‘On a Harley-D?’
‘Sure, those guys are totally committed.’
I thought of riding out along the Sussex coast, the swans on the lagoon at dawn, their heads under their wing. On your own? I wanted to ask, but held myself in check. It was none of my business whom Chas was seeing. I had made it not my business.
‘Can’t you put some pressure on Janice?’
‘No need for that, she’ll crack of her own accord within twenty-four hours.’
‘While my case rots away on the floor.’ I felt my heart sink at the thought of those bundled cadavers, those blackening toes, the fly that had circled my head, Bubba at my heels, just waiting to give me the black spot.
‘Two hours, Chas. How did Janice put it? – A quick in and out for the Coroner.’
‘And a quick in and out for me, perhaps? For Auld Lang Syne.’
I sucked in air. I felt as though I was treading water here, unable to gauge the depth, not to mention the undertow. ‘I didn’t mean that exactly …’
‘Of course you didn’t.’ He held up his hand. ‘But joking aside, I don’t care too much for the equation here, Louise. I thought you wanted to keep our relationship out of the mortuary. You wouldn’t come and work for me over here, but you’re still stuck in the same old groove, still chasing round after stiffs. Hasn’t the counselling taught you some insight? Old Fraud had a name for it, didn’t he?’
I looked away at his bike leathers hanging up behind the door, an outline of the man Chas was, a thing of too too solid flesh. Man doesn’t live by bread alone, I wanted to say, but didn’t dare say it. Not because I was frightened of Chas, not that, but because we were always arguing from different premises, like characters from Dr Johnson’s joke, old women nattering from their respective doorsteps. But at least Chas left his door open. At length, he reached forward and picked up the phone.
‘Two hours tops,’ he told me curtly. ‘Then let’s say you’ll owe me one.’
***
Chapter 2
The inside of the van was stifling with the build-up of the afternoon. I ached to go home and take a long cold shower, but my shift didn’t finish until six, assuming the Bubba did not mark me down for overtime tonight. We had twelve cases backed up between the four of us, with Edith Woods now making it a baker’s dozen. If Chas came through for me, and I could get the old woman off my books by Friday, I thought I might just persuade the Bubba to let me off the Bank Holiday weekend, when I was hoping to catch up with the reading list for the diploma. The counselling training was to be my passport out of this place, my one way ticket out of purgatory. On the worst days, like this was turning out to be, I felt like some glorified charwoman, cleaning up after the Great Grim Reaper, who surprised the so-called Evergreens in their nests of squalor, sweeping them out from under their greasy sheets. Even on the best of days, the routine sadness of my work took me into the stews of human beings at the limits of their lives, to mop up the mess, to straighten out the coverlet and tidy up. I thought of the bodies in the annexe, going off like so many dead fish, with no choice but to take this shoddy treatment from the public service personnel, when all they wanted was that final sleep of peace. Wait till you cross over, they were shouting. No quarter, no quarter. NO QUARTER.
Bubba was already adjusting the allocations chart when I arrived back at the office, her Crimplened backside blocking the view like a giant tomato. A genetic modification. A gross affront to nature. I tried to hide myself behind my terminal. I had a funeral to finalise for Friday with a humanist speaker, who was proving a bit anal, and witnesses still to appraise for a forthcoming inquest. Another unwashed elder who had died a lonely death. We often found them sitting in their armchairs, the TV flickering before them, a cup of cold tea at their side, sometimes fermenting.
The curdling scent of Yardley’s Gardenia preceded Bubba to my desk. She rattled the keys to Edith Woods’s house under my nose. Where was the evidence of friends or cash? she wanted to know. The pension book needed finding. ‘That’s elementary,’ the Fat Controller scorned. ‘You should know better with your degree and all. Get on to it.’
Fleeing the rolling tide of resentment my education unleashed in the Bubba, I set off again for the Notting Hill borders, a fresh plastic suit and disinfected boots at the ready in the back of the van. Strictly speaking, Jack should have accompanied me, but he was needed for another clean up. Bubba said she had no choice but to trust me, sniffing at me as she said it. But Edith Woods would not have anything worth pinching. Edith Woods belonged to the legion of corpses which Bubba had boasted of removing from thousands of inner-London apartments before she took the supervisor’s job: isolated, broke, and with no one left in the world who would give them a decent send off. I did not expect to find any bank books at the flat, at least none that showed a healthy balance. What ready cash Edith had would amount to odd coppers stuck down the arm of her chair, probably old coinage, too, although it would be my scrupulous duty to bag it all and set it off against the City’s expenses.
I parked the van on a double yellow line and entered the near-derelict house, making my way up the uncarpeted stairs still littered with the same old dog ends and take-away wrappers. The air was stuffy and thick with dust. For form’s sake, rather than from expectation, I knocked twice, like the postman, on Edith Woods’s door, then gave it another half-minute before unlocking.
A broad chalk cross marked the carpet by the wardrobe. The stench was overpowering, but I held the vial of lavender beneath my nose and crossed the floor, my free hand fighting off flies. The room was at the back of the house, one of those mid-Victorian terraces that seem to go back forever into tangled gardens which no one ever tends, at least not in tenanted houses, which this one was. We were told that she was the last tenant. The landlord had no knowledge of her next of kin. But he didn’t want to know in any case. He had written off her rent, fixed long ago in 1969, and turned the page. The glint of developer’s gold was already dotting his eye.
I tiptoed around the spot where the body had lain, sweating in my squeaky plastic scene-suit and my rubber boots. The wardrobe door was slightly ajar, so I reached for the handle and yanked it full open. Some beautiful scarves – silk, with Deco designs, and from the look of it original, lay neatly folded upon the top shelf. The shelf beneath was packed with sour-smelling undergarments: girdles, stockings with cheesy green feet, three pairs of French knickers. Below these, a shelf with a drawer which I could not get open. In the hanging space to my left were the usual old woman’s clothes, quite good, though: tweed skirts, the odd silk dress, and everything natural fabric: cotton, or silk, or wool. At the very end of the rail, an old mink stole exhaled a welcome smell of mothballs, companion to the fox-fur tippets that overhung the dressing table mirror. All these animals had kept their heads, and their little glass eyes, neutral as mummers’ masks, followed me through the gloom.
I tried to get the drawer open, but it refused to budge. In my aggressive yanking, I dislodged a pack of tarot cards beneath the scarves, scattering them over the greasy rug. Her pension book had lodged at the back of the drawer. She was born the year they gave women the vote in this country. Within the pages of the book was an old post card, written in pencil, too faded to read. The postmark was still clear, though: June 1972.
I tried hard in this job to dissociate myself from any charge of prying. It was a job of work, I told myself, a rotten job, but a job all the same. Someone had to do it. Someone had to clear up after the dead. I thought of the resentful gang back at the mortuary, making that first incision on Edith, the last tenant, and sat back on my haunches, miserable and desperate and sick up to the teeth. I didn’t want this job any more, and certainly not this case today. The counselling job lay over the hill, promising my deliverance from the dead and all that working with the dead entailed: that deadening of the mind and nose till every sense was shut and sealed and permanently blue. I started sifting through Edith’s papers with my latex gloves. And then I heard the bell.
This was a noise so unexpected, in a place where all lifelines has been so manifestly cut, I let out a small, shrill scream. Then, steadying myself in the line of duty, I went downstairs to answer.
An elderly woman stood out on the porch. Her hair was coiffed in a lavender-grey French pleat. Her light summer suit, in a blue and while silk dogtooth, was cut to measure. But her eyes were reddened and her nose blotchy beneath its pale veneer of powder. ‘Oh,’ she said, surprised to see me. ‘I wanted Mrs Woods.’
‘My name is Moon,’ I told her. ‘I work for the City. Are you a relative?’
‘Why, what’s happened? Is Edith all right?’
‘Are you a relative?’
‘I’m Mrs Blank. I’m a friend of hers, from The Tuesday Club. She didn’t come to join us again yesterday. I was worried about her.’ A shadow crept over the woman’s face. Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she? I knew she was dead. I had a premonition.’
I let my silence speak for me. Grief was one of the hardest things I had to confront in this job. The power of grief is a terrible, visceral thing, running the whole gamut of emotions. Anger was not uncommon: they didn’t want to dig into their pockets and tried to use the City’s representative as a whipping post. Some people laughed, though that was often a defence. One ex-wife had responded: So tell me something I don’t already know.
‘I am authorised to make the arrangements for Mrs Woods,’ I said at last. ‘I’m trying to trace her next of kin.’
‘There’s only Roy. How did it happen?’ the woman asked suddenly. ‘She was fine last week. Independent was Edith. Too independent for some. She never would go and see the doctor.’
‘Her landlord found her this morning,’ I said. ‘There was no sign of any break in. Did anyone else have a key?’
The woman shook her head. ‘Not that I know of, dear. Like I said, Edith was independent. She was all alone then, at the end. Where is she now?’
‘At the hospital.’
‘What hospital? I thought you said she was dead?’
‘There needs to be a post-mortem examination, for the Coroner.’
‘A what? What are they doing to her? She was old, old.’
‘It’s standard procedure in cases like this.’
‘But it’s awful, just awful. Hasn’t she been through enough?’
The woman started sniffling. I took her gently by the arm and drew her inside off the porch. ‘Hay fever,’ she said, spluttering into a handkerchief. ‘Stinging nettles. They have the worst sort of pollen. It comes from the railway embankment. Perhaps we can go upstairs? I should like to sit down for a minute.’
No harm in that, I considered, except to the olfactory receptors. But Mrs Blank did not seem perturbed by the smell in her old friend’s apartment, possibly out of delicacy, just possibly because she did not notice it, thanks to her hay fever.
‘What happened to the cat?’ she asked, glancing into the kitchen. ‘Edith used to put it in here when it was naughty.’
A grand cadenza of a stink exploded in my face as she opened the cupboard under the sink. A cat was crouched in hiding behind the refuse pipe, frozen in death and frosted with putrefaction. Mrs Blank backed away, banging into me as I stepped back into the hall. We shut the door.
‘Oh, that’s awful,’ said Mrs Blank. ‘Just awful.’
I reached in my pocket for the vial of lavender.
‘I expect you’re used to it,’ she commented, retreating into the bedroom, where her eye lit on the furs that hung over the mirror. ‘She’s still got all these things,’ she sighed. ‘Edith had a stall for some years on the Portobello Road. When she got too old to do it anymore, she sold most of the things for a pittance to Mr Wick, that’s a gentleman from The Tuesday Club. He has a theatrical costumier’s shop on the Edgware Road. They’re quite worthless.’ She was fingering the Deco scarves.
‘Do you think Mrs Woods could have left a will?’
‘What for? She had nothing to leave, and no one to leave it to if she had. She did all she could for Roy.’ Mrs Blank sat down heavily on the dressing table stool. ‘That’s her son, you know. He has schizophrenia. He was in hospital for many years. He treated Edith worse than a dog.’ She shook her head. ‘He hit her in the face so hard, she nearly bit her tongue off.’
‘Which hospital?’
‘That big lunatic asylum, you know.’ She shrugged. ‘The one they call The Nunnery.’
I nodded. There would be records.
‘Edith called him a Holy Fool. She said the Lord would take care of him.’
‘What religion was she?’ I asked, because this was something else I needed to settle.
‘Edith was a Theosophist. She had a very deep mind, eccentric some said, but she was all right really when you got to know her, poor old soul.’ Mrs Blank reached down and picked up one of the scattered cards. It showed a long-haired figure with a hairy belly and cloven hoofs. I made an involuntary sound, more out of repulsion than from recognition, although there was something familiar about the face.
‘He shouldn’t frighten you,’ said Mrs Blank. ‘Not this one. He doesn’t mean what you think he means. He’s a force of nature. Harness the force and you will master it. Ignore it,’ she handed it back to me, ‘and you will live forever in its shadow. Are you interested in the Tarot? I can do you a reading if you like. I only charge ten pounds.’
‘I need to make the arrangements for your friend,’ I said quickly. ‘I’ll have to try and find her son.’
‘She always wanted to give me one of these scarves.’ Mrs Blank gave me a coy smile. ‘I think I’ll take one now, as a memento.’
‘I’m afraid all Mrs Woods’s possessions will need to be listed. Her son may …’
‘Roy certainly wouldn’t want it.’ Mrs Blank was already putting the scarf into her handbag. ‘And he certainly wouldn’t agree to that post-mortem. He always hated doctors.’
‘You said he was mentally ill.’
‘He still has rights.’ She tapped the handbag. ‘You don’t want me to have her old scarf, but you can do what you like with her poor old body. Another friend of mine had to have one. They told her daughter it was just like a surgical operation – like something out of ET, or whatever it’s called.’
‘You mean ER, the Emergency Room.’ I repressed an involuntary smirk. ‘It is like a surgical procedure, Mrs Blank. They take the greatest of care.’ But I felt my face heating up even as I said that. I could quote the Coroner’s leaflet, aimed at putting relatives in the picture regarding what happened at autopsy, till I was purple in the face, like Edith was now, but I could still see those bodies on the annexe floor, the technician with the trolley, giving them the evil eye. I needed to get Mrs Blank away from here, away from this context of death. Those dull-eyed animal stoles were both accusatory and tempting.
‘Can I drop you anywhere,’ I said. ‘I have to lock up here for now.’
She shouldered the handbag and shook her head. ‘I’ll be all right, thank you. I have a few errands to run. But you will let me know about the funeral?’
I watched her walk off down the street before getting into my van. Before I drove off, I called Bubba on my cellphone. She said she would chase up the son with The Nunnery Clinic, then directed me back to the mortuary, to chase up the PM report. I thought it most unlikely that Chas would have finished by now, but went back anyway, like a dog returning to its vomit. There were other mortuaries on my ambit, of course, but I always seemed to draw this one, like the shortest straw.
The duty technician was unknown to me, a person with a mullet hairstyle greased behind his ears.
‘Louise Moon,’ I said. ‘For the Coroner. I’ve come for Edith Woods.’
‘She’s saying her prayers,’ he laughed, directing me towards the cutting room. A student in a bloody apron, a raw girl with rheumy eyes, was stitching the body of my old woman. Impawala favoured me with a broad smile. ‘We’ve got an extra pair of hands here now, thanks to you, Louise.’ She n
odded at the student. ‘Professor Androssoff’s been in. She’s just helping us close up.’
‘And the report?’
‘Stroke,’ she said finally. ‘What it is to have friends in high places.’
Mullet-head was shifting Edith Woods onto a trolley. The dead woman’s hand flopped down at her side. I noticed the dirt beneath the fingernails. ‘I am sorry,’ I told the corpse. ‘I am trying to make things right for you.’ The technician exchanged a sly glance with the student. They would all be getting a rise out of Professor Androssoff’s old succubus. I didn’t care.
‘I’ll put her in number thirteen.’ The technician pushed the trolley towards the row of newly-humming fridges. ‘Unlucky for some.’
I went through to the fly-spotted cupboard where the departmental administrator had her terminal, an appropriately cheerless ambience in which to set down the causes of death. The hospital saw death as the ultimate failure, a thing to be spoken of in whispers, to be hidden away behind screens and under sheets. Some of the clinicians here regarded death as no more than a change of condition, a change with ever shifting shades of meaning. What did death mean anyway, in the Twenty-First Century? Heart-stopping death pre-dated the dawn of defibrillators. You could keep a brain stem alive when everything else had ceased to function, so what did it mean when the brain stem died if everything else was functioning artificially, though, to all intents and purposes, quite normally (or what passes for normally), courtesy of a machine? And what of all those organs – kidneys, hearts, livers, eyes – removed from accident victims at point of death and transplanted into the sick? Did that mean the donors weren’t really dead, at least not in their entirety, or had they somehow been transposed into another system, efficiently recycled by modern metaphysicians? Thanks to my line of work, I knew what death looked like on the face of it, but even now I couldn’t say, I couldn’t even begin to say I knew what death was.
Grave Truths Page 2
