Sealfinger (Sam Applewhite Book 1)

by Heide Goody

  There was a distant ding on the line. “Customer’s come in. Look, I’ll see you later. Can I come round yours so we can go in together?”

  “Sure,” said Sam.

  “Gotta go.”

  The line went dead. Sam pretended to put the phone down on an old-fashioned receiver and gazed at Doug for a long moment.

  “Gonna go out and find this Edith Vamplew,” she said. “Let’s see if she knows what happened to Wendy Skipworth. Or the one-legged man.”

  She felt as if she was trying to convince herself, that she was following clues to a mystery no one wanted solving and which, theoretically, wasn’t a mystery at all. Nonetheless, with only mindless paperwork (written in DefCon4’s byzantine corporate-speak) to otherwise occupy her, she found it very easy to summon the energy to leave the office and seek out Mr Vamplew at Lavender Court (or possibly Lavender Court House).

  She found the right house on the second attempt. The door was once again answered by the disinterested teen in headphones.

  “Yeah?”

  “Hi,” she said. “You might recall. I was here before. I was with the woman who took the turkeys. I spoke to your dad.”

  “Yeah, they’ve gone,” he said.

  “The turkeys?”

  “Them too. I meant my folks. Out.”

  “Oh,” said Sam. “I was hoping to ask your dad about the Vamplews.”

  “That’s us,” said the teen.

  “Yes, I gather. And there aren’t many of you.”

  “No. It’s a stupid ass name.”

  “I don’t know. It’s got ‘Vamp’ in it. That’s a bit…” She made a spooky noise. “Isn’t it?”

  “Do I look like an emo or goth to you?” said the teen.

  Sam did not consider herself to be an old adult. She was only thirty. On optimistic days, she’d even describe herself as a young adult. But she wasn’t up to date with teen trends. To her eyes, the lad looked at least a bit goth-ish, a tiny bit emo-ey. She had hoped to speak to a Vamplew with more gumption, but if he was the only Vamplew on hand… “I’m trying to locate an Edith Vamplew.”

  The lad nodded, then shook his head. “Nope.”

  “No aunts or cousins?”

  He shook his head slowly, his fringe swaying.

  “Maybe a grandma?”

  “I’ve only got two.”

  “Right. Right. It’s not a very common name. Edith. Probably an old person’s name.”

  “My sister’s kid’s friend is an Edith. In fact, I think she knows two.”

  “A child?”

  “A toddler.”

  Sam was surprised but, she supposed, the old names did circle round, find new life. She thought about the names in the boxes. Could they be baby names? But why?

  “I suspect this Edith is going to be an older person,” she said.

  “Sorry,” said the teen Vamplew. “I reckon any old Ediths are long dead. Dead and buried.”

  “Right,” she said. Then, struck by a thought as powerful as a physical blow, exclaimed, “Sam Applewhite, you are an idiot!”

  “What?” said the teen.

  Names in boxes. Neat rows. Dead and buried. Sam could have slapped herself at her stupidity but narrowly decided against it.

  “Applewhite?” the teen was saying. “Like the magician guy?”

  Sam was already nodding when she remembered to frown. “How do you know about Marvin Applewhite? He stopped being famous before you were born.”

  “Nah, the old guy from the YouTube videos. Does that close-up magic stuff. My mate says he lives round here.”

  “He’s my dad.”

  “Cool,” said the teen, though without much enthusiasm. “Know any tricks, then?”

  “A couple,” she said. “Right now, I’m going to ask the dead to help me solve a missing persons case.”

  “You’re weird.”

  Sam took that as a compliment and left to fetch her van.

  58

  Jimmy learned a lot about cremation from his first personal experience of it.

  Four hours on full heat was definitely enough to cremate an inconvenient old biddy and an untrustworthy vet. But that was just the cremation. They had to hang around for another couple of hours, in the near silence of the shelter, for the remains to cool enough for them to be handled. The remains, on what Jimmy thought of as the oven tray, weren’t a small and convenient pile of ashes. They were a collection of mostly fragmented bones, laid out in the approximate shape of two sloppily intertwined human beings.

  Wayne had advocated sticking the oven back on for a few more hours, but Jimmy suspected this was as good as it was going to get. The charred bones had the colour of cremation ash. Maybe, in the proper crematoriums, this was how ashes started out. Maybe the undertaker had to smash them up. Maybe the undertaker had a special food blender or smoothie maker for turning bones into ash.

  Jimmy found a shovel outside along with a horse-feed sack. Together, he and Wayne scooped the remains into the sack. Jimmy noted the largest fragment of skull, a curved smooth piece of bone. He had no way of knowing if it was Sacha’s or Mrs Skipworth’s, but he was struck by how thin the bone was, and touched by an almost satisfying thought that, with skulls so thin, it was no wonder people died easily, and they really had no one to blame but themselves.

  The bag of remains was heavier than he’d expected, a good ten pounds or more of bones. But it was a damned sight less stinky, and far more transportable, than Mrs Skipworth’s manky corpse had been.

  With dawn more than an hour or two away, they made their way back to the van with their still-warm spoils. Jimmy checked the clinic rooms one last time to make sure his clean up job was good enough, trying to make the place look like Sacha had simply tidied up and left for the evening.

  Sacha’s car keys were in his coat by the door. Jimmy put the coat in the car and drove it round the back of the stables. It was hardly hidden, but it gave the superficial impression Sacha had left the premises. Only then did he climb in the van with Wayne and declare they were done.

  “We gonna scatter the ashes then?” Wayne asked.

  “Not when they’re like that,” Jimmy replied. “But I need some shut-eye first. Then we’ll get them sorted.”

  Hours later, Jimmy woke in the Shore View container house, the one with actual proper windows and doors, rather than the fake ones adorning all the other containers. His clothes stank like a bonfire. Ash stained his trouser legs.

  He looked across and saw Wayne laid out on a bed of fibreglass rolls. The big man was pale and perfectly still. Jimmy watched his chest for signs of movement, hopeful that he had stopped breathing; that he had succumbed to his injuries in the night. Jimmy watched him for a long time and couldn’t be sure. It suddenly became very important to Jimmy. Rather than going over and prodding the fat lump to see if he would wake, Jimmy lay quite still, lining up the curve of Wayne’s belly with a seam in the plasterwork and trying to assess if it was moving.

  Jimmy didn’t know how long he had lain like that, observing, measuring, when Wayne spoke.

  “If you had a bionic eye, would you want it to be a real eye?”

  “What?” said Jimmy.

  “A bionic eye. Would you want it to look like your real eye? Or would you want it to be like a robot eye, like the Terminator?” Wayne turned his head to look at Jimmy. The dressing Jimmy had wrapped around Wayne’s head and ruptured eye was now stained light brown with dried blood.

  “You could have whatever you wanted,” said Jimmy.

  “Yeah, but I was just thinking.”

  “Sure.” Jimmy sat up. “You want breakfast?”

  Wayne shook his head, his sweaty head squeaking on the plastic coating of his makeshift bed. “I don’t think I’m hungry any more.”

  “Any more?”

  “There’s less of me than there used to be. Maybe I don’t need as much food.”

  A Wayne who didn’t want food? Maybe Wayne’s body was hitting a tipping point, hanging over the precipice of t
erminal decline, like a zebra going limp once it knows the lion has caught it.

  “Okay, mate,” Jimmy said with honest good cheer. “No breakfast. But we’ve still got a job to do.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The bag of remains. We’ve got some paddle mixers over at Welton le Marsh?”

  “Should have.”

  “Excellent. Let’s saddle up.”

  It was nearly noon by the time the two of them set out. There were a couple of lads on site, painting the exteriors of the new containers. They actually looked passably pleasant from a distance, like post-war pre-fab houses or beach huts, but the grim reality of these houses would probably be all too obvious close up. Jimmy gave the lads a nod and a wave which they returned. Neither appeared to care that he and Wayne had spent the night there, or that Wayne was looking increasingly like a war-wounded soldier.

  “I can drive if you like,” said Wayne, once Jimmy had got him in the van.

  “Drive? You can barely see.”

  “Bionic eye, remember?” said Wayne and tapped the bandage.

  “Right.”

  “But I want to drive.” Wayne grabbed for the steering wheel as though he could haul himself over to it or it over to him.

  Jimmy rapped the back of Wayne’s hand sharply. “You need to be calm. And you need to sit where you’re told.”

  Jimmy drove to the Welton le Marsh construction site. His life for the past week, for as long as he could remember, had been a ragged diamond, ten miles to a side, between Anderby Creek, Welton le Marsh, the Frost house at Friskney and Skegness itself. Hell, if it existed, didn’t need to be any larger than that.

  “I’m bored,” said Wayne, clearly still sulking that he’d not been allowed to drive.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Can we play I-Spy?”

  Jimmy looked at his one-eyed colleague. “I-Spy?”

  “Yeah. What you do is you look at something and say, ‘I spy, with my little eye—’”

  “I know how it’s played,” said Jimmy. “Sure. You start.”

  Wayne made a big show of looking round at the rural landscape: the thick grassy verges, the golden brown fields. “I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with r.”

  “Road?”

  “Wow, yeah! Your turn.”

  Reasonable Jimmy might have been howling with frustration fifteen minutes later, trying to entertain a giant idiot who thought fence began with a. Eventually, Jimmy realised Wayne thought that fence and offence were the same word. He didn’t bother pointing out neither of those words began with a.

  Incriminating human remains in the back of the van or not, Jimmy couldn’t get to Welton le Marsh fast enough.

  There were no teams working at the development today. Many had been diverted to Shore View. The first houses here were close enough to completion that house buyers could begin looking round next week. There might have been a bit of a rush job on some of the work, but the cracks in the plaster weren’t going to show for a few months yet. This was acceptable. One problem at a time.

  “Now mate,” Jimmy said to Wayne, “I need to go and sort out Mrs Skipworth and Sacha. I need you to sit tight in the van. You can do that, right?”

  “Oh yeah, I can do that.”

  “The thing is, Wayne, I know you sometimes forget, don’t you?”

  Wayne shifted uncomfortably. “I know Jimmy, I don’t mean to.”

  “And I don’t need you wandering around drawing attention to us.”

  “I understand.” Wayne frowned. “Have we had breakfast?”

  Jimmy nodded. “We had a delicious breakfast, yes. Now, I have an idea that will make sure you stay here.” He dipped into the door compartment of the van and pulled out a bundle of cable ties. “See these? I’m gonna put one round your wrist then attach it to the steering wheel. That way, it’s going to be a handy reminder that I need you to stay here. Got it?”

  Wayne grinned as Jimmy tied his right hand to the steering wheel. Jimmy tried not to recoil at the touch of Wayne’s bloated off-colour flesh.

  “Nice and tight,” said Wayne.

  “Good,” said Jimmy and hopped out.

  There were brickies’ supplies in what would be the last completed house. Jimmy had a sack full of bone fragments to grind down. It would be tempting to put them in the cement mixer drum, but that wouldn’t break them up sufficiently. Jimmy sought out a paddle mixer, a power tool with the handles and body of a pneumatic drill, and a head that was essentially a giant whisk.

  Jimmy tipped the sack of cremated remains in a heavy duty tub and turned on the paddle mixer. When he dipped it in the tub, it immediately threw up clouds of ash. That was fine. The ash could go where it wanted. It was the bone fragments he need to work on.

  Bone clattered and crunched beneath the spinning paddles.

  The noise and vibration meant he almost failed to notice the phone ringing in his pocket. When he did, he quickly patted the worst of the dust from him and answered.

  “Jacinda.”

  “Did I wake you?” she said, snidely condemning.

  “It’s been a long day already,” he said. “I’ve settled the business with—”

  “No names! No names!” she cut in.

  “You think someone’s listening in?” he sneered.

  “I have an Alexa in the office. Of course someone’s listening in.”

  Jimmy could have laughed. He attempted to pat further ash from his clothes but it was a pointless endeavour. “Fine!” he said. “I’ve settled your bill with the vet and, on top of that, I’ve closed our account with the old woman. I’m just tidying away the final paperwork right now. That good enough for you?”

  There was a thoughtful silence.

  “It’s the least you could do, as you well know,” she said. “Anyway, is there not another aspect that still needs dealing with?”

  “Little Miss Marvellous.”

  “Who?”

  “DefCon4.”

  “Yes, that,” said Jacinda.

  “We don’t need to bother. What clues are there for her to follow?”

  “What about W— I mean, what about our, er, bipedally-challenged friend?”

  “Visually-challenged too now,” said Jimmy.

  “What?”

  “The man’s likely to kill himself by accident if I leave him unsupervised. I could just leave him in a room with a whole bunch of horse tranquilisers— Hang on.”

  There was a box of stick-on Fentanyl patches still in the van. A half dozen had nearly killed Wayne before. The full twelve would send him to sleep and then to the grave in seconds…

  “Leave it with me,” he said.

  “The DefCon4 woman…”

  “She has nothing to go on. It’s not like she’s going to turn up here and start questioning our road alterations, is she?”

  59

  Sam parked the Piaggio at the bottom of Mrs Skipworth’s drive.

  An idea – an answer – buzzed in her head and, though she couldn’t let it go, she didn’t want to relinquish it too soon. She looked at the bay window of the empty house and then across to the churchyard.

  “You saw ghosts,” Sam murmured. “Playing silly buggers at night.”

  Sam crossed to the churchyard. It was surrounded by a simple fence of stout wooden stakes and barbed wire, enough to keep wandering sheep or pigs out. Just enough to declare itself as a border. Sam found the gate and stepped inside.

  The church, a squat rectangular thing, was a common enough type round here. Not large or ostentatious, drawn in on itself as though it knew how wicked the winters round here could be and didn’t want to offer any of itself up to the elements. She went to the church door. There was a notice on it.

  * * *

  St Matthew’s Church – Part of the Burgh Parishes – Services by arrangement

  * * *

  She wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, but it didn’t sound like it was a busy or regularly attended church. The churchyard itself was overgrown and scruffy.
Those graves which were simply horizontal stones with no marker were almost entirely invisible. A couple of raised tombs and a copse of headstones marked out the other graves.

  “Names in little boxes,” said Sam.

  The graves were all old, barely any later than the First World War. Lichen covered engravings that might have been from the seventeen hundreds, if only Sam could make out the numbers.

  She worked her way through the graveyard, looking from grave to grave. Certain surnames cropped up time and again. Whole families buried across the decades and centuries.

  Then she found it.

  Edith Vamplew, died 1862. Next to Benjamin Greening, died 1897. Next to that, Thomas Osmond, died 1899. The names from Wendy Skipworth’s notepad.

  “I asked if they were coming to your next birthday,” she said and suddenly felt like crying. At one simple memory of the woman no one else seemed to care about. At the thought that, in all likelihood, Wendy Skipworth was now dead, like these people.

  Mrs Skipworth had come to the churchyard and made a note of all the gravestones in this corner, right up against the fence and the narrow tarmacked road squashed up to the other side. Sam couldn’t quite work out why she had done that.

  Then she noticed the odd texture of the grass in front of Thomas Osmond’s grave. The grass had not been cut for several months, maybe even a year, and where the grass grew against gravestones, the blades were longer, sheltered by the wall of stone. However, the grass directly in front of these graves was shorter, flatter, bent inward.

  Sam crouched and touched the grass. Not only was it flatter, blades of it were bent over and trapped under the gravestone, as though caught when the century-old gravestone was slid into place.

  “What the—?”

  Sam looked along. The same was true for all of these graves. She looked beyond them. Under the boundary line of the fence she could see narrow strips of fresh turf. The gravestones had been moved – and the fence too, she realised – moved inward by less than a metre.

  “Someone has been playing silly buggers,” she said emphatically.

  Not far away a car horn beeped repeatedly, but Sam was too mesmerised to pay any attention.