by David Bowker
A great gust of wind raced across the square. Somewhere behind me, a shed door clattered and banged. An abandoned Coke can rattled belligerently in the village hall parking lot. That was enough for the police officer, who got back into his car to finish his cigarette.
Eventually, the car rolled forward, executed a loop, and headed slowly out of the square. When its headlights hit the gate in front of me, I flung my head earthward.
As soon as the sound of the engine had died, I opened the gate. It immediately swung shut. I found a brickbat in the front garden and used it to wedge the gate open, then heaved the body through. So intense was my guilt that I felt I was being watched and had to keep stopping to scan the dark windows of the neighboring houses. I could see no one, but my sense of public shame persisted. I had the peculiar feeling that the spirits of my forebears were looking down at me, shaking their heads in sorrow and disbelief.
The thought of my ancestors brought forth a childhood memory of my aunt Edna defending me against my mother’s suspicions when my kid brother ratted on me for kicking him. Not Mark, she had insisted. Mark would never do a thing like that. My aunt’s loyalty brought tears to my eyes then and did so now.
Sniffling, I unlocked the trunk of the Audi. The automatic light flashed on, unhelpfully providing illumination for anyone who wanted a grandstand view of a man in his early twenties trying to lift a dead woman into a car.
I flattered myself that I was strong, but that was before I tried to lift one hundred and fifty pounds of dead meat off the ground. The effort almost gave me a hernia, and still I got nowhere. The body on the ground made an eerie hissing noise as air escaped from it. It was as if Janet Mather were booing me from beyond the grave.
Someone tapped me on the back. Bucking like a startled cow, I spun round to see Caro standing behind me. When I’d finished swearing, she seized my shoulders and kissed my brow. “I’m feeling better now,” she whispered. “I want to help.”
* * *
TOGETHER, WE lifted Mrs. Mather into the trunk. Then we sat in the car, discussing what to do next. “What about the beach hut?” I said. “We could store her in the beach hut and throw her into the sea, a bit at a time.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” said Caro.
She fetched the spade from the house and told me to drive to Bloxham Church.
We parked the car on a dark track along the side of the church and wandered into the cemetery. Even without a flashlight, we could see where the latest arrival had been interred. There was a fresh mound on the north side of the church, made luminous by the pale flowers heaped upon it.
In the churchyard, Caro grabbed me and stuck her tongue down my throat. I wasn’t remotely aroused and pushed her away.
“What do we do now?” I said.
“We dig up the grave and throw her on top of the coffin,” said Caro. “Then we just fill the grave in again.”
“Earlier today, you wouldn’t overtake the coffin because you thought it’d look disrespectful. Now you want to dig it up.”
“So?”
“Well, as hiding places go, don’t you think this is a bit obvious?”
“Who to?”
“The police. Wouldn’t a fresh grave be the first place they’d look?”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” sneered Caro. “You’d think they’d target drunk drivers by parking outside bars and waiting for the drunks to stagger out to the cars. You’d think they’d automatically issue speeding tickets to everyone who drives in the fast lane. But no. The police are the same people we laughed at at school, Mark. They couldn’t pass their exams then, and they can’t solve crimes now.”
“But if anyone ever opens the grave, they’ll find Mrs. Mather in it.”
“Yeah. But she’ll just be a pile of old bones by then. Even then, why would they link her to us? Unless…”
“What?”
“While I was lying down, you didn’t fuck the body?”
“What?”
She laughed. “Just checking. Some men find dead women attractive.”
“I cannot believe you,” I said.
We fetched the spade and a tiny flashlight from the car. Caro shone the light at a makeshift sign that had been placed at the head of the grave in lieu of a headstone. It read ALAN BEEVIS 1963–2004. AT REST.
“Not for much longer,” said Caro.
Carefully, working systematically from top to bottom, we removed the floral tributes from the grave and arranged them on an adjacent plot so that when the job was done and the hole refilled, we could return each wreath to its original position.
The digging took longer than I’d expected. The recently excavated earth was soft and yielding, but still the task was backbreaking. Caro, who was meant to be keeping watch, sat with her back against the churchyard wall, smoking. At one point, she offered to help, but then she started giggling and throwing the soil everywhere, so I had to take the spade from her.
There were no houses overlooking the churchyard. My labors were observed by no one. Our only companion was a fat hedgehog who crossed the cemetery, grumbling strangely. My mouth was dry, and I wished we’d thought to bring some bottled water. I got so hot that I took off my jacket and hung it on the branch of a young tree that stood in a corner of the cemetery.
The church clock chimed the quarters. By two-thirty I was bathed in sweat and the hole was a reasonable size. “Let’s get her,” I said to Caro.
“But I thought graves were meant to be six feet deep.”
“Yeah, six feet is the legal depth,” I snapped. “But in case you hadn’t noticed, what we’re doing isn’t legal.”
“No need to get grouchy.”
“No need to get grouchy? You kill someone, I break my back and sweat buckets to hide your dirty work, and all you can do is criticize the size of the hole I’ve dug?”
All bickering ceased when we returned to the car to fetch Janet Mather. Numbed into silence, Caro and I each took an end and dragged the blanketed corpse through the cemetery gates. I heard a soft chink, like a small coin hitting the ground. I shone the light at the ground but could see nothing. We continued to haul our burden over the grass, brought it to the brink of the grave, and pushed it into the hole with our feet. The wind blew. The trees scraped and sighed.
At that moment it seemed as if there were no light or joy or loveliness anywhere in the world.
Then I started to shovel the dirt in. There was a snigger. I stopped digging and turned to Caro. “What’s so funny?” I said.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Well, what are you laughing for?”
“I didn’t laugh.”
We froze, watching and listening for the slightest sign of another presence. A car droned by on the main road, and the trees in the churchyard creaked. The wind played its traditional haunted-house symphony in the telephone wires overhead. Then, as a final insult, it started to rain.
I lay on my back among the rotten leaves while the rain lashed down. Caro patted the mound with the back of the spade and carefully replaced the flowers. As she labored, she passed from airheaded levity into cold determination. The only thing we couldn’t do anything about was the thin layer of spilt soil around the grave. When the last resting place of Alan Beevis looked more or less pristine, she shone the light over the ground between the side gate and the grave, ensuring that we hadn’t dropped anything.
Then we drove back to Holeness, our wipers set at max to combat the pounding rain.
“It’s good that it’s pissing it down,” said Caro. “The rain’ll erase our footprints.”
Her coolness astonished me. “Is that all you’ve got to say?”
“What would you like me to say?”
“Well, you just killed somebody. I don’t expect you to break down in remorse. I know you better than that. But you must feel something.”
“Listen,” said Caro. “My feelings for that woman amount to precisely nothing. With her reactionary views, her small-town self-importance, her br
ide-of-Frankenstein hair, and her despicable fat arse, she represented everything that makes this country second-rate. She should have been killed years ago, when she burned that kid’s hand. But guess what? She got away scot-free. People can get seven years in prison for fraud, but that bitch scars a child for life and doesn’t even go on trial. So I don’t care. Understand? I don’t care about Janet Mather. She was a piece of despicable trash. All I care about is that we don’t get caught.”
“What happened to being nice?”
“It was being nice that caused all this,” said Caro. “Let’s face it, I’m not a nice person. I’m vengeful and unforgiving. So if I pretend to be nice, all the contempt and spite I want to show has nowhere to go. It’s like that poem by William Blake ‘I was angry with my foe, I told him not, my wrath did grow.’ So when Mather asked me to tidy the garden, I wanted to kill her. Instead, I backed down. When I found out what she’d done to Dale I wanted to burn her hands, then kill her. So when I hit her with the spade, I was letting out all the festering hatred I’d stored up by being nice to her.”
“That’s all very interesting and highly insightful,” I said. “But somehow, I don’t think it’d impress a jury.”
I could smell Mrs. Mather’s ghastly scent on my hands. “Oh, God, Caro,” I said. “Tell me something nice. Tell me something that’ll make me feel the world isn’t one enormous grave.”
“I’m pregnant,” said Caro.
“It needs to be something true,” I said patiently. “Not just something you’ve made up to please me.”
“It is true. I did a test. I’m about nine weeks gone.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“I was waiting for a special occasion.”
* * *
BACK IN Prospect Square, I searched in my trouser pocket for my house key but couldn’t find it.
“We’ve got to go back,” I said. “I must have dropped it in the graveyard.”
“We didn’t drop anything,” she said. “You probably left it in the house somewhere.”
We used Caro’s key to open the door and went inside. The bad smell still lingered in the hall, as if Mather’s ghost were invisibly glowering at us. We stuffed our muddy clothes into the washing machine and cleaned the dirt off the spade and our shoes. By the time we had showered it was after five.
When we went to bed, Caro crawled under the duvet and started playing with me. I wasn’t in the mood, but she was so skilled and insistent that before long I was hard. Then she climbed aboard and screwed me. She took ages, arching her back to take me deeper inside. And as she came, shuddering with pleasure, she murmured, “We killed her, Mark. We killed the fucking bitch.”
After that, I didn’t feel much like sleeping. I left Caro alone and went out to clean the car.
* * *
IT WAS noon before Caro surfaced, awakened by shrieks of laughter. Out in the square, a teenaged boy was waving an air pistol at two teenaged girls. As we watched, the boy fired at one of the girls. He missed, and the shot broke the window in the door of the village hall.
“You were right about this place,” said Caro, watching the spectacle disinterestedly. “It stinks. Let’s go somewhere else.”
“We can’t,” I pointed out. “If we just up and leave, it’s going to look like we’re running away. We might as well place an ad in the post office window. Murderers of Janet Mather seek life imprisonment.”
* * *
I WALKED to the village bank to withdraw some cash. As I was turning away from the ATM, I saw Philip Mather and Dale. They were on the other side of the road, deep in conversation with a middle-aged couple. I could tell by their earnest expressions that the topic under discussion was Janet. Philip looked exactly like a man who hasn’t slept for thirty-six hours because his wife has gone missing. Dale looked almost as bad. I realized, with a twinge of sadness, that the boy had probably loved the woman who branded him.
I felt sorry for Dale. But like Caro, my only feeling about Janet Mather was a quiet sense of righteousness, as if she had been an enemy soldier that we had been forced to shoot in self-defense.
Once I got home, I intended to look up the word “sociopath” in the dictionary to see if I qualified. But when I walked into the kitchen, I received a severe jolt. Caro was having tea with a shy young policewoman. The shock made my heart flutter as if I’d stepped under an icy shower.
There was no immediate cause for despair. The WPC and her colleagues were making house-to-house calls in the hope of finding someone spattered with blood to help them with their inquiries. She asked us how we’d spent the previous night. I noticed an empty champagne bottle by the sink and had an idea.
“We were celebrating,” I said.
“Oh, yes?”
“I’m pregnant,” explained Caro.
The police officer’s face lit up. “Oh, that’s lovely. My big sister’s expecting. I’m dying to be an auntie.”
At that moment, I knew beyond doubt that we had won the WPC over and she didn’t suspect us of anything.
Toward the end of the day, Ricky Cragg dropped round to ask if I wanted to go to the pub.
“Not today,” I said. “Caro’s feeling a bit under the weather.”
“Oh. Women’s trouble, is it?” he said knowingly. “Rather you than me. I suppose you’ve heard about Janet Mather?”
I nodded.
His eyes twinkled mischievously. “Hope you didn’t do her in and bury her under the floorboards.”
“No,” I said truthfully. “I didn’t do that.”
“Pity,” said Ricky. “Then I could have danced on her grave.”
There was a silence while I wondered what he knew or suspected and how much he could keep to himself.
“Apparently, the police have arrested a local man,” said Ricky. He looked away, yawning and scratching the back of his neck as if the news bored him. “As the story goes, this chap once spat at Mrs. Mather when she tried to sell him some raffle tickets. God knows, the man was only doing what we’d all like to have done.”
Then he winked at me.
* * *
THAT NIGHT, we kept hearing noises. Creaks and sighs, doors opening and closing. Then there would be silence for a while, and we would doze only to be reawakened by another eerie sound. Finally, we both sat up in bed with the light on, holding each other. Downstairs, the creaks and bangs continued.
I reached for the Kimber on the bedside table. The gun wasn’t there.
“Did you move it?” I said.
“No.”
“You must have done,” I said. “It was right here when we came to bed.”
“I swear I didn’t touch it.”
“It’s her ghost,” said Caro. “She doesn’t know she’s dead, so she’s walking about downstairs.”
“Bollocks,” I said. “The woman didn’t have a soul, so how could she haunt us?”
Together, we went downstairs to investigate. When we were on the first landing we stopped to listen. All was dark below. We inched down the stairs in the dark, and then the light came on and we saw someone sitting in the hall, back against the wall.
Caro yelled, and I jumped back so suddenly that I bashed into her, causing her to stumble. “Jesus, Mark! She came back!”
It was true. Mrs. Mather had returned from the grave. In two days, she had decomposed considerably. Her face, blackened and distended, resembled an overripe plum with skin about to burst. Her trademark frizzy hair, now caked in mud, sprang up from her skull like a cloud of petrified filth.
“Shit,” I said. “Who did this?”
“Mark, what if no one did it?” She was holding the sleeve of her dressing gown over her face because of the pungent stink coming from Mather’s corpse. “What if she walked from the cemetery by herself?”
“She didn’t.” Caro was squeezing my arm so tightly that my hand was going numb. “Someone did this. This is some sick bastard’s idea of a joke.”
* * *
WE SEARCHED the house
. There was no sign of forced entry, or of the culprit. “I think I know what must have happened,” I told Caro. “I dropped my house keys in the cemetery. They were found by whoever did this.”
“Bad Jesus,” said Caro. “It’s got to be.”
“Why would he bother? If he thinks we killed his brother, he’s just going to come straight at us, like a rottweiler. He’s not going to toy with us. He’s going to torture us and kill us.”
“What about Bromley and Flett?” said Caro.
“What about them?”
“You’ve met them. They’re sick enough. If they know we’ve killed Mather, they’ve got us, Mark. They’ll be able to fuck me whenever they like. I won’t be able to stand it. I’ll kill myself before I let them touch me.”
Caro went rigid, trembling so furiously that her teeth chattered. I had to fetch a quilt from upstairs and wrap it round her, holding her firmly until her body relaxed. I left her in the kitchen with the radio on while I covered the less-than-fragrant Mrs. Mather with large plastic garden refuse sacks, dragged her carcass into the back room, and locked the door.
* * *
NEITHER OF us wanted to be left alone in the house with a corpse. In the morning we both walked to the shops to pick up some groceries. It was the Thursday before Easter. Easter eggs were on sale in the post office and the local convenience store. In the window of the cake shop, rows of hot cross buns, Easter Bunny cookies, and little iced chicks were proudly displayed. We might have bought some if our appetites had not been affected by the events of the previous night.
In our justifiable paranoia, it semed to us that everyone, from the bank clerk to the strangers in the street, regarded us with unusual interest. “What if they know?” whispered Caro when a telephone engineer shouted down from his pole to wish us a good morning. “What if the whole village knows what we’ve done?”
Walking back, we passed the smallholding owned by the Mathers. A notice at the end of the drive displayed a bad photocopy of the missing woman’s face under the heading MISSING. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN?
