‘Of course, I could do it,’ Mrs Penny said, placing a knife down on her empty scone plate. She rearranged the cosy on top of Dorothea’s teapot. ‘I have someone who could help with the paperwork. Nye & Sons, solicitors. But I might need your help too.’ She folded her napkin and laid it by her plate. ‘With the official side of things.’
Mrs Jones cleared her throat again and got in before anyone else could interrupt. ‘How generous of you, Mrs Penny,’ she said. ‘An excellent idea. I’m sure we will all help in any way we can.’ She looked around the circle of Elm Row ladies and invited them to disagree. For a moment there was silence. Then the circle of women began to murmur. ‘Of course.’ ‘What a good idea.’ ‘How kind.’ ‘Just the thing.’ A small rustle of assent running around the circle like a summer breeze. It came to rest on Mrs Penny as she lifted Dorothea’s teapot once again. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Now that’s sorted, would anyone like some more?’
When it was time to go, Mrs Penny helped them with their coats.
‘How good of you to come.’
With their gloves, where necessary.
‘Anything I can do, just ask.’
Saw them off down the steps.
Goodbye, Mrs Jones.
Goodbye, Mrs Nolan.
Goodbye, Mrs Quinn.
‘Got to pull together,’ she called out as she waved them all away. ‘During these unpredictable times.’ Then she shut the door behind them and wiped her hands together, swish-swash. All hers now. Well, almost. Just one last thing.
The worst came to the worst for Dorothea the following Friday night. Not bombs, but a whole other commotion. Men shouting. A woman shrieking. The phoney war over, the real war begun.
Barbara sat up in bed and howled, ‘Ruby! Ruby! Ruby!’
Ruby sat up in bed and howled, ‘Clemmie! Clemmie! Clemmie!’
Clementine stood on the top-floor landing and howled, ‘Mummy! Mummy! Mummy!’
Until Mrs Penny came upstairs and said, ‘Be quiet, all of you!’
Dorothea howled too as they carried her out, flat in their arms, nightdress dragging in the dust. ‘Like a dog,’ Mrs Penny said later. ‘Like the wild animal that she was.’
‘Shh,’ said Tony from his seat by the stove. ‘Little pitchers have big ears.’
‘Little pitchers need water.’ That was what Mrs Penny said. ‘And somebody’s got to pay.’
The next day the sisters gathered in the kitchen wearing their outdoor coats, as though they might be going somewhere too. ‘Take off those ridiculous labels,’ Mrs Penny said. ‘You’re not going anywhere. Too much work to do here.’
Clementine looked as though she might cry. ‘But what about the evacuation?’
‘I’ll evacuate you, young lady, if you don’t do as you’re told.’
Ruby went upstairs chanting, ‘Bomb! Bomb! Bomb!’, a small handful of stolen peel sticky in her palm. Clementine went upstairs to frown at the pile of clothes neatly folded on the chair by her bed. Barbara went upstairs to play with her little tin pig. She’d been looking forward to a farm. Big cows. Smelly pigs. Girls with thick arms (as hers would one day turn out to be). But life, as she was to discover, didn’t always go her way.
Later they all stood around the kitchen table where Mrs Penny had laid out a special tea – bread and butter sprinkled with hundreds and thousands, all the colours of the rainbow bleeding into the fat. At each of their places, alongside their teacups, was a little angel cake, vanilla sponge crowned with a butter-icing swirl. They all stared at the cakes. Then they stared at Mrs Penny. It was Clementine who spoke first.
‘Where is Mummy?’
Tony cleared his throat and dug at the inside of his pipe. Mrs Penny wiped her hands on Dorothea’s apron. ‘Now sit down, girls, I’ve got something to tell you.’ She pulled the teapot towards her. ‘Your mother . . .’ she declared, ‘has departed.’
Goodbye, Alfred.
Goodbye, Dorothea.
‘I will be your mother now.’
Hello, Mrs Penny. Came in as housekeeper. Went out as owner of it all.
Except . . .
A memory floating upwards in the night: an angel hovering in the doorway as Barbara watched from her bed, small eyes round like boot buttons in the darkness, gazing at the glint of metal in the angel’s hand.
‘Say my name,’ the angel murmured as she bent to stroke Barbara’s mousy tangle of hair.
‘Barbara Penny,’ said Barbara, hoping she had got the answer right, the cold touch of a blade against the warmth of her neck.
But the angel didn’t reply, just drifted to the other side of the bed where Ruby lay still, hot breath panting, sharp silver blade slipped behind her ear too.
Then the angel was gone, a haze of light vanishing into the shadows, nothing but a dream. Until the next morning, when all three girls woke a little more light-headed, a little more lopsided, than they had been the day before.
2011
Maggots in the plugholes. Flies in the sink. Mouse droppings scattered over every surface. And a fridge full of rotting food. That was what Margaret had been expecting when she finally arrived at the scene of the crime. But that wasn’t what she got. No police tape or fingerprint dust. No sign of forced entry. No need for a coverall suit to match her new, coverall life. Not even any latex gloves or those plastic things to stretch over her inappropriate shoes. Just a few scratches around the keyhole and a cold, empty flat on the outskirts of it all.
‘Where should I go now?’ she had asked, back at the Office for Lost People after the disaster of a missing corpse.
‘You could try Mrs Walker’s flat,’ Janie said. ‘Who knows what that might reveal?’
‘Is there something in particular I should look for?’ Margaret wasn’t keen on going over a dead person’s leftovers, particularly ones that had been hanging around for more than a month.
‘Oh, the usual.’ Janie waved a vague hand. ‘Utility bill, NHS card. Anything that’s relevant is good.’
‘What’s relevant?’ But Margaret had known the answer to that already. Passbook, bank statement, cash. It all came back to money in the end.
‘Correspondence is useful too,’ Janie continued. ‘Might help us track down a relative.’
‘Haven’t the police done that already?’
‘Usually, within the city boundary, they do. They’re brilliant in Edinburgh.’ Janie smiled suddenly, sun rising in her face. (Married to a policeman, perhaps.) ‘But Mrs Walker was right on the periphery. In a grey area, so to speak.’
Margaret nodded. She had quite a few grey areas in her own life right now. Only that morning her mother had asked how long she intended to stay. And Margaret had not been able to tell whether Barbara wanted to keep her, or to move her on.
From the depths of her office drawer, Janie dug out her latest offering. Label 1 – Yale type. The key to Flat Two, 47 Nilstrum Street. Mrs Walker’s last-known abode before she checked out.
Janie handed the key over, continuing, ‘The police aren’t so good on the outskirts. Get sidetracked by other, more important things. Breaking and entering. That kind of stuff.’
‘Oh,’ said Margaret. For what could be more important than death? The End of Everything. Unless of course it wasn’t suspicious, in which case it was just something that happened every day.
‘They write up the sudden death report and leave someone else to do the legwork. Usually it goes straight to the crematorium via the Procurator Fiscal, but this one seems to have slipped through the net.’
By the time Margaret inserted Mrs Walker’s key into the lock at Flat Two, 47 Nilstrum Street she felt as though she had slipped through the net too, out onto the periphery of it all, surfing the landscape of the dead. It had taken her two buses to get to her client’s last dwelling place, slipping from one onto another in an attempt to lose the black car that appeared to be following, heart beating fast at the thought that what she had attempted in London might have finally caught up with her in the north. Only to end up in a stree
t as bleak as Margaret might have expected for an old lady abandoned at the very end of her life. Dark tenements, dirty windows, a flurry of To Let signs and a row of small, decrepit shops – a baker, a Costcutter and an off-licence where you had to point to what you wanted through a wall of specially reinforced glass. It was just like the Edinburgh of Margaret’s childhood. Unreformed.
She knew already that Flat Two was a rental – short term, all-inclusive, cash payment, no questions asked. Somehow Margaret already suspected that, just like her, Mrs Walker had appeared from somewhere else. The rent had been paid for three months only, although (as it turned out) Mrs Walker hadn’t even needed that. Perhaps the Walker estate was due a refund. Enough for a wreath. Or a shiny coffin. But then again, there was the sanitation bill to consider. Somebody had to clean up after a corpse.
Unfortunately for Margaret, just as Dr Atkinson had pronounced, the corpse on the trolley in the Mortuary Viewing Area had not been Mrs Walker, but a man named Thomas Macleod. Nor had Margaret’s client been waiting outside in the holding bay to be wheeled in next. She wasn’t in either of the post-mortem suites, nor back in rack twenty-one of the fridge.
In fact, Mrs Walker hadn’t been in any of the six fridges that loomed large at the back of the Transfer Area, where the technicians and the mortuary manager gathered in a tight huddle to confer. Margaret had waited as they pulled the cadavers from the shelves one by one, then slid them back one by one too – the bodies of Edinburgh stacked and racked, backed up already, even though it was still only the beginning of the year. Every single fridge shelf had been fully occupied; just not by the dead person Margaret was now responsible for.
After an hour of searching Margaret had phoned Janie from the mortuary office.
‘Margaret. How’s it going?’ Janie sounded efficient. ‘Found anything yet?’
‘Er, no. In fact . . .’ (How did one put it?) ‘Mrs Walker seems to have escaped.’
It was Dr Atkinson who had given Margaret a consolation present, of sorts. Not a corpse, but paperwork. A copy of the post-mortem results, as promised. Natural causes, done for by age and disease, high levels of alcohol and tar. And stapled to that, a photocopy of the sheet of newspaper Mrs Walker had been wearing around her middle when she breathed her last.
The news-sheet was an account of Births, Marriages and Deaths some time in late November, five columns of neat prose detailing a series of lives once lived, now gone for good, in amongst others that had only just begun. Beneath the announcements was a small box bordered in black. This Morning. Followed by a line of scripture in miniature text: Suffer little children to come unto me . . . The Episcopals, the Catholics, the Evangelicals or the Friends, spreading their wares in the face of the lost. The rest of the verse had been cut off by the mortuary photocopying machine. Margaret squinted at the tiny block of prose. ‘Where’s the original?’
‘With the body, I’m afraid.’ Dr Atkinson ushered Margaret and her paperwork towards the door. ‘We like to keep everything together. They can’t have gone far, though.’ The pathologist seemed remarkably sanguine about the loss of Mrs Walker. ‘She is dead, after all.’
In the hall of Mrs Walker’s flat a single light bulb shrouded in dust hung above Margaret like a resident ghost. It was bone-chillingly cold. Cold enough for Mrs Walker to have frozen to death, cryogenically preserved within twenty-four hours of taking her final gasp.
Four doors, half open as though someone had just left, led off the hall to four rooms – kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and the living room where Mrs Walker had been found. Margaret knew the layout without needing a plan. It was exactly the kind of dingy Edinburgh rental accommodation that she and her mother used to inhabit when Margaret was a girl. ‘Dirty!’ Barbara would declare when they first arrived at each new dwelling, standing in the middle of yet another empty hallway, brown suitcase in hand. But despite a million buckets of Flash, or the yellow squirt of Jif around yet another stained old bath, each flat still contained a thin layer of melancholy, coating everything they touched.
It had taken Margaret a long time to realize that the melancholy didn’t come with the flat. It travelled with her. Clinging to her coat sleeves and secreting itself inside her own small bag (three pairs school socks, school skirt, grey jumper and a lucky coronation penny she had stolen from her mother’s bedside drawer because . . . well . . . she turned out to be good at that). It was only when Margaret fled to London and never looked back that she discovered the melancholy didn’t belong to her either. It belonged to her mother instead.
Mrs Walker’s hall didn’t contain a sense of melancholy so much as the absent air of the dead. Once here, now gone, nothing left behind but junk – a whole heap of it swept up into a rough pile behind the front door. Menus for Chinese takeaway, thick-crust pizza and a cascade from a local supermarket advertising festive deals on turkey, even though Mrs Walker had probably already been dead by the time Christmas came and went.
Margaret sifted through the pile, remembering Janie’s instruction about correspondence and her mother’s observation about the value of junk. There were a few envelopes in amongst the rest, one or two of them opened, others with heavy tread marks on the outside. Size eleven. Police issue. None of them was marked for a Mrs Walker. None of them was marked for a real person at all.
Margaret followed a trail of cold cigarette ash into the bathroom, where small sprays of ice were growing like ferns on the inside of the already frosted glass. The bath was an old cast-iron type, little green valleys carved into the enamel beneath the permanent drip-drip of the taps. It looked as though it hadn’t been used for years, judging by the small collection of corpses gathered in its depths. Jenny-long-legs, some tiny flying creatures and a couple of spiders, their many limbs curled up.
Above the basin, propped on a grimy shelf, was a mirror all spotted and silvered, and next to that a lipstick worn to a small greasy stub. Margaret was surprised by the tiny scarlet indent left at the bottom of the tube. Barbara’s lipstick had always been brown.
Beside the lipstick was a powder compact complete with old-fashioned puff. The powder was worn down to almost nothing. Margaret held it to her nose and a sudden memory of Barbara rose up, coat buttoned to her neck, bending to brush Margaret’s cheek with her own powdered face as though she were an acquaintance rather than her own child. ‘Be good when I’m at work.’ Then the quiet snip of the front door as it fell to, and Margaret left behind with nothing but a list of rules.
Don’t peek.
Don’t pry.
Don’t poke your nose in where you ought not.
Though that had never stopped Margaret digging into things which, even then, she knew she should not.
Mrs Walker’s kitchen was bleak too, not bleach and wipe-clean roller blinds like at The Court, but the stale remains of a thousand cigarettes lurking in every corner. There was a table shoved into a recess and a built-in dresser lumpy with too many coats of gloss. The only source of heating appeared to be an ancient gas fire, burners all stained. Margaret tried the ignition switch, but as with the electricity, gas appeared to be something that was no longer included in the rent.
A single teaspoon with a spindle of a handle lay abandoned on one of the kitchen surfaces, stranded in a dried-up puddle of what must have once been tea. The spoon was silver, now tarnished, its surface a dark oily blue. Margaret rubbed a thumb across the tiny figure soldered to one end. St Jude, patron of lost causes. Or something like that. An apostle spoon, left behind to say its silent prayers for the dead. Margaret dropped the spoon back into the cutlery drawer along with all the other odd forks and knives. Tidying up was the least she could do now that Mrs Walker was no longer here to tidy for herself.
The only food Margaret could find was two tins of condensed milk in a cupboard and half a tin of peas in the fridge. It reminded her of Barbara’s kitchen when she’d first arrived at New Year. Nothing but a cupboard lined with soup and an onion sprouting a green shoot. So, once the light had fallen away from the
sky, Margaret had gone out and bought chips, hurrying home across icy pavements in her inappropriate shoes. It had been their first supper together in more years than Margaret had wanted to count, salt and the vinegary taste of sauce, eaten from their laps as though Margaret was still a child.
In the narrow scullery attached to Mrs Walker’s kitchen another trail of cigarette ash dribbled across the floor to the window, where an old stub had been ground into the bare boards. Margaret stared down at the ghost of red on the filter. A fall of dust had settled along the window ledge like a first sift of grey snow. Margaret lifted the corner of the old net curtain and stood listening, uncertain. Voices, faint but distinct, rising from somewhere. The sound of children playing, high in the sharp frosty air.
In the living room a single armchair sat facing an empty grate. There was no sign of a fire any time in the last century, or anything on the mantelpiece but another small ridge of dust. The cover of the chair was greasy, pattern rubbed away at the top. Margaret tried to imagine a dead body resting within its confines. This was where Mrs Walker had breathed her last, after all, blood pooling in her wrists and ankles, a rattling in the back of her throat.
According to the police report there had been a glass tumbler on the floor beside the armchair, but Margaret couldn’t see one now. She considered kneeling down on the filthy carpet to check. But she couldn’t help thinking about her hands getting sticky with the long-accumulated debris of a human life – hair and cigarette ash, old skin and other bodily secretions which she didn’t want to contemplate. Margaret had only been inside the flat for ten minutes and already she felt dusty all over, the cuffs of her mother’s elongated cardigan picking up stray hairs and God knows what else where they stuck out from beneath her coat. Besides, Janie had been adamant. Margaret was here for paperwork, nothing more.
The Other Mrs Walker Page 9
