‘Donnie said he saw you upstairs.’ The technician smiled and turned to the ledger. ‘A bit green about the gills, that was how he put it.’
Green gills. Stomach contents probably green too. And the hollows of her cheeks. Margaret knew she had somehow managed to lose any polish she had left the moment she crossed the border. What was it about this city that always stripped her clean?
The technician smiled. A kind face, used to reassuring people in the face of their loved ones’ untimely demise. ‘Don’t worry, it’s normal in here. Now, let’s see. Mrs Walker.’ She ran her finger down through the entries. ‘She’s been here a couple of weeks now, I think.’
‘Is that usual?’ Margaret decided it was best at least to try to be professional, despite the continued churn of her insides.
‘Not necessarily. Usually move them out in a few days. But it always stacks up at this time of year.’ The technician grinned up at Margaret. ‘Can be two or three months sometimes for the difficult ones.’
Margaret had a sudden vision of old people lying slumped in their hallways right across the city, no one but bluebottles their final companions as they waited for the mortuary ambulance to come and move them on. Bile burned in the back of her throat. That was probably green too.
‘Here she is. Rack twenty-one.’ The technician closed the ledger with a thump. ‘Why don’t you go to the viewing area. I’ll bring her up for you to see.’
The viewing room was a relief after the rest of the mortuary – a still space, quiet, with muted lilac-coloured walls and air that smelled and tasted normal. Margaret sat on the small chair in the corner, her legs trembling just like her mother’s fingers on that glass of rum. Where were those two dead twins, she thought. And to whom did they belong?
Along one wall there was another glass partition, this one covered by a Venetian blind, vertical slats folded shut. Margaret closed her eyes and waited. Her homecoming hadn’t exactly been the holiday she had imagined. Not so far, at least.
‘Cancer.’ Suddenly there was a woman standing beside Margaret, her skin scrubbed bare just like the dead man upstairs. ‘Dr Edwina Atkinson, pathologist,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘And you’re Margaret Penny.’
Margaret just took the hand that was offered and nodded.
Dr Atkinson was the same pathologist who ten minutes before had been upstairs dissecting and probing and making all sorts of notes. Now she was instructing Margaret. ‘I was one of the doctors who did the Walker post-mortem. We’ve got the report somewhere. Do you have a copy?’
Margaret shook her head.
‘Would you like a summary?’ But the pathologist didn’t wait for Margaret to answer. She began to recite instead. ‘Carcinoma. Tumours in lungs and bones. Heart disease. Fatty arteries. Amongst other things.’ It was rather like Barbara’s recital of her churchgoing activities, just without the prospect of salvation at the end.
‘Natural causes then?’ Margaret was pretty sure this was what the pathologist was telling her.
‘Oh yes, diseases of all kind. No doubt one of them did for her.’
‘Any idea which exactly?’
‘Not really.’ The pathologist shook her head. ‘Could be any one of several. It can be hard to pin down with someone who is old. Still . . . vital organs tell a story for quite a long time after.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, cardiac arrest, for example. You’ll still see the scarring on the wall of the heart for months. Maybe years.’
A heart that has been beaten, pummelled and cut into tiny fragments, before being left to fester on a life-support machine. Margaret knew all about that.
‘Cigarettes, of course. Smokers’ skin, all jaundiced. Everything inside gone furry.’
Margaret had given up smoking when she turned forty, believing there was still time to create the life she’d always assumed would be hers – two silver-haired children grinning in crumpled Technicolor. Or something of that sort.
Dr Atkinson tapped absently at the front of her own chest, tip-tap, as though to indicate what might happen if Margaret allowed that sort of recklessness to re-enter her life. ‘Or in this client’s case, alcohol. Her liver was like paste. Bloated. Probably drank herself to death.’
Margaret saw again the forest of empty bottles lined up under her mother’s kitchen sink and wondered if Barbara’s liver might be going that way too. About the only thing she and her mother had managed to agree on in the last two weeks was whether to open another bottle once the one they had started was done.
‘Had she been dead for a while?’ she asked.
‘Hard to say.’ Dr Atkinson scratched at her nose with a well-trimmed fingernail. ‘A couple of weeks, perhaps, probably more. There was decomp of course. Thankfully there weren’t any maggots.’ She pulled a face. ‘I can’t abide those.’
‘Did she look . . . normal?’ Margaret wanted to ask if Mrs Walker’s hands and feet had turned black, a mummy in the making, but she wasn’t sure of the correct terminology.
Dr Atkinson laughed. ‘Not bad. The cold, you know. Kept her preserved. Got to be good for something.’ The pathologist peered at the glass partition. ‘Very thin though,’ she added. ‘If I remember right, hardly anything to her.’
‘What age do you think she was?’
‘That’s your job, isn’t it – date of birth?’ Dr Atkinson turned to Margaret with a bleak sort of grin. ‘But I’d say around mid seventies to mid eighties, judging by her skin and her hair. Hair can tell you a lot about a person. DNA. The keeper of our secrets.’ Dr Atkinson touched her head for a moment. ‘It’s amazing, really, what you can learn from the dead.’
After Barbara had refused to acknowledge the existence of the dead twins it had been her turn to ask a question Margaret wasn’t sure she knew the answer to. ‘Why are you always trying to dig up the past, anyway?’
‘It’s my job now,’ Margaret had laughed, raising a glass of red wine in a toast.
But Barbara wasn’t playing. ‘No,’ she’d said, chest rattling. ‘Isn’t your job to lay the past to rest?’
Now, in the calm air of the viewing room, Margaret touched a hand to her own hair. She’d always wondered about her ancestors and here, perhaps, lay the key. Sheep stealer, maybe. Peddler of fake coins. Some sort of troublemaker buried in her genes. A quick snip and who knew what might be revealed? Whereas Barbara had always insisted on being cremated. Wasn’t that what she had tried to teach Margaret? Leave no trace.
‘Did you take hair samples from Mrs Walker?’ Margaret asked. She would have liked to have something physical of her client. At the moment Mrs Walker seemed all surface and not much else.
Dr Atkinson shoved her hands in the pockets of her uniform. ‘No, no. We only do that if there is any ambiguity. There was nothing suspicious here – just an old lady who died of natural causes.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘It’s nothing like the television, you know.’
Four murders an hour. An axe in the chest and head. A body giving up all its secrets just like that. Still, it didn’t seem quite so unambiguous to Margaret. No one had been able to tell her Mrs Walker’s first name yet.
‘Look, I’m sorry.’ The pathologist checked her watch again. ‘I’ve got to go. Three more bodies to process. Get stacked up at this time of year. The famous Edinburgh backlog.’ She held out her hand for another brisk shake. ‘But make sure you get a copy of the report before you leave. Everything you need to know is in there.’
Margaret nodded. The nature and causes of a death typed out on two or three pages. Clues to a life retrieved from inside dead flesh and turned into prose. It all came down to paperwork in the end. Just like Janie had said.
Behind the glass there was the sudden sound of a door opening, the soft squeak of a trolley wheel. Dr Atkinson took a quick step back. ‘Ah, just in time. The specimen.’ The slats of the Venetian blind began to glide apart as Margaret stepped up too.
She found herself gazing into a small, oak-clad space. The light behind the gla
ss was muted and dim. Three lily stems bowed gracefully in one corner. Just behind the partition the body was laid out, covered by a purple cloth with a golden braid. Margaret placed a finger on the glass wall between where she stood and her client lay. Here she was at last. Mrs Walker. Not alive. But not gone yet. Just waiting for the beginning of her end.
Except . . .
Dr Atkinson sucked in a small, sudden breath. ‘For God’s sake!’ (Though it was clear to Margaret that her client was long past God’s help now.) ‘That’s not Mrs Walker. That’s someone else.’
1937
Down in London the beginning of the end for the Walker family started with a coronation for a king who should never have been a king and ended with a phoney war. Nobody wanted the first and the second was only a warm-up for the cataclysm to come, but some people knew an opportunity when they saw one. And how to take it too.
‘A memento of the big day.’ The photographer went from door to door, working his way up through the streets from the great swathe of the river towards the Fulham Road. He came to Elm Row late in the afternoon, tired and despondent, to a series of tall, narrow houses separated by thin, damp passageways that ran through to the backs. The photographer twirled the buttons on his waistcoat. Surely someone here would want to celebrate the crowning of a new monarch with a family portrait, all present and correct.
Mrs Quinn.
Mrs Nolan.
Mrs Jones.
The Elm Row women all shut their doors in the photographer’s face, one after the other, aprons stained with flour and chicken’s blood, summer dresses all limp with the heat.
Mrs Fraser.
Mrs Yates.
Mrs Todd.
Even the woman with a fat baby on her hip. Mementos of one king’s betrayal and another’s sudden rise were obviously considered to be in poor taste in this street.
At last, the photographer came to number 14. Tall and narrow like the rest, five steps up to the front door. But here, instead of a grown woman wearing an apron, twelve-year-old Clementine Walker lounged outside. Her hair fell in pale tangles around her face. Her hem dragged in the dust. Her legs were bare. And her feet too, soles grey with dirt. But her eyes were still startling. First one thing then another, like small pieces of glass washed in from the sea.
‘Take your photo, miss?’ The photographer lifted his camera case with one hand and his cap with the other. ‘To celebrate the coronation.’
Clementine twirled a rat’s tail of hair between finger and thumb, then put it between her lips. ‘It’s not till next week.’
‘Be prepared.’ The photographer twirled one of his buttons in reply. ‘Isn’t that the motto?’ He gazed at Clementine’s legs, exposed from ankle to thigh by the shortness of her frock.
Clementine stared back, then removed the hair from her mouth, slick with saliva. ‘I’ll have to check with my mother,’ she said, eyes sliding away from the photographer, then back again. ‘You’d better come inside.’
In the parlour Dorothea looked confused. ‘A photograph?’ She turned towards the wall where two small children slept behind cold glass.
‘For the coronation, madam.’ The photographer stood in the doorway, cap neat in hand.
‘What coronation?’ Dorothea was languishing on a chaise longue that had seen better days, wearing a cotton nightgown that had seen better days too.
‘Do you have a special outfit?’ asked the photographer. ‘You’ll want to look your best.’
Upstairs on the highest, furthest floor, Clementine wriggled and jiggled, trying to get comfortable as she pulled on the best set of clothes she had. A white pleated skirt. A white knitted top to match. A band around the middle embroidered with blue and red crowns. Her special coronation outfit, donated (like everything else they owned now), all the rest of their nice clothes having disappeared piece by piece into a pawnshop on the King’s Road.
In their place had come women each week, touching and smoothing their hair as they stood in the hallway. Mrs Quinn. Mrs Nolan. Mrs Jones. Trying to get as close to Alfred as they could, now that Dorothea was not the woman she had been.
‘Just thought it might help . . .’
‘A little thing I dug out . . .’
‘More than we can possibly eat ourselves . . .’
They came holding bottles and pie dishes. Baskets full of old socks and cuts of leftover meat. Clementine watched from the landing as Alfred held on to the banister to keep himself upright, bathing the visitors in wafts of breath rinsed in whisky while they said their piece.
‘Some apples from the garden.’
‘A jug full of cream.’
Voices falling into whispers as they stretched to reach Alfred’s ear.
‘So sorry for your troubles.’
‘So sorry for your loss.’
Except . . .
Dorothea wasn’t dead yet. More like an angel floating in the night, drifting through the rooms on pale feet, nightdress trailing. Say it, darling. Say it. As Clementine, small and wraithlike in her turn, appeared by her side, clocks ticking down to midnight.
‘Mummy?’
Taking Dorothea’s hand in her own.
Emblazoned now in coronation white, Clementine pulled patched smocks over the heads of the twins. Little Ruby and little Barbara. One dark. One mousy. She pushed fat limbs through armholes and buttoned up the backs, then attempted to brush what little hair they had while Ruby stuffed hairpins into her mouth and Barbara sat mute. After that she took them downstairs to Dorothea’s bedroom and let them play with the one-armed china cherub while she brushed and brushed her own hair.
On the ground floor in the parlour, the photographer fiddled with his equipment while Dorothea sat upright on the chaise longue, hair as white as a cockleshell now. Around her neck was a fox stole, head intact, eye glittering at the photographer every time he glanced up.
Clementine appeared at last, processing into the room with two toddlers staggering behind. Her hair rose around her head in a cloud of static, as though she had acquired a halo while the photographer had been tinkering with his lens.
‘What’s your name, miss?’ he asked.
‘Clementine,’ she said.
‘Clementine. That’s pretty.’
‘Yes,’ she said tilting her head towards him. ‘From the song.’
Oh my darling.
Though no one ever sang to Clementine any more.
The photographer did the duty shots first. One baby after the other sitting on their mother’s knee – Ruby wriggling and squirming, Barbara all lumpen and frowns. When the photographer asked her to smile, Dorothea looked straight at the lens with a perplexed expression. ‘What’s my name?’ she said.
‘Madam?’
‘Mama!’ the baby on her lap called out and the woman dropped her head to the sound, hair tumbling over her face as the shutter clicked down.
After that they all went outside, the last rays of daylight shining through Clementine’s hair as though to set her on fire. A young queen pouting on the doorstep, small white skirt raised to the top of her thigh. Two small acolytes sitting in the middle of the road stuffing gravel into their mouths. An old queen swaying on the top step draped in a fox fur, as though she was in charge of the proceedings. Crazy, thought the photographer as he pressed down the shutter over and over. They’re all crazy. But still he went on.
Half an hour later, his own hair black with sweat, face as lined as the creases in his daughter’s frock, Alfred Walker returned to 14 Elm Row as though on a matter of urgent importance. Which, of course, he was.
‘Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!’ A small clamour rose from the street as he appeared. But Alfred didn’t respond. Instead he leapt up the front steps, passing his eldest in her coronation outfit as though she didn’t even exist. As he went by, he adjusted the fox stole on his wife’s shoulder, touching Dorothea’s bare skin with the tip of one finger. Then he disappeared into the narrow hallway and took the bare boards of the stairs two at a time, a faint trail of whisky follo
wing in his wake.
The photographer adjusted his lens and wondered whether he should continue. Until Clementine’s voice rose, thin but determined, into the silence. ‘Shall we go on?’
So they did.
Clementine posing on the doorstep.
Clementine pouting in the doorway.
Clementine lounging on the green chaise longue.
Crazy, the photographer thought again as he pressed down the shutter. They were all crazy. But still he couldn’t resist.
An hour on, and Alfred appeared again with a small bag in his hand. Dorothea was lying on the chaise longue once more, hair all across her shoulders. The children were upstairs getting changed into normal clothes. The photographer was packing up his case.
‘They’ll be ready in time for the ceremony next week,’ he said to Alfred. ‘Should be lovely.’
‘Sorry?’ Alfred seemed anxious. He kept looking at his watch.
‘The coronation.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Alfred.
‘You can pay me when I bring them round.’
‘Right.’ But Alfred wasn’t really listening. Instead he went and stood outside on the front step looking towards the end of the street.
The photographer sidled past him, pulling on his cap. ‘I’ll be off then.’
But it was Alfred who left first. ‘Just got to pop out,’ he said. ‘Can you mind them?’ And down the steps he went, out into the middle of the road, three children upstairs and a wife in the parlour with a dead fox around her neck.
The photographer stared after him. ‘What the . . .’ And made to follow.
Then a woman came walking, passing Alfred at the point in the road where later a bomb would fall, leaving a crater that took years to be filled. She gave a quick nod as she went by and Alfred dipped his head in response, but neither of them paused to speak. No one but the photographer seemed to notice her arrival: brown-suited, no-nonsense lace-ups, small suitcase at her side.
The Other Mrs Walker Page 7
