Cathy was already headed down the path on the long walk back to the bus stop.
*
John Mortimer was chained to his body while he’d been abused in the funeral home. At first he’d seen his body mutilated, and then, beautified. But after the mutilation, and before the makeup, he’d been dressed in a fine suit while a young man who’d sounded Polish and thought he was Rocky had pounded Mortimer’s carcass like a halved cow in a meat factory.
But then, he’d been able to see. The horror of seeing his corpse and the things death held in store for him paled in comparison to what followed when the lid closed on his coffin.
Now there was nothing but sound and the dreadful sense of being chained and bound by his corpse, unable to escape the bonds and float free. Just to go. Whether heaven or hell, he did not care.
Sound, yes, but muffled through the lining and wood of his black coffin.
No sight, though. No idea where he was going, if he was to spend an eternity, chained to his rotting corpse, deep within the heavy, musty dirt. If it would be short, to see himself burn.
Please, God, dear God, please let this end.
He thought this, over and over, alone in the black embrace of his coffin.
For two days.
By the time the funeral came, hearing the minister’s voice was such a sweet relief. He cried, though he could produce no tears. He shouted for them to let him out, but no one could hear him. He screamed and begged and sobbed without tears.
And within his dead body, his soul, his mind, the important parts broke so completely, so resolutely, that after the silence the hissing made no sense to him.
His first thought was snake…but he wasn’t afraid of snakes, nor did he think he’d ever seen one.
Then he heard a crackling sound, and thought the earth was crushing his cheap new home. But soon, with no manner in which to understand the passage of time, it became light again. The light of sweet fire.
He sighed.
The sight was horrible. His coffin, his body. His suit alight, his flesh roasting, melting, turning black, flaking away. Watching himself burn in a fire hot enough to take even his bones.
When the flames took everything and he was just dust, he was thinking, still.
Free, he thought. Free.
Until that, too, drifted away, and John Mortimer was no more than the memory of a man in the breeze.
III.
Hattie
Hattie Frey was an EVIL BITCH.
She could almost see the thought written in capital letters in her mute patient’s eyes. Hattie smiled and the patient she never bothered to call by name because he’d be dead soon enough tried to bring her closer. He was feeble, though (and he stank), and Hattie was still young enough, spry enough, to step back smartly.
She knew full well what he wanted. He wanted some sweet, sweet relief from the pain and the agony of being a smelly, moaning, terminally ill vegetable. She could give it to him. Easy enough.
Or, I could have a laugh, she thought. Look at him. Pathetic old bastard, fingers like little knobbly sticks. The few teeth he had in his head rotten, his breath stinking almost as bad as the rest of him. Covered in sores, stinking like a camp toilet. She shuddered, thinking of him touching her.
Bet he’s thinking of touching me, she thought. Bet the dirty bastard would shoot right there in his fucking nappy.
She had a kind of second sight when it came to having a laugh—she’d never been caught. Never would be. But still she was careful. Taking a quick look round the ward, Hattie winked at the dying man, whose name she couldn’t be bothered to remember.
No one around to see, nor did she feel anyone watching her. Aside from the man in the bed next to Mr. Whatever, and he could look all he wanted. Hattie leaned over Mr. Whatever, careful to keep out of range of his gross old hands, and pulled her shirt down, almost all the way down to her nipples, and gave him an eyeful of her cleavage. He could barely move his head, but he could move his eyes. He looked away.
“Well, fuck you then,” she said, suddenly angry enough to spit. “Just trying to give you a bit of cheering up.”
The old bastard over in the next bed was getting a good gander, too.
“Fuck are you looking at? You a pedo?” she said. He shook his head. She smiled, showing no teeth, and walked over to the man, Mr. Terry. She remembered his name well enough. He lay there on his crisp sheets, greased black hair, eyeing her as she walked toward him. She swayed, watching his face redden.
“You’d like a feel?”
He managed to nod.
“Probably been about hundred years since you had a tit in your hand, eh?”
He nodded. Looked eager.
Why not? she thought. Anything for a laugh.
She took his decrepit old man’s hand and put it on the swell of her right tit. Bless him, but he shook. Kind of like having a geriatric vibrator to play with.
“Bet you like that, don’t you? But you know what? You’ll be dead before you ever have another pair of tits in your hand, eh?”
She patted him on the cheek and left him shaking. Mr. Terry had a boner. Mr. Whatever-His-Fucking-Name-Was didn’t want to look at her tits, but she was just having a laugh with both of them.
Mr. Terry probably wanted a hand job. The other? He’d settle for a top up of his morphine, but fuck ’em both.
Hattie was an EVIL BITCH, but she was also GOLDEN, because she saved the Caulden family money, and for the Caulden family, the residents in the Old Oak Hospice weren’t really people, but carcasses full of cash.
*
Mr. Caulden was a Bartholomew. Mrs. Caulden was a Millicent. He called her Millie. She called him Bartholomew, always. She watched her thoughts around him, because no matter how badly she wanted to call him Bart sometimes, it wasn’t worth it. She had most everything she wanted. Life could be a hell of a lot worse.
She almost always rose before him, headed down the stairs of their four-bedroom house. Millie cooked him kippers. They were the “boil in the bag” variety, but he insisted she grill them, looking out over the long back garden from her designer kitchen. Not an especially nice house, but it was expensive, in the right neighborhood, and more importantly, had a balcony that overlooked Bartholomew’s golf club.
She loved the house because when her husband was at the first tee, she knew full well he’d be gone at least two hours and Dermot, the golf pro, didn’t work on Sundays. Unless you counted fucking the members’ wives. Millie wasn’t particular about who Dermot fucked the rest of the week, as long as she got hers on Sunday, regular as clockwork.
If it rained on Sundays, she was a thorough bitch for the rest of the week.
Mr. Caulden assumed the change.
Mr. Caulden, Millie thought as she was cooking his damn kippers, was an idiot.
She placed the kippers on a plate with a slice of buttered brown bread.
“Breakfast!” she called up the stairs, because a marriage that survived largely on spite was about the small victories.
He came down the stairs in his boxers and dressing gown.
“Morning, dear,” he said.
“Morning, darling,” she replied, trying to hide her repulsion at the sight of his scrawny white calves beneath his robe.
Only then did she head upstairs. One round, a victory on points.
It was going to be a good day.
*
Caulden didn’t often go into work, into the actual hospice, although he maintained an office there. The truth was, he couldn’t stand the smell that lingered in the whole building, in the halls, the office, the kitchens. He owned the Old Oak, and it paid handsomely enough. Certainly enough to employ a few managers to do the donkey work and put up with the stench.
But then when a man’s torn in half, he guessed you had to show face. At least for a little while. In many ways, it was about keeping up appearances.
“Really,” he told himself on the drive to the Old Oak, “you’d think the police could handle this sort of
thing.”
He drove his BMW slowly. Because keeping up appearances, sometimes, wasn’t just about what you showed, but what you didn’t.
For example, his attire. He wore a suit, a nice one, but it was just a relatively cheap suit. What was the point of spending a fortune on a suit for heading to the Old Oak? Place was full of terminally ill drug addicts and old spinsters. A nice suit for the hospice, because he had to look presentable. He only wore expensive suits for meetings with people who would understand that it was an expensive suit.
He drove his BMW at a sedate pace along the path to the Old Oak. A mile or so long, through the big gates and the trees, then to the gardens (largely kept to grass, because he didn’t wish to pay a team of gardeners half his earnings to keep flower beds for a bunch of dying old men), all the way along the graveled drive until he reached Old Oak, with its dark red brickwork and ancient ivy. The main building housed the wards and the nurses’ station, newer additions housed the kitchens, stores, offices and all the other places a building like this needed to keep running. He hoped to build more, finances permitting, because palliative care was where the money was. Spend a little to accumulate. The home had once belonged to a sugar magnate and his family, the Chesters. Old money gone bad. Caulden’s money was relatively new money gone good. For most in the health care sector, money was tight, dependent on government purse strings. Old Oak was private, though, with additional funding and the occasional perk.
Caulden parked his big car in his spot. He might not use it often, but he didn’t want to park in the public lot with the Citroens and Fords and the sort of people that drove them. He noted a police car, unmarked (a Ford Mondeo, new) was parked in the plebe’s car park.
“About time they sent someone with a clue out,” he said to himself as he unbuckled his seat belt. They’d sent policemen, forensics, detectives, photographers. The last few weeks had, frankly, been hell at the hospice. The staff were on edge. Hell, even he was on edge.
Maybe, at last, they’d come to tell him they couldn’t close the case, or that they’d caught someone…or…
Truth was, he didn’t know. He was tired. He’d had enough of the police traipsing through Old Oak, investigating the murder of a dying man. In the end, all he really wanted was some kind of resolution so they could all move on. And so he could fill the damn bed again.
He stepped from his car and pulled on his suit jacket, then locked the car with the button on his key fob. Briskly, because of the cold that bit hard this deep into winter, he headed inside, tugging his shirt cuffs back down below his jacket sleeves.
*
Jim Wayne thought Bart Caulden a bit of a dickhead, truth be told. He didn’t care if the feeling was mutual.
“Jim,” said Bartholomew, entering the office to find Jim already there, sitting in a spare chair with the window down, blowing smoke against the cold air. He seemed surprised, though the policeman didn’t know why. It was a courtesy that he’d come. He thought Bart would’ve appreciated the gesture, instead of looking a little like the poodle had shit the rug.
Jim supposed he was smoking in another man’s office, but still he had to fight the urge to call the jumped-up mortician “Bart.”
“Bartholomew,” he said. “How’s the swing?”
“Not what it was. Back hurts on the long drives now. Guess we’re not getting any younger.”
Jim didn’t care, one way or the other. Getting older always beat the other option.
He shrugged, to pass the comment off, but didn’t get into complaining about his joints and his haemorrhoids, like some old man’s pissing match. He didn’t want to spend any longer on Bart than he had to. And the simple fact was, this was just a polite call on a fellow club member. It didn’t hurt to keep things sweet around town with the people who mattered.
“Look, Bartholomew,” said Jim, tossing his half-finished cigarette from the window. “I won’t keep you long. Just a word to the wise, you know?”
“What is the word?”
“There’s going to be a bit of a fuss, still. The investigation won’t close. The man had no family, so there’s no one clamoring for a result. A result, frankly, we’re not going to get.”
Bartholomew shrugged. “Probably for the best.”
“Three weeks since the murder, not a thing to go on. Honestly. Nothing. No fibers, no trace of a murder weapon. No witnesses. No one fleeing the scene covered in blood. No lunatic confessions. Nothing. It’s like the thing never happened at all. I could almost believe that, but for a man cut in two in the morgue.”
Bartholomew winced at the image.
Jim shrugged. “Things will quiet down after a while. It’ll blow over. But it will…linger. Man got cut in half, you know?”
The thing was, DCI Wayne didn’t really care if Bartholomew had to go through some shit with the press. He did care that a man had been cut in two and that there was absolutely nothing he could do unless someone either handed themselves in or was found hanging in a park with a note round their neck. It wasn’t a trail that had gone cold. It was fucking frozen, and there were no tracks.
A murder, in fact, that might as well have been committed by a ghost.
He’d looked into the deceased, the family. Nothing.
Never, in all his years as a policeman, had he been called to a crime scene with such an absence of evidence to follow up.
The thing was, something was wrong, and there was nothing he could do about it. Nothing at all.
And when you can’t do anything, the only thing left to do was to put it aside, put in on hold, wait, let it sit like a stone in your gut. He didn’t want to think about it anymore. He wanted to get back to the office and have a cup of tea, sit on his haemorrhoid pillow, get comfortable. His arse hurt and he hated winter. He had a book on the go in the office, a team of monkeys to chase around after criminals, and an assistant with a nice arse who made a cracking cup of tea.
It was a mess, but they’d kept the sordid little details from the press. Words had a way of leaking, though. He couldn’t keep the fact that a murder had been committed silent. The press loved a murder. The more gruesome the better. Little things like a man severed clean through would make the front pages of the nationals, maybe, not just the locals. Then he’d be up shit street, under a mass of pressure to get a result when there wasn’t ever going to be one. He didn’t give a toss about Bart.
“Tea?” said Bartholomew. “A real drink?”
“Better not,” said Jim. “I’m on duty.” Fact was, being on duty didn’t stop him from taking a drink in the slightest, and as a DCI he could pretty much do what he wanted. Which was why he didn’t take a drink.
“I’d better scoot,” said Jim. “Just a heads-up, that’s all.”
“And I appreciate it, Jim. Thank you. I’ll show you out?”
Jim nodded. He pushed himself to his feet—Bart hadn’t sat down. He couldn’t, because there was only one seat and Jim had sat in it.
*
As Jim made his way through the double doors and into the ward, he saw an older lady sitting before one of the beds, reading quietly aloud.
“I’ve been meaning to ask,” said Jim. “What’s the deal with her?”
Caulden didn’t need Jim to elaborate.
“It’s a long story. Bit of a weird one.”
“I love a weird one,” said Jim.
“The man there? He came here on compassionate leave from prison. Apparently he killed a man. His family—his mother—paid for him to see his days out here.”
“But the bed’s empty…?”
“He died a year ago, but his mother bought the space. Insisted we keep it…empty. Don’t rightly know why, but it’s bought and paid for. We could use the beds—always, but…no skin off my nose.”
“Why is that woman reading to an empty bed?”
“Cathy?”
“That’s her name?”
Caulden nodded. “Yep. Cathy Redman. She saw him out. Worked here going on twenty years. I think, if I�
�m honest…I think she might have gone nuts. She’s up for retirement soon. Hard worker, though. A good worker. She reads to the bed when she finishes her shift, without fail. Don’t see the harm in it.”
Jim looked at Caulden for a beat, waiting for something more.
Caulden just shrugged. “Maybe not so long a story, after all, eh?”
“Guess not,” said Jim Wayne. He shook hands with Caulden, then waited for Caulden to punch the number into the keypad.
“Thanks again,” said Caulden. Jim nodded, again, but said nothing. He got into his Ford Mondeo and drove back to his office, thinking not about a man cut in two, but this time, thinking about an old lady reading to an empty bed.
And all the way, the entire drive, that stone sat right there, in his gut, and he knew he wasn’t done. Not by a long shot.
*
Caulden stood at the entrance to the ward and watched Cathy Redman reading to the ghost in the empty bed.
Sometimes she spoke to the ghost, too. Not in the way that people spoke to their pets, or babies, like they didn’t expect a reply. No, more like…like watching one side of a telephone call. Beats, pauses, between her words.
Kind of like she was listening to a reply that Caulden couldn’t hear.
Gave him chills every time.
Then why don’t you get rid of her? Get rid of the bed, or at least fill it again?
It’s just a hollow shrine, right?
But he knew different, because he’d seen the man in the bed for himself, and the sight would never leave him. The man, as he’d been at his death, withered away by disease, but bright-eyed like a child, animated, even. He’d moved his hands and those hands had been real enough to cast a shadow upon the bed in the middle of the day.
Then he was gone.
Caulden shivered and left the same way he’d come in. Briskly.
*
Serendipity was rarely lost on Cathy Redman. She understood the morphine Hattie held back leveled out the morphine she stole. She understood she was complicit in Hattie’s crimes.
Flesh and Coin (The Mulrones Book 3) Page 3
