory cause of his breakdown.

  But, since I’d known him, he’d never shown signs of sexual interest in anyone.

  And it was clear that nothing of that kind was needed to explain his presence in Mary Griffin’s kitchen when I was taken upstairs to meet Amy.

  She was an enchanting little girl with her mother’s brown eyes. But Amy’s looked unclouded by fear. Whatever scenes she may have witnessed in that house, she appeared untraumatized by the experience. That might be different if she woke from a bad dream in the night, but at that moment she irradiated the whole room with her happiness. And I could see how much that was helping her mother’s healing process.

  The immediate reason for her joy was in front of her. She sat on a little Amy-sized pink wooden chair, in front of a pink-painted Amy-sized dressing table. There were four drawers down one side with a smooth wooden top running across to two stout legs the other side. Leaving a perfect Amy’s-knee-sized space for her to sit in comfort at the dressing table. On the surface in front of her stood an adjustable mirror. Its frame and the front of the drawers were decorated with Frozen stickers.