Dark Undertakings

by Rebecca Tope

  David had had enough; the last thing he wanted was sympathy from people he hadn’t spoken to for fifteen years. ‘Right,’ he grunted dismissively and turned away.

  ‘David!’ Susie’s reproach rang high and clear. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  The Dunlop woman was trying to steer her husband and child across the room, away from the encounter. ‘Come on, Frank,’ she chivvied, ‘they said you ought to have a sweet drink.’ She cast an anxious glance at David, which he assumed arose from a fear that he was planning to pick a fight with Frank. The idea was not unappealing.

  Susie too seemed disconcerted. With a familiar lurch of his gut, David understood how nervous he was making them. He knew he seemed peculiar at times, when his thoughts ran out of control. He shook his head and made for the door. Hitting Frank Dunlop would be a very stupid thing to do.

  But it seemed that a grim inevitability had taken charge of events. Just outside the door, they walked into Roxanne and Pauline, the sisters standing shoulder to shoulder, blocking the way.

  Pauline’s eyes were almost closed from weeping, and the sight of Susie set her off again. Roxanne took a deep breath, and placed herself between the two other women. ‘I won’t ask what you’re doing here,’ she said. ‘We’re collecting Craig’s things. Pauline needs to talk to you, but not yet. Not here.’

  ‘Craig left a note,’ said Susie breathlessly. ‘I’ll show it to you, if you like.’

  ‘Not here,’ Roxanne repeated. They stood awkwardly in the doorway, the strangeness of the situation paralysing them all.

  ‘Oh look,’ said Roxanne, suddenly. ‘There’s Lorraine, and her family.’ Lorraine, sitting at a nearby table with Frank and Cindy, heard her name and looked up. Roxanne moved towards her, and then noticed Frank’s bandaged finger. She laughed unpleasantly. ‘Don’t tell me,’ she said. ‘David Lapsford did it. You two’ve been fighting over reputations.’ She turned back to David. ‘Though it seems to me you’re the one who should have got the worst of it.’

  Before she could say any more, David had grabbed Susie and marched her down the corridor. His head hummed painfully. Nobody, it seemed, liked him. They all wanted to get him, for crimes he didn’t understand. And here he was, doing Susie a favour well beyond what most men would do.

  ‘Strikes me Craig might be well off out of it,’ he muttered, as he strode out to the car park.

  Jodie felt an urgent need to walk herself into a better mood. She often went for a long walk on a Sunday afternoon, usually beside the river. Sometimes she followed it all the way to the sea, ten miles distant. She strode out now, quickly, irritably overtaking strolling couples or families with young children. She crossed the bridge in the centre of town, and headed upstream, where the ground was steep enough to deter most Sunday afternoon ramblers. The river ran through the ever-dwindling gap between Bradbourne and its neighbouring big city brother, its borders marshy in places. The sound of traffic was ever-present, but there were still places where no human habitation could be glimpsed, and a brief sense of timelessness could be enjoyed.

  These walks were often prolonged meditations. She sorted through the jumble of the week past, the irritations and difficulties on the working day, the tedium of her evenings. When her mother had remarried and gone to live with her oily new husband in Malta, she had signed over her Bradbourne house to Jodie, with no strings. So Jodie now lived in a three-bedroomed Victorian semi, in the older part of town, free from any mortgage payments, and with the simplest of tastes. Jodie had money to burn, and it worried her that it made not the slightest improvement to the quality of her life. If anything, it reduced it, because once men discovered the truth of her financial situation, their resulting increased keenness was both offensive and alarming. There were very few men in the world whom Jodie trusted. Jim Lapsford had been one of those few.

  David Lapsford was, in one sense, another. At least he wasn’t capable of the cynical cupidity which had been her usual experience. But David was volatile in other ways, and she knew there was no way she could have ever married him, even if their relationship had survived his sudden disappearance. The news of his parentage had been a shock, but on reflection it explained a lot. The fleeting expression of pain that had crossed Jim’s face every time his younger son was mentioned; the erratic behaviour from the boy’s earliest years. Now, of course, everyone was going to be wondering who David’s real father had been. Jodie had dismissed the incest theory before it got off the ground. So who had got Jim’s sister Julia pregnant and then failed to own up to his responsibilities? Was it a total secret, unknown to everyone now alive? Or did Monica know, had she known from the start, and incorporated that knowledge into the raising of the little boy who had grown up so troubled?

  Jodie abandoned this train of thought. Trying to guess the identity of a man who had been to bed with Julia Lapsford twenty-four years ago was a mug’s game. Except – except that she had the distinct feeling that the man in question might be still around. Still close by, watching his son grow up without ever making himself known. And if that was the case, perhaps there was yet another mysterious link with Jim’s death. Jim had written David off in recent times, leaving him to make his own life. Jodie herself had witnessed the scene at the printworks when David had come to ask for a job and Jim had angrily refused him. She had been careful not to take sides, to turn her back and let them get on with it. It had, after all, been none of her business.

  Scarcely aware of her physical surroundings during these musings, she now found herself on a piece of high ground, looking down on the river, where it had carved itself a deep channel. Pausing for breath, she cast an automatic glance at the view before her. As views went, it was quite a panorama. To her right, the haze and glints of the city, barely three miles away, spread to the horizon. The grey ribbons of major roads, the pale chunks of new office buildings, dotted with the greenery of conscientiously-positioned trees, were all just visible, as the ragged outskirts of the urban sprawl seemed to be edging towards her. As she turned in a slow arc, the plain that was yet to be developed and exploited gave the impression of a thickly-wooded piece of pure countryside. Yet it contained innumerable small villages, connected by roads, served by large shopping centres and the all-pervasive Royal Victoria Hospital. The Royal Vic was like a little town all of its own. Jodie sometimes felt it was like a magnet, drawing people in to be healed, or employed, or gratified in some other way. You could be a volunteer visitor or car driver, you could sell sweets or newspapers. You could be a non-medical clerk or telephone operator, or an on-site painter and decorator. It had a laundry, a vast kitchen, its own radio station and a number of charitable appeal funds. Jodie hated the hospital. For her it was a dark, voracious monster, swallowing up the people she loved, making them promises it couldn’t hope to fulfil. Her father had died there when she was eighteen, and nothing had really been right since then.

  To her left lay humble Bradbourne, so jealous of its ancient identity, despite the straggling new housing estates. A slow little town, famous for nothing more noteworthy than an eccentric medieval saint, rejoicing in the name of Penitent, who suffered a particularly inventive and pointless succession of torments before dying nobly at the hands of an outraged feudal lord. The story was thin, even after all the subsequent embellishments, and the only regular reminder was the St Penitent’s Wood, named for him from early times.

  Jodie had lived all her life in Bradbourne, but had been removed from normal interaction with children her own age by being sent to a minor public school by her misguided parents. Her father had visited her and written to her so much that he had become an embarrassment to her. Her mother seemed to forget all about her. An only child, she never learnt the knack of ordinary society, and now, she supposed, she never would.

  With a sigh, she turned her back on her home town and continued to walk. The haze over the city turned out to have been rain clouds, and there was now a thin drizzle falling. She didn’t mind – her cagoule had a hood and her shoes w
ere stout. She veered away from the river, following a path through fields and into a small country lane. Blackberries grew lush in the hedgerows, with no sign that anyone had been interested in gathering them. She pulled a few off as she passed, but they sat heavily in her stomach.

  Thinking about living off wild fruit reminded her of Roxanne Gibson, who had defied the prevailing culture, which only understood food if it came in a small plastic tray from a supermarket, and was actively demonstrating that you could exist more than adequately on the contents of the hedges, spiced up with the meat of rabbits or pigeons – if you could catch them. No wonder Roxanne made people uneasy, living as she did. And no wonder Jim Lapsford had found her so exciting. She was doing what he had often dreamt of doing, but would never have the courage – or the backbone – for. Roxanne had found the sort of contentment that people like Jim and Monica and Jodie herself would never even glimpse.

  But Jodie felt no sympathy or gratitude towards Roxanne. Oh, no. She blamed her for Jim’s death.

  Craig’s neck and jawline were dark red and purple, but the rest of his face was surprisingly undamaged. Nobody had closed his eyes, and they were still the same greeny-blue, but dreadfully, horribly empty. Like the glass eyes of toy teddy bears. There could be no doubt that whatever the spark was that had been the real Craig, it was now firmly extinguished. In a strange way, that made Susie feel better. She need no longer worry about the fate of his body. It wouldn’t know or feel anything any more.

  She had told David that Craig’s suicide had come as a total shock to her; completely unexpected. But this was not strictly true. He had threatened to kill himself often enough over the past year or so – she just hadn’t taken any notice. It had seemed like nothing more than self-pitying words, with no possibility of becoming real. She had been angry and dismissive, and never for a moment taken him seriously. Now he’d really gone and done it, for the reasons he’d put in his note. The part about Susie’s dad having a go at him made her wince every time she thought about it. Sid had, after all, only been acting on her prompting. And he’d already been on the phone, insisting on coming round later, desperate about his part in Craig’s death. When he’d brought her the news yesterday, he’d looked ghastly, blaming himself for what he’d said to the boy that morning. Susie had tried to reassure him. Her dad was all she had left now – the last thing she needed was for him to go to pieces.

  In the hope of making him feel better, she had told him the whole story of the illicit business she and Craig had been conducting. She had been stealing prescription pads from the surgery for several months, and using them to obtain supplies of Viagra and other recreational drugs. The Viagra had been sold through small adverts in local papers, and Craig had dealt with the other stuff, careful not to let Susie become too closely involved. ‘Even if we’re caught, they’re not going to come down too hard on you, if we keep it like this,’ he’d said. Even so, she’d been increasingly unhappy about it, and had first begged, then threatened, in her efforts to make him stop.

  Sid, when he arrived, questioned her intently. ‘How can I believe you?’ he demanded, when she assured him that her only crime had been to steal the prescription pads and post out the canisters of Viagra to the men who replied to the advertisements.

  ‘Just believe it, Dad,’ she sighed. ‘Why should I lie to you now?’

  She told him how the day before Lapsford died, she’d tried to finish with Craig, once and for all. He’d clung to her, pleaded, threatened, until she’d been frightened and upset, but unshakable in her decision. He’d spent all night with her from Monday evening to Tuesday morning, waking her up a hundred times to ask her again if she’d please, please change her mind. He’d followed her out of the house, making her late for work, pawing at her like a miserable, abandoned dog.

  In the end she’d shouted at him, turning on him, almost pushing him off the pavement. ‘Just leave me alone, will you!’ she’d screamed. And at last he’d got the message, and turned away, letting her trot quickly around the next corner, without a backward glance. When they’d had that pub lunch together on Friday, it had seemed that he was beginning, finally, to accept her decision. The fact that Lapsford had died made it easier to convince him. ‘He thought we might have killed him, you see,’ Susie told Sid. ‘Viagra can give people heart attacks, can’t it, if they take too much of it? When Dr Lloyd diagnosed a heart attack, with no need for a post-mortem, I couldn’t believe our luck. Although I did feel guilty. Part of me wanted the truth to come out. I badgered the doctor about it, because really, he shouldn’t have signed the certificate like that. But Craig was terrified.’

  ‘I knew there was a connection,’ Sid said, smacking his right fist into his left palm. ‘As soon as they brought him in, and I remembered he was Dr Lloyd’s patient. I kept having this horrible idea that it had something to do with you – because I haven’t forgotten what happened between you and Jim …’

  ‘Stop it, Dad! Nobody’s going to find out, though, are they?’ she asked. ‘The prescriptions, I mean.’

  ‘Not if I can help it,’ he promised her.

  ‘Thanks, Dad,’ she sniffed, burrowing into his chest like a little child.

  After the scratchy encounter in the hospital, Susie knew she’d have to go and see Pauline – the sooner the better, before the numbness wore off and she got helplessly emotional. Craig’s mother had always been the best thing about the whole business. ‘You like her more than you like me,’ he’d accused, more than once. And it was true, in the end. Pauline was funny and sparky and alive. She rushed round helping everyone in sight, cheerfully devoting her time to doing an old lady’s shopping, or just sitting down for a long leisurely chat to one of her many friends. Susie had always admired Pauline, and wished she could be more like her.

  Before she could find the energy to go out, there was a ring at her bell. She lived in a tiny flat over a shop, and had an entryphone that didn’t work. She’d have to go down and open the door herself. She already had a good idea who it would be, and was proved right.

  ‘I was going to come and see you,’ she said, feeling swollen with apprehension.

  Pauline stepped inside, and began to climb the stairs without looking at Susie. From behind she seemed old, pulling herself up the steep staircase heavily, as if every joint hurt and she was carrying some heavy burden. Misery was too light a word for it.

  At last, they faced each other, making no move to touch. ‘I know you think it’s my fault,’ said Susie, marvelling at her own courage. ‘I would, in your place. Let me show you his letter. He’d have wanted you to see it.’

  Pauline took the folded paper gingerly, and slowly opened it. ‘Sit down,’ Susie said. ‘I’ll go and make some coffee.’

  ‘I can’t read it,’ said the woman, dropping the letter onto the table. ‘The words are dancing about. It’s like it’s alive.’

  Susie said nothing, but withdrew to her kitchen. Returning five minutes later, she found her visitor crouched on a battered chair with wooden arms, her elbows making sharp angles as she clenched her hands together. Susie waited. There was a hollow thumping inside her head, making it impossible to speak.

  ‘The mother always blames herself,’ Pauline said. ‘Quite rightly, too. If I’d done it different, he’d never have got so obsessed with you.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s true,’ said Susie gently. ‘He didn’t want you to blame yourself – that’s what he says. Craig just never really understood how to be happy. We all did our best for him – and from his note, it sounds as if he knew that.’

  Pauline looked up and gave a ghastly grin. ‘Funny business, life,’ she said bitterly. Susie closed her eyes and felt her whole body fill up with the sheer sadness of it all. A bottomless well of tears was suddenly there, where emptiness had been only moments before. Sadness was a relief after the fear and guilt there had been up to now.

  ‘Yeah,’ she agreed. Mindlessly, she moved towards the chair, and sank onto the floor, pushing her head into the older
woman’s lap, the smooth texture of Pauline’s sweatshirt somehow friendly and ordinary. The tears soon soaked a sizeable area, while Pauline’s hands rested heavily on her head.

  ‘There, there,’ the woman murmured. ‘It’ll be all right.’

  Susie knew that it wouldn’t, couldn’t ever be all right, but it sounded good, just at that particular moment.

  Karen and Drew had dawdled over lunch and washing up, in an unspoken agreement to try to make time pass more quickly. Everything within reach had been washed and dried and put away. In the living room, Karen plumped up the cushions, ran a duster over the television screen, and the front of the shelf unit on which it sat. The stage was set for an afternoon of video-viewing.

  The phone hadn’t rung so far, and Drew was already beginning to assume that it wasn’t going to. ‘I’m going in two minutes,’ Karen announced. ‘If I see two that we’d like, I’ll get them. Otherwise, one long one, and then I’ll make some biscuits for tea. I’m going to Alldays, right? I should be back in twenty minutes at the most.’

  ‘Take your mac – it’s raining,’ he advised. ‘And mind how you cross the road. I’m sorry you can’t have the car, but if there’s an urgent call-out, I’ll obviously have to use it.’

  ‘No problem,’ she smiled. ‘It’s only drizzle. I won’t melt.’

  ‘See you soon.’ The door banged gently behind her, and he picked up the local paper for lack of anything else to do.

  The streets were deserted. No pedestrians and not many cars. The intermittent splashing of vehicles driving along wet roads was the only sound. Karen had a sensation of being at a great distance from the important action. She had a sense of events taking place way beyond her perception, doors closed to her, nobody caring that she even existed. And she was glad to have it like that. There were more important things to think about than a shambolic murder investigation into a death that nobody seemed to regret all that much.