‘Three months, perhaps four.’ Alfred touched Dorothea’s stomach too.
‘I couldn’t leave my angels.’
‘What about Clementine?’
‘Clementine?’
Out on the landing Clementine held her breath.
Then Alfred said it. ‘We could send for her later. She’s a big girl now.’
Outside, the forbidden tree was covered in little green pods. It stood in the patch of wasteland at the far end of the garden, roots all tangled up with thorns.
‘Never touch,’ Alfred had said to Clementine when she was young. ‘Never go near.’
A tree full of pods in the summer, all crunchy and plump.
‘Never touch. Never lick. Never sniff. Never smell.’
Dripping with golden treasure for a few brief weeks in spring.
Clementine sucked on a last segment of orange as she hummed and picked and plucked. Oh my darling. Moving through the grass as silent as a moth, juice dribbled on her dress, small red welts rising on the surface of her skin from where thorns had scratched and plucked at her. Little seeds, little pods, little plates and little bowls. Sandwiches the size of a child’s finger. A scone spread with jam the colour of blood. Also a fairy cake carved down the middle to make two.
The sun shone hot on the manicured lawn as the adults poured themselves another round of drinks. The table was a mass of crumbs and stains now, Dorothea’s favourite china covered in smears. Two small children with golden hair hunched at the edge of the wilderness, their heads close together. One. Two. Three. Four. All the way to a thousand. Then they rose on dimpled legs and headed into the tall grass. ‘Clemmie! Clemmie! Clemmie!’ Whispering as they ran through tunnels cut into the undergrowth, towards a feast laid out beneath the magic tree.
Little cups of sorrel.
Little green pods.
Little plates of berries.
Little black seeds.
Once inside the den they were hidden forever. Two twins and their older sister. Invisible to anyone who might want to see.
That evening Clementine sat in her bedroom on the highest, furthest floor and waited as her parents searched. She was counting. One. Two. Three. Four. All the way to a thousand. Then some more. She waited for over an hour, tracking their movements in and out of the house. The pantry with its meat safe. The scullery with its copper. The coal-hole under the street.
Then she stood up on a chair and looked out over the back gardens full of onion rows and summer cabbages, currant bushes laden with fruit. She could see sheds covered in peeling paint and crumbling brick walls. She could see big sheets drooping in the heavy evening air. She could see trees – and beneath them a thousand perfect picnic spots.
‘Have you found them yet?’ Alfred asked when Clementine finally came downstairs. He was checking the cupboard in the hall for the third time.
‘Have you seen them?’ Dorothea grabbed Clementine by the shoulders as she whirled from the front room to the back in the dress covered in pink sprigs.
‘No,’ Clementine whispered, but neither of her parents stopped to hear what she had to say. She stood for a moment by the back door staring out towards the end of the garden, a jungle of brambles and grass disappearing into twilight as the light fell away. Then she went upstairs to her bedroom again and waited some more.
It was Alfred who found them in the end. Tongues black, lips black, froth on their chins, sitting by the base of the laburnum tree, the remains of a wondrous feast spread all around. Little empty cups. Little empty plates. Little black seeds all sprinkled in their laps. As alike as two peas in a pod, ants already crawling inside their shoes.
Goodnight, Little Alfie.
Sleep tight, Little Dottie.
Two children dead before they’d even begun.
He appeared from out of the jungle as the night stole in, a dead twin on each arm, his skin scratched and scored from all the thrashing he had done to find what he had lost. Dorothea was standing in the centre of the manicured lawn when he emerged, straight and silver in the moonlight, her long shadow cutting across the grass. She screamed when she saw them, hands to her head. And from where she was watching on the highest, furthest floor, Clementine put her hands to her head too.
Alfred laid the small children down, one after the other, on the patch of tidy grass. Little Alfie and Little Dottie in their pristine summer clothes, feet in button-up slippers, faces like two wax dolls. Dorothea stopped screaming, a sudden plunge into silence. Then she fell too.
From the highest, furthest floor Clementine watched as two dead children and their mother spread out around Alfred like the petals of a flower. She frowned as from the very centre of Dorothea’s crumpled frock a bud began to grow. Tiny at first, nothing but a spot in the darkness, then blooming and spreading, turning Dorothea from white to scarlet in the gloom. Then Clementine stepped down and knelt upon her bedroom floor to pray once more.
Dorothea was away for almost a week. When she came back she was no longer scarlet. Instead she was almost transparent. Her stomach concave. Glittering hair shorn. Clementine hid behind Alfred as they carried Dorothea up the stairs, head first, feet last. She breathed in her father’s heavy scent of tweed and coal dust, underpinned now by the stink of whisky. The water of life. But not for Alfred. Not any more.
Alfred’s fingers pressed into Clementine’s skull as Dorothea passed, as though to hold her down. Then he removed his hand and headed upstairs too, behind his stricken wife. Didn’t even look back as he was swallowed by the grey.
That evening Clementine watched once more from the landing as her father kept a vigil by Dorothea’s bed. Her mother’s breath rattled in the dim light. Dorothea’s scalp was bald, prickled with stubble like a thousand miniature stars. On a table beside where she lay was a jewellery box lined with nappy velveteen and a hairbrush with a handle made of bone. And next to that, a photograph: black and white. To remind them of all that had gone. Two children pressed forever behind a cold rectangle of glass.
Three days later Alfred swung the axe – chop, chop, chop, chop. He danced while he did it, deep in the jungle at the end of the garden, like a whirligig. A turning dervish, wild and mad. Upstairs in her bedroom Clementine still knelt on the hard, dusty floor. Her knees were bare and covered in a pattern of purple bruises. ‘Please, please, please, please,’ she prayed. But she never did know what should come next.
They buried them in the cemetery, where a holly bush would blossom with a million red berries when winter came. Two small coffins stuffed with lace and linen, lowered into the mud. One, then the next. All the grown-ups crying as they filed out to watch.
‘Poor little Alfie.’
‘Poor little Dottie.’
But Clementine didn’t say a thing.
Instead she stayed inside staring at the stained-glass window, all golden and emerald and red. The priest appeared, collecting hymn books once again. ‘There, there, child,’ he said, reaching out a hand.
But Clementine slid away along the pew of polished wood. ‘Where have they gone?’ she said, voice rising once more into the cool arc of the chapel. She didn’t mean her parents.
‘Why, child, the babies are in heaven.’
But Clementine didn’t really need to ask. She knew already. Suffer little children to come unto me. The twins had gone to the promised land.
PART TWO
A Brazil Nut
SUMMARY REPORT OF POST-MORTEM
Date/Hour of Post-Mortem: 08/01/2011; 8:30 A.M.
Pathologist: Dr Edwina Atkinson c/o NHS Lothian
Client Name: MRS WALKER
Case No.: 2011-88
Date of Life Extinct: 02/01/2011 (DATE FOUND)
Body Identified by: Patrycja Nabialek, neighbour
EXTERNAL EXAMINATION:
The body is that of a white female measuring 5 ft 6 in. and weighing 6 stone 1 oz. The deceased is wearing a tweed skirt, a knitted cardigan, a blouse made of a synthetic material, nylon tights, underwear and brown leather shoes.
Age is undetermined, yet appears consistent with somewhere between 75 and 85 years.
The body is cold and unembalmed. Lividity is fixed in the distal portions of the limbs. The eyes are closed. The hair is dyed red with white roots. Minor abrasions (scratch marks) were observed on the deceased’s cheeks and scalp.
Upon removal of the victim’s clothing a faint odour of whisky was detected. Newspaper was discovered wrapped around her middle. Minor abrasions (scratch marks) were present on the lower half of both arms. The fingernails are short, appearing ragged, and fingernail beds are blue. There are no residual scars, markings or tattoos.
Cont./
2011
The Edinburgh City Mortuary was an unassuming sort of place. A low concrete building set back from a narrow chasm of a street. Margaret approached with caution. Death was a matter of the everyday here – best to take care.
She rang the bell at the public entrance and the door was answered by a neat man in highly polished shoes. ‘Miss Penny?’ he enquired. ‘Janie said you might pop in.’ Someone who knew Margaret was coming almost before she did herself.
The man’s shirtsleeves were crisp, creases tight as origami folds. He ushered Margaret inside to a waiting area that constituted three empty chairs, a small table and a vase of plastic flowers. It was just like any other waiting area in any other public building. Except for that feeling of it being somehow outside of normal time and space.
‘You’re here to identify a client.’ The mortuary manager waited beside Margaret, poised and neat, ready to deal instantly with anything that concerned the dead. The reason for her visit seemed to be a foregone conclusion as far as he was concerned.
‘Well, not so much identification,’ Margaret said. ‘As information.’
‘What’s the person’s name?’
‘Mrs Walker.’
‘Ah yes, Mrs Walker.’
The reputation of Margaret’s client preceded her, despite being a mystery in every other way. Margaret pulled out her slim brown folder to address the facts, only to be interrupted by a sudden clamour – the sound of a vehicle pulling up outside. A black car come to head her off before she’d even begun, perhaps.
Two burly men, large and imposing, appeared out of nowhere to chap at the glass. The mortuary manager hurried to let them in. ‘DCI Franklin,’ he said, dipping his head as a woman entered first, elegant in a dark woollen coat.
‘Hello, Donnie. Everything ready?’
English accent. Refined. Was there anyone in this city, Margaret wondered, who was actually born and bred?
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Good man.’ DCI Franklin glanced at Margaret as she passed, then back to the mortuary manager. ‘Straight from the scene of the crime, Donnie. Nice and fresh.’ And the detective was gone as swiftly as she had arrived, in a sweep of tailored navy lined with a flash of silk. Not come for Margaret after all, it seemed, but to check up on another unfortunate just waiting to be seen to before being assigned to the grave.
The two police officers filled the space with their stab vests and their radios, their heavy belts loaded with a jumble of accessories. Outside it had started to snow again and on their shoulders small drifts of white melted away into the dark uniform weave. ‘We’ll go down, Donnie,’ one of them said. ‘Check everything’s in order.’
‘All right.’ The mortuary manager lifted an arm as though to indicate the direction they should head in. But they were already away, down the corridor to another waiting room in the basement, where Margaret presumed all the corpses were kept. A shudder rippled through her as though someone had just walked over her grave. Black feet. Hair all stuck to the sofa. She pulled her red, stolen coat closer. It wasn’t that she was afraid of dead bodies. It was just that she’d never had to meet one face to face before.
The mortuary manager turned to Margaret. ‘You’ll have to excuse me for a moment,’ he said. ‘There’s been a murder.’ A certain satisfaction shadowed his words.
‘Of course.’ Margaret understood now. Only the night before Barbara had instructed her as to the whys and wherefores of Taggart. ‘Finished ages ago. Old-fashioned,’ Barbara had gesticulated, the remote in one hand and a glass of rum in the other. ‘All newfangled ways of killing now.’
In the empty waiting area, Margaret passed the time wondering exactly which of these newfangled ways of killing had led to today’s delay. Knives in stomachs. Bodies washed up on a beach. Or some sort of invisible poison injected into the veins. She’d contemplated murder herself only recently, standing outside a family home in London wondering whether to ring the bell first, or just go ahead and do the deed. Stabbing with a steak knife or the sharpened edge of a spoon. Gouging, tearing, biting until an ashen-haired woman turned as red as the rug on which she lay. Or a rag, shiny with turpentine, pushed through the letter box. Followed by the flare of a match falling, falling, until the two met in a fiery embrace.
Margaret had been surprised at the satisfaction it could give – the personal approach. After all, death in her family had always been something that happened off-screen. Grandparents, for example, lost forever in a car crash, or a suicide pact, twelve pills washed down with whisky. Or (more likely) fatty arteries and a weak heart.
‘Do you have any pictures of them?’ she’d asked Barbara once when she was young.
‘Of who?’
‘Your mum and dad.’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
Barbara’s answer wasn’t so much a question as a line drawn in the sand. ‘Do you have any pictures of me?’
It was true, Margaret acknowledged now, as she waited to be introduced to a dead body of her own. Despite all the years they had lived together (and all the years they had not), she never had seen any photographs of Barbara when she was younger. Nor of the two of them together when Margaret was younger too. Not outside that first tenement in Edinburgh, or gathered around the plastic Christmas tree Barbara insisted on putting up year after year. Not on that trip they once took to the seaside, three miserable days on a wet beach where Margaret stood in the Atlantic until her feet were blue and Barbara refused to remove her shoes. Not even from when it all began, Margaret as a baby wrapped in a blanket, perhaps, Barbara holding her up for all the world to see.
Except . . .
There had been one photograph, at least. Two dead, sleeping children pressed behind cold glass. ‘Where is it?’ she’d asked her mother only the night before, once the drama of her getting a job had subsided. But Barbara had just waved her hand as though to deny that such a thing ever existed and opened a fresh bottle of rum.
From somewhere down in the depths of the City Mortuary there was the rattle of a metal shutter rolling up. Margaret wondered if it meant the latest corpse was coming in or going out. She fiddled with the lucky coronation penny inside the pocket of her red, stolen coat. The signs in the corridor pointed downstairs to the ‘Transfer Area’ and upstairs to the ‘PM Suites’. She brought out the penny and held it for a moment in the flat of her hand. The penny looked back, impassive, like the fixed eye of a dead bird lying in a gutter. Let the king decide.
So he did.
Upstairs, the Post-Mortem Suite was a melange of bright lamps and the slow swirl of constant movement. Several people were gazing intently through a glass partition into a space where technicians in white plastic aprons with blood smeared down the front were weighing and sawing and lifting and cutting on the other side. Long strip lights hung from the ceiling. Water ran constantly through a hose into a deep stainless-steel sink.
What remained of a man lay in the centre of the room, head elevated on a neck prop, chest held open by some sort of crank. His legs were mottled, marked with patches the colour of cooked lobster. His skin was glassy, as though he had been in the bath too long. Margaret stared at the man’s arms. They reminded her of the missing limb from a grubby china cherub, severed long ago.
Arrayed along a shelf on the far side of the room were what she imagined mu
st be the victim’s vital organs. Purple lungs embroidered with blue arteries. A yellow sack bulging with gut. On a set of scales, blood pooled around a liver dark as velvet. Next to it a technician cradled a brain in both hands. Somewhere a drill was being tested, a screeching, squealing sound.
Beneath her red coat, cold sweat crept across the surface of Margaret’s skin. Just as she was thinking she ought to leave before anyone noticed, someone turned, looking over to where she stood pressed up against the wall. DCI Franklin in her smart woollen coat, frowning at the intrusion. Margaret held her brown folder up to her chest as though to demonstrate her credentials. Behind the glass partition a woman in green scrubs stopped talking, waiting for everyone’s full attention to return to her. Margaret scrabbled for the door handle. Nobody turned to look as she exited. No one paid her any attention at all.
Down in the basement, the Transfer Area was cool and scented with disinfectant. Margaret drew in a deep lungful of its chilly, antiseptic air, relief flooding her ventricles. On a table in the corner a big ledger lay open. She glanced at some of the entries, wondering if she might find her client.
9 January. Suicide. Jumper, fully clothed.
11 January. Male. Discovered in water.
13 January. Decomposed, maggots.
Amongst other things.
‘Welcome to the underworld.’ The young woman wore white fisherman’s boots along with her apron.
‘Oh, I’m sorry. I was just . . .’ Margaret’s tights clung to the inside of her thighs.
‘Aye, checking up on the inhabitants.’
‘Well yes, I suppose so.’
‘Couldn’t face the upstairs, eh.’ The technician laughed. It wasn’t a question. She held out a hand covered in blue latex. ‘You’re Margaret, right? Margaret Penny.’
‘Er . . .’ Margaret held on to her brown folder, not wanting to offer her own hand in reply. She wasn’t sure where the woman’s blue glove might have been.
‘Oh, sorry. Habit.’ The technician pulled the glove off. Beneath it her fingers were rosy. ‘You’re here for Mrs Walker, right?’ The technician’s hand was surprisingly warm. Margaret’s was freezing, as though she had been in the mortuary fridge herself.
The Other Mrs Walker Page 6
