Human Remains

by Elizabeth Haynes

  I got home and cleaned the kitchen and bathroom, put in a load of laundry and ironed my work shirts while watching the news.

  I’ll have to plan my weekend carefully, with so much to fit in. Vaughn’s dinner party, diverting as it sounds, is the least of my priorities at the moment.

  BRIARSTONE CHRONICLE SEPTEMBER

  Briarstone Man Found Dead in Flat

  The badly decomposed body of a man in his 50s was found by city workers at a block of flats in Briarstone yesterday.

  The housing officers called at the flat in North Lane after several official letters and phone calls had gone unanswered it was revealed. “The body was discovered sitting upright in the living area and the television was still on,” a government spokesperson said.

  The man is believed to be Robin Downley, unemployed. Neighbors had not seen Mr. Downley for some time. One woman who did not wish to be named told us: “I kept calling the city about the smell. I must have called 30 times and they never stopped by.”

  Robin

  My wife left me, and that was the beginning of the end of my life.

  I remember I was at home with the kids on a Sunday afternoon, doing the dishes, when the doorbell rang. It was Elaine, my wife’s best friend. She had tears in her eyes. I invited her in and bumbled about making a cup of tea while she sat in the living room and sobbed unself-consciously, making a hideous racket. Fortunately the kids were upstairs also making a hideous racket so they were none the wiser.

  “Where’s Beverley?” Elaine said to me when at last she could speak. I assumed she just wanted her best friend’s shoulder to cry on, not mine.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “She went out.” We weren’t the sort of couple who spent every minute together. We had our own lives, our own hobbies, our own friends. It made the time we did spend together more exciting, more precious. Or so I thought.

  The doorbell rang again just then, and I remember feeling terrible, as if the world had suddenly shifted on its axis and I hadn’t realized, as if something were wrong in the most fundamental way possible and I was the last one to know. On the doorstep was Beverley, with Mike, Elaine’s husband.

  They were holding hands.

  I stood aside to let them in and they went into the living room where Elaine was sitting, presumably already somehow aware of the bombshell they were about to drop into all of our lives. They were surprisingly calm, rational, and emotionless as they delivered the news. They had been carrying on the affair for the past five months, and they were no longer prepared to continue to lie to everyone. Beverley told me she didn’t love me anymore. She loved Mike and she wanted us to get a divorce so that they could get married.

  At the time I took it all so well. I think if it had just been Bev and me having the discussion I might have ranted, thrown something, certainly raised my voice a little. But here we were, the four of us, having this civil discussion downstairs while upstairs our children played some game that involved a lot of banging and crashing and pounding of feet on the landing between the bedrooms.

  They got their way, of course. There was nothing I could do to stop it, and, besides, after the initial hysteria Elaine seemed to get used to the idea and then she was fine with it. How could I kick up a fuss when she was being so reasonable?

  In the days and weeks that followed, though, I found myself at the start of a downward spiral. I moved out into a rented flat, leaving Bev and the kids in the house while it was sold. But it was the wrong time to try to sell a four-bedroom house, and it stayed on the market for month after month, while I paid the mortgage and the rent on the flat and money to Bev for child support.

  Alone in my miserable little one-bedroom flat, trying to make sense of what I’d done wrong—why it was me being punished when I wasn’t the one who’d had the affair, who’d demanded a divorce—I started drinking every night and then eventually in the morning when I woke up, too.

  I lost my job the following November, on the day when I came into work still partly drunk from the day before and even drunker because I’d had to have a bottle of strong cider before I could face the day.

  Bev helped me out a bit. She was a good girl really, kind, one of the reasons why I married her in the first place. I think she felt guilty over the way things had ended. She told me I didn’t have to pay for the kids for a while, until I got things sorted out, and as it turned out I didn’t have to pay for the big mortgage anymore since Mike and Elaine had sold their house, and he’d moved in with Bev and the kids.

  I got a bit of money from Social Security, and that went to the rent for the flat. The little bit that I kept back from that, I tried to spend on food, and bills, and presents for the kids on Christmas and birthdays. But more often than not I’d go to the corner store and buy a couple of bottles, just to keep me warm.

  This was where I ended up, two years after the moment it all started, with me in blissful ignorance doing the dishes on a Sunday afternoon while my kids played upstairs and my wife was who knew where doing who knew what.

  You never realize what loneliness is until it creeps up on you—like a disease, it is, something that happens to you gradually. And of course the alcohol doesn’t help: you drink it to forget about how shitty it is living like that, and then when you stop drinking everything looks a hell of a lot worse. So you keep drinking to try and blot it all out.

  I always thought if there were someone I could have talked to, someone who’d really listen—not the doctor, who was always in a hurry to get me out of the surgery because I smelled of booze and worse, not the people at the day center who heard stories like this all the time, every day. Besides, there are a lot worse tales to tell than mine.

  There was nobody like that, of course. And if there had been, if some random person had come up to me in the street and said, “How are you?” and meant it, what would I even have said to them? Where would I have begun?

  Sometimes I used to play a little game when I was outside, just to see if I could catch someone’s eye, to see if I could get them to look at me, even just for a minute. And you know what? Nobody looks you in the eye. And I realized it had been years and years since anyone made eye contact with me, and the last person was probably Bev. So what did that mean? What does it even mean? If people stop looking at you, do you cease to exist? Does it mean you’re not a person anymore? Does it mean you’re already dead?

  Annabel

  I knew it was unusual to believe in angels.

  I didn’t talk about it at work because of course it would become some huge office joke. My colleagues dealt with horrific crime every day of the week, and the only way they coped was to joke around wherever and whenever they possibly could. They laughed about each other and they all took it, quite happily. Often they made fun of us, the analysts. Kate didn’t mind it at all, of course, but then she had so much confidence in her own skin that you could tell her she was a butt-ugly nobody and she’d give you a grin and a wink and reply with something like, “Sure thing, gorgeous.”

  I knew I was too sensitive. I tried not to be. I tried to put on this brave, jolly face and deflect the worst of the jokes about my weight, or my lack of a social life, by getting in there first. I think they sensed that there was a line there that couldn’t be crossed.

  That was why I didn’t tell them about the angels. How they were real, holy, beautiful, and around us all the time. I would feel them when I was sad—a rainbow, a feather, a breath of a breeze against my skin. I talked to them and listened for whatever they might say to me. I tried to act in a way that made them happy.

  But at the moment I wasn’t happy. I thought constantly about Shelley Burton and all the other ones, those people, those poor people, alone in their houses at the moment of death, waiting to be welcomed home by the angels and yet on earth, knowing that they would lie there and rot, unloved, untended, unrespected. The thought of it made me feel ill and ashamed. I wondered if they had really known what they were doing, or if life had treated them so badly that the need to die h
ad become a greater force than the horrible prospect of what might happen to them afterward.

  Today three members of the Tac Team were in for a meeting with Intel, and they were all having a good old laugh about my sudden fascination with rotting corpses. Oh, ha-ha, very funny, Annabel the fat old frump has a fetish for fetid meat. Who’d have thought it? Kate was joining in and having a laugh. Well, to be fair, even I was laughing, but what else could I do—burst into tears? They didn’t really mean it disrespectfully, even though any outsider would have been horrified at some of the things they were saying. It was just their way of coping with the things they had to see and deal with. Meanwhile I had my hand in my pocket, my fingers feeling the solid shape of the crystal angel I carried all the time, trusting, hoping for some peace from it all. Hoping that I could do my job properly and persuade someone to look into it, this alarming pattern of unloved and unwanted people.

  Hoping that I could make it stop.

  But they didn’t seem interested. I replied to Frosty’s e-mail in the end, and copied in the DCI from Major Crime, Bill, and even Media Services (why not, after all?). I suggested that this was a very worrying trend and that even if there were no actual crime, it was a symptom of the dysfunctional communities that we were supposed to be trying to repair. The DCI deleted the e-mail without opening it. Media Services opened it, and then deleted it. Bill didn’t even open his.

  Bill was the senior analyst. Thanks to the last round of cutbacks we had to share him with the East Division, where he’d always been the one in charge. Although he claimed to be “always on the end of the phone if need be,” we’d only seen him once or twice in the six months since he’d been our senior. It was supposed to be a sign of our self-sufficiency that we were left to continue with things the same way we always had—but in truth he liked the easy life, and traveling the twenty miles or so to a town center police station where he wouldn’t be able to park was a bit beyond him.

  Until Thursday I didn’t have a chance to work on them, the bodies. I had other work to do, a profile on another sex offender, this one about to be released after a long sentence. It was all about managing risk. I looked at his offending history, the places he’d lived, his associates, his family, his current situation, trying to find a pattern to determine if he was likely to prove a danger. No pressure, then—we’re only talking about the most unimaginable hurt coming into innocent young lives.

  Kate was off, too, which made things even more stressful. I was monitoring her list of tasks as well as my own.

  I was so absorbed that I didn’t even notice anyone was behind me until a hand landed on my shoulder and I jumped a mile.

  “Sorry,” he said, laughing like a big kid. It was Andy Frost. “Didn’t mean to make you jump.”

  “That’s OK. Sir.”

  “Stop with the ‘sir,’ Annabel. I’ve told you before.”

  “I know. Force of habit.”

  “I got your e-mail,” he said, perching on the edge of Kate’s desk. “Do you think you could have a look at the list of bodies in a bit more detail? Do me some sort of comparative case analysis?”

  “Of course. It would probably be a bit basic, though. Don’t forget they’re only on incident logs; they’re not crime reports. Some of the ones I looked at were incredibly brief.”

  “Hmm,” he said, pondering. “I did mention it in the Force Tactical. Major Crime weren’t remotely interested, of course, but then I’m not really surprised. They’ve got a lot going on at the moment. But Alan Robson showed an interest. I said I’d get him a bit more detail.”

  “Alan Robson? The head of Crime Reduction?”

  Andy nodded. “Yes—he was moved over from Tac Ops last month.”

  “He’s probably looking to build his promotion portfolio.”

  “Even so, it’s better than nothing. You might well have something here, and of course, as you said, it’s a community issue, which is what’s gotten his attention. And if we end up needing to do something with Social Services, or Age UK, or whoever, he’d be your man to sort that group out.”

  I gave him a smile. “I’d best get on with it, then.”

  I went home via the supermarket and then Mum’s house, to deliver the groceries she’d asked for yesterday. She’d already phoned again this afternoon: she had forgotten to tell me some of the things she needed, and didn’t want to be without them for the weekend, even though I usually did a shop for her on Sunday morning. When I let myself into her house the TV was on, loud, as it always was, and if it hadn’t been for her grunt in reply to my hello I would have assumed she hadn’t realized I was there. I put her food away in the fridge and put a frozen shepherd’s pie in the microwave to thaw, and turned the oven on to warm up. While the microwave was whirring away I washed and dried last night’s dinner plate and this morning’s cereal bowl and put them away in the cabinet.

  My stomach growled at the smell of meat and gravy emanating from the microwave. When it pinged I put the plastic dish on a baking tray and shoved it into the oven, setting the timer.

  “It’ll be done in twenty minutes or so,” I said. “You want me to do some veggies?”

  “Peas’ll do,” she said, not looking up. “And potatoes.”

  “It’s got potatoes on the top,” I said. “It’s a shepherd’s pie.”

  She didn’t answer. I sighed and put a pan of water on the stove to boil, got a big potato from the vegetable drawer of the fridge, and stood there peeling it, wondering why the whole process made me want to weep.

  By the time I’d cooked the potato and the peas the shepherd’s pie was done, the top of it crispy and golden brown, the gravy bubbling up through the mashed potatoes. I dished it up on a plate and put it on a tray with a knife and a fork and a piece of paper towel, because all her napkins were put away somewhere in a box, covered with packing tape that had lost its stickiness years before and now hung loosely around it.

  She started eating without a word, blowing in short puffs across the top of her steaming fork, and then cast a glance across to me, and at that I got up again and went to the kitchen to get her a drink. When I put the glass of water down on the tray she looked at me with an expression of disgust. “What’s that?”

  I had no energy for this battle tonight. Sometimes I fought and won, more often than not, but tonight I gave in right away and went back into the kitchen. In the fridge was a bottle of white wine, unopened. I unscrewed the top and brought it back with a wineglass for her. There was no point pouring just one glass. Once the top was unscrewed, she would finish it anyway. If she got drunk and fell over it would be her own fault.

  That was the end of it. I said good night, put my coat on, and went back out into the night.

  The cat at least was comically pleased to see me, meowing at my feet and jumping up as though it would help, purring loudly when the bowl suddenly appeared in her line of sight. And, once she’d eaten, she cried at the door to be let out. I opened the door and she was gone, off into the night to do whatever it was that she spent hours doing after dark. And the house was quiet, and I was alone again.

  Colin

  I should have been reading about critical submodalities before this evening’s tutorial but instead I found myself distracted by last year’s biology textbooks. I recall learning about decay—such a beautiful, perfect process: designed by Nature, tarnished and distorted by human activity. So many variables, predictables, the whole system governed by Nature, which is beyond human control.

  I went online to look up “active decay,” my favorite stage of “putrefaction.” Active decay, technically, starts after “bloat,” Nature’s announcement: the soft tissues reduce rapidly during this period, especially if, during the bloat phase, the skin has stretched so far that it has ruptured. As well as activity by detritivores, internal processes (natural ones) accelerate the decomposition, including the endlessly fascinating autolysis, which is the destruction of cells by the body’s own enzymes. The pancreas, which is full of digestive enzymes, is one
of the first organs to go. At the end of the active decay phase there is very little left—not even skin. The molecules that once made up a living, breathing, sentient being, transformed into atoms to feed the soil and encourage new life. The ultimate in recycling.

  Eventually I had to leave my computer behind. On the way to college I stopped in at a house in Catswood. Just a brief visit. Not very enlightening.

  The Wilson building was gray in the rain, a concrete block that others find hideous and I find interesting. The structure of it is so uniform, but the closer you get to it the more you notice the cracks, the lichen invading, the textures changing as the weather corrodes it.

  There were five at the tutorial: Darren, Lisa, Alison, Roger, and I. Nigel, the tutor, was late as usual, and we hung around outside the locked tutorial room with our machine coffees, standing there in a grim sort of silence. I wondered if they were also trying to think of something intelligent to say. That’s the trouble with this course; it puts you under real pressure to come up with something good when you do manage to speak to one another.

  Roger came over to me and cleared his throat. He wanted to know if I had put any of the techniques into practice yet.

  “Not at all,” I said, and then immediately gave him a smile and a halfhearted wink, since I knew by the nature of the study that he would be able to tell I was lying. Although he might have missed the lie and misinterpreted the wink. Such is the precarious nature of our methods of communication.

  After the tutorial I waited in the classroom, asking inane questions about the potential for linked study and how many credits this course might give me toward a further degree, this time in psychology—why not, after all?—but really just delaying so that I would not have to walk back out to the parking lot with the gang of losers.