The Four Last Things

by Taylor, Andrew

  Another fragment of another dream had concerned David Byfield. He had seen an angel flying low over Magdalene Bridge in Cambridge.

  ‘Real feathers,’ he insisted to Sally and Michael, ‘rather like a buzzard’s.’

  ‘But Lucy’s missing!’ Sally shouted.

  ‘This is far more important.’

  In a different part of the same dream, she and Uncle David were in a police station that smelled like a public lavatory. Chief Inspector Maxham leaned across the counter towards them, sucking in his breath, the air hissing between his tongue and his teeth.

  ‘Couldn’t have been an angel, sir. Angels don’t exist.’ Sally was embarrassed. Grown men did not believe in angels. David became very angry with Maxham.

  ‘Don’t be naive, Officer. You’re not competent to make wild assertions like that.’

  The chief inspector smiled, revealing Yvonne’s perfect teeth. ‘You were dreaming.’

  ‘I was not.’

  Uncle David raised his arms and spread them wide. To her horror, Sally saw that his dark clerical suit was sprouting two rows of silvery-white feathers, one for each arm, running down the sleeves from shoulder to cuff. Uncle David was growing wings.

  By eight o’clock, Sally had showered, dressed and had breakfast, which in her case consisted of three cups of coffee. She and Judith sat at the table in the living room. Judith tried to entice Sally’s appetite from its hiding place by filling the flat with the smell of toasting bread and boiling herself an egg.

  ‘No news is good news.’ Judith’s face creased with anxiety, and Sally felt guilty for spurning all those good intentions. ‘Why don’t you have a spoonful of cereal – something light like cornflakes?’

  Sally reached for the coffee pot. ‘Perhaps I’ll have something later.’

  ‘I expect you’ll want to go to church this morning. I’m sure Yvonne will drive you.’

  Bugger church. ‘I don’t want to, thanks.’ Sally glimpsed, or imagined, hurt surprise in Judith’s eyes. Bugger Judith. But it wasn’t that easy to slough off the habit of being considerate. She heard herself saying soothingly, as if Judith, not herself, were the victim: ‘It’s kind of you to think of it, but I want to be here when my husband comes home.’ With his slippers warming by the fire, the newspaper on the arm of his chair and fresh tea in the pot? ‘And of course there might be some news.’

  ‘I do understand.’ Some of Judith’s creases vanished. ‘Won’t be long now, will it? It will be easier with the two of you.’

  Sally nodded and sipped her coffee. She doubted if it would be easier when Michael came. Nothing could be easy without Lucy. In the second place, there wouldn’t be just the two of them because David Byfield was coming up to London, too. In the third place, Michael, much as she loved him, was likely to create more problems than he solved. He habitually repressed his emotions, which meant when they did come to the surface they tended to be under great pressure and boiling hot.

  ‘I wonder if the newspaper’s come,’ Sally said, her eyes meeting Judith’s.

  ‘I’ll see, shall I?’

  Before Sally could protest, Judith was on her feet and moving towards the door. A moment later she returned with the Observer.

  ‘Would you like me to … ?’

  Sally held out her hand for the newspaper. ‘I’d rather find out myself.’

  The story was confined to a few paragraphs on one of the inside pages. Lucy Appleyard, four, had disappeared from her child minder’s; the police had not ruled out the possibility of foul play. Chief Inspector Maxham provided a guarded comment, which in effect said no more than that the police were investigating.

  ‘The whole parish is praying for Lucy, Sally and Michael,’ Derek Cutter had told the Observer‘s reporter. ‘Sally’s a marvellous curate. She’s already made her mark at St George’s.’

  Sally pushed the newspaper, open at the story, across the table. Judith read it quickly.

  ‘Fair enough, I suppose,’ she said brightly.

  ‘I wonder what the tabloids are saying.’ Sally winced. ‘Perhaps it’s better not to know.’

  A key scraped in the lock of the door to the landing.

  ‘That’ll be Yvonne.’ Judith gathered up her handbag, and risked a small joke. ‘Just in time for the washing-up.’

  The living-room door opened and Maxham came in. Yvonne’s blonde head bobbed above his shoulder in the hallway behind him. Judith glanced at Sally and stiffened, ready to take action. Sally put her hand to her mouth and stared at Maxham.

  ‘There’s been a development, Mrs Appleyard.’ Air hissed into his mouth. ‘It may not be connected with Lucy, so don’t get upset.’

  Maxham came to a halt a few paces inside the room. Yvonne moved round Maxham and came to stand beside Sally. Judith edged closer. My God, what are they? Wardresses?

  ‘Do you know a church called St Michael’s?’ he asked.

  ‘Which one?’ she snapped. ‘There must be dozens.’

  ‘In Beauclerk Place – west of Tottenham Court Road, near Charlotte Street.’

  She shook her head, unable to speak.

  ‘When the caretaker – churchwarden, would it be? – came to unlock this morning, he found a black bin-liner in the porch. I gather there are wrought-iron gates on the outer arch of the porch and a proper door inside. Someone must have slipped the bin-liner through the railings or maybe over the top.’

  Get on with it. Sally watched Maxham’s face, saw the pale eyes blinking behind the black-rimmed glasses and the muscles twitching at the corners of the mouth. With a shock she realized that he was stalling because he found this no easier to say than she did to hear.

  Air hissed. ‘The fact of the matter is, Mrs Appleyard, there were some clothes inside that bag. A pair of child’s tights and a pair of boots. They seem to resemble the ones you described Lucy as wearing.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake – what about Lucy? Is she there, too?’

  Maxham hesitated, greedily sucking in breath. ‘Well,’ he said slowly. ‘Yes and no.’

  St Michael’s, Beauclerk Place, stood at the end of a cul-de-sac squeezed between higher, younger buildings to either side and behind it. It was a scruffy little building built of red brick, rectangular in design, with pinnacles at the corners and debased perpendicular windows. The visible windows were protected with iron grilles and decades of grime. The church was like a child who has never had quite enough love or money devoted to it.

  The uniformed policeman pulled aside the barrier to allow Maxham’s unmarked Rover to drive into the cul-de-sac. The buildings on either side were post-war, with plate-glass windows and Venetian blinds: probably offices, empty on a Sunday. As yet, there were no sightseers, but the police were ready. The car slid to a halt near the church. Two police cars were parked nearby.

  The porch had been tacked on to the south-west corner of the church. The police had screened off the entrance. On the left of the porch was a row of iron railings which ended in a matching gate.

  Sergeant Carlow switched off the engine. He looked over his shoulder at Maxham, sitting in the back of the car with Sally. Maxham nodded. Carlow extracted his long body from the car and walked towards the screened-off porch. His hips were unusually wide for a man’s, Sally registered automatically, and as he walked his bottom swayed like a woman’s.

  Maxham folded his hands in his lap. ‘Just going to see what’s what.’

  For a few seconds, silence spread through the car. In the front passenger seat Yvonne stared fixedly through the windscreen. The inspector rubbed his fingers on his thigh. Carlow reappeared. He looked paler than ever.

  Maxham turned his head towards Sally. ‘You sure you’re up to it? Still time to change your mind.’

  ‘I’m quite sure.’

  ‘We can wait till your husband –’

  ‘No.’ My baby. ‘Can we get it over with?’

  Maxham nodded. The three of them got out of the car. It was suddenly cold: the wind funnelled through the cul-de-sac and escape
d into the dull, grey sky. Sally forced herself to look away from the porch. She noticed that the gap between the railings and the church had silted up with a thick mulch of empty lager cans and fast-food wrappings, and that the gate at the north-west corner guarded the entrance to a narrow alleyway between the north side of the church and the adjacent building.

  According to a notice on the wall, the Anglicans now shared St Michael’s with a Russian Orthodox congregation and a Methodist one. Otherwise it would probably have been made redundant long ago. Perhaps that would have been better than this unloved half-life.

  Half a life, half a person?

  Sally found herself staring at the porch. From what she could see above the screens, it was about six feet wide and nine feet deep; it was covered with a pitched roof of cracked pantiles streaked with lichen and moss.

  Maxham put a hand under Sally’s elbow. They walked towards the screen. Yvonne and Sergeant Carlow fell in behind. A one-legged pigeon with frayed feathers hopped across their path. An amputee. To those in fear, creation was nothing but a mass of portents. Sally pulled away from Maxham and thrust her hands deep into the pockets of her long navy-blue coat. They rounded the corner of the screen.

  The light dazzled her. For a moment she stopped to blink and stare. Two floodlights gave the interior of the porch a hallucinogenic clarity. The outer gates were open. On either side were benches, with notice boards above. It should have been sheltered in there, but the notices fluttered and rustled in the wind. A photographer was shooting away seemingly at random, the shutter falling in a stammering rhythm like irregular rifle fire.

  The little space was crowded. Beside the photographer, another scene-of-the-crime officer was dictating into a hand-held machine. A third was measuring the dimensions of the porch. A fourth man, with a bag next to him, was kneeling in the far left-hand corner. Sally glimpsed shiny black plastic.

  ‘This is Dr Ferguson,’ Maxham said. ‘Mrs Appleyard.’

  The kneeling man half-turned and nodded, acknowledging the introduction.

  Sally swallowed. ‘Where –?’

  ‘Here, Mrs Appleyard.’ The doctor rose to his feet in one supple movement. He was younger than Sally, fresh-faced, with a healthy tan and a Liverpool accent. His eyes slid to Maxham, then back to Sally. ‘Are you sure you want to see this?’

  ‘Yes.’ With an effort she kept her voice low, concealing the scream inside her head.

  Ferguson nodded. ‘Over here.’

  He gestured not as Sally had expected towards the black plastic on the floor behind him, but to a plastic sheet on the bench on the left. Two L-shaped ridges showed underneath in relief, each about twenty inches long. Automatically Sally looked up, unable to keep her eyes on the two ridges. She examined the notice immediately above, noted with furious concentration the yellowing paper, the nearly illegible typed letters and the circular rust stains left by vanished drawing pins.

  She was aware that Maxham and Yvonne had moved a step nearer and were now standing directly behind her. The other police officers had stopped what they had been doing. The doctor was watching her, too. All of them were in position, she realized, ready to catch her when she fainted. Ironically, the thought braced her.

  ‘You’re ready?’

  Ferguson drew back the plastic sheet. Beneath was a transparent plastic bag with a neatly written tag. The bag contained a pair of small, white, woollen tights with ribbing on the legs. For an instant they looked as if they had been stuffed with kapok like cuddly toys. The tights were lying in a reddish-brown puddle of blood. Sally compressed her lips and swallowed. She thought of meat from a supermarket defrosting on its plastic tray. Blood need only be blood: nothing more, nothing less: largely composed of water, a means of supplying living tissues with nutrients and oxygen and of removing waste products. Once separated from the pumping heart, it was nothing but a reddish-brown liquid.

  Drink ye all of this; for this is my blood.

  ‘Mrs Appleyard?’ Ferguson murmured. ‘Steady, now.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  The waist of the tights lay flat against the plastic. There was no kapok in there. The blood was thickest from the top of the thighs to the waist of the tights. You could no longer see the whiteness of the wool.

  O Lamb of God –

  Sally’s eyes travelled down the length of the legs to the feet. The feet were wearing miniature red cowboy boots. They were dainty things, the leather supple, a delicate pattern stitched in black thread at the ankles. In the toe of the nearer one was a shallow cut about half an inch in length.

  You naughty girl. Have you any idea how much those cost?

  ‘The ankle boots are Italian.’ As Sally paused, she heard a faint, collective sigh behind her. ‘They’re made by someone with a name like Rassi. I bought them at a shop in Covent Garden about two months ago.’ The boots had been an extravagance that Sally had been unable to resist. She had put towards the cost the money that David Byfield had sent for Lucy’s last birthday. Michael had been furious. ‘I wrote Lucy’s name on the back of the maker’s label.’ Not the sort of boots you could afford to lose, she had thought. ‘As for the tights, I’m pretty sure she was wearing ones like that on Friday. It’s hard to be absolutely certain because of the blood.’

  Lucy’s blood. Oh Christ – can’t you stop this?

  They had known what Lucy was wearing, down to the maker’s name in the boots. But they needed to be sure. Sure? Gingerly, Sally stretched out her hand towards the two legs.

  ‘Mrs Appleyard –’ the doctor began.

  Sally ignored him. She touched the leg very gently with the tip of the index finger of her right hand. ‘It’s icy.’

  ‘It may have been deep-frozen until recently.’ Maxham’s voice was harsher than usual.

  ‘Like the hand they found in Kilburn Cemetery?’

  ‘Yes.’

  What struck Sally now was the silence. Here they were in one of the world’s great cities, in the middle of a pool of silence. There must have been at least a dozen police officers within thirty yards and they all seemed to be holding their breath.

  Dear God, the pain. Had they had the decency to kill her first, and kill her swiftly?

  Sally ran her fingertip delicately down the leg, following the curve of the knee, on down the shin to the top of the boot. She bowed her head.

  ‘Mrs Appleyard?’ Maxham sounded anxious, with just a hint of exasperation. ‘That’s all we need, thank you. You’ve been very helpful. Very brave.’

  Sally slipped the thumb and forefinger of her hand right round the ankle and squeezed it, through the plastic bag and the leather. She felt the hardness of the bone underneath.

  ‘Mrs Appleyard,’ said Ferguson, ‘there’s a possibility of postmortem damage. That could give us problems at the autopsy.’

  Yvonne put her hand on Sally’s arm. Sally shook her off. Someone snarled like a dog deprived of a bone. Me. Puzzled, she ran her hand round the bend of the L and on to the foot itself. Maxham grabbed her other arm. She felt the toes. It wasn’t possible. Yvonne and Maxham pulled her gently back.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Appleyard.’ Maxham allowed his exasperation to show plainly. ‘Now we’ll get you home. Your husband will be back soon.’

  I don’t want my husband: I want Lucy.

  Then Sally saw how the impossible might have happened. Must have happened.

  ‘The legs are too long,’ she said slowly. ‘So they aren’t Lucy’s.’

  Maxham allowed Sally to sit inside the church because he could not think of a valid reason to prevent her. Besides, she knew, he had assumed that she wanted to pray, a possibility which embarrassed him. His embarrassment was a weapon she could use against him.

  It was very cold. The gratings set into the cheap red tiles suggested underfloor heating, but either the system didn’t work or the people using the church could not afford to run it. The silence pressed down on her. The air smelt faintly of incense. The brass of the lectern was smudged and dull. She glanced up a
t the roof, plain pitch pine, full of darkness, shadows and spiders’ webs.

  Her eyes drifted along the line of the roof to the east wall. A large picture in a gilt frame hung above the altar. The light was poor and the paint was dingy. Maybe the Last Judgement, Sally thought, a cheap and nasty Victorian copy if the rest of the church was anything to go by. Christ in Glory in the centre of the picture, a river of fire spewing forth at his feet; flanked by angels and apostles; and below them the souls of the righteous queuing for admission to paradise; and the archangel with the scales – Michael or Gabriel? – weighing the souls of the risen dead. A picture story for children afraid of the dark.

  And Lucy? Was she afraid? Or already dead?

  Sally let out her breath in a long, ragged sigh. Don’t think about that. Think about the good news. The legs were not Lucy’s, any more than the hand had been. They were the wrong shape, wrong size, wrong everything. Lucy’s were thinner and less muscular, and her feet were much smaller than the feet which had been stuffed into Lucy’s red Italian cowboy boots.

  At first Maxham had not believed Sally. Even Yvonne and Dr Ferguson had been sceptical. They had all been suspicious of her certainty, willing to attribute it to wishful thinking.

  I’m her mother, damn you. Of course I know.

  Sally bowed her head. Once again she tried to pray, to thank God that the legs were not Lucy’s, and that therefore Lucy might still be alive. But her mind swerved away from prayer like a horse refusing a jump. An invisible barrier hemmed her in, enclosing her in her private misery. It was as if the church itself had surrounded her with a wall of glass which cut off the lines of communication. For an instant she thought she glimpsed the building’s personality: sour, malevolent, unhappy – a bricks-and-mortar equivalent of Audrey Oliphant, the woman who had cursed her.

  What’s happening to me? Churches don’t have personalities.