Viridian Tears

by Rachel Green

  “Not like these.” She stroked the line of a Celtic knot in silver. “These are psychically neutral, made from spiritually pure silver. By holding it and concentrating on your love for this woman you’d imbue it with your essence. Whenever she wore it she’d think of you.” This was, after all, true of all gifts, and despite most of the pieces being made in China, she did make a point of washing every piece in salt water to rid it of negative energy when they came to her.

  “I see.” He fingered a mid-range Goddess pendant priced at twenty-five pounds. “When you put it like that…” He picked up the necklace. “Do you do gift boxes?”

  “Of course. “ Meinwen led him to a display near the counter. “Two ninety-nine.”

  “I walked into that one, eh?” He smiled as he took out his wallet and handed her a bankcard. She pulled out a reader and connected it to the telephone line.

  “That’s twenty-seven ninety-nine.” She handed him the card reader and he tapped in his security number and passed it back. When the transaction had gone through she pulled out the card. “There you go Mr–” She read the name printed on the bottom, “–Browning.”

  “Thank you.” He slipped it back into his wallet and picked up the small bag with the necklace and box. “Just call me Graham.”

  Chapter 35

  “So this is where you hide during the day?”

  Meinwen looked up at the feminine voice, smiling as she recognized the woman from the new cemetery. She made the connections to recall her name. New Eden Cemetery…Eden… “Mrs. Maguire. What brings you out of your coffin?” She smiled to show the comment was made in good humor.

  “This and that.” She fingered a display of silver necklaces, letting them fall through her fingers as her hands passed them. “I’ve no funerals booked for this afternoon and after the debacle this morning I left Emily to deal with the incomings so barring emergencies and sudden deaths with no suspicious circumstances–” she patted the edge of a bookshelf “–I have the afternoon free for shopping and marketing.” She pulled out an elastic-banded handful of leaflets from her bag. “Would you mind having a few of these in your information stand?”

  Meinwen held out her hand for one and read the title. After Death: What to do with someone who loved the environment. “Catchy.”

  “All suggestions welcome. It’s far more efficient than cremation but how do you say that without being crass?”

  “How about Pushing Up Daisies? With the same subtitle, of course. Perhaps you could make wild flowers part of the service like they do in America. I saw an advert for cremains in a biodegradable coffee cup with your choice of tree seed already inside.”

  “I can’t bear trees in cemeteries and besides, cryomation makes several pounds of compost material, not just a coffee cup full.” Eden sank back into a skull-themed throne. “Mind you. I could still offer bulbs and seeds compressed into the nutrient block.”

  “Sounds fabulous.” Meinwen crossed to a rack on the wall next to the community notice board and added the pamphlets. While she was in the vicinity, she opened a box of soapstone Buddhas and began attaching price tags. “Have you thought any more about the standing stone?”

  “Yes. You can have your monolith as long as you don’t expect me to pay for it.”

  Meinwen paused, a price tag dangling from her fingers. “Really? That’s brilliant. I’ll cost it up and start applying for grants. If we have it carved we’d be eligible for Arts Council funding.”

  “Marvelous. You could try Eddie Burbridge, too. His heirs, anyway. He was always on the lookout for charitable donations for tax purposes. That’s why he gave me the lease on the land. I could ask on your behalf, if you like. I got on well with the family.” She frowned. “Best leave it a day or two though, now the wife’s died as well. I left a message offering New Eden as a final resting place but no one’s got back to me yet.”

  “You want to host her funeral?”

  “Why not? I did her husband’s. That went splendidly. Not like the one today.”

  “Today? What happened today?”

  “Frank Dibben. A man with several parts and two wives.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with polyamory.”

  “I wouldn’t know, but this was bigamy, plain and simple. Neither wife knew about the other until they both turned up to see him off and then all hell broke loose. There were fights breaking out left, right and centre and if Father Cullen from St. Pity’s hadn’t had the foresight to lower the coffin to safety I think the philandering Mr. Dibben would have been scattered to the four corners”

  “Oh dear. No wonder you wanted a break.” Meinwen wrote out another price tag. “Wait. Did you say Eddie Burbridge held the lease on New Eden?”

  “Yes, but it was a lot cheaper that buying the land. I’d originally thought to set the cemetery over Offley way but couldn’t afford to buy three acres of prime agricultural. I sent an enquiry about the land where I am now to the council. It was fallow, as far as I could see. As luck would have it, the enquiry came before Eddie Burbridge and he liked the proposal enough to offer me the lease.”

  “That seems…serendipitous.”

  “Doesn’t it? Anyway, one of the stipulations was that he be interred there, though Mrs. Burbridge glossed over that and elected to have him cryomated instead. It was very odd, really. He even had the plot marked out ready. Mind you, with the death of the wife perhaps the children will defer to their father’s original wishes and drop them both in the same plot.”

  “That was foresighted of him.”

  “Yes. I had the impression he was a community man, though. He made several charitable donations that I know of, and I’ve only been here three years. That’s why I thought of him for your monolith, actually. He sponsored the needle sculpture on the hill. You can see it from the cemetery.”

  “Dew Point.” Meinwen pulled a pamphlet entitled The View from Here from the bookshelf and showed Eden the cover. It was a view of Laverstone from the spot, with the obelisk in the foreground. She didn’t mention that you couldn’t actually see that view; it faced the other way, over Hobb’s Wood, and she’d actually manipulated the picture on the computer. “I protested the construction at the time. The trees there were a favorite spot for nesting woodpeckers and he tore them all down to make the damn thing visible for miles. He paid for the statue of Robert Beswick outside the town hall, too, though I didn’t mind that. Beswick was a good mayor. Did a lot for the community.”

  “Really? Burbridge was disparaging about him. Even left a bit to be read out at his eulogy putting him down.”

  “That’s odd. They were good friends in life.”

  “All a front, I suppose. You know what politicians are like.”

  “Yes, crooks, mostly.” Meinwen replaced the booklet since Eden had a sincere lack of interest in it and returned to pricing up Buddha.

  Eden rose to her feet and crossed to a bookcase full of wooden carvings. She picked up a heart-shaped one, priced at seven pounds. “How lovely these little trinkets are. You know, if these were made of something that rotted away to nothing, I’d allow them on my graves.”

  “Your graves?”

  “The graves my clients have rented.” She waved away the technicality. “You could make a killing if you catered the funerary crowd.”

  “I’ve never really thought about it.” Meinwen narrowed her eyes at the young businesswoman. “I wouldn’t have to sell crucifixes and angels, would I?”

  “Not if you didn’t want to, though if you did…” Eden left the sentence hanging.

  Meinwen chose to let it asphyxiate. “If I made them out of nuts and seeds they’d encourage wildlife into your cemetery too. You could get a ‘Going Green’ award from the council.”

  “I’m already green. That’s the whole point of freeze-drying human remains.”

  “You’ve got a green heart.”

  “Makes a change from someone calling it black.” Eden grinned. “Anyway, I must go. Thanks for taking the pamphlets.”

&
nbsp; “Glad to help.” Meinwen turned, an inch-long Buddha dangling from her fingers by a ribbon. “Mrs. Maguire?”

  “Eden, please.”

  “Eden…Be careful about dealing with the Burbridges. There’s something not quite right there. Remember that one of them is a murderer.” She hung the Buddha from a hook and opened a different box.

  “Pfft. You can’t believe everything you read in the papers. I’ve always found them quite lovely to deal with. Very considerate.”

  Meinwen stepped forward and pressed a charm into her hand.

  “What’s this?” Eden held it up. It was a ring of silver, cast to look like wooden sticks, on a thin chain.

  “A protection charm.” Meinwen gave her a tight smile. “Humor me.”

  Chapter 36

  Meinwen watched the cemetery owner cross the street and head toward the market, losing her only when she turned past the dress shop on the end of Salter’s Lane. She hadn’t realized the new cemetery was under a leasehold contract from Burbridge Estates. Where there any pies in Laverstone the old racketeer hadn’t got his thumbs in?

  She treated herself to a chamomile tea and a wheatmeal biscuit while she ruminated on the new information. The name Burbridge was commonly seen on billboards and hoardings around Laverstone though she’d never really paid it any heed. Now it seemed as closely woven with the modern fabric of the town that unraveling the thread left loose by his unexpected death might leave more than one family in tatters.

  She pulled out her phone and rested it on the counter. She’d lost hers earlier in the year and Sergeant Peters had given her this one. Though she’d avoided smartphones for as long as she could, now that she had one she didn’t know how she’d gone through life without it. She opened an internet browser and performed a search for Laverstone and Burbridge which netted her thousands of results. She narrowed it with donated and came across four distinct occasions.

  The first she knew about; the bequeathing of the statue of the former mayor, Robert Beswick, outside the town hall. It was something she approved of, the outgoing member sculpted in the act of handing over his seal of office. There were several pictures to go with the article, one or two of them views normally invisible to the general public, who generally viewed the life-sized statue from the base of the six-foot high plinth, designed to discourage vandals, though Robert generally sported a traffic-cone hat or, at one point during Fresher’s week at the Technical College, a strap-on dildo.

  One of the pictures illustrating the article showed a close up of Beswick’s head and a second, details of the two objects he was holding, a book and a pair of scales, signaling justice and compassion. What gripped Meinwen was the detail of the open book, the right-hand page of which was a carved symbol matching that of the key Joseph had given her. Eddie Burbridge had left a clue to his possession of John Stearne’s chest.

  The second bequest was, as she had guessed, the obelisk at Dew Point, an object she’d seen many times as she stood to use the natural stone altar at the tip of the promontory. What she had never noticed, or rather, she had noticed but never realized its significance, was the same symbol, carved once again into the tip of the needle. She’d always assumed it to be a bastardised version of the Eye of Horus, and said as much in her pamphlet. She’d have to revise the edition now. The illustration showed the obelisk but didn’t make clear on which side the eye was carved. She couldn’t remember either and had to hunt out the series of photographs she’d taken of it when writing the pamphlet. It wasn’t on the front, as you looked at the needle, but on the side facing the cemetery, though it pre-dated Eden’s business by almost a decade.

  That made two of Edward Burbridge’s bequests with the Witchfinder’s Eye, as she now thought of it, carved into them. Was it a coincidence?

  She opened another browser tab for the third bequest, made when Eddie moved to Laverstone from London. She’d commented on it only yesterday: The Gaunt's telecommunications mast at the back of Winston’s garage. The photographs of it were less distinct than the first two bequests she’d looked at, since they’d been taken by a reporter when it had been erected. She couldn’t see a Witchfinder’s Eye on it, but mainly because the mast was a silhouette against the sky behind. A new search for images of the Gaunt's Mast revealed no further detail. Those she came across were invariable portrait shots of people with the tower in the background, though one photograph was of a Marsh Warbler with the mast a distinct vertical in the background. She followed the photograph to its host page and narrowed the spot to an area east of the canal below the bluff of the Laver Hills.

  She took her phone to the wall opposite the shop door, where an one-to-twenty-five scale map of Laverstone highlighted the points of pagan interest in Laverstone; the remaining stones of the original circle, the Bronze Age barrows, the site of the Stone Age hill fort, the abbey ruins and so on. She found The Gaunt's and Winston’s garage and, since the map was framed under glass, drew a circle on it with a dry marker pen. The marshland east of the canal and west of the hill was marked on her map as simply Laver Wetlands but tracing the road to the north gave her the more modern name: The New Eden cemetery. That was odd. She couldn’t remember seeing the radio mast from Eden’s cemetery and she’d been deliberately looking at landmarks when sighting the position of the circle monolith.

  She marked the positions of the Dew Point obelisk and the town hall, respectively south and west of the cemetery. With The Gaunt's to the north, what was the betting that Eddie’s fourth bequest was to the east?

  She checked the webpage for it. There would be no Witchfinder’s Eye on this one, or if there were, it would not be of Eddie’s construction. The symbol was clear enough, however, a twenty-five thousand, tax-deductible donation to the restoration of St. Pity’s steeple.

  Meinwen drew a line between St. Pity’s and the town hall, and another between the Gaunt's mast and Dew Point. The two lines crossed in the cemetery, not twenty yards from her proposed monolith, on ground belonging to Burbridge Estates.

  What was the betting it was the exact spot Eddie had wanted to be buried? Burial meant digging, and digging down meant digging up.

  Meinwen stood back.

  She was quite sure she’d just solved the riddle of the missing Burbridge millions.

  Chapter 37

  Meinwen rang Eden. “Are you back at the cemetery yet?”

  “On my way, yes. Why?”

  “I need to come over and dig up one of your plots.”

  “You can’t. Not without an exhumation order.”

  “What if there’s no body inside?”

  “Hmm.” Meinwen could hear the hum of traffic in the background. “Are you certain of that? Without a shadow of a doubt?”

  “Yes. I think you will be too, when you see the plot.”

  “Will I? Which plot is it?”

  “I can’t be certain until I get there and check some landmarks.”

  “I’d be happier if there was a police presence. I can’t afford to get on the wrong side of the law. Not in my business. I don’t want to run foul of the Disposal of Physical Remains Act. Or the Desecration Act, for that matter.”

  “Fine. I’m sure I can get DI White to come down. It’s his murder case, after all.”

  “Wait. Murder case? I thought you said there wouldn’t be a body?”

  “It’s not the body I’m expecting to find. It’s the motive.”

  “Now you’ve lost me all together.”

  Meinwen chuckled. “Don’t worry. I just need your permission to do a little digging.”

  “Very well. I’ll ask Malcolm to stand by with the digger.”

  “No.” Meinwen almost shouted it into the phone, she was so terrified Eden would close the connection. “Don’t mention it to Malcolm. I think he may have been one of Eddie Burbridge’s heavies.”

  “Really? That’s interesting. Very well. It’s a good job I can operate it then.”

  Meinwen made another call and arranged for a lift to the cemetery, then a third
to DI White to ask him for his presence in a purely supervisory capacity, assuring him that while she was certain there wouldn’t be a body she could promise him something of interest to his case. She put the phone down hoping she was right.

  By the time Michelle pipped to say she was outside, Meinwen had collected her compass, binoculars, laser-sighting tool and theodolite and used the map inside a copy of The View from Here to mark the four points she’d worked out. She locked up the shop and left by the back door, dumping all the gear into the back seat of Michelle’s car. She paused, half inside before she realized Michelle already had a passenger.

  “Oh, hello.” She shot a look at Michelle but the younger woman was concentrating on the road and particularly the approach of a traffic warden. “It’s Mr. Browning, isn’t it? We met earlier. I didn’t realize you were buying for Michelle.”

  “Buying?” Michelle half turned, looking from Meinwen to Graham. “Buying what? You didn’t tell me.”

  “It was meant to be a surprise. I didn’t get the chance to give it you since you were already half way out the door when I got back.”

  “Sorry, did I let it slip?” Meinwen settled into the seat and slipped the seatbelt on. She rearranged her equipment so that it wasn’t poking her in the ribs. “It was a thoughtful gift, though I might have given different advice had I realized who the recipient might be.”

  Michelle executed a three-point turn in the narrow street and the traffic warden abruptly changed direction and headed the other way. “Where are we going?”

  “The cemetery, didn’t I say?” Meinwen tried to see out of the front window, Travelling in the back of a car always made her feel sick. “The new one by the canal, though, not St. Pity’s municipal.” She touched Michelle on the shoulder. “Would you just pull up by that pillar box? I have to post this before the end of the day.” She held up a padded envelope. “Online postage payments, you see. It has to go out within twenty-four hours.”