Grave Concerns

by Rebecca Tope

  It was close to four o’clock when he got home. Calling in at the office first, he found Maggs with a shorter list of phone calls than on the previous day, but a look of agitation on her face.

  ‘There’s a man here,’ she hissed. ‘Look!’ She pointed out of the small back window, overlooking the field. Drew could see a figure in a long brown coat, standing beside the new grave. The head was bowed, hands clasped, and as he watched, the man clumsily knelt down on the grass near the head of the grave.

  ‘I think I know who that is,’ Drew said. ‘If I’m right, then we’ve got quite a bit to talk about. I’ll give him a few minutes and then stroll out for a chat.’

  ‘He’s been here nearly half an hour already. He walked up and down the field a bit, to start with, and then seemed to decide it was the new grave he wanted. I’ve been keeping out of the way – I don’t want to put my foot in it by telling him something he’s not supposed to know.’ She looked at Drew searchingly. ‘You haven’t been keeping me very well informed on this, you know,’ she reproached. ‘I thought we were supposed to be working on it together.’

  Drew sighed. ‘There hasn’t been much time. And you haven’t asked me how the funeral went.’

  ‘I can see it was OK. You’re practically glowing.’

  ‘It was fantastic!’ he told her, exultantly. ‘You should have heard what Mrs Hankey said. She was as pleased as anyone could possibly be. And they paid me, look.’ He dug out the brown envelope and opened it. Five twenty-pound notes were neatly folded inside. ‘She’s given me more than I asked. We’ll be rich, Maggs, if this catches on. Your faith will be rewarded.’

  ‘I never doubted it,’ she said casually. ‘But maybe there’s just a few hurdles to jump before we’re earning a thousand quid a week.’

  ‘Each!’ he said wildly.

  ‘Obviously, each.’ She folded her arms majestically. ‘Meanwhile, you’d better go and interview your witness, or whatever he is. He looks as if he might be leaving.’

  The man outside had got to his feet, and was rubbing his hands slowly together. Drew made for the door. ‘Hello!’ he called, hoping he sounded more friendly than challenging. The man was still fifty yards away, and although he looked right at Drew, he made no sign that he’d heard him speak.

  The long brown coat turned out to be made of leather, very creased and stained, but nonetheless genuine. It confirmed Drew’s conjecture that this was Trevor. Trevor who lived in Luxor, who had known Gwen Absolon and written to her about runes and plans and past romances. He was bearded, thin, hollow-cheeked. He walked carefully down the slope towards the road, glancing briefly from Drew’s face to the ground and back again.

  When the distance between them was four or five feet, the man stopped. ‘You the owner of this place?’ he asked. Then, before Drew could answer, he added, ‘You’ll have to shout. I’m very deaf.’

  Drew nodded wordlessly and wondered how to paraphrase all the things he wanted to ask. ‘Come into the office,’ he invited loudly, with an exaggerated sweep of his arm towards the building. ‘We could have some tea.’

  The man cocked his head on one side consideringly. ‘Why?’ he said.

  At least it looks as if he heard me Drew thought. ‘Why not?’ he said.

  The visitor smiled at that, and ducked his head in a jerk of acceptance. Drew led the way. He fished teabags out of the filing cabinet, and reached milk down from a shelf. The cool room had a tap, and he quickly went to fill the kettle, which also lived on the shelf, well out of Stephanie’s reach.

  He clattered with mugs for a few moments while the man sat on one of the chairs, leaning an elbow on the desk. Drew remembered how agitated Daphne Plant would become if a customer strayed into the office – where they might read letters to ministers, or funeral accounts. No such paranoia here, he thought smugly.

  ‘You know whose grave that is?’ Drew said, looking out of the window at the spot where the man had knelt.

  ‘I hope it’s my friend Gwen’s,’ he replied. ‘Otherwise I’ve just said goodbye to the wrong person. Not that it would matter much,’ he added.

  ‘You didn’t come to the burial. I assume you read about it in the paper.’

  ‘What? Oh – the burial. No.’ He looked at the floor until Drew produced a mug of tea which he took in both hands. ‘Did anybody?’

  Drew shook his head. ‘Not really,’ he said.

  ‘She died last year – is that right? I did see the papers. Mrs Fielding showed them all to me, on her computer. Damned clever, that – pictures and everything. Even showed me her necklace – the one poor old Habergas bought her. I felt a bit bad about him – seeing he was so keen on the old girl. I buggered off to Tangiers, anyway, after that business at Saqqara. Should have left him with a clear field from the start. She’d probably have done all right with him.’

  So: another piece of confirmation that the body had indeed been that of Gwen Absolon. But then, he’d stopped doubting it a long time ago.

  There was something strangely anachronistic about his visitor. The coat, the old Etonian accent, even the mention of Tangiers, all seemed redolent of the thirties. And yet he was probably only just over fifty, at most. Drew sipped his own tea and tried to move things along a bit.

  ‘I think I found a letter of yours,’ he said, trying to speak distinctly. ‘Amongst her things.’

  ‘You know who I am then?’

  ‘I think so. But I could be wrong.’

  ‘My name’s Trevor Goldsworthy. And yes, I wrote to Gwen. She was a good friend.’

  ‘Your letter didn’t mention Saqqara,’ Drew observed.

  ‘No. I didn’t want to upset her.’

  Drew reminded himself that this could very easily be Gwen’s killer. He also remembered Maggs’s caution about revealing the identity of the body in the grave. Reasons for suspecting Trevor’s motives were legion, and yet Drew found himself compelled to trust him. Impatiently, he tried to resist. The man could be a spy, or a drug dealer, for heaven’s sake. That was certainly what he most resembled.

  ‘I last saw her in Saqqara, though,’ Trevor continued obligingly. ‘The day of that shooting. She was in an awful state, of course, and came to me for comfort. I like to think I rose to the occasion, in my own small way. So much work involved when something like that happens.’ He grimaced expressively, conveying the tedium and frustration as well as the emotional suffering. ‘Not that she seems to have had much feeling for the girl,’ he added.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Well, she couldn’t conceal a certain grim sort of satisfaction. At least it wasn’t any of the others, she said. Maybe there’s something in religion after all. Allah seems to have got it right for once, anyway. Afterwards she decided to take a break from the tours. Said she’d see if she could straighten things out with her daughters, once and for all.’

  ‘How long had you known her?’ Drew asked loudly. It appeared that the question had come across clearly enough.

  ‘Ages,’ said Trevor. ‘On and off, mind you. ‘We’d meet up in North Africa, Cyprus, Turkey – that sort of area. My old stamping grounds.’

  Drew adopted an encouraging, interested expression, hoping for more detail. He was only partially gratified. ‘I really wanted to see her again,’ Trevor groaned, with a glance out of the window. ‘I never thought she’d go and die on me.’ For the first time, he showed signs of grief. ‘I can’t believe I won’t see her again,’ he said wonderingly. His eyes filled with tears.

  Drew waited for the little storm to pass. It wasn’t long in doing so. ‘You’ve got it nice here,’ the man continued. ‘Gwen’s lucky.’ Then he remembered. ‘But they put her here before, didn’t they? The bastards who killed her. Jumped the gun, according to the papers, and buried her before the place was hardly open. And now you’ve put her back again.’ He shook his head painfully, and rubbed a hand down one side of his neck, under the ear. ‘Ouch,’ he groaned. ‘Must’ve slept awkwardly last night. Damned sore.’

  ‘Do you know Genevie
ve?’ Drew asked suddenly, having been careful not to deny or confirm the man’s analysis of Gwen’s fate. Trevor looked at him, frowning. ‘Genevieve Slater,’ Drew repeated more loudly.

  ‘You mean the bitch daughter? Never met the bloody cow and hope I never do.’ He fixed his eyes on Drew’s, his look hard and bitter. ‘She broke Gwen’s heart.’

  Drew couldn’t bring himself to pursue this line of enquiry. ‘Your letter,’ he said hastily. ‘The one in Gwen’s things.’ Trevor watched his face intently, in the effort to catch his meaning. ‘You said a man had been bothering her. You said you’d “settle his hash”, if I remember right.’

  Trevor sucked his upper lip, thinking hard. ‘That’s right,’ he said slowly. ‘The Gliddon chap – Sarah’s husband. Some nonsense about suing her for dereliction of duty. He started on about it even before the body was back in the UK. Bereavement takes some people like that, of course.’

  Drew raised his eyebrows. ‘You know,’ Trevor persisted. ‘Anger – it’s a natural response to pain or grief. Quite irrational, of course. Nobody could blame Gwen for what happened to Sarah.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Karen’s mood seemed to alternate between anger and a flat depression that Drew had never seen before. On the whole, he preferred her angry. ‘You’ve been back for over an hour, and never even bothered to pop in to see how I was,’ she accused, the moment he stepped through the door. ‘I saw the van, and assumed you’d come here first, before the office. Stephanie’s been grizzling for most of the afternoon, and my back’s worse, if anything. Thanks for asking.’

  She was lying stretched out on the sofa, with Stephanie in the crook of her arm, fast asleep. The sense of being doused in cold water combined with the increasingly familiar blanket of guilt, paralysed him in the doorway. He couldn’t deny the truth – he had forgotten all about her. The relief of an afternoon without his daughter, not to mention the dazzling success he’d made at the funeral, had outweighed any worries he’d had over Karen’s strained back.

  ‘It didn’t occur to me,’ he told her truthfully. ‘When I got into the office there was a man visiting the new grave. I could hardly risk missing the chance to talk to him.’

  ‘The new grave?’ In spite of herself, she showed interest. ‘It wasn’t the murderer was it? Revisiting the scene of the crime?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Drew knew better than to rush things. ‘He certainly seems to have known her pretty well. Knows the daughter, too – or of her, at least.’ He was treading carefully now.

  Karen leant her head back. ‘You know this business isn’t going to do us any good publicity-wise, in the long run. People are going to associate the field with something unsavoury, if they remember the story at all.’

  ‘Believe me, I wish it hadn’t happened as much as you do. I’m going to give it another week or so, follow up one or two ideas, and if they don’t lead anywhere, I’ll tell Genevieve I can’t do what she wants. I don’t think she’ll be very surprised.’

  ‘She won’t ask for her money back, will she?’

  ‘Not if I can convince her I’ve done everything possible. When her baby arrives, she’ll be too busy to worry about it any more. At least she’s got a grave to visit. And if she does decide to talk to the police, she can probably establish her mother’s identity from the samples they’ve taken. It only needs her to provide a hair or bits of old skin or clothing or bedding.’

  Karen wrinkled her nose. ‘And wouldn’t that land you in real trouble with the police?’

  He put up both hands, palms outwards. ‘Let’s hope not. Now – change the subject. Ask me about the funeral this afternoon.’

  She was contrite then, her own forgetfulness as culpable as his had been. And although his excitement and self-satisfaction had mostly evaporated, he gave her a full account of his first outing as an officiant, including the approving words from Marjorie Hankey.

  Drew expected Wednesday morning to drag, but the reality turned out very differently. Karen insisted she was well enough for work and drove off determinedly, leaving Drew and Stephanie frowning at each other over a stack of unwashed dishes and toast crusts.

  Before he could even open the dishwasher, Maggs let herself in through the back door, eyes wide with excitement.

  ‘Have you seen what’s happened?’ she demanded.

  Drew stared stupidly at her. ‘What are you talking about? And didn’t we agree you wouldn’t use this door? Karen wants the office and house kept separate—’

  Maggs shook her head impatiently, and pointed out of the still-open back door. ‘Look!’ she ordered.

  A crude wooden cross was visible, halfway up the field, decorated outlandishly with a variety of apparently slaughtered animals. It stood perhaps five feet high, rammed into the ground where the grass had been left uncut, some distance from any graves. As if magnetised, Drew went outside for a closer inspection.

  A dead hare hung from one arm of the crosspiece, and a crow from the other. The top of the vertical was crowned by a roughly woven wreath, and below it dangled a badly damaged rabbit, tied to the stake with a tight cord. All the bodies seemed to be seriously mangled and at least one was unpleasantly smelly.

  Maggs followed close behind. ‘Yuk!’ she said. ‘It’s much worse when you get near it. Do you think it’s more black magic? Didn’t you hear anything in the night?’

  He shook his head, trying to remain rational. ‘Not very clever magic,’ he said critically. ‘I thought they usually put their crosses upside down.’

  Maggs tutted. ‘It’s serious, Drew. What if somebody sees it from the road? We’ll never live it down. How could they do it, with you just there in the house?’

  ‘We sleep at the front of the house,’ he said. ‘And it wouldn’t necessarily make any noise pushing a stake into the ground.’

  ‘They must have come in a car,’ she pointed out. ‘Unless it’s the neighbours.’ The neighbours were a very ordinary family, twenty-five yards away. Beyond them, the village centre started, comprising four dwellings, a church and a straggling farm. Drew shook his head.

  ‘Not the neighbours,’ he said with certainty.

  ‘What’re you going to do?’ she asked.

  For reply, he gripped the lower part of the offending object and yanked it upwards. It came out of the ground easily, and he found himself holding it upright as if in some bizarre religious procession. He threw it hastily to the ground, and left it there. ‘I’ve got to get back to Stephanie,’ he said. ‘Let me think about this. There has to be some reason behind it. Some kind of message.’

  ‘Will you tell the police?’ He was already striding back to the house, and she was trotting to keep up with him. He gave no answer to that question for some minutes.

  ‘If I report it, it’ll get into the papers,’ he said finally. ‘And the police can get themselves in a bit of a twist about this sort of thing. They link it up with all kinds of nonsense, and the whole thing can get blown out of proportion. At worst, it’s someone who thinks there’s some special significance to a burial ground, which makes it a good place for some highly unpleasant practices. But I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s a sort of protest from some religious nutter. It’s probably the same people who left that sack under the brambles, and sent those letters. They were probably going to hang up the pheasant and the fox’s head as well as this lot.’

  Maggs was not mollified. ‘Horrible,’ she shuddered.

  ‘They haven’t disturbed the graves or done any damage,’ he pointed out. ‘It could have been a lot worse.’

  ‘And it might be yet if you don’t stop them,’ she warned.

  ‘They’ll stop,’ he said with confidence, ‘if we don’t give them any sort of satisfaction. Ignoring it is by far the best strategy.’

  ‘Well, I think it’s scary. Where did they get those poor animals from?’

  ‘Roadkill, I expect,’ he said, thinking about the flattened crow and mangled rabbit. ‘Though I admit it’s unusual to see a hare killed by
a car.’

  ‘I saw one last week,’ she remembered. ‘The day of the burial. It looked as if it’d just been hit. It might be the same one. It was on the dual-carriage, a mile this side of town.’

  ‘They must have picked it up that same day – otherwise magpies and things would have cleaned it up in a few hours.’

  ‘They must be mad,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you scared?’

  ‘Not a bit,’ he said bravely. ‘But I’ll tell you what – we can fix up some security lights and fit a lock on the road gate. We should have done that before, I suppose.’ Busy with Stephanie and all her equipment, he sent Maggs ahead to open up the office. At least they’d have something to do that morning – phoning for prices and options on security systems.

  But the prospect was a depressing one. He had wanted his cemetery to be open, available to visitors at any time, a place of peace and sanctuary. Intrusion and desecration hadn’t entered his head as a potential hazard. Security lights would pollute the natural peace of the field, masking the night sky and implying a defensiveness he did not want to feel.

  Puzzlement over the source of the sinister crucifix, combined with gloom over the compromises he was being forced to make, made for a restless morning. The only relief came from an intriguing piece of news gleaned from another phonecall from Fiona at the Borough Council Offices. She called to say she had confirmed her decision to refer all the Council funerals to him, apart from those which specifically requested cremation. This was a coup for Peaceful Repose, and would seriously upset Daphne Plant.

  ‘At least, it was never really a formal contract with Plant’s,’ Fiona told him. ‘Just custom – or habit. We haven’t made any real commitment to use them.’ Drew knew already that it was deemed advisable to use an undertaker based outside the town where most of the deaths took place. A ‘contract’ funeral was done cheaply, at unpopular times of day, and the complex sensitivities of the business meant that local undertakers preferred not to be seen performing them too close to their own sphere of operation. Hence Plant’s, from Bradbourne, five miles outside the city where Fiona worked, had been ideal. Drew was acceptable for similar reasons. ‘As long as you’re sure it won’t reflect badly on your own business?’ Fiona added.