by Rebecca Tope
She flinched at the skilful thrust. ‘I don’t believe that Drew thinks I’m deranged,’ she said softly. ‘I think he understands my need to know.’ She lifted her head, her hands curled into fists. ‘And I do need to know, you see,’ she stated clearly. ‘I very much need to know exactly what has happened to my mother.’
Jim Kennett was an avid consumer of all news items – television, radio, local and national papers – absorbing the stories like a gossipy old woman and retelling them with embellishments over the bags and benches of the small old-fashioned sorting office in Cullompton. Jim had been a postman for twenty-five years, a job perfectly suited to his temperament.
The reported discovery of a dead woman in a new cemetery in a small village, buried there before the first official interment, appealed to him enormously. He chuckled over it more than once. ‘Someone was in a hurry,’ he said. ‘Jumping the gun and no mistake. Makes you think, though. What was in their minds – murdering her and then burying her all nice and tidy in a field that everybody must have known was going to be a natural burial ground?’ He mused on this, while his fellow postmen ignored him. ‘I mean – if you’d just killed someone, you’d bury them in a quiet place where you wouldn’t expect anyone to go digging. Wouldn’t you?’ He looked at Pete and Fred thoughtfully, not really expecting any reply. ‘So, maybe they wanted someone to find her. Makes no sense, even then.’
Pete and Fred were even more unrewarding than usual, but Jim needed to worry away at the story for a while yet, before he could let it go. He took it home with him, and started thinking aloud over the supper table, with his wife Caroline and son Jason. ‘That murder’s a poser,’ he began, chewing his fried liver thoughtfully. ‘I was just saying to Pete and Fred this morning – why bury someone in a place where you know she’ll be found?’
His wife and son seldom read the papers or followed the more obscure news stories. ‘What?’ said Caroline.
‘Two or three weeks ago – they found a body, dead six months or more, in a field which was already due to open as a natural cemetery sort of place. They still haven’t identified her. It was on again last night. Asking for people who think they might have known her to come forward.’
‘What’s a natural cemetery?’ said Jason.
‘You know – where they have trees and wild flowers and bits of rock instead of proper gravestones. It’s catching on all over the place. Sounds OK to me. Time we got back to a more sensible way of doing the necessary.’
Caroline slowly raised her head from the task of removing the rind from her bacon. ‘I never told you, did I?’ she said. ‘Last summer, when I was coming back from Taunton. I’d been to see Auntie Hilda, we’d gone shopping together, and then to a film. Uncle George had toddled off to some Masons’ do – though heaven knows what they made of him. He’d already lost most of his marbles by then. Anyway, I got the last train home. I saw something going on in a field. Looked like people burying something or someone.’
Jim laughed scornfully. ‘You were dreaming,’ he said. ‘Besides, you can’t see outside a train at night.’
‘The carriage lights had gone out. To be honest, I thought I might have been dreaming, too. Maybe I was. It was a bit like a dream. Two people, with something lying on the ground. A big dark shape, it was. It could have been a person. I could see a spade, and a torch—’
‘Hey! What if Mum saw them burying this woman!’ cried Jason. ‘She’d be famous! Where was it, Mum?’
‘Somewhere between Taunton and Exeter, that’s all I know. Where’s this place you’re talking about, Jim?’’
‘North Staverton,’ said Jim, his hands resting immobile beside his plate. ‘Right beside the railway line. Good God, woman – why didn’t you say something at the time?’
She shrugged and sighed. ‘I forgot about it,’ she said. ‘Once you get off a train, you don’t think about it any more. It’s as if it all happened in another world. And you know how woolly headed I am these days, anyway.’
‘You’ll have to tell the police,’ said Jim, with rising excitement. ‘Go and phone them now.’
She shook her head. ‘I’m no good with the phone. I’ll get all tongue tied. I’ll pop in tomorrow and see if they’re interested. But really, I haven’t anything very useful to tell them, have I? They already know she was buried there. All I can do is give them a date – if it’s the same place.’
‘A date can be very important,’ Jim told her seriously. ‘Very important indeed.’
Simon Gliddon got up that morning with a sense of foreboding thick in his chest. It was the anniversary of his wife’s death. A year ago today, she had been shot down, without any chance of escape, while minding her own business on an innocent holiday tour of Egypt. Simon had insisted on seeing her body when it was eventually shipped back to England. There was no other way that he could ever have believed the truth of the story he had been told. As it was, it hadn’t looked much like his wife. Her skin had darkened to the colour of his in-laws’ mahogany sideboard; her hair had been brushed into a cloud around her head, instead of tied back in the ponytail she always wore. Only the wide plump shoulders, the stubborn jawline and the beautifully embalmed hands wearing the wedding ring he had put on her finger, had convinced him that it was really Sarah. The image of how she had looked had remained with him constantly, only slightly dimmed after the passage of a whole year.
He had intended to go to work as usual, hoping to drown the memories and the sudden flashes of rage in the routine tasks he would have waiting on his desk, but he decided he couldn’t face it. Perhaps he owed it to Sarah to remain at home, trawling through the past, wondering how he might yet ensure justice for his dead wife and punishment for those who were at fault.
The house still bore many signs of Sarah’s existence. He had changed almost nothing – the kitchen still had mugs and ornamental plates and recipe cuttings exactly as she’d left them; the bathroom had her shampoo and body lotion on a shelf in the cabinet; the cupboard on the landing was full of her dressmaking materials. Only her clothes and shoes had disappeared, collected by her mother and disposed of in the early weeks. There was a small box of jewellery in one of the drawers, which Simon fingered from time to time, imagining the unborn daughter who had died with Sarah inheriting the objects if she had been allowed to live.
He would never marry again – of that he was certain. His father, currently on his third wife, found this inexplicable. ‘She wouldn’t have wanted you to be lonely, son,’ he said repeatedly. ‘There’s no law says you have to mourn her forever.’
Simon didn’t even try to explain that he would never dare embark on marriage again. It had been too traumatic the first time for that to be within his power. He knew he could never stand there a second time mouthing those promises. He could never find words to reveal just how gruelling his marriage to Sarah had actually been. Nobody would believe him, anyway. They’d think he was mad.
And maybe I am mad, he thought to himself. Mad with the frustration of never being able to tell anybody how it really was. Mad with the blurring of the facts as time goes by. Who can say, now, what was real?
Yet suddenly, now, on this special anniversary, when he was permitted to indulge himself all day with self-tormenting memories, he remembered a man who just might understand how he felt. A man who was in a marriage that seemed, from what Simon had glimpsed of it, to be not unlike his own. He rummaged through an old address book and located the number. Perhaps the man would be at home. If not, then so be it. He felt he was rolling a dice, letting fate take control.
The phone was answered on the third ring. ‘Willard Slater here,’ said a familiar voice.
‘Simon Gliddon.’
‘Hello!’ Willard sounded unusually jovial. ‘I was just thinking about you. Seems you’ve got your revenge on the old bat, then?’
‘What?’ Simon’s mind went blank. ‘Say that again.’
‘The lady we all love to hate, as they used to say in the films. Come on, man, you know what I
’m saying.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Simon spluttered, ‘but I really don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I understand,’ Willard soothed. ‘Just my little joke. So to what do I owe the pleasure?’
‘It’s the anniversary today. I wanted to talk to you.’
It was Willard’s turn to splutter. ‘Me? Funny sort of choice,’ he said in loud self-denigration.
‘We used to talk,’ Simon reminded him. ‘You were always a good listener.’
‘That was different. I was your tutor. And it was a long time ago. And we talked more about economics than affairs of the heart, if I remember rightly.’
‘Perhaps we did,’ said Simon, putting the phone down, limp with disappointment.
Jeffrey hadn’t been very enthused by the prospect of adding a pets’ cemetery to the Peaceful Repose Burial Ground. ‘Have to make a fence round it,’ he said gloomily. ‘And keeping track of what’s in there’ll be no fun. All shapes and sizes. Are you going to have horses? Hamsters? It’s a minefield, Mr Slocombe, I’m warning you.’
‘It’s too lucrative to refuse,’ Drew told him. ‘And it’s a good idea, really it is. Look, we’ll pace it out now and stick some pegs in, and you can make a start on the fence next week. Simple sort of post and rail arrangement would probably be best.’
‘Costs a fortune, that does,’ said Jeffrey.
‘Not if we do it ourselves. It’ll keep Maggs occupied, too, if she helps you. Meanwhile, we’ll put the labrador here, look.’ He pointed to a shallow hollow where the grass was tussocky and the sunlight was dappled by the flickering shadows of one of the beech trees. ‘It’s a lovely spot.’
‘Too good for a dog,’ grumbled Jeffrey, clearly determined not to look on the bright side.
The interment next morning went well enough. Drew and Maggs lowered the plain rectangular box into the two-foot-deep grave, while Mr and Mrs Grainger sniffed wordlessly. Poignantly they threw a doglead and well-chewed toy on top of the coffin. ‘We’ll never have another dog now,’ Mildred said. ‘We’re getting too old to exercise it properly.’
Drew smiled sympathetically, though Hubert looked as if he could handle a lively dog without too much difficulty. But a dog could last twelve or fifteen years, and by then the man would be over eighty, he supposed. Pity to have to plan so far ahead. It was only a split second between that idea and the returning awareness that he should be doing much the same thing himself. After all, he had a family – he’d be expected to find money for college fees when he was fifty, pressured to make a respectable income for at least the next twenty years, surrounded by noisy demands.
Before they left, Hubert Grainger handed over a cheque for three hundred pounds and shook Drew vigorously by the hand. ‘Excellent job, excellent,’ he said. ‘You chose a perfect spot for the poor old boy to rest in. We read about this place in the local rag, you know. It’s every bit as pleasant as we imagined it would be.’ He turned and looked towards the top of the field, more or less exactly at the place where the body had been found. Drew held his breath, expecting some comment about the discovery of the dead woman, but it never came. Instead, the man went on to ask, ‘All right if we come by for a visit from time to time, is it? Just for old time’s sake?’
‘Of course,’ Drew told him. ‘That plot’s yours now, to visit whenever you like.’
‘D’you hear that, Mildred?’ He turned to his wife, who was standing with her back to them, gazing up the field, apparently lost in painful thoughts. ‘Mr Slocombe says we can visit whenever we like.’
The woman turned slowly to face him. ‘I’m not sure I’ll want to do that, Hubert. It’s all so sad here.’
‘Buck up, old thing,’ he said gently. ‘It’ll be all right, you see.’ And he led her back to the Volvo, pausing only to nod a final thanks.
It was the first time Drew had buried an animal – although he’d once had cause to keep a dead dog in Daphne Plant’s mortuary fridge – and he was astonished at how moving the experience had been. As he watched the grieving couple drive away, he blinked rapidly for a few moments.
It was definitely coincidental that Drew was at the local police station to collect a burial order when the fax came through from the Cullompton Police to say there was a possible witness to the burial of the unidentified body in Slocombe’s Field.
‘Hey, Drew – come and look at this,’ invited PC Tony Stacey, who was holding the sheet of paper. ‘They’re talking about you again.’ He beckoned Drew to his desk, and proffered the faxed message.
‘Witness has come forward to say she saw two people burying something shaped like a human body in the Slocombe Burial Ground at North Staverton. Mrs Caroline Kennett was on a train late at night, and saw something going on from the window. Date said to be 12th August last year. Over to you, mate. Give us a call if you’d like to interview the witness.
‘Well, well. There is a railway line running alongside your field, isn’t there?’
Drew nodded. ‘But how can she have seen anything? Everything’s pitch black, in the countryside, and she was on a well-lit train.’
‘We can ask her to explain. Not that it helps much. Just means we have a date.’
‘One that’s easy to remember anyway,’ said Drew casually.
‘Why’s that then?’
‘Glorious twelfth? Grouse shooting starts, doesn’t it?’
‘Not much of a shot myself,’ said PC Stacey, with a parody of modesty that did nothing to conceal the flash of dislike. ‘Not a date that immediately thrills my heart.’ He leant forward. ‘To be perfectly honest, it’s the first time I’ve ever heard of it. Not the sort of circles I move in.’
‘Well, me neither, really,’ said Drew, suppressing a sigh. Yet again he’d managed to make himself look arrogant, or pretentious, by being too clever. It happened depressingly frequently, always in the company of other men. No wonder he preferred being amongst women: they never seemed threatened by displays of knowledge.
The burial order he’d been collecting was for one Cynthia Smithers, aged seventy-two, dead of congestive heart failure without having consulted a doctor for nearly a year. Her two sons and three daughters had collectively agreed on a Peaceful Repose funeral, having read about it in the local press. ‘There’s precious little money around, you see,’ explained one of the daughters to Drew. ‘And it sounds nice in your field.’ Not for the first time, Drew wondered whether he’d done the right thing in keeping costs so low. For so long now, funerals had made a substantial hole in almost any family’s resources, and the population had seen that as no more than fitting. If you offered a cheap service, did that risk undervaluing the person being buried? Was he making things too easy for the miserly and uncaring? The accusations had been articulated only too vividly by his former employer, Daphne Plant. You’re not doing anybody any favours, Drew. Not even yourself. If people genuinely can’t afford fifteen hundred pounds or so, then there’s a DSS fund to help them out. Isn’t a person’s life worth commemorating with some serious expenditure? All our social and personal values these days are tied up with money. By forcing them to dig into their pockets, we’re saying we think death is something really important. What message are you going to be giving them? ‘Just stick your old mum in this field, where she’ll soon be fertilising the grass and the daisies. It’ll only cost you a few hundred quid.’ It’ll backfire on you, Drew. Just you mark my words.
He hadn’t tried to argue with her. He saw only too clearly how it appeared to her, under her unwavering value system. Her family had been in the business for generations, fighting off threats from voracious American funeral companies, building determinedly on Plant’s commitment to the local community, with their intimate knowledge of family connections. Daphne couldn’t afford to listen to Drew. Even though funeral practices had scarcely changed in a century or more, there was no room for complacency. A natural burial ground, with its overtones of recycling and ecology, and a move away from empty ritual orchestrated by an unknown min
ister, just might be the future preference for a substantial proportion of the population. Drew could hardly expect his former boss to send him off with her blessing.
Cynthia Smithers’ daughter quickly redeemed herself, however. ‘Could we have one of those pretty willow baskets?’ she asked. ‘We’ll come and decorate it ourselves, if that’s all right. And we’ll dress Mum up in her Sunday best.’ For the next day and a half, no fewer than nine members of the woman’s family made free with Drew’s cool room behind the office, making up for the shortage of money with an infinity of time and care and attention. Drew almost wept with relieved admiration.
‘Could we put up a bird box?’ asked a grandson. ‘So she can be sure to have some bluetits around her? She loved bluetits, did Granny.’ Drew went with him to select a suitable point on the trunk of one of the beech trees, indulging in a glowing vision of a succession of such suggestions, until the field became an overflowing paradise of colour and wildlife and individual statements of love. Yes! he crowed to himself. It’s really going to work.
Cynthia’s two sons dug the grave themselves, saving another eighty pounds on their bill and doing Jeffrey out of a job. They went down three and a half feet, which Drew advised was the deepest he thought sensible. After some research, he had worked out how to get the significance of this across to people, without getting too graphic. ‘There’s virtually no oxygen deep in the ground,’ he explained. ‘So the natural processes don’t happen properly. And in this particular bit of ground, there’s a layer of clay at about four feet, which only makes it worse. I won’t go into the biochemical details, but ecologically speaking, a body is going to be a lot more useful if it’s not buried too deep.’ Privately, he wished they’d made it even shallower, but it was still a decided improvement on the traditional six feet.
