The Other Mrs Walker

by Mary Paulson-Ellis

  PART FOUR

  A Photograph

  CERTIFIED COPY OF AN ENTRY OF BIRTH

  LOCAL REGISTER OFFICE

  Application No. B 056112

  REGISTRATION DISTRICT: Kensington

  BIRTH IN THE SUBDISTRICT OF: Chelsea

  When & Where Born:

  12 June 1925, 14 Elm Row, London

  Name, if any: Clementine Amelia Walker

  Sex: Girl

  Name & Surname of Father: Alfred Walker

  Name, Surname & Maiden Name of Mother:

  Dorothea Walker née Stirling

  Occupation of Father: Works Manager

  Signature, Description & Residence of Informant:

  A. Walker, Father, 14 Elm Row, London

  When Registered: 18 June 1925

  Signature of Registrar: M. G. Ellison

  CERTIFIED to be a true copy of an entry in the certified copy of a Register of Births in the District above mentioned.

  CAUTION: THERE ARE OFFENCES RELATED TO FALSIFYING OR ALTERING A CERTIFICATE AND USING OR POSSESSING A FALSE CERTIFICATE © CROWN COPYRIGHT

  WARNING:

  A CERTIFICATE IS NOT EVIDENCE OF IDENTITY

  2011

  The funeral parlour belonged to Scotmid, the same organization that ran the supermarket where Barbara stocked up on her rum. Cheap. Family oriented. A member of your community from cradle to grave. No wonder Margaret’s search for a missing corpse had ended up here. This must be where they brought all the lost souls.

  She had phoned from London to give Janie the good news. A story to tell, at last. ‘Excellent,’ Janie had replied. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow then, with the paperwork.’

  Except . . .

  London was unauthorized. Margaret was still supposed to be in the north. She pressed the last of her pound coins into a slot in the phone box outside the Chelsea Old Town Hall. ‘What time do you want me?’ she said hoping for afternoon at least.

  ‘Ten a.m.,’ said Janie. ‘And bring Mrs Walker’s possessions.’

  ‘Her possessions?’

  ‘You’ll find them with the body. We’ve got her back, it seems.’

  Margaret came home on the last train north, sliding from one day into the next as it heaved and wheezed its way up the east coast. Most people slept throughout, squeezed into narrow bunks, but the remains of Margaret’s expenses wouldn’t stretch to that. Instead she rode north in a carriage that was empty except for herself and a brown folder laid out on a table, less slim now than it had been just a few days before.

  The sleeper was expensive, but Margaret knew now that sometimes that was how life’s little wrinkles worked themselves out. Besides, they opened the buffet car after Newcastle and she feasted on smoky bacon crisps once again. Life had a funny kind of circular motion to it that Margaret was just beginning to enjoy.

  ‘We collected her three days ago.’ The director of the funeral parlour was a mild man who wore a dark suit and an expression more akin to a helper at a children’s party than a person who buried the dead. ‘Didn’t realize anything was wrong until we consulted the paperwork. Not complete, you know. No date of birth.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Margaret. But not for long, she thought.

  ‘Instant dismissal if we hold a funeral for the wrong person.’ The funeral director held out a business card that declared he was also a community relations officer. ‘Used to work in finance,’ he said. ‘Got out long ago.’

  Margaret wished then that she had got out long ago too. Well before the disaster of a man with hair the colour of slate in the rain. Or two children in crumpled Technicolor that should have been hers but weren’t. Before bailiffs and solicitors’ letters. Before a rag soaked in turpentine dropped through a letter box, followed by a match. Not to mention twelve dusty pills on a cold kitchen floor and a bottle of cheap wine gone sour.

  At the very least she might have had a better outfit. The director cum community officer wore his well – black but with the faintest stripe of charcoal, a tie dip-dyed claret. Though Margaret thought she could go one better. For she had a dead fox hidden beneath her coat.

  Mrs Walker was in the basement being rinsed clean. Down a narrow stairway, past several empty coffins propped up against a wall. In the middle of the room was a long table covered by a cloth. Beneath the cloth was a body.

  Mrs Clementine Walker at last.

  Margaret’s client turned out to be as slight as a wren, all tiny bones and not much else, just as Dr Atkinson had said. It was as though somewhere along the line of her life she had drunk all the medicine and shrunk, nothing left but a shadow of herself. No wonder she had been so easy to miss.

  ‘I’ll leave you alone then.’ The funeral director was already heading back up the stairs. ‘Michaela will look after you. She’s our expert when it comes to being prepared.’

  Michaela was young. In her twenties perhaps, maybe thirty. ‘Call me Micky,’ she said to Margaret. ‘Everyone does.’ Smothered from head to foot in a gigantic apron, hands sheathed in a pair of latex gloves. ‘I’m glad someone’s come to help. I was beginning to wonder if anyone was going to claim her.’ Micky adjusted some silvered tubing where it emerged from beneath Mrs Walker’s sheet, liquid running like mercury through the dead woman’s vital organs, blood siphoned off, all the rest flushed clean.

  Margaret was unnerved, as though her client might be washed away again before she’d had a chance to close the case for good. She held up her brown folder. ‘I’m just here to collect her possessions.’ Though even Margaret knew by then there was more to it than that.

  ‘It’s always good to get some advice, though.’ Micky picked up a large make-up brush.

  ‘I can try, I suppose.’ Margaret had never considered a career as an embalmer, even though up until this moment her own life had been about as embalmed as one could get without actually being deceased.

  ‘I need to know what she might like,’ Micky said. ‘Hair and make-up, that sort of thing. Wouldn’t want to send her off painted the wrong colour.’

  Mrs Walker’s hair was dyed, just as Pati had said. White at the roots and a sort of self-concocted fiery orange at the tips. Margaret could see that it was in dire need of retouching and she was sorry, all of a sudden, that her client hadn’t been able to hold on long enough for that. ‘Can you do something about her hair?’ she said.

  Micky had combed Mrs Walker’s hair straight back from the forehead, and despite her slightness (or perhaps because of it), the new hairstyle suited Margaret’s client. It made her seem rather like a graceful reposing queen, nothing but the faintest hint of violet on her eyelids and a small mouth rubbed pale until it almost wasn’t there. It was rather like looking at the china cherub, just without the shorn-off limb.

  ‘Do you mean dye it?’ Micky asked.

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘We wouldn’t normally.’ Micky put a hand to Mrs Walker’s brow and stroked the dead woman’s hair back from the crown of her head to the tips. ‘But perhaps we could for her.’

  Mrs Walker’s skin was like the cherub’s too, a translucent quality that Margaret now realized was common in the dead. She reached into her bag and pulled out an old-fashioned powder compact worn down to its last few crumbs. ‘I think she’d like this for her face.’ Mrs Walker might be pickled inside, but Margaret knew what she would prefer on her cheeks. ‘And lipstick too,’ she said.

  Micky produced a folder and wrote on the outside, Mrs Walker, deceased. ‘Colour?’ she said.

  ‘Scarlet,’ Margaret replied.

  Micky started to make notes in flowing, curling script. ‘And what do you think she might like to wear?’ she said. ‘We’ve got the clothes she was found in.’ She pointed with her pen to the only belongings Mrs Walker seemed to have left: a skirt made of tweed; a patterned synthetic blouse; tights all wrinkled around the knees and ankles; and, perched on top, a pair of scuffed brown lace-ups, size five like a schoolgirl’s, as though Mrs Walker had never quite grown up.

  Both women looked at
the pile of raggedy clothes, then at the fragile corpse. Just like Margaret, Mrs Walker appeared to have dressed herself out of somebody else’s wardrobe. A kind of bag lady, perhaps, rummaging through other people’s stuff to make a living, pushing a shopping trolley of jumble-sale finds around expensive streets. That would explain the lack of any useful sort of stuff. Pension books and bank statements, rent receipts or letters from a cousin or a niece. Margaret’s heart gave a small leap. Was this how she would end too if she decided to head back to the south? Drifting from borough to borough with nothing but a small blue holdall and a pair of inappropriate (now ruined) shoes?

  Micky frowned at where Mrs Walker lay becalmed beneath her cloth. ‘We could put her in a shroud, of course.’

  Scrubbed clean, white as the freshly fallen snow outside.

  ‘But perhaps you know of something better?’

  And Margaret knew at once that she did.

  Micky touched the sheet about where Mrs Walker’s ankle might be. ‘I also encourage people to put something into the coffin with the deceased. A memento of sorts.’

  A dusty nut, perhaps. An orange on a plate. Or maybe just some scraps of paper scattered over the corpse. Moyra Walker. Mary Walker. Ann. All the children Mrs Walker longed for, perhaps, but never had.

  ‘Mobile phones are a favourite.’

  ‘Mobile phones?’ Margaret couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to be buried with their mobile phone. Wasn’t the point of death that you finally left all that behind?

  Micky laughed. ‘The relatives want it. Sometimes the deceased. In case they aren’t really dead.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be too late by then?’ Margaret said.

  ‘Yes, but death isn’t rational, is it? We get all sorts in here.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Margaret, ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Do you know where she came from?’ Micky was ticking off boxes on her form.

  ‘London originally. Who knows, after that?’

  ‘London,’ beamed Micky. ‘Now there’s a place.’ Which was one way of putting it. She tweaked the silver tubes again, the last of Mrs Walker dripping through into a great plastic vessel beneath. ‘Do you come from London?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Margaret. ‘Well, sort of. How about you?’

  ‘Me? No.’ Micky looked up and smiled. ‘Ireland,’ she said. ‘Celtic Tiger before it lost its roar. Can’t you tell?’

  And then, of course, Margaret could.

  ‘I might try my luck in London,’ Micky said. ‘I’m sort of filling in time here, if you know what I mean. Waiting for the client who appears with money strapped beneath their clothes along with a note saying, “For the embalmer”.’ She laughed then, a lark surfing an Irish breeze.

  ‘Do you get that often?’

  ‘Money? Occasionally. But never the note.’ Micky laughed again. ‘It’s usually jewellery stitched into hems.’

  Bibles and paybooks for the husbands. Jewellery for the wives. Margaret glanced over at the neat pile of Mrs Walker’s clothes. Perhaps there was a fortune sewn into the waistband of her client’s jumble-sale skirt. One thousand fifty-pound notes folded concertina-style and secured forever by a needle and thread. Or failing that, a brooch.

  Micky laughed again, as though she knew exactly what Margaret was thinking (which, of course, she did). ‘There’s none. I’ve checked. But you can look if you like. Wouldn’t want to burn up someone’s inheritance before they’d even had a chance to read the will.’

  Margaret went over to the pile of clothes and lifted them one by one, just to be sure, a fumble at the hems and the cuffs, all her fingers deep in Mrs Walker’s weft and weave. But Micky was right. There was nothing there that should not be, other than the absence of anything significant at all.

  Micky put down her file, all the boxes ticked now. ‘We’ll wait for you to sort out the details with Janie before we get her prepared. Is there anything else I can help you with?’

  ‘This,’ said Margaret, picking up a piece of newsprint from beneath Mrs Walker’s pile of clothes. Her client’s one remaining possession, such as it was. ‘May I take it?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Janie. ‘What’s hers is yours now.’

  At the Office for Lost People (deceased), Margaret began with a brown folder full of paper and ended with a story about children (long dead), mothers (mad) and a woman who was born, then lost, then born again beneath an embalmer’s sheet in Leith. She laid out all the treasure she had accumulated across Janie’s desk in the hope that an invoice for services rendered would be issued in swift response.

  A jeweller’s receipt.

  An admissions form.

  A certificate for death.

  A certificate for marriage.

  And another one for birth.

  ‘The crematorium will be pleased,’ said Janie, tapping at those neat teeth with her biro as she surveyed everything that Margaret had brought. ‘It’s about time Mrs Walker was moved off their pending list.’

  ‘Dorothea and Alfred,’ said Margaret. ‘Two dead twins.’

  Janie shuffled some papers on her desk. ‘Clementine, you say?’

  ‘Yes. Clementine Amelia Walker, born 1925. I have her birth certificate here.’

  ‘Excellent.’ Janie looked into her computer screen and pressed a few buttons on her keyboard. ‘It’s paperwork that matters, in the end.’ She started flicking through the forms, all the is dotted, all the ts crossed, barely glancing at the other odd objects Margaret had brought along.

  A twist of orange peel.

  Some paper scraps.

  An envelope with three small clippings of hair.

  Forms were Janie’s métier. The rest was just rumour and speculation, nothing but anonymous stuff to hold in the hand. When she came to the certificates from Chelsea she frowned at them for a moment while Margaret held her breath. ‘Everything seems to have arrived very quickly. Normally it takes a week or so for official documents to get here, unless you go in person, of course.’

  ‘Oh.’ Heat flashed up beneath Margaret’s coat. She could feel her face shining like a beacon pointing directly towards an unauthorized trip to London undertaken with some defrauded expenses cash.

  ‘You must have special powers of persuasion for them to have sent the certificates so soon.’

  Margaret swallowed. ‘I told them it was an emergency. High death count in Edinburgh needing to be cleared.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Janie. ‘Right.’ And she flushed too, a delicate shade to match her jumper.

  Margaret’s heart lay down again after that. Her lie hadn’t been a lie at all, just a rearrangement of the truth.

  ‘She was known as “Mrs”, wasn’t she?’ Janie was staring at her computer monitor again, adding words to a form. ‘But you’re saying she never married.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Margaret. ‘No. I mean, not as far as I can tell.’

  ‘Well . . .’ Janie added the title ‘Miss’, before the word ‘Clementine’. ‘All sorts of women pretend to be married. Even in this day and age.’

  Margaret nodded. It was the Edinburgh Way.

  ‘1925 makes her a bit older than we might have thought. Perhaps the cold preserved her.’

  Black lungs. Liver like paste. Not to speak of the holes in Mrs Walker’s bones and her brain. Margaret wasn’t sure it was the cold so much as the whisky that had kept her client pickled for so long.

  Either way, Janie tapped the precious d.o.b. into her computer screen. ‘You’re certain it’s her, not some mix-up.’ Janie obviously liked to double-check, in case somebody double-checked her.

  ‘Well, there is the jeweller’s receipt.’

  Janie rummaged in the folder for the crumpled piece of paper still giving off the faintest scent of cloves. ‘How does that fit with the subsequent identification?’

  ‘Clementine Walker was their client.’

  Rose & Sons, jewellers of distinction, visited before a foray into a long-abandoned admission box. A shop door that opened with the ding of an old-fashioned bell.
A smart young woman who appeared from somewhere down in the depths. A firm that was still in the same family even after fifty years. Magic, Margaret had thought then. Happens more often than you think.

  ‘Yes,’ the young woman had said when Margaret enquired. ‘We do keep records. Even some from as long ago as this. If you’ll just give me a minute.’

  And a minute was all that it had taken before the confirmation came back. ‘Walker, Miss. Initial C.,’ and the same phone number that had already summoned Margaret on the flying visit south. Her client was her client. No doubt left.

  ‘There’s this too, of course,’ Margaret said to Janie, indicating the piece of newsprint once wrapped beneath Mrs Walker’s clothes.

  ‘What’s this?’ said Janie, with a slight wrinkle of her neat little nose.

  Not Births, Marriages and Deaths, but a Bible verse. Margaret pointed to the box all bordered with black. ‘Suffer little children . . . Matthew 19, verses 14 to 16,’ she said.

  ‘And?’ Janie poked at the news-sheet. She didn’t seem quite as convinced as Margaret that its everyday exhortation to do good provided the final proof that Clementine Walker was indeed the corpse reposing down in Leith.

  ‘The Ten Commandments,’ Margaret said. ‘That’s what the rest of the verse is. Murder and adultery. Loving thy neighbour as thyself. Not to mention stealing, of course.’

  ‘But what’s that got to do with Mrs Walker?’ There was the tiniest hint of irritation in Janie’s voice now.

  ‘It’s written on the Brazil nut.’

  ‘The Brazil nut?’

  And the dusty nut retrieved from the back of a drawer came into its own.

  ‘Can you see?’ The smart young woman at Rose & Sons, jewellers of distinction, had beckoned to Margaret when she’d asked. ‘It’s the Ten Commandments.’ And she had laughed, eyeglass held up to her face. ‘Thou shalt not.’

  Margaret had been amazed at how the indecipherable scratches suddenly took on their proper life when she peered through the eyeglass too. Thou shalt do no murder. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness. Honour thy father and thy mother. Love thy neighbour as thyself. Barbara Penny’s Ten Commandments, etched into Mrs Walker’s nut.