The Four Last Things

by Taylor, Andrew

  Gratitude was in any case misplaced. The legs had belonged to another child. Should she thank God for the other child’s death and mutilation? Beside that terrible fact, the goodness of God receded to invisibility.

  Sally opened her eyes, desperate to find a distraction. On the wall nearest to her hung a board with the names of the incumbents inscribed in flaking gold letters, beginning with a Reverend Francis Youlgreave MA in 1891 and ending, seven names later, with the Reverend George Bagnall, who had left the parish in 1970. It was a big board and three-quarters of it was blank. No doubt Youlgreave and his immediate successors had imagined that the list of incumbents would stretch on and on, and that the building would always be a place of worship.

  Things could never get better, she thought bitterly, only worse. How those long-gone priests would have hated the thought of her, a woman in orders. And what was the purpose of it anyway? It now seemed absurd that she had fought so hard to be ordained, and that she should devote her life to playing a minor part in the affairs of a dying cult. So far the effect had been wholly evil: she had ruined her own life, damaged Michael’s and abandoned Lucy. She was to blame. She was too angry with herself even to share the blame with God. Oh yes, he was still there. But he didn’t matter any more. If the truth were told, he never had. He didn’t care.

  You mustn’t blame yourself. David Byfield’s words twisted in her memory and took on a bitter and no doubt intended irony. He blamed her. He always had blamed her, the woman who had committed the double sin of wanting to be a priest and taking away his Michael. She wondered yet again what bound the two men so tightly together. Whatever the reason, now she had her reward for breaking into their charmed relationship, and no doubt David was rejoicing.

  Sally stared at the list of priests. The church’s dedication was written in gothic capitals at the head of the board: ST MICHAEL AND ALL ANGELS. Her mind filled with a thrumming sound, as though a thousand birds had risen into the air and were flying across the mud flats of an estuary. Her husband’s name was Michael, and the church was dedicated to Michael. Just a coincidence, surely. It was a common name. Only a paranoiac would think otherwise.

  And yet –

  This evil was beginning to take shape. It had been planned and executed over a long period. The brown-skinned hand in Kilburn Cemetery and the bleeding legs in the porch must be connected with each other because there were so many correspondences: both had been deep-frozen; both were parts of a child’s anatomy; both had been left in places which were sacred; and they had been found within twenty-four hours of each other. It was theoretically possible that the two were separate incidents – that the story of the severed hand had inspired a copycat crime – but this seemed less likely. The boots and the tights left no doubt at all that Lucy was at the mercy of the same person. Had there been a message there?

  Lucy’s dismembered, too.

  Whoever had taken her had not done so merely for sexual gratification or from emotional inadequacy; or if he had, that was only a part of it. What lay in the porch had been designed to shock. And the urge to shock had been so great that it had outweighed the risk of being seen.

  The wings rustled and whirred. Not just to shock: also to tease.

  Had Lucy been chosen not for herself but because she was a policeman’s child? Sally remembered Frank Howell’s feature on St George’s in the Evening Standard. Perhaps someone had read it who had a grudge against the police in general or Michael in particular.

  Then why not leave the remains outside a police station? Why the church today and the cemetery yesterday? Perhaps the hatred was aimed at God rather than the police. A further possibility struck her: that this might be a more extreme form of the loathing which had gripped Audrey Oliphant; and in that case it followed that Sally herself, by wanting to become a priest, could have been directly responsible for bringing down on Lucy’s head the attention of whoever had taken her.

  ‘I’m getting paranoid,’ she told herself, her voice thin and childlike in the empty spaces of the cold church; she shocked herself, for she had not realized that she had spoken aloud. ‘Stop it, stop it.’

  The thoughts spurted through her mind – fragmented and disjointed. The noise of the wings grew louder until it obliterated all other sounds and swamped her ability to think. The thrumming was so loud that Sally hardly felt like Sally: she was merely the sound of the wings. She drowned in the sound, as if in the black mud of the estuary.

  ‘No. No. Leave me alone.’

  The thrumming grew even louder. It was dark. She could no longer breathe. She heard a great crack, so loud that for a moment it dominated the thrumming of the wings. Cold air swirled around her.

  ‘That’s quite enough.’ The voice was furious and male. ‘This must stop at once.’

  Sally opened her eyes and turned her head. Through her tears she saw Michael’s godfather, David Byfield, stalking down the aisle towards her.

  8

  ‘Do but extract from the corpulency of bodies, or resolve things beyond their first matter, and you discover the habitation of Angels …’

  Religio Medici, I, 35

  ‘Lucy’s as good as gold with me.’ Angel rinsed the soap from the back of Lucy’s neck. ‘Aren’t you, poppet?’

  Lucy did not reply. She looked very young and small in the bath, her body partly obscured by a shifting mound of foam. She was staring at a blue plastic boat containing two yellow ducks; the boat bobbed up and down in the triangular harbour created by her legs. Her wet hair, plastered to her skull, was as black as polished ebony.

  ‘It’s the first of December today,’ Angel went on, briskly sponging Lucy’s back. ‘Did you know, if you say “White rabbits” on the first of the month and make a silent wish, then the wish will come true? Well, that’s what some people say.’

  Eddie thought that Lucy’s lips might have trembled, and that perhaps she was saying ‘White Rabbits’ to herself and making a wish. I want Mummy. She had had very little to eat for over thirty-six hours and this was beginning to show in her appearance. Children, Eddie had noticed, reacted very quickly to such changes. Now it was Sunday morning, and Lucy’s shoulders looked bonier than they had done on Friday evening, and her stomach was flat. She was still listless from the medication, and perhaps from the shock, too, otherwise Angel would not have risked taking her out of the soundproofed basement to give her a bath.

  (This had been Angel’s rule since the incident with Suki, a sly girl who acted as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth until Angel went out to fetch a towel, leaving her alone with Eddie: as soon as the door closed, Suki had bitten Eddie’s hand and screamed like a train. After that, Angel gave their little visitors regular doses of Phenergan syrup, which kept them nicely drowsy. If a visitor became seriously upset, Angel quietened her with a dose of diazepam, originally prescribed for Eddie’s mother.)

  ‘There’s a good girl. Stand up now and Angel will dry you.’ With Angel’s help, Lucy struggled to her feet. Water and foam dripped down her body. Eddie stared at the pink, glistening skin and the cleft between her legs.

  ‘Uncle Eddie will pass the towel.’

  He hurried to obey. There had been an unmistakable note of irritation in Angel’s voice, perhaps brought on by tiredness. He noticed dark smudges under her eyes. He knew she had gone out the previous evening and had not returned until well after midnight. Eddie had tried the door to the basement while she was out, only to find that it was locked.

  Angel wrapped the large pink towel, warm from the radiator, around Lucy’s body, lifted her out of the bath and sat her on her knee. Eddie thought they made a beautiful picture, a Pre-Raphaelite Virgin and child: Angel in her long white robe, her shining hair flowing free; and Lucy small, thin and sexless, swaddled in the towel, sitting on Angel’s lap and enclosed by her arms. He turned away. His head hurt this morning, and his throat was dry.

  The clothes they had bought for Lucy were waiting on the chair. Among them was a dark-green dress from Laura Ashley, with a whit
e lace collar, a smocked front and ties at each side designed to form a bow at the back. Angel liked her girls to look properly feminine. Boys were boys, she once told Eddie, girls were girls, and it was both stupid and unnatural to pretend otherwise.

  ‘Perhaps Lucy would like to play a game with me when she’s dressed,’ Eddie suggested.

  The girl glanced at him, and a frown wrinkled her forehead.

  ‘She might like to see the you-know-what.’

  ‘The what?’ Angel said.

  Eddie shielded his mouth with his hand, leaned towards her and whispered, ‘The conjuring set.’

  He had bought it yesterday morning and he was longing to see Lucy’s reaction: all children liked presents, and often they showed their gratitude in delightful ways.

  Angel rubbed Lucy’s hair gently. ‘Another day, I think. Lucy’s tired. Aren’t you, my pet?’

  Lucy looked up at her, blinking rapidly as her eyes slid in and out of focus. ‘I want to go home. I want Mummy. I –’

  ‘Mummy and Daddy had to go away. Not for long. I told you, they asked me to look after you.’

  The frown deepened. For Lucy, Eddie guessed, Angel’s certainty was the only fixed point among the confusion and the anxiety.

  ‘Now, now, poppet. Let’s see a nice big smile. We don’t like children who live on Sulky Street, do we?’

  ‘Perhaps if we played a game, it would take Lucy’s mind off things.’ Eddie removed his glasses and polished the lenses with the corner of a towel. ‘It would be a distraction.’

  ‘No.’ Angel picked up the little vest. ‘Lucy’s not well enough for that at present. When we’ve finished in here, I’m going to make her a nice drink and sit her on my knee and read a nice book to her.’

  To his horror, Eddie felt tears filling his eyes. It was so unfair. ‘But with the others, we always –’

  Angel coughed, stopping him in mid-sentence. It was one of her rules that they should never let a girl know that there had been others. But when Eddie looked at her he was surprised to see that she was smiling.

  ‘Lucy isn’t like the others,’ she said, her eyes meeting Eddie’s. ‘We understand each other, she and I.’ Her lips brushed the top of Lucy’s head. ‘Don’t we, my poppet?’

  What about me?

  Eddie held his tongue. A moment later, Angel asked him to go down and warm some milk and turn up the heating. He went downstairs, the jealousy churning angrily and impotently inside him as pointlessly as an engine in neutral revving into the red. The two of them made such a beautiful picture, he accepted that, the Virgin and child, beautiful and hurtful.

  He altered the thermostat for the central heating and put the milk on the stove. His headache was worsening. He stared into the pan, at the shifting disc of white, and felt his eyes slipping out of focus.

  Virgin and child: two was company in the Holy Family. Poor old Joseph, permanently on the sidelines, denied even the privilege of making the customary biological contribution to family life. The mother and child made a whole, self-contained and exclusive, Mary and the infant Jesus, the Madonna and newborn king, the Handmaiden of the Lord with the Christ Child.

  Where did that leave number three? Somewhere in the crowd scene at the stable. Or leading the donkey. Negotiating with the innkeeper. No doubt paying the bills. Acting as a combination of courier and transport manager and meal ticket. No one ever said what happened to old Joseph. No one cared. Why should they? He didn’t count.

  What about me?

  It seemed to Eddie that almost all his life he had been condemned to third place. Look at his parents, for example. They might not have liked each other, but their needs interlocked and they excluded Eddie. Even when his father allowed Eddie to join in the photographs, Stanley’s interest was always focused on the little girl, and the little girl always paid more attention to Stanley than to Eddie; they treated him as part of the furniture, no more important than the smelly old armchair.

  When Stanley died, the pattern continued. His mother hadn’t wasted much time before deciding to find a lodger. But why? There had been enough money for them to continue living at Rosington Road by themselves. They could have managed on Thelma’s widow’s pension from the Paladin, her state pension, and what Eddie received from the DSS. They would have had to live frugally, but it would have been perfectly possible with just the two of them. But no. His mother had wanted someone else, not him. She found Angel and there was the irony: because Angel preferred Eddie, at least for a time.

  Only Alison and Angel had ever taken him seriously. But Alison had gone away and now Angel no longer needed him because she had Lucy instead. But what made Lucy so special?

  Eddie’s eyes widened. The milk was swelling. Its surface was pocked and pimpled like a lunar landscape. A white balloon pushed itself over the rim of the saucepan. The boiling milk spat and bubbled. He lunged at the handle of the saucepan and a smell of burning filled the air.

  I blame you.

  Mummy, Mum, Ma, Mother, Thelma. Eddie could not remember calling his mother by name, not to her face.

  Angel had taken charge when Thelma died. Eddie had to admit that she had worked miracles. When he finally managed to drag himself downstairs on the morning of his mother’s death, he had sat down at the kitchen table, in the heart of Thelma’s domain, and laid his head on his arms. Still in the grip of an immense hangover, he hadn’t wanted to think because thinking hurt too much.

  He had heard Angel coming downstairs and into the room; he had smelled her perfume and heard water gushing from the tap.

  ‘Eddie. Sit up, please.’

  Wearily he obeyed.

  She placed a glass of water in front of him. ‘Lots of fluids.’ She handed him a sachet of Alka-Seltzers which she had already opened to save him the trouble. ‘Don’t worry if you’re sick. It usually helps to vomit.’

  He dropped the tablets one by one into the water and watched the bubbles rising. ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘I suspect it was a heart attack. Just as she expected.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You knew she had a heart condition, didn’t you?’

  A new pain penetrated Eddie’s headache. ‘She never told me.’

  ‘Probably she didn’t want to worry you. Either that or she thought you’d guessed.’

  ‘But how could I?’ Eddie wailed.

  ‘Why do you think she gave up smoking? Doctor’s orders, of course. And those tablets she took, not to mention her spray … Didn’t you ever notice how breathless she got?’

  ‘But she’s been like that for years. Not so bad, perhaps, but –’

  ‘And the colour she went sometimes? As soon as I saw that I knew there was a heart problem. Now drink up.’

  He drank the mixture. At one point he thought he might have to make a run for the sink, but the moment passed.

  ‘It’s a pity she didn’t change her diet and take more exercise,’ Angel went on. ‘But there. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, can you?’

  ‘I wish – I wish I’d known.’

  ‘Why? What could you have done? Given her a new set of coronary arteries?’

  He tried to rid his mind of the figure on the bed in the front room upstairs. Never large, Thelma had shrunk still further in death. He glanced at Angel, who was making coffee. She was quite at home here, he thought, as if this were her own kitchen.

  ‘What happened last night?’

  She turned, spoon in hand. ‘You don’t remember? I’m not surprised. The wine had quite an effect on you, didn’t it? I didn’t realize you had such a weak head.’

  He remembered the basement restaurant in Soho. Snatches of their conversation came back to him. The silk tie, blue with green stripes. Himself vomiting over the shiny bonnet of a parked car. Orange candle flames dancing in Angel’s pupils. The three white tablets in the palm of her hand.

  ‘Did you see my mother last night?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So what happened when we got back?’

  �
��Nothing. I imagine she must have been asleep. I took you upstairs and gave you some aspirin. You went out like a light. So I covered you up and went to bed myself.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  Angel stared at him. ‘I’m not in the habit of lying, Eddie.’

  He dropped his eyes. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘All right. I understand. It’s never easy when a parent dies. One doesn’t act rationally.’

  She paused to pour water into a coffee pot which Eddie had never seen before. He sniffed. Real coffee, which meant that it was Angel’s. His mother had liked only instant coffee.

  A moment later, Angel said in a slow, deliberate voice: ‘We had a pleasant meal out last night. Your mother was asleep when we got home. We went to bed. When I got up this morning I was surprised that your mother wasn’t up before me. So I tapped on her door to see if she was all right. There was no answer so I went in. And there she was, poor soul. I made sure she was dead. Then I woke you and phoned the doctor.’

  Eddie rubbed his beard, which felt matted. ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘Who knows? She might have been dead when we got home. She was certainly very cold this morning.’

  ‘You don’t think … ?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That what happened yesterday might have had something to do with it?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Eddie.’ Angel rested her hands on the table and stared down at him, her face calm and beautiful. ‘Put that right out of your mind.’

  ‘If I’d stayed with her, talked with her –’

  ‘It wouldn’t have done any good. Probably she would have made herself even more upset.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘Her death could have happened at any time. And don’t forget, it’s psychologically typical for survivors to blame themselves for the death of a loved one.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we mention it to the doctor? The fact she was … upset, I mean.’

  ‘Why should we? What on earth would be the point? It’s a complete irrelevance.’ Angel turned away to pour the coffee. ‘In fact, it’s probably better not to mention it. It would just confuse the issue.’