Grave Concerns

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘We won’t need to buy much,’ she persisted. ‘We can get by without new clothes, and I can grow veg in the garden. I’ll get some Maternity Benefit for a bit. And maybe by the winter, you’ll be bringing in a lot more business.’

  ‘I haven’t had that two thousand quid from Genevieve yet,’ he admitted. ‘I’m not sure she’ll ever actually give it me. I’m not sure I can rely on her promises.’ The reference to Genevieve was rash. It brought a renewed flood of physical reaction that took his breath away. He was full of a terrible ache, guilt and sadness finding expression in his bloodstream and nervous system. He felt inflated, blown up with emotion, unable to speak.

  ‘You’ll get it,’ said Karen fiercely, ‘if I have to go and demand it myself. She’s caused enough trouble, without withholding payment. You’ve earned that money – every penny of it.’

  He laughed weakly. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘And when we get it, we’ll buy a lot of sensible things, and save the rest for the electricity bill.’

  At weekends, the office phone was redirected into the house, so that Peaceful Repose calls and personal ones all rang through on the instrument in the Slocombes’ kitchen. When Drew answered it at twelve forty-five on Saturday, just as Karen was ladling out some thick tomato soup into bowls for them both, he had no way of knowing just how important a call it would turn out to be.

  ‘Is that Peaceful Repose Funerals?’ came a female voice. On Drew’s confirmation, it continued, ‘Thank goodness! It’s taken us ages to find your number. This is St Joseph’s Hospice – in West Whittleham. We have a Mrs Hilda Jones for you. We don’t have a mortuary, so we’d be grateful if you could come today.’

  ‘West Whittleham?’ Drew spluttered. ‘That’s thirty miles away! Are you sure it’s me you want?’

  ‘There’s no mistake. I expect the relatives will contact you shortly. Mrs Jones has only been with us for five days. A very sad case. She had pancreatic cancer and it wasn’t diagnosed until the very final stages. It’s all been very sudden.’

  ‘Could you give me the name of the next of kin?’ Drew asked.

  ‘Hang on a minute.’ He could hear papers rustling, and some whispering, before the woman came back. ‘Mrs Caroline Kennett, from Cullompton. She’s the niece. I’ll give you her number—’ She recited a string of digits. Drew hurriedly wrote them down

  ‘I’ll try and be there before five,’ he told her. ‘I’ll have to contact my partner first.’

  Karen made him finish his soup before trying to locate Maggs. His stunned surprise took some time to wear off.

  ‘She came here a couple of weeks ago,’ he said. ‘Maggs showed her round. She’s the woman who witnessed the burial of that body last summer. Or thinks she did. The police didn’t seem too sure. She must have decided we’d do for her aunt. What an extraordinary way to get business.’

  It was three-thirty before they heard Maggs’s bike revving outside. She’d been out when Drew called, and her mother had no idea where she’d gone. All she could do was promise to pass on the message the moment she returned. ‘Phew!’ sighed Drew. ‘We’ll just about make it. Where’ve you been?’

  ‘Shopping,’ she said. ‘Not that it’s any of your business.’

  He’d got the van ready, and looked up the route they’d have to take to the hospice. Caroline Kennett still hadn’t made contact, and he’d been hesitant to bother her. Protocol decreed that the first contact should come from the family, but in this instance, he was very unsure. ‘What if she changes her mind?’ he said. ‘We’ll be accused of abducting the aunt’s body.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Karen had scoffed. ‘You’ve had your instructions from the hospice. If she changes her mind now, you can bill her for your wasted time and petrol.’

  Maggs was excited by the whole episode. ‘This is more like it,’ she crowed. ‘A real live call-out. Just like Plant’s.’

  ‘Sixty miles, round trip,’ Drew reminded her. ‘We won’t be back till six or later. And then you’ll have to stay on a bit, laying her out. The good news is, it doesn’t sound as if she had time for any chemotherapy. You know what that does to them.’

  ‘Too right,’ she laughed. Bodies arriving from a hospice were notoriously unpleasant; the combination of terminal cancer and massive doses of chemicals generally leading to almost immediate putrifaction. For an undertaker abjuring embalming, this could cause unsavoury problems.

  ‘Off we go then,’ he sang, waving a careless farewell to Karen and Stephanie.

  The route he’d picked out lay through a number of small villages for the first ten miles. One of them happened to be Fenniton where Genevieve lived. ‘What a coincidence,’ said Maggs, ingenuously.

  When they arrived, the hospice receptionist directed them to a small room at the back of the building, where the body lay on a bench, wrapped in a thin white sheet. ‘No need for cremation papers, thank goodness,’ said the nurse who’d shown them the way. ‘That’s always a relief, especially with someone from a distance.’

  ‘Where did she live?’ asked Drew curiously. ‘Not Cullompton, surely?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ said the woman vaguely. ‘Some little village, over your way. Don’t you know the family, then? The niece seemed to have a very high regard for you.’

  Maggs preened. ‘Looks as if we’ve made a good impression.’

  In the van again, she remembered something. ‘Mrs Kennett said she had an aunt,’ she recalled. ‘She was going to visit her, but got a taxi to us, before going there for lunch. Didn’t say where her auntie lived, though.’

  Heading west, into the setting sun, Drew was forced to drive slowly. The dappled shadow of trees lining the country lanes alternated with sudden bursts of blinding sunlight. They followed the same route as before, and as they approached Fenniton Maggs gave a sudden yell. ‘There’s Stuart!’ she shouted. ‘Why isn’t he at work?’

  Drew slowed down. ‘Presumably he gets a day off sometimes. Do you want me to stop?’

  ‘Oh, well—’ she hesitated. ‘OK.’

  The boy looked up in surprise as the vehicle drew up beside him. Maggs leant out of the window. ‘Hiya!’ she said.

  ‘Oh – hi!’ he managed, as he recognised her. ‘What are you up to?’

  ‘We’ve been on a removal,’ she said, importantly. ‘We’ve got a body in the back.’

  ‘Maggs!’ Drew reproached her. ‘Mind what you say.’

  ‘Oh, Stuart won’t be upset – will you?’ she breezed. ‘He lives on a farm – he’s used to death.’

  ‘I need to be, round here,’ he said irritably. ‘I’ve just been listening to the woman next door moaning on about her friend dying all of a sudden. You’d think it had never happened to anybody before. Only seventy-three, and never a day’s illness. Then she has to go and die of cancer before we know what’s happening.’ He mimicked a tremulous old woman’s voice. ‘Poor Hilda – she had so much to live for.’ He shook his head. ‘I shouldn’t, I know, but you ought to have heard her.’

  ‘Hilda?’ repeated Drew and Maggs on a single note. ‘Not Hilda Jones?’ added Drew, incredulously.

  ‘No idea,’ Stuart said, staring. ‘She was in a hospice miles away. Died last night, of cancer of the pancreas, apparently.’

  ‘Well, fancy that,’ said Maggs cheerfully. ‘Small world, eh?’

  Drew didn’t say anything. He was congratulating himself on successfully biting back the question: How’s Genevieve?

  Drew phoned Caroline Kennett as soon as he got back. The residual influence of Plant’s made him impatient with families who were dilatory in contacting the undertaker, even though he knew quite well that they had innumerable other things to do, as well as coping with grief, shock, denial and bewilderment. A man’s voice answered.

  ‘Is that Mr Kennett?’

  ‘Speaking,’ came the voice. ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘My name’s Drew Slocombe – from Peaceful Repose Funerals. I’m phoning to tell you that your wife’s aunt is now here in our cool room. We
’ve just collected her from the hospice, as requested. Um – under the circumstances, it would be very helpful if you or your wife could call in here on Monday to make all the necessary arrangements. We’d hope to have the burial by Wednesday at the latest.’ He grimaced to himself, knowing that by Wednesday the body would have probably begun to deteriorate quite noticeably.

  ‘Wednesday!’ the man repeated. ‘Good grief. That’s a bit quick, isn’t it?’

  Drew stifled a sigh. This was going to be a recurrent problem, he realised. People who chose him for their funerals without a full awareness of the implications would have to be told some unpalatable facts, particularly in warm weather. Not for the first time, he wondered why it was that Britain went in for such delayed funerals. Even in America, where embalming was the norm, they left a scant two or three days between the death and the disposal, in most cases. The majority of countries across the world managed it in twenty-four hours.

  ‘Not really,’ he said patiently. ‘Considering she died last night. If it helps, I can take your instructions over the phone.’

  ‘I’ll fetch Caroline,’ the man said heavily.

  ‘Hello?’ came a woman’s hesitant voice, a minute later.

  ‘Mrs Kennett,’ said Drew. ‘Has your husband explained that we have Mrs Jones here now, in North Staverton? I’ll need to ask you a few questions about the sort of funeral you’d like. And I assume you’ve been told about registering the death? That has to be done before we can go ahead with the burial. I was just saying to Mr Kennett that we really do need to do it by Wednesday at the latest.’

  ‘We never thought she’d die so quickly,’ blurted the woman. ‘I can’t believe it yet. Poor Uncle George is never going to come to terms with it.’

  ‘She has a husband?’

  ‘Yes, but he’s not capable of making any arrangements. I’m having to do everything for him. He’s practically senile now, poor old chap. It’s got much worse over the past few months.’

  ‘Sad,’ Drew sympathised.

  ‘Yes. But poor Aunt Hilda!’ she returned to the main subject. ‘I was chatting to her yesterday afternoon. Telling her about your field, and how nice it all was. And she suddenly said she wanted to be buried there. She knew about it already, of course, from the papers. She’d been taking an interest, as it happens. Funny how things come together, isn’t it? I told her how I’d seen something from the train, and she said she’d been wondering about that woman, ever since she first read about it.’

  Drew politely let her prattle on, not really listening, running through in his head all the things he and Maggs would have to do on Monday. Wondering who’d dig the grave, now Jeffrey had gone.

  At last there was a pause. ‘So you can come and see us on Monday?’ he interposed. ‘I can show you where she’ll be buried – and you can decide on a coffin. The best thing would be for you to go and register the death first – I’m afraid that’ll have to be at the Registrar in West Whittleham. I checked at the hospice for you, and they open at ten. The office is in South Street. You need a doctor’s certificate, if they haven’t provided it already, and then get the death certificate—’ Although this had never been part of his work at Plant’s, Drew knew the procedure off by heart. The bureaucracy of it offended him at times, forcing confused relatives to drive around the county chasing doctors and registrars, but he also knew that he could help by breaking it down into easy stages.

  ‘Oh, goodness,’ the woman bleated. ‘It all sounds very time-consuming. Especially as I don’t drive.’

  ‘Can’t your husband take you?’

  ‘No – he’ll have to be at work. But my son might.’ Drew left it at that; there was a limit to how much he could do to assist.

  ‘Let me give you my phone number, and we can talk again tomorrow,’ he offered. ‘This is really just to let you know that everything’s in hand. I don’t want to push you into making any decisions tonight.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said breathily. ‘Poor Aunt Hilda! She was so full of life. Such a sharp mind. She had quite a theory about that body in your field. But I told her not to be silly. For two pins, she’d have gone to the police about it, months ago, she says. But then she got poorly, and forgot about it.’

  This time, Drew was listening. But he refrained from appearing too eager. ‘That’s interesting,’ he said lightly. ‘I’ll look forward to hearing all about it when I see you.’

  Sunday passed quietly, with no further contact from Mrs Kennett. Drew left her in peace, assuming she’d sorted out her transport difficulties and knew what she needed to do the following morning. The phone remained silent and a cloudless sky ensured it was the warmest day of the year so far. Drew decided to give their small garden some attention.

  Originally, the garden had been part of the field attached to the cottage, and was still separated from it only by a rather unprepossessing chain link fence. The new office, created out of a rickety lean-to, extended beyond the fenced-off area, so there was direct access from the office’s back door to the burial ground – essential for carrying coffins to a grave. The garden, however, presented an incongruous image, particularly as it had been neglected for ten years or more. Shrubs had burgeoned thickly in one corner – rhododendrons, mainly, but there were also nettles and thistles in profusion. The whole area, measuring something like forty feet by a hundred, needed a complete overhaul, ideally employing a rotovator. Today, though, Drew contented himself with digging out nettles, roots and all, cutting back a straggly and vicious rambling rose, and piling his trophies onto a big bonfire. He admitted to himself that he wasn’t working primarily for the sake of the garden – but in order to create some clear thinking time.

  He was not inclined to take seriously Mrs Kennett’s Aunt Hilda’s fanciful theories about the dead woman, but the fact that she had a theory at all was intriguing. It suggested that there might be other people out there, mulling over what they’d read, exchanging ideas, piecing together oddments of information, until they slowly arrived at a complete picture.

  The Slocombes lived in an area where people still had family and neighbourly connections, meeting at Women’s Institutes, in the supermarket, at work and in the pub. They talked over the weekly news, passed on gossip, expressed their entrenched opinions. Murder and a new way of burying the dead would obviously feature prominently in these conversations. It was no real surprise that Aunt Hilda thought she knew who the dead woman might have been. As Stuart had told them, her friend lived next door to the Slaters. She would doubtless have seen Gwen the previous summer and probably taken note of her height and general appearance. She might even have admired the Egyptian necklace. None of that was in the least unlikely, but it was just one possible scenario. Probably a thousand other individuals nursed their own private theories on the matter too, every bit as plausible.

  Drew followed the chain of reasoning again, step by step. Genevieve’s next-door neighbour was close friends with Caroline Kennett’s aunt. Four people. And didn’t they say that everyone in the world was connected by just such a chain? Wasn’t it only six or seven links, before we were all somehow connected – all eight billion of us? If that was true – and surely it couldn’t be – then how likely it became that four women, all aged between forty and seventy, living within twenty miles of each other, should be connected. The wild card, the Joker, was the added coincidence of Caroline Kennett being on that particular train at that particular time, and having it stop at that precise point on the line. Now that, he decided, was weird. But even that could be explained away. He knew trains did often stop just there, for reasons he supposed involved a signal or a junction somewhere down the line. In fact, North Staverton had once had its own tiny halt, long ago abandoned as an official stop, but perhaps still in possession of signals and a need for a cautious approach.

  It was at least an intriguing intellectual exercise. It highlighted the realities of human relations, while at the same time warning him against jumping to conclusions.

  Maggs confesse
d to a very similar line of reasoning when they compared notes on Monday morning. ‘I just know there’s some sort of link with this Sarah woman,’ she insisted.

  ‘Maybe Mrs Kennett will settle it for us,’ he said optimistically.

  ‘I doubt it,’ she said. ‘If she knew enough to do that, she’d have gone to the police.’

  ‘She hasn’t had time. Her auntie only told her on Friday, and then promptly died. Talk about deathbed confessions!’

  They waited impatiently for Caroline Kennett to put in an appearance, unable to make any firm preparations for the funeral until they knew what she wanted. He spent a few minutes playing with Stephanie, fitting plastic cups inside each other, hiding things under them, praising her when she quickly picked up the nature of the game. Then he handed her a Marmite sandwich and left her to continue on her own. So long as she thought he was watching with all due approval, she was content to cooperate.

  The enforced idleness gave Drew all the opportunity he needed to think afresh about Genevieve. He even permitted himself to talk about her. ‘The baby’s five days old now,’ he remarked, into a long silence. ‘I wonder how she’s coping.’

  ‘Do you want me to go and find out?’ Maggs’s reply came so eagerly that he stared at her in surprise.

  ‘You sound keen. I thought you didn’t like babies,’ he said, before the penny dropped. Her darkened cheeks gave her away, along with the averted gaze. ‘It’s that Stuart, isn’t it,’ he teased. ‘You want to see him again.’

  ‘What if I do?’ she flared. ‘He’s a nice guy, and he knows things that might help us get this business settled.’

  ‘He seemed pleased to see you too,’ Drew said kindly. ‘As far as I could tell.’ His own illicit and shameful yearnings seemed sordid compared to the fresh young attraction between Maggs and Stuart. He felt a sort of benign envy.