A DREADFUL SUMMONER

KEITH MCCARTHY

Copyright © 2014 Keith McCarthy

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 1495246019

ISBN-13: 978-1495246012

Close pent-up guilts,

Rive your concealing continents, and cry

These dreadful summoners grace.  I

am a man more sinned against than sinning.

(King Lear)

PROLOGUE

The light came on and it was as if his world started once again because, for that moment, he had no recollection of how he came to be there.  The light caused him to blink back the spasm at the back of his sore eyes; he swallowed and suddenly his throat was agony.  There was a man standing in front – that was his next realisation.  He was bound and gagged and naked – the one after that.  The next two and all subsequent rushed in upon him; he was in some sort of workshop; the light was coming from a single unclothed light bulb, there was the constant rumble of traffic from close by.  He remembered then who he was, but none of this explained the why.   Vague memories of being stopped in the street near to his flat, asked for a light, his sympathetic admission that he didn’t smoke, and then that dreadful, nauseating punch hard into his stomach; the dirty pavement – dog shit close by, the stain of an old ‘pavement pizza’ just within the range of his blurring vision – leaping to embrace him and jarring his wrists and knees; the feel of the cold damp dust.  Then, as if the pulsating nausea of the initial blow were not enough, an explosion of pain in his throat and his head was propelled back on his neck and he perhaps heard someone say, “Swallow that, you cocksucker.”

“Do you know who I am?” asked the man.  He was dressed casually but neatly; he had an air of money.  His voice was soft but forceful. 

He tried to speak but the gag made him only make a sound; he shook his head, finding his neck constrained by something tight and vicious.  He was bound into a chair; the chair felt as if it were bolted to the ground.  The room was a garage; there were stacks of tyres on the wall behind his interrogator, a bench on which were various power tools and wrenches to his left; to his right a Ford Capri had been raised into the air by a lift above an inspection pit.  He was terrified, but not just because of what he could see and what that implied, but of what he didn’t comprehend.  The man said, “I know you.”  The emphasis was very strongly on the last word.

He appreciated then that the man was angry; it followed quickly, like a burst of electricity in his sagging, ageing belly, that this man wasn’t just angry, he was livid.  The man continued, “You’re Neville Fite.”

The jolt of electric terror recurred, this time even more painful, as he suddenly saw that this man wasn’t even just livid; he was maddened with anger; it showed in his unnaturally constant gaze. He tugged experimentally at the bonds around his wrists, finding little play and no little pain; he could move his head just enough to see that his bonds were wire.  Oh, shit...

What had he done?  Who was this lunatic?  His world was not this man’s, his world was harmless...

This casually dressed man began to pace across the wall of tyres, from the bench to the inspection pit and back.  “Do you know why you’re here?” he asked the oil-stained concrete floor.

Of course, Neville could not speak, but he made his ignorance plain as strenuously as possible, even though the wire around his neck treated him most grievously, and his guttural sounds were exceedingly, hoarsely loud.  The man stopped, and looked at him, and smiled.  “No, I don’t believe you do.”  He sighed, shook his head and began again to pace.  His voice was never less than calm, but that only scared poor Neville all the more.  The pacing continued for many more seconds – ticks of a clock that was only in Neville’s head and that became as long as hours to him as they counted themselves into and out of existence.  At last the man said, this time looking up at the only windows in that room, set up high above the workbench, and made of dusty, smeared, frosted glass so that they illuminated only themselves, as if jealous of their light.  The man said, “I have a lot of very precious possessions.  A lot.  I’ve worked fucking hard for them, and I think I deserve each and every one them.”

Neville was not about to argue.  Not with this man; whoever he was, he was clearly dangerously insane.  His dress – as if he were going on to play eighteen holes and the golf club, perhaps in a pro-am competition – only made his words and his demeanour and his simmering, volcanic fury all the more disturbing.

“I would give every one of them up, though, for my son.”

He stopped dead, quite suddenly as if powered down for a second, but his eyes were on Neville.  “My son, Gareth.”

And, although he didn’t understand it all, Neville did then begin to comprehend, and very much to regret.  He wanted to explain to this man, that it had all been innocent, that he hadn’t known, that the boy had been willing...

The man turned his back to Neville.  Hanging on the wall in a gap between the workbench and wall of tyres, was a large, bulky coverall suit, and with a sensation that made all that had gone before it seem trivial, Neville realised that it was made out of rubber.  The man took it down and, ignoring him completely, began to put it on. Neville began to squirm, ignoring the slicing pain in his wrists and ankles and neck, the sticky warmth that coated it.  There was no give; he tried to rock the chair, but it refused to yield as well.  While he was thus struggling, a voice coming from behind the chair cut in.  “I should go.”  Had he been in a more coherent frame of mind, Neville might have recognised it.

The suit now on, and although his eyes were greedy only for Neville the man said after a pause of consideration, “Maybe you’d better.”  There came the sound of retreating steps, the sound of metal door opening and quickly closing.

To Neville, his persecutor said, “I’m told you’re a cultivated man, Neville.”  He paused, waiting for Neville to cease his useless attempts to change things.   When Neville did so, he asked, “Do you know what ling chi is?

Neville could not answer but that was alright, because he did not know.  The man waited a moment, as if hoping that an answer might be forthcoming, then grunted softly in disappointment; Neville, it seemed, was a poor pupil.  “Ling chi is an ancient Chinese art.”

Again, he waited.  Neville heard the final word and dared to let hope – hope that was entirely irrational and without proper foundation, and the more deceitful because of it – enter his head.  Then the man went on, “It is an art of torture, Neville.”

Neville’s bladder released, his bowels likewise; his head was filled to the top of his cranium with mindless, asphyxiating fear.  The man’s tone was ever reasonable as he continued, “It is a torture of humiliation.  Just as you have humiliated me, so I will humiliate you, Neville.  It is the way of my world, and my world is now your world.”

Again Neville began to struggle, this time his threshold of pain higher, but it could have been out of sight, beyond the stars, and it would have made no difference.  He was panting and his panting was filling his ears as well as his lungs.  Blood and sweat adorned his wrists, neck and ankles; tears his cheeks.  The man turned to the bench and picked up a single-bladed razor.  He showed it to Neville; the light bulb in that room was a paltry thing but the steel of that blade was smooth and shiny, and it caught a few light rays to flash just slightly towards Neville.  “In English, it has become known as ‘the death by a thousand cuts’, but that is not really very accurate.  I have read that there can be as many as three or four thousand cuts, and slices, and small amputations...”

Neville added muffled screaming to his litany, and his head was filled with it.  Despite the cruel wire bonds, he was still managing to move quite a bit but suddenly hands clamped his head over his eyes, although he was beyond surprise in realising that there was yet another person in the room.  The fingers of the hand separated his shut eyelids.  The man in front of him said, “The Chinese were ever so resourceful, Neville.  What do you think could make that kind of thing worse?  I mean, it’s pretty fucking bad as it stands, but they thought of something that would be the perfect turn of the screw...”

He seemed to wait momentarily for an answer but, receiving none, he made a face of disappointment accompanied by a small shrug of the shoulders, and began to move towards the old and naked, soiled and hysterical man.  The hands around his face tightened even more.  The man was smiling as he explained, “They blinded the victim first, Neville.  Brilliant, isn’t it?  The unbelievable agony of the blinding and then the horror of the slow, so gentle slicing...”  He stopped directly in front of Neville.  “I think a single stroke through each should suffice,” he said at last.  His voice was soft, as if he were dreaming; and perhaps he was.

He raised the blade high, paused, then dropped his arm again.  The pause was terrible.  He examined the blade from different angles.  “I don’t do this kind of thing these days.”  He looked at Neville, then gestured with his head to the owners of the hands that held Neville.  “I have people do it for me.”  Then he laughed softly, almost delightedly.  “I’m going to make an exception in your case, Neville.”

And he again raised the blade, and this time swept it horizontally through the air towards Neville’s face.  The last thing that Neville ever saw was a smile that reached happily up to the eyes of his torturer and killer.

THE END

He’s dead at last.

Even after drinking so much of the drug and then being knocked out, God, did he struggle.  I don’t know what I’d have done if he had realised earlier that I was killing him; I couldn’t have resisted him and I know that he would have been vicious in his retribution.  Oh, yes, he would have been very vicious indeed. I sit down once again in my living room, the curtains drawn against the warmth of the humid night, only a single standard lamp to cast silhouettes and shadows on his relaxed face and on my shaking hands; they shake all the time now, though not for much longer.  I do not have long left, perhaps only minutes, before Mr Brown comes to enquire how things have gone.  It will be time enough, though.  

I am going to die tonight, but I’ve been dying for a long time; the only that has changed tonight is that the time has been set; and set by me, not by God.

I am rather proud of that.

THE BEGINNING.

1.

It was the heat and the silence that Maggie loved about the hotel, at that time, in that perfect place; these were things that she cherished, that she so rarely experienced anywhere else.  The stone terrace looked out over a deep valley that was farmed but done so in the unique way of French agriculture; seemingly haphazard, seemingly mired in a rustic past, seemingly almost slothful.  Things got done in the small, irregular fields, but no one ever seemed to do them; no one seemed actually to work very hard.  She knew that this was not true, that this miscomprehension was born of the cultural ignorance, and that it was she who was the poorer for it.

Jean-Pierre came out of the dining room, scanning the terrace, noting which of the six groups of diners needed attention.  He came over to Maggie.  “More wine?” he asked, taking hold of the bottle that leaned drunkenly in the ice bucket, his manicure arguing strongly against a life of hard labour.

“Thanks.”  She held out her glass. 

Whilst he poured – label uppermost, firmly grasping the base of the bottle, finishing with a twist so that there would be no unsightly drip – he asked, “What about Eleanor?”

“I expect she can manage a little.”

“Is she all right?”

“She’s fine.  She’s taken a call.  She’ll be back in a moment.”

He replaced the bottle in the melting ice.  “Coffee?”

“Please.”

“Out here, or inside?”  He looked at the setting sun behind her.  “It will soon be surprisingly cool.”

“Inside, then.”

He nodded, happy that she had taken his advice, and went back inside the house.  The shadows were lengthening from behind her, stretching along the sweep of the valley; the breeze was certainly cooling, but not distressing; it merely comforted rather than nagged or annoyed, and there was no need to hurry inside.  There was a road some fifty metres below the terrace, along the boundary of the hotel’s tumbling, partly wooded gardens, although it rarely intruded except when a tractor rumbled along it, as one did now.  There were children still in the open air pool splashing but not shouting overmuch, certainly providing nothing more than unintrusive background effects; the parents were still sunbathing, although Maggie doubted that they were being overly irradiated by now.  Soon Simon would come out of the cramped, hot kitchen, still in his whites, and sit at the Pianola to entertain those guests who cared for old-fashioned sing-alongs, greeting the dusk with his untrained but strong baritone, occasionally enticing his partner, Jean-Pierre, to standing behind him and add a slightly weaker tenor voice.  Maggie had been coming here for over ten years – first with her parents, then with boyfriends, now with whichever parent wanted her company on a short break - and this peculiarly affecting ritual (hinting as it did at something old and lost from the modern world, certainly from her modern world) never failed to entrance her.  This place had the air of a sanctuary about it; not just because of its relative isolation and its high position, but also perhaps because of its history as a lavish priest’s house (it was next to a disused church).

Where was her mother?  Probably the call was from David, Maggie’s brother, who could make small talk without effort and seemingly with appropriate interest, a knack that had entirely eluded Maggie.  To her – as it was to her father – phone conversation was supposed to perform a function of information conveyance; to David and her mother, it was its own purpose, entirely divorced from the transmission of data.  This was just one of the many divergences that had cast their family unit into two distinct tribes, as completely as different languages would have done; Maggie and her father could see David and her mother, could talk to them and touch them, could give and receive gifts (even love), but could not – in some intangible, existential way – be with them.  Because of this, she saw reproach in her mother’s gaze and in her attitude, and it had become worse since the divorce; now she felt that her mother regarded her with suspicion, as an ally of her father and therefore as an enemy, and there was no amount of reminiscence, chatter or time spent together that could allay this. If anything, the more she tried, the worse it became, for she appeared to become too desperate to infiltrate her mother’s life or, at least, she was dreadfully afraid that she appeared so.

From below, the sounds of the parents calling the children out of the pool drew her attention; the family were staying in one of two self-catering apartments in the hotel and had not come to dinner.  She discovered that she was now alone on the terrace, the others having drifted inside the dining room, ready for Simon’s nightly performance.  The scent of honeysuckle was strong and moths began their inebriated dancing before the wall lights.

At last her mother returned and sat down opposite her.  An odd expression held her lined but determined face.  She didn’t look directly at Maggie, rather at the westering sun, now far gone in its descent.  “Drink up,” suggested Maggie.  “I’ve ordered coffee for inside.”  Jean-Pierre’s prediction that it would quickly become cold was proving true. 

Her mother turned her attention to the glass; it was done in the manner of someone having to concentrate on what she was doing; she seemed, like the moths, to be drunk.  She did not immediately reach out to take it, though.  Her lips were pursed and Maggie suddenly realised that something had made her angry.  “What’s the matter?”

Her mother had eyes that had grown paler with the passing of days, although the whites remained pristine, without the common yellowing and veining of age; they were staring at the glass (now clothed in condensation) as if it held new and unexpected, yet arcane fascination for her.  She said thoughtfully, “Your father always had a way of spoiling things.”

Her mother rarely mentioned her father anymore; when she did it was, as now, usually in tones that were terse and bitter, reflecting the legacy of the divorce, which was itself the legacy of one infidelity too far and too obvious.  “What’s he done now?” Maggie asked.  The five years since the divorce had been regularly punctuated by eruptive disagreements between her parents, almost as if they were still married; perhaps they always would be, she often thought.  Usually, and accompanied by the reek of breathtaking hypocrisy, such arguments were sparked by her father’s jealousy when his ex-wife dared to see other men.  Her mother – at least as far as Maggie knew – was not in a relationship the moment.

“That was David.”

“I guessed that.”  But her mother had lapsed into absence and the crepuscular light became oddly numinous.  “What did he say?”

Her mother almost snarled her response. “Your father’s dead.”

2.

They did not join in with Simon’s entertainment that evening.  Maggie explained to Jean-Pierre that they had had bad news from home and they took their coffee in their room.  As they talked, the faint plinking of the Pianola and the ragged, impromptu chorus of about ten guests and Simon accompanied their shocked conversation.  It was the manner of Neil Carson’s death as much as the fact of it that found Maggie incredulous.

“He drowned?”

“Well, they haven’t done a post mortem yet, but he was fished out of the river and that’s the supposition that the police are working on.”

“But he could swim.”

“Not well enough, apparently.”

“Which river?”

“The Wye.”

It made no sense, at least not to Maggie.  To her mother, though, there seemed nothing odd about the event, at least not judging by her attitude; she was still angry, though.  Her ex-husband might have died, but he had spoiled her holiday which seemed of more importance to her.  “What was he doing swimming in the Wye?”

“He fell in, they think.  He was fully clothed.”

“Drunk?”

Her mother’s snort of contempt did not need additional words, but she said anyway, “I expect so.”

It was full dark now.  The lamps around the room gave a warm light that brought out the best of Jean-Pierre’s interior decoration; eclectic yet consummately tasteful, a mix of the antique and contemporary; Maggie never failed to wonder at his seemingly effortless ability to create an ambience of elegant, Gallic sophistication.  Their cups were dry, the cafetiere empty save for dregs.  Suddenly it was all just a backdrop for their thoughts about a man who meant such different things to mother and daughter.  His wife had never forgiven him for his betrayal of her – not once, nor twice, but four times – and that he was now a shimmering shade held only in her memories made no odds.  His daughter’s perspective, though, had never allowed her to judge him solely on that; her relative distance from her mother led to refraction of the memories, with consequent mitigation of the sin.  She looked at him through the crystalline lens of childhood and dependence, and the parallax thus produced shifted her outrage just enough to continue to need to know him and love him.

After a period of silence that fell between them and that was deepened by the ending of the amateur festival of song from below, Maggie said, “I’d better get onto the airline.”

Her mother’s head jerked up bearing an expression of surprise and annoyance.  “Why?”

“To book early flights home.”

Before she had finished speaking, her mother said firmly, “Oh, no.”  The shake of her head was only slight, but it was performed with such determination, it made her mother’s bobbed, greying hair shimmy quickly but frantically.

They were due to spend four more days in the Toulouse countryside; Maggie could not imagine spending lazy days by the pool or taking day trips in the hired Peugeot with the knowledge of her father’s sudden death shading everything.  “We’ve got to.”

Another shake of the head; it was identical to the first, and this added emphasis to her obvious determination to stay.  Her next breath was deep and almost shuddering.  “That man managed to spoil my life.  He will not spoil my holiday.”

Her mother was slight and thin, but she had always been strong-willed; Maggie’s upbringing – coercion to join the Brownies and the Girl Guides, unforgiving and unreasonable judgement of boyfriends, unforgiving and unreasonable punishments for minor infringements of the ‘house rules’ – bore (in her view, at least) clear and irrefutable testament to that.  What had happened with Will Burnell was the ultimate exemplar, an event in Maggie’s life that her mother had never been able to see as anything other than a bad mark against her daughter; Maggie had often marvelled how that could be, but even her father had been unable to bring her around to her mother’s point of view.  What ought to have been a reason for her mother to support her daughter had somehow turned into a cause of further disapproval.  Maggie had thwarted his wife’s dreams, her father had told her one late night after the divorce.  “She had it all planned out.”

“So did I,” she had replied, not without some bitterness.

“I know, dear.”

“She blames me, doesn’t she?”

He had hesitated at that, but with his mouth downturned, he had said softly, “She’s never said so openly to me, but I think so.”

Which was as it always was.  Once an opinion was formed, a judgement handed down, there was no right of appeal; indeed, measures towards trying to achieve a correction of injustice had always been likely to be met with the full force of matriarchal power, and that situation still prevailed.  “But we can’t leave David to cope on his own.” Actually, she held the thought that it would do her younger brother much good to do just that; her problem was that she would not have felt comfortable soaking up the rays and gorging herself on Simon’s cooking while her father began to decay, even if it was being slowed in the fridges of a public mortuary in Hereford. 

“David assured me he could cope.  He specifically said that I wasn’t to go back, and that I was to enjoy the rest of my holiday, and that is what I intend to do.”

Maggie had been in too many conversations like this before with her mother to continue the argument, much as she wanted to.  It wasn’t that she couldn’t understand her mother’s position – even agree with it – it was that it placed her in an invidious position.  It would be difficult to travel back and leave her mother alone - even if it was in a place she knew well and surrounded by people who were effectively old friends - and yet not to do so would break her own bonds with her father, would be interpreted as uncaring and cold, perhaps especially by herself.  She felt that her mother was being unkind and self-centred in not thinking of Maggie’s situation; but that was as her mother had always been.  She suspected that it was actually one of the reasons that Maggie would always hold something back in her love for her.

With an inaudible sigh, she said, “Why don’t we go downstairs and ask Jean-Pierre for a nightcap?”

“To celebrate, you mean?”  Her mother’s waspish tone hurt something inside Maggie’s soul.

“You can celebrate,” she replied evenly.  “I think my drink will be for different reasons.”  She went on before her mother could retort, “You may have lost a philandering husband, Mummy, but I’ve lost a father.”

It silenced her mother, but her expression was eloquent.

3.

The next morning, over breakfast, Maggie announced, “I’m going back.”

They were in the new part of the extended dining room, eating local pastries, French bread and homemade fig jam.  The extension had given light and openness to what before could have been a slightly suffocating room, especially when the weather was particularly close.  The family from the pool were there as well, the children behaving excitedly but quietly; a gay couple from Canada had just come in and were standing at the table choosing foodstuffs.  The maternal mouth paused midway through daintily chewing a small mouthful of bread; there were two fine breadcrumbs on her lower lip.  She stared at her daughter, whilst resuming her mastication, then swallowing.  “Are you.”  It was not posed as question, although the two words bore with them a demand for explanation.

“I think I should.”

“What about me?” 

“I know that it means I’ll be leaving you here...”

“Alone,” she pointed out, as if Maggie had failed to think of this.

“Yes, but...”

“You invited me on this holiday.”  Maggie knew that she ought to have been inured to this, should have been impervious to the accusatory tone, the hurt look that hovered around the thin, pale lips and played on the concentric creases at the corners of her the maternal mouth.

Yet, she wasn’t and would never be.

“But things have changed,” she said and heard not words but whining.

Her mother took in coffee; as she did in everything, her motions were precise and dainty, but Maggie knew better than to believe that this was a sign of subservience or weakness.  If anything, they were the gestures of  power and privilege.  “Not for me they haven’t, Maggie.”

They continued their meal in a silence which strained at the leashes that, no matter what they wished, bound them irrevocably. One of the children began to hit the other; the gay man chuckled over something.  Jean-Pierre came and gave them a fresh cafetiere and the day grew inexorably yet perceptibly that little bit warmer, moment by tranquil moment.

“When is your flight?”  The query came out of nothing, certainly not out of Maggie’s expectancy.

Surprised and thus uncertainly, Maggie said, “I don’t know.  I was going to look them up after breakfast; there’s probably something back to Bristol this evening.”

No direct response; her mother finished her breakfast and then dabbed at her mouth after emptying her coffee cup.  As Maggie refilled it, she said, “I’m not happy, Maggie.”

Her tone was shot through with sharp tones of ice but at least she hadn’t resorted to calling her ‘Miss’ or ‘Young lady’, and the very fact that she had stooped to acknowledge that her daughter might actually go through with her plan suggested much to Maggie.  She tried to parley. “I know that, Mum.”  She didn’t actually reach out to her across the pastel table cloth, but she hoped that her tone did the aural equivalent.  “But I just feel that I can’t stay here.  Not now.”

Nothing.

“I know it’s different for you...” she began again.

“Too damn right it is, young lady,” hissed her mother suddenly. The family didn’t hear because they were busy arguing, but the Canadian couple did, although they tried not to show it.  Before Maggie could speak, she continued, “That man was a bastard to me.  He spoiled my life.”

“Mummy, he’s dead.”

The Canadian couple were doing their best, Maggie reflected in the back of her mind; she couldn’t blame them for a soupcon of prurience, especially as her mother’s whispers had enough penetration to waken the comatose.  “And he’s still spoiling things for me!”

That particular thrust even reached into the heart of the squabbling family; Jean-Pierre came into the room from the kitchen and was momentarily taken aback by the silence that had fallen precipitously.  Her mother suddenly stood up.  “Do what you must.”

Maggie suspected her mother meant this as a challenge but, at the age of thirty-two, she thought perhaps it was about time she stood up to it.    

4.

I brush my teeth with a toothbrush whose bristles are so fine and soft that they remind me of the days when I was a boy and I lathered my face with badger’s hair and shaved with single-bladed safety razor.  Yet my mouth still bleeds, and pain from my gums makes me wince tears of pain, no matter how gentle I am, no matter how much of my precious time I take.  At least I do not need to shave now.

I am bald but the hair loss has still been something that bothers me.  Not the fact of it, you understand (I have been gradually losing my hair for too many years for its complete disappearance to be in any way itself distressing), but its significance as a sign of what is happening to me.  My hair has finally died completely, leaving the liver spots to crawl openly over my skin like the disgusting lice that they are, parading their decay, exalting in their victory.  The hair has succumbed, the rest of me follows, organ by organ, part by part, until I diminish so far that I am no longer there.  Perhaps, at the end, I won’t even realise that it has happened.  I look in the cracked mirror of the sliding door of the bathroom cabinet and I see an old man under siege, uncertain not of whether he will surrender, but only of when.  I see a man who is not now enjoying life, nor even living it, he is merely encountering it; he is mindlessly extending it, with no purpose, nothing more.  He is just being stubborn; fruitlessly and annoyingly stubborn. 

Today is a bad day.  Today is the day after I have been picked up by a car and driven to the hospital and been given an infusion of something that almost certainly won’t cure me, but which most certainly does make me feel like shit. I am in the ‘nadir’, I am told, when the chemotherapy really hits, and you feel too ill to do anything.  I am told it will last a few days, and then improvement will start to seep through me; this is relative improvement, of course.  Nothing will get me back to the time before the cancer, when I didn’t have constant back pain and my flesh didn’t hang off me like dusty, dry, pink shrouds.  Nor will this ‘improvement’ mean that my mouth is not forever breaking out in ulcers, or that I will gain appetite, or that the itchy rash will leave me in peace, or that I will have gained hope and lost dread.

The day is warm; the house is cold; my whole world is cold.  The sun shines through the windows of the bedroom as I walk back into it from the en suite and dust dances in its effulgence; some might see that as somehow romantic, but I only see where it has settled on the furniture and window sill, and then I see only that I do not have the energy to clean anymore, and that I no longer have a wife to do it for me.  My dusting days are over; it is one of many things that I no longer do and I feel that, each day, another is struck from the list. AT some time yet to come, that list will be down to just one thing – living – and then that day will end and the list will finally be blank.

Tea has lost its flavour for me and I do not think I will ever again taste it properly, but I still like to have a mug of it in the morning; that and buttered toast.  For a few years I tried a spread that would lower my cholesterol, because the GP said it was ‘on the high side’; I never knew what cholesterol was but I was a good citizen and so I got this stuff as he suggested.  It was all right – no better and no worse than the proper butter I was used to – but boy, was if pricey.  Still, it was at a time when I had some health and thought I ought to do everything I could to preserve it.  Now I say, ‘fuck that’, and I hope you’ll forgive me the sentiment.  I say words like that a lot, I have to admit.  I sit in the kitchen, then, and eat proper butter, unable to taste it anymore and having endured the agony of the bleeding ulcers on my gums, yet gaining important satisfaction from doing it.  I cannot sit at the table too long because, even with a cushion on the chair, it soon becomes uncomfortable.  I no longer eat for comfort, or nourishment, nor even for habit; I eat mainly because my stomach needs to be full for my medication.  Half of this is because of the effects of the cancer, the other half is because of the effects of the treatment; it is an odd road down which I travel.  Having forced the food down – I am now forever either full or nauseous, yet shedding weight as if my body no longer listens to my stomach – and taken the first of my morning tablets (paracetamol), I then wash up the plate, the knife and the mug, distractedly watching the rain begin to fall in a faint, ghostly haze that is gone in the sunlight before it has fallen.

I have little to do today.  Gemma is due to call and she will be cheerful and solicitous, and convince me that she is so because she genuinely feels those emotions and not just because it is her job as MacMillan Cancer Nurse.  I really like Gemma.  She is short and tubby – things that bring with them a remembrance of vigour that manages somehow to lift me.  Her accent is thick and tuneful, her brown eyes large and most intoxicating (or so I said to her, which made her laugh and made me happy), her hands small and soft, nimble and sure; I look at her hands when she doesn’t realise I am doing so, and I wonder how my hands and her hands can be so dissimilar; it is as though we are of related but different species.  It is a thought that perhaps has more than a sheen of truth.

I have seen too much death in my life, but I haven’t seen nearly enough dying.

The local paper was delivered when I was bleeding in the bathroom.  I pick it up from the hallway by the front door that sticks in the winter, then go into the front living room and switch on the television, sitting heavily, and with a groan I cannot stop, in my old grey leather armchair.  On the table to my left are most of my pills; I have gone beyond coffee spoons, now using tablets to register the passing of the hours and days.  The doctors tell me that the most import of these is the single, daily cream-coloured thing called Tarceva; it is supposed to be a wonder drug, although unfortunately it doesn’t always work.  I am supposed to take this with a large glass of water, and it is my preference to add some whisky to that; I have told no one I do this, because I do not think that they will approve.  Well, fuck them.  I am an old man who is dying, and yet I am also a child, also a thing to be commanded and coerced, apparently; cancer has made pewking mewling thing of me, it seems.  That hurts almost as much the burrowing back pain that keeps me awake from one twilight to another.

The others are various medications to treat whatever I have that day; diarrhoea or constipation, perhaps a fever, perhaps a touch of vomiting, possible a soupcon of wheeziness.  I am in a sweetshop, able to choose whichever confection I feel I would like; I am indeed in my infancy.  I have been prescribed capsules of oramorph, which is one of the strongest of painkillers, but I don’t take them as such.  I am fed up with taking magic pills that seem to produce only illusions of improvement, as if they were stage conjurors rather than true wizards.  Instead I open each capsule between trembling, insensate fingers and pour the tiny crystals of white, light fluff onto a sheet of paper; having done this to four of them, I carefully pour into that day’s whisky through a small funnel, and swirl it around.  Half a bottle a day, with water, is enough to last me all day.  I am not addicted to it.  It is a small comfort which, in a barren living, is a place to shelter.

It takes me a moment to appreciate the significance of the headline.  Local doctor drowns in river.  It is only when I read down that I take more than passing, passive interest.  Neil?  Neil Carson is dead?  The shock of hearing of the death of my old friend is great; I own that I take a deep draught of the scotch at that one.  The television talks of national news from a bright studio in a place a long, long way away; to me, now, the national news is of no interest; local things – those which are immediately around me, are all that will ever matter now.  I read on.  When Gemma lets herself in, I am already halfway down the whisky decanter and I have to rush to hide it from her, although I suspect she knows all about it.

5.

The golf club was a hundred years old and looking magnificent, a grand old woman just coming into her prime, revelling in her experience.  Heavily wooded in areas, with some holes on quite steep hills, and fairways that were viciously narrow in places, it was not an easy course to play, but to the good amateur player – the one who had enough money and spare time to play regularly three or four times a week and to have regular lessons with the pro – it was challenging, but not too difficult.  To the man who now sat in the clubhouse and drank wine with a roast beef and horseradish sandwich, it was relatively easy.  He was immaculate dressed, and his movements were precise and measured; he was a man who was enjoying life.  His companion was less sanguine.  This man did not take his eyes from the first; he was not eating or drinking because he had not been invited to and, when you were in the company of Jack Skinner, you were seen and not heard until told otherwise.  This man was dressed rather more formally in a suit and tie, although they were not tailored and it showed. 

Skinner finished his sandwich and then his wine.  He leaned back in his chair having wiped his mouth with the cloth napkin, then looked out across the view down the first fairway towards the now ageing high rise office blocks of Croydon town centre.  He sighed; it might have been one of contentment, but the man opposite him knew him too well to be fooled.  It was one of exasperation.  Skinner said, “What the fuck am I paying you for, Sean?”

Sean said nothing. He had seen Skinner rarely over the past years, and he was grateful for that and not just because when Skinner wanted to see you in person, it was likely to be very bad, if not for you then for someone else; there was also his own personal position to consider, because if people got the idea that he and Skinner were a bit too close, they might take an interest, and Sean didn’t want that, not at all.  Skinner continued to take in the sunlit view of evening Croydon; from here it actually looked quite enchanting, here where the dirt and the dust could not be seen, and the traffic could not be heard.  “I’ve given you an unlimited budget.  You can have anyone you want to help you.  You’ve obviously got your own contacts amongst your colleagues, and I’ve given you more in Customs and Excise, and in the Borders Agency, even in fucking parliament, Sean.  Yet it’s been five weeks and you’ve still come up with nothing.”

“I’ve narrowed it down.  There’s no chance that they got out of the country.”  He hoped that his voice conveyed an assuredness that he did not feel, and that it didn’t betray the sense of panic he was feeling.  When he had been given his orders, the one scenario he had wanted to avoid was this discussion.  “I know for a fact he hasn’t accessed any money.”

“He’s an accountant, Sean.  He’s probably got more pounds squirreled away than you’ve got brain cells.”  As always, Skinner’s tone was deceptively kind but Sean Hooke knew that this meant nothing; nothing at all,

“And he’s very clever.  We knew that...”

Skinner’s glance silenced him and he waited.  Someone walked past them, having coming into the bar from the locker rooms; it was a short, swarthy man with dyed hair who appeared to be out of breath.  His sweater was loud and red.  “Hello, Jack.  Good round?”

Skinner inclined his head and said modestly.  “Fair.  You?”

“Lost one in the water at the third.  Bastard hole.”

“Bad luck.”

The swarthy man moved on.  Skinner looked at the crimson sweater as it made its way to a party of three at the bar.  He said thoughtfully, “They want me to be captain of the club next year.”

“Do they?  That’s an honour.”  Detective Chief Inspector Sean Hooke did not play golf, but he did do obsequiousness.

“I think I’d make a good captain.  Don’t you?”

Sean Hooke was never going to say anything except, “Yes.  Undoubtedly.”

Again Skinner pondered, looking at the four men at the bar.  “I won’t do it, though.  The day they started letting in people like that little cunt, that was the day I knew I was too good for this place.”  Turning back to the younger man, he said, “I’ve got my name down for Sunningdale.  I’m told I’ll be nominated and accepted within the year.”

Sean couldn’t suppress a tremor of the lips as he said, “That’s fantastic,” and hoped that he sounded genuine.  One of the many things that upset Jack Skinner was the idea that he was being patronised.  Skinner stared at him for a long time; far longer than was good for Sean’s sense of wellbeing.  Eventually he said, “You have to be patient to be a success in life, Sean.”

“I know.”

“I’ve got a lot of patience.”

“I will find them, Jack.”

Perhaps Skinner did not hear him.  “After what they did to me, I think I’ve been heroically patient with you, Sean.”

“I’m close.  I know I am.” 

With a frown, Skinner enquired incredulously, “Do you need some more incentive to get the job done, Sean?”  There was a touch of wonder in that question, as if he couldn’t quite believe that this outlandish concept might be true.

Perhaps it was because he shook his head with such vehemence that the Chief Inspector’s voice seemed almost tremulous .  “No.  Not in the least.”

Skinner stared at him with an intensity that was almost unhuman.  He said quietly, “I want them found, Sean, and found soon.  You’re going to do that small thing for me, because that’s what I pay you for.  I’ve waited long enough.”

“It won’t be long...”

But Skinner was no longer listening.  His voice low and steady, his gaze unbroken and his smile unwavering, he continued, “And when you’ve finally done what I pay you for, I’m going to let them know how unhappy they’ve made me.”

Skinner was again looking out at the Croydon skyline and for a moment Hooke had the feeling that the man opposite him was engaged in an internal and violent struggle; it was rare indeed for Jack Skinner allow anyone a glimpse of what was beneath that ever-smiling mask, and it underline to him just what was at stake should he fail.  Skinner did not move for a long time, then, and when he did take his gaze from the view, it almost with a visible start, as if ungreased bearings had for a moment frozen.  And then he was back, and he was again looking at Sean with his customary smile, one that lit up his whole face, reaching to his eyes and beyond.  “You do understand, don’t you, Sean?” he asked.  When Sean insured him that did, he said, “Good, good.  I knew you wouldn’t want to let me down.  Not on this one.”  Knowing that he had been only temporarily  reprieved, Sean tried to relax and failed. 

Brown, Skinner’s driver and security came into the bar and Skinner stood to leave.  He said, “You’d better get going, Sean.  You haven’t long left to get the job done, you know.”  The smile remained.

As Sean Hooke left the golf club, he thought through his rising panic that it wasn’t possible to have such a genuine smile when you were intimating such hideous things; and that’s what Jack Skinner had been doing – intimating, threatening, promising hideous things.

At least not if you were sane.

He did not want to imagine the fate that lay in wait for Henry Gerald Sommerville who had had the temerity to run away with Mrs Jack Skinner five weeks before.

6.

Maggie couldn’t work out why the house was a stranger to her.  She had spent the first eighteen years of her life living in it; even when she had been at medical school in London, she had returned for the holidays; even when she had been first a general junior doctor, then a specialist trainee pathologist on the West Birmingham circuit, she had been a constant returnee to the family home.  After the divorce five years ago, when her mother had moved out to a townhouse in Hereford, she had never been long absent.  All around her was subconscious familiarity, and everywhere she looked, she saw it was overlaid with something she found abhorrent.  It was as if the prism of her father’s death had inverted all her emotional memories of this place.  It was a lovely, homely house set in a spectacularly beautiful part of England, and yet now these properties were abhorrent to her.  Looking through the ground floor rooms – the double aspect lounge, the stately dining room, the study and the huge kitchen at the back – all she had loved was now almost physically nauseating to see; even the odours – which had never before come to the foreground of her awareness – now induced an emotion that was not too far from repulsion.  Her memories of childhood suddenly seemed shameful and despicable; her love of her father even seemed called into doubt.  She did not feel close to tears; she just felt desiccated melancholy, an ennui that itself refracted and distorted her remembering.

David did not seem to feel the same emotions and she did not doubt that this subjective impression was correct.  To him, his father had ceased to be during the divorce and the recriminations that then abounded; the man who had recently died was just someone he had known.  He might once have known him well, but he was not about to grieve for him, because his mourning was done and he was out of the tunnel that Maggie was only just now peering cautiously into.  She watched her brother as he prowled around the house, his demeanour one of a polite but disinterested observer, almost one who was there in a professional capacity; if he recalled his childhood in this house, it was much as one might watch a DVD a few years after seeing the film in the cinema.  She even fancied that his glances held the look of an evaluator, seeing not childhood but resale value in the photos and objects, the rooms and the marks of use.

They were in the house to search for a will.  She could see that David had resented her return from France.  He had, she suspected, hoped to gain yet more brownie points from her mother by coping here in Hereford, playing the lead role and thereby usurping his older sister.  He had not deigned to reply to her text from Toulouse, and his tone had been clipped over the phone line when she had contacted him on touching down in Bristol.  Was it wise, he had enquired, to leave Mum in France alone?  She had told him that she didn’t think their mother was particularly upset by the death.  Was she so sure about that?  Their mother had never been particularly open about her feelings.  Maggie had declined to continue the argument; one thing that her mother had been particularly open about was her hatred of their father.  Davey, she knew, was trying to score points; their sibling relationship was best characterised as a fencing match without an end, an eternal semiotic, occasionally actual, jousting match composed of thrust, jab and spiteful counter-strike.

They had been through the drawers of the study desk, then through the sideboard in the sitting room; above them were two floors of bedrooms and then the loft where they both knew were stored a lot of box files; they were both dreading having to search through those, but it seemed to them to be the next most likely place.  “The PM’s being done this morning?” asked Maggie as they walked up the stairs to the second floor. 

Davey didn’t answer for a moment.  “Oh, the post mortem.  Yes, so I’m told.”

There was a brief spasm of anger in her.  She felt that he resented her specialist knowledge in this area, that his inability to recognise the abbreviation had merely been affectation; he had always refused to acknowledge her achievements, first in becoming a doctor, and then in becoming a consultant forensic pathologist so quickly.  She could not understand this, for she had always taken elaborate care to praise his own career success as an architect.  “Will they ring you with the results?”

“Yes.”  He sounded as if he thought she was going to argue.

She stopped to look out of the window at the end of the landing as he went in search of the pole with which he could pull down the loft hatch in the ceiling.  The sunshine was bright and the view was stunning; the church on the left, the impressive, serpiginous stone bridge that took the road out of Mordiford over the river Lugg to Hereford, and beyond that distant city of Hereford.  The lawned garden was on a gentle slope and relatively overgrown in comparison with the images inside her head, just as the colours inside the house were faded and the carpets more worn than they should have been.  The fields of corn, the copses and the orchards that stretched away towards the city were shimmering in the heat.

“Where the hell has he put it?” demanded her brother from the bedroom to her left.  He was looking for the pole with which to pull down the loft ladder; she could hear him stomping around on the bare floorboards; he sounded bad tempered.  He spoke as if their father were just out at the local shop, perhaps driving back by now.

“Here,” she said, suddenly spotting it just to the right of the window in front of her.

He came out and snatched it from her petulantly.  Before she could reply, his phone rang; it was no more sudden than that of any other phone call, but they both would have sworn otherwise at that moment.  It made them both realise that the house was silent, and that this was at odds with their memories of the place, that it seemed unnatural, or perhaps even expectant.  He gave her the pole and scrabbled for the phone in the pocket of his trousers.  It was playing something classical – Bach, she thought, although she wasn’t sure and would never have given him the satisfaction of asking.  He cut it off and said, “David Carson.”  His voice held officiousness; not surprising, she thought, because her younger brother was rather officious much of the time.  His focus drifted slightly as he listened to what was said.  “Yes,” was his only word for a while before, “Okay.  When will you know for certain?”

She knew that it was about the autopsy and she wanted to tell him that he wasn’t asking the right questions, but she knew also it would only have antagonised him if she tried to set him right.  “That long?”  Another pause, then, “Okay.  You’ll contact me as soon as you know, though?”  Apparently whoever it was would.  “Good.”

He cut the connection.  For a moment she thought she was going to have ask him what it had all been about – it would have been typical of him – but he said after a short pause and in a voice that at first had tones she could not read, “The conclusion of the pathologist is accidental drowning.”

“How come?” was her immediate demand.  “He was a good swimmer.  Don’t you remember how he used to take us to the pool in Hereford?  He would just spend hour after hour doing lengths while we had our lessons.”

“They’ve got to do further tests, but they think he was drunk.  The pathologist apparently said the fumes were so strong he had a headache after doing the examination.”

She realised that there was something between triumph, contempt and anger in his voice as he said this, and the appreciation of this made her react angrily.  “That’s absurd!  He wasn’t a heavy drinker.”

Davey was shaking his head, which meant that she couldn’t properly see a smirk on his face, but the shape of his voice told her there was one there.  “He wasn’t before the divorce, perhaps, but who knows what happened thereafter?  He was living on his own, don’t forget.  I rarely got the chance to see him, and you had your own career.”

I rarely got the chance to see him...

Wow.  Davey had expunged their father from existence during the divorce, and done so without compunction and with nary a backward glance.  She wondered how his total refusal to have anything to do with his mother’s ex-husband could be translated into a phrase such as that.  While that thought was rebounding inside her head, picking up sparks of iridescent irritation as it did so, he added, “Look at how much booze there is around this place.”

“There was always a lot of drink in the house.  The point is that the bottles aren’t empty and the house isn’t untidy.”

“Who knows how much he got through on a daily basis?”

Oh, don’t be stupid, Davey.  Be vicious and uncaring if you must, but at least be rational.

She said through her anger, “I saw enough of him to know that he wasn’t likely ever to fall in the river and drown.”

He shrugged, a gesture that said all sorts of things – if you say so...  I don’t believe it... he was a bastard...  I’m quite happy he’s died the way he has... I’ve got one up on you...  He muttered, as if he were also tired of the contest for this while, “We’ve got to find that will.”

They found it in a tin box under the bed in the main bedroom; an almost comically trite place to find it, as if her father were a character in a play written by Rattigan.  It had interested David more than her; not surprisingly, her father had split his estate between the two of them, the clauses regarding grandchildren being superfluous, his ex-wife not mentioned.  To Maggie it was a curiously dry document, exemplifying the legal habit of covering emotional agony in mummified jargon, cruelly contemptuous of grief.  For the time being, she was staying in the house, her brother having gone to his mother’s place in the city, a totally apt arrangement.  Ghosts did not bother her – she had seen too many of the dead – but the suffocation of her loss was worse; she wasn’t scared, she was weighed down by despair, rendered almost paralysed by her past.  She seemed to have fallen into a soft morass of clinging reminiscence, where the early good memories were painful, the later bad ones – when her parents’ marriage was fracturing asunder, and there were constant, vicious, tearless arguments standing out against a background of low-level enmity – were excruciating.  Her overwhelming emotion was of despondency; she would never see her father again, and could only formulate an imaginary last speech to him in which she could whisper her farewells and he could reassure her that he loved her.

In the falling cool of the night, she sat in the white, wooden-framed conservatory and looked out across the garden.  The air was distinctly cooler than it had been in Toulouse, the light less golden, the atmosphere (even here in deep Herefordshire) somehow less one of isolation.  She had just phoned her mother but the conversation had lacked anything even approaching lustre; she heard in her mother’s tone a failure to forgive her daughter for abandoning her in France.  Maggie suspected that David’s call – he would undoubtedly not have failed to report in and make sure their mother had his interpretation of events – had been received with considerably more warmth.

All afternoon, she had fought the urge to ring the Coroner’s Office herself and get the facts of her father’s death directly.  She did not think that David would deliberately distort or hide information, but she was certain that a few more probing questions from someone who knew the process intimately would have elicited some sort of information that might allay her incredulity at what David had reported.  Now, it was too late.  Perhaps tomorrow, then.  David had announced that he would be at the funeral directors, making arrangements for the interment; there had been a touch of challenge in this announcement, and she had not felt inclined to accept it.  She would make a few phone calls then and ask a few pertinent questions, such as who the pathologist was, and what ancillary information the Coroner’s officers had been able to obtain.

7.

“You’ve had such an interesting life!”

Have I?  I’ve never thought so before.  I have been witness to thousands of lives – their loves and their disappointments (especially those), their minutiae, their illnesses and their sheer ordinariness – and it has never seemed to me that mine is in any way extraordinary.  “I wouldn’t say so,” I respond. 

The business of her visit is done.  She has asked after me, looked at my mouth, checked I am okay for medications and that I am eating properly.  Now it is time for the social side.  She sips her coffee.  Her lips are full, her legs are shapely.  I’m falling in love!  For a moment this idea seems impertinent, sacrilegious...just plain wrong.  How should I dare to fall in love with a woman who is perhaps twenty years younger than me, who is black and still has much life and love before her?  I, who am a sixty-nine year old who will probably never see his allotted span, who is in constant fear, who feels pain deep within his body and soul, who is decaying with each breath, each infusion of cell poison, each bout of vomiting and diarrhoea.

I am a man who disgusts himself.

“But you were in the police.  You were a detective inspector,” she insists.

“A long time ago.”

“Even so.  You must have such amazing memories.”

Yes, I have memories, I do not say.  They are all I have and it is a curse, for they rub my face in my own decay.  “Some,” I admit cautiously.  “A lot of it was boring, like most jobs.”

“And then you worked for the Coroner.  That must have been fascinating.”

“Sometimes.”

“You should write a book, Sam.”  Gemma sounds serious; perhaps.  I feel it would be impolite to point out I probably don’t have the time left.

“Your job must be very rewarding,” I say to deflect her.  It’s funny but I never used to be very good at social chitchat; perhaps it’s a side effect of the drugs.

“Oh, it is...it is...”  But it’s obvious she doesn’t want to talk about that.  Gemma’s visits are about me, not about all the other people she tends as they die.  “You could use that.”  She says, having finished her coffee and indicating the PC in the corner of the room.

“What for?”

“Writing your memoir.”

I am old enough to remember when a memoir was only written when all else had been done.  “Maybe.”

“Do you use it a lot?”

“Yes.”

I must have sounded defensive because she rushes to assure me, “I didn’t mean to be rude or nosy.”

The bay window in this room – the sitting room – and front two bedrooms upstairs look out on a narrow suburban street on the northern edge of Hereford; it is a nice street, in which the neighbours know me and I know them, although not too well.  The back rooms show me the small garden, should I care to look, where there is a tiny greenhouse in one corner, a minute circular fish pond where frogs court in the spring and tadpoles change into frogs in the summer.  I prefer to spend my days looking through the third and fourth windows on the world, though – the television and the one the computer offers me; they allow me to forget who I was, what I am become, and what I will soon be.  “You’re not.”  My coffee is cold; Gemma kindly made it, but she always makes it too strong for me.  “I do a lot of surfing.” 

“Nothing naughty, I hope, Sam.”

We laugh politely together.  “No,” I reassure her.  “Nothing like that.”

When she is gone, her suggestion that I should write my memoir returns as I sip some more whisky; the morphine within it does not taste, although I suspect the aficionados would wince if they knew what I was doing to such a noble liquor as Scotch whisky.  I know, though, that I will not write anything, and not just because it would seem to be the final act of my life, but also because I have seen many sides to humankind in my life, and some of those views I do not wish to see again. 

After I had worked for twenty-four years as a policeman, I became a Coroner’s Officer; in that role I think I helped a lot of people come to terms with the loss of a loved one.  I was part of the process of discovering the cause of unexpected or unexplained deaths, and the information I was able to pass to bereaved relatives really helped them; often, they were effusively grateful.  My time as a policeman was less fulfilling.  That’s not true, actually.  It was fucking horrible.  It was terrible.  It ended my marriage and it ended the life of my son. 

I do not think that I will write about things such as that.  

I still see some of the images in my head, when I lie in my bed, feeling the pain deep in my belly, the sickness rising in my gullet, the sweating on my paper-skin face; as I hear the clock ticking implacably into the darkness that creeps ever nearer.  I see the body of my beautiful, beautiful boy after the car had run him down; I see the body of the man he had persuaded not three days before to testify in the case that would have made me a chief inspector, his tongue cut out and his chest exploded by bullets; I see others so treated just because they were unlucky to cross paths with the wrong man.  I see poor Neville, who thought to trust me.

No, I won’t write about those things

8.

Gareth Skinner had not lived with his parents for many years.  He had a flat in the centre of Croydon that his father paid for; he had a job as a junior architect in a small firm based in Kennington, South London, not far from the Oval cricket ground, which was at least convenient.  He had qualified from Leicester University with a poor degree but had had no problem in finding work; he had never asked how this was so, because he did not need to.  He by now knew that his father had somehow been behind his employment – just as he had been behind everything in his life – and knowledge of the details would only have added secondary infection to the pain of excoriating embarrassment.  Thus he was deliberately and knowingly unaware that his father owned the firm, albeit from a position well hidden behind tax-efficient, tortuously connected companies, many of which were used for other, less wholesome financial transactions.  He had come to discover that the only way to exist with anything less than total immorality in Jack Skinner’s world was to act only ever in impenetrable, wilful ignorance.

Gareth had lived in his flat for three years now.  The first he had come to learn of his mother’s disappearance was when he had been invited for Sunday lunch, an unexpected event and one not to be ignored.  Frankie Brown, looking as ever blank and passive, had answered the door and he had gone into the sitting room for an aperitif and found only his father there; the smile was in place but, in retrospect, perhaps subdued.  His father poured him a large Glenfiddich and Gareth reflected afterwards that he had had no say in this, that (as in so much else) it was something that he did because his father expected it.  He was unsure if he even liked malt whisky at all.  His own glass refreshed, his father sat back down and there they were, the two of them, sitting opposite each other across the ornate fire surround, when his father picked up a piece of paper that was on the occasional table at his side.  He held it out to Gareth.  “Read this,” he suggested.  His voice was calm, and his face bore nothing but tranquillity.  It was a note written in Melanie Skinner’s hand.  It said merely that she’d had enough of her marriage and was leaving.  Nothing else, and it was brutal in this simplicity.

Gareth looked up at his father, who was scrutinising him intently.  He was used to not being able to read the expression but, in this instance, this left him feeling terribly afraid; he found that he had no words and no questions that he was not scared of uttering.  His voice neutral with only the vaguest hue of curiosity, his father enquired, “Did you know anything about this, Gareth?”

“No.”  He was compelled by something – fear, perhaps? – to add, “Nothing at all.”

He hadn’t, either.  He had often wondered how or why his mother put up with being in such a situation, for she did not seem complicit in her husband’s activities yet, like her son, she could not be ignorant of them; he had always been unable to believe that she had anything other than disgust about the origin of her comfortable life, yet she never showed sign of it.  Fear, he had always assumed; after all, this was really also the adhesive that kept him in that life. 

His father had appeared to accept his assurance that he knew nothing about the matter, and had not referred to the subject again.  Gareth was too timid to ask the manifold questions about the circumstances of this treachery (for surely his father would see it as such) that had packed his head at that time; the conversation had continued along lines decreed by his father until they were called into eat.  It was surreal but, in his father’s house, it was close to normalcy.

Gareth had no appetite, yet had not dared show this.  It was a terrible ordeal in that dining room with his father and Juliette, the woman who was just the latest in a long list of women who had shared his father’s bed whilst his mother looked on, apparently impassively.  His father appeared oblivious of this.  “This is wonderful, Juliette.”  Before the housekeeper could respond, Jack Skinner then added, “As always.”  He turned his head from his left to his right and said to his son, “Isn’t it, Gareth?”

Gareth Skinner nodded.  “Delicious,” he agreed.

The voices were polite and the whole affair wore a thick lacquer of conviviality.  The conversation over the meal was, as always, predominantly one way; Jack Skinner talking and asking questions, his audience answering them or making comments that were appropriate.  That Melanie had gone, and that he never referred either to her or her absence during the course of the meal, was a huge, screaming absence in that room. 

The food was good, for Juliette had trained in high end restaurants in both France and Japan before establishing a private catering firm and then, three years before, becoming Jack Skinner’s private chef, and more.  No one had ever spoken about the added responsibilities, even in a whisper, even in a thought that was quickly smothered at its mewling birth.  Life in the presence of Jack Skinner was always strange, but this was something more.  The house in Chipstead radiated opulence, a black body of shimmering wealth that sucked the eye in and, at the same time, dared the onlooker to do anything other than look quickly away again.   For many years, Gareth had known that Jack Skinner’s marriage to his mother had been nothing more than a convenience, for his father if not for her.  They occupied separate bedrooms, an arrangement that allowed him free rein.  Not that Jack Skinner trumpeted his habits; he didn’t need to, because everyone in the house already knew about it.  When young, Gareth had made reference about it to his mother – he couldn’t recall what he had said, precisely – but she had made it plain by the tartness of her response that it would never be any of his business.  He did not then know how hurt she was, and how she had to fight to contain the pain of injury. 

He had come to view his mother partly as a beautiful fool, partly as a victim; he could not see her with love, however, even when he learned the truth of his parents’ way of life.  He had frequently wondered why she put up with it, but that was before he came to appreciate just what kind of a man Jack Skinner was behind the smile.  In later years he came to see his father as an enigmatic monster, like a prowling tiger; in some ways stunningly attractive, in others a source of hysterical anxiety. 

9.

“We’ve already given all this information to your brother.”

The voice was very reasonable, and thereby infuriating.  It had a Worcestershire burr, unlike the deep Herefordshire or South London ones that Maggie was used to.  “I appreciate that,” she assured this anonymous man, this mouthpiece of a legal process.  “But he’s not used to the procedures and terminology...”  And I am, she didn’t say.  She wanted to tell this man that she was no fool, that she was effectively a big fish swimming in from a nearby pond, and that he should pay her due homage, yet she wanted to do it with a degree of subtlety, because she knew that minor functionaries could nip painfully at an important person’s ankles.

“What don’t you understand, Dr. Carson?”

Was he being impertinent?  To her unaccustomed ear his accent hid his attitude, as if he were speaking from behind perfect verbal camouflage.  “My father’s body was found in the river.”

“That’s right.”

“Where?”

“Hoarwithy.  One of the customers at the New Harp spotted the body from the beer garden.”

“What time?”

“’Bout seven-thirty on the Sunday evening.”

“And there was no sign of trauma?”

“Not according to the pathologist.”

“How long had he been in the water?”

Until that moment he had displayed insouciance, easy in his ripostes.  This direct demand for data provoked him into a change of attitude, one that was more defensive.  “I’m not sure I should be giving that information out at present.”

“Who exactly was the pathologist?”

His defensiveness, once it was exposed to the open air, hardened into an impenetrable shell.  “That’s not something I can tell you.”

“I probably know him,” she pointed out.  “I am a pathologist myself, you know.”

He did know; she had made sure right from the off that he was apprised of that particular piece of information – that, in effect, he had better not try to bamboozle her.  Reluctantly, he said, “It was Dr. Appleton.”

She found that she didn’t know the name, which was actually something of a surprise.  She had known it wouldn’t be one of her father’s colleagues, but she had assumed it would be someone from a neighbouring county, and she thought she knew most of them.  “Appleton?”

“Richard Appleton.”

“Where does he work?”

“He’s been doing a locum at Hereford Royal Infirmary.”  And as if it mattered, as if it would affect her opinion of his competence, he added, “Nice chap.  An American.”

“Does he have a permanent position?”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

You should do, she thought.  You can’t just let anyone do your autopsy work; you should know exactly who’s in that dissection room.  She said, “I’d like to see a copy of the report.”

“One will be made available to the family along with all the other papers in time for the inquest.”  She heard the words and she heard the lofty tones of self-importance.  He was perfectly entitled to take such a position, but it didn’t mean that he wasn’t a complete twat.

She fought her desire to argue.  Coroner’s officers had a difficult job and the vast majority did it well; they interfaced between the juggernaut of legal process and people who were bereaved and therefore upset, bewildered and, not uncommonly angry; they also liaised with the police and the public, which was not always an easy task.  They were usually caring and aware of the needs of the next of kin.  Not this one, apparently.  She tried to be fair and told herself that her needs were not necessarily the usual needs of relatives; it didn’t work.  There was no point in arguing, though.  She changed tack.  “Has Dr Appleton made any estimate of how long my father’s body in the water?”

His answer was immediate.  “Forty-eight hours.”  She was about to respond but, having broken through the barrier, but she suddenly discovered that he could be a model of garrulousness.  “We’ve checked with the Environment Agency and, because the river’s fairly high and fast at the moment, that timing would put him at Mordiford on the Friday night; very conveniently, more or less just outside his house.”

Conveniently?  “I see,” she said neutrally.  She didn’t bother to explain that it had been something of a trick question.  Timing immersion in water was a fool’s game – more so even than estimating the time of death by rigor mortis – and anyone who thought they could achieve anything approaching accuracy was either ignorant or a charlatan.  It told her a lot about Richard Appleton. 

“Were there any witnesses?”

“None have come forward.”

She knew that with no other evidence of foul play, no one would be actively looking for anyone.  “You’ve taken a statement from my brother.”  It was a declaration, not a question.

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“I’m afraid I can’t release the contents of our reports until after the inquest.”

Shit!  She had asked David, but he had been evasive and, she knew of old, that meant he was being underhand.  “I take it you would have no objection if I discussed the case with Dr Appleton?”

“I’m not sure you’ll be able to do that, even if the Coroner were to give his permission.  He’s had to leave the country.”

“Why?”

He sounded annoyed.  “Personal reasons,” he replied, as if it were none of her business which, she admitted to herself, it wasn’t.

“Did Dr Appleton take any samples for histology?”

“Oh, no,” was the hasty reassurance.  “Nothing like that.”

She knew that he was used to dealing with relatives who hated the idea of post mortem examinations and most definitely loathed any suggestion that small samples of organs and tissues might be retained for microscopic examination.  On this occasion, though, he was dealing with someone who thought that was exactly what should have been done.  “Is Sam Fisher still working for you?” she asked, unable to think of anything else.  She remembered the name as someone who had been professionally close to her father.

“Sam?  No, he retired a few years ago now.”

Now completely stymied (she had hoped that he might prove more co-operative), she said, “Well, as soon as you are able to give us more information, perhaps you could let me know at the same time as my brother.”

The pause before he replied told her a lot.  “All right.”

“And I don’t want the body released from the mortuary just yet.”

This made him react.  “Why not?” he demanded.

“Because I’m not convinced that further investigations won’t be required.”

“Miss Carson...”

“Doctor Carson.”

“Yes...Doctor Carson...It’s not for you to decide matters like that.  I know that you’re a pathologist, but that doesn’t give you special rights.”

She knew that he was legally if not morally correct.  “I don’t think it’s as straightforward as you seem to think,” she pointed out.

He didn’t say anything immediately, but the phone line was clear enough for her to hear a sigh.  “What leads you to suppose that?” he asked eventually. 

“I don’t know what my brother has told you, but I think that the scenario you’ve put forward is completely out of character.  Daddy wasn’t an alcoholic...”

“Nobody’s suggesting he was, Dr Carson.”

She ignored the interruption, because they both knew it wasn’t true, and continued, “...And he certainly wouldn’t have drunk himself silly alone at home and then gone for a walk by the river.”

“The evidence is, that’s exactly what he did do.”

It was her turn to sigh, and she didn’t care if he heard or not.  “In my professional opinion, there’s enough doubt to warrant further investigation, and that means not releasing the body for disposal just yet.”

She used her ‘court voice’, the one that she had learned to use to impress judges and jurors; it implied that she was speaking with authority; in the legal process, it didn’t matter whether you were right, whether you were good, or whether you were clever, it mattered only if you made people believe you, and that required, as her pathology professor put it, ‘weightiness’.  Being pretty and having a slightly husky voice were either very, very good or very, very bad, depending on whom she was speaking to.  It was a moment before she found that she had achieved a small victory.  “It’s ultimately, the Coroner’s decision whether or not such investigations are warranted,” began the voice down the phone line, “But I appreciate your concerns...”

She waited.

“We’ll keep the body in the fridges at Hereford until we have the results of the toxicology.”

It was a small victory, but significant, as if she had found a small handhold on an otherwise smooth rocky cliff.  She dug her fingers into this and pulled herself upward.  “If you let me have your email address, I’ll send you mine and also a mobile number.”

He wasn’t too happy, but he didn’t object.  “Walter.Haggit@hw.gov.uk.”  He spelled it out for her.

10.

They reorganised the Coronial service in Herefordshire four years ago, the bastards.  Some little sucker somewhere in the Ministry of Justice did a fag-packet calculation – dressed up as a ‘business plan’, no doubt – and decided that they could save a few million by merging the Coronial districts of Herefordshire and Worcestershire into one.  My office was closed down, and the administration was moved to an out of town shithole business park just outside Malvern; we all had to reapply for our jobs and – hey presto, bugger-me-backwards-with-a-bent-broomstick – I didn’t get reappointed.  ‘Too old’, apparently; they wanted a younger image, as if we were a television channel, or we had to sell our services and Radio One were eating into our slice  of the business of sudden death and suicide.  I don’t know how much money they saved, but I’d bet my father’s cock it wasn’t nearly as much as thought they would; I’d go double or quits on his bollocks that they actually ended up spending more.  Wally was luckier, though; that is to say, he was eight years younger than me, so he was re-employed.

“How’s things, Wally?” I ask.

“Oh, you know,” he replies, as if I would.  I hear caution in his voice, although I think that there is something of friendliness, too; even if you work in the business of bereavement, you don’t get to talk to those who are dying too often.  Me, I’m now used to talking to people who are talking to a person who’s dying, so it sort of slides off me.  The question that he asks next, that he has to ask because that is the convention, is not easy for him, I think.  “How are you, Sam?”

“Not too bad,” is my quick, easy and mendacious reply. 

“That’s good.”  He’s relieved, I can hear.  He might not be so relieved if I told him the truth, that I was awake at three-thirty in the morning with stomach cramps and having light brown diarrhoea that almost left me dead with the stench. “We should go out for a beer sometime,” I suggest. 

“Just say the word.”  He knows I won’t.

“I need some information, Wally.”

“Of course.”  He sounds happier at this, and I can’t blame him.  No one wants to look through the bottom of a beer glass at a friend who is dying.

“It’s about Neil Carson.”

“Oh, of course.”  Wally didn’t know Dr Neil Carson as well as me, but he worked with him off and on.  “Bit of a shock, that one.”

I sip my whisky.  I’ve spent a lot of my life with a phone receiver to my ear and always hated the sweatiness it produces.  “The papers aren’t saying a lot.”

“Not many facts at the moment, Sam.  Poor bugger was picked out of the river at Hoarwithy on Sunday.”

“What does the PM say?”

“Probably drowned.  Probably drunk, too – although that’s unofficial.”

Drunk?  Well, maybe.  Neil liked a drink, although I don’t think I ever saw him anything other than pleasantly tiddly.  Wally says, “I’ve taken a statement from the son, who says that his father went downhill a bit after the divorce.  He didn’t seem surprised.”

I remember David Carson; not my cup of tea, perhaps, but I thought a fairly reasonable young lad.  I hadn’t seen Neil much over the past year since my illness was diagnosed – I’m not even sure he knew about it – so maybe things did get sticky for him and I was just too far out of the loop to know it.  A pang of remorse strikes me; I’ve been self-centred, not thinking of anyone else but myself.  Wally continues, “So the working hypothesis is that he got himself plastered in his home – you probably remember it’s quite close to the bridge in Mordiford – wandered out for some reason and then topples into the water over the side; the wall’s not that high.”  High enough and thick enough to make that unlikely, it occurs to me.  When I point that out, I can tell that Wally gets a trifle peevish.  “Maybe he climbed up for a pee, then.”  Perhaps he realises that he’s being facetious, because he then goes on, “Either that he found himself down by the water’s edge and just trips up.”

Which sounds more likely, I suppose, but only in the way that two lightening strikes in the same place are more likely than three.

“I don’t understand why people just can’t accept that fact that he got bladdered and that’s the kind of thing that happens when you sink one too many.”

It is only after a moment that I appreciate what he has said.  “Someone else asking questions?”

“The daughter.”  He sounds aggrieved.  “She’s a fucking pathologist herself, of course, so she reckons she should get special treatment.”

Margaret – ‘Maggie’ – I recall.  I had met her a few times, although I didn’t know her well.  Neil was very proud of her.  “In what way?”

“She seems to think that some funny business has gone on, so she’s holding everything up.  As if that weren’t bad enough, she’s not willing to let her brother be the sole point of communication; she wants to be told herself as well.  I reckon there’s something going on there.  You know how a death in the family can bring up all sorts of tensions and troubles...”  He realises what he has said and his voice stops abruptly.

“Yeah,” I say quietly.  “I do.”

My eyes flick to the photograph of Jake that sits on the window sill; it was taken on the day that he passed his A-levels with good enough grades to read for the law at Oxford University; like his father, he was stupid and he opted to become a policeman instead, getting fast-tracked; it was a decision that led in part to his death.  After that, it took about a year for my marriage to finally fracture completely.  Without really thinking anymore about Neil Carson or Walter Haggit, I say, “Thanks, Wally,” and cut the connection.

11.

“I understand completely, Maggie.”

At first Professor Melrose had never seemed so understanding, at least not in Maggie’s experience.  He was her departmental head, after all; he wasn’t expected to be understanding of her personal problems; he had to run the faculty of forensic medicine at St George’s Hospital Medical School, and that mostly involved organisation, teaching and getting grant money.  He was a short, distinctly tubby man who had a habit of swaying  and smiling dreamily as he lectured, as if he was moving to a beat that only he could hear; it was slightly incongruous when his subject was blunt trauma to the head or the finer points of state execution by electrocution.  Perhaps his ears were filled by the soft, booming rhythm of the coming of the grim reaper.  She wondered as they spoke now if his words were accompanied by his habitual smirk – his nickname amongst the students was ‘smiling death’, not least because he not infrequently reduced them to tears in viva examinations before summarily failing them, while his eye twinkled merrily and his tone suggested that he would have done anything to pass them, if only they had given him a chance.

“I’m terribly sorry, Professor.”

“Not at all, not at all.   It must be very hard for you at the moment.”

“At least we’re in the middle of the summer holidays.”

“Yes,” he agreed, although he did so unenthusiastically.  She wondered how much damage this bout of compassionate leave would do to her standing in the department.  She was the newest of five senior lecturers, yet to feel that she had proved herself.  Professor Melrose was, she felt, quite capable of using this against her in the future.  “You’re on leave until next Monday, anyway,” he said.  “So I’m sure you won’t need much longer.”

Very much a shot into the ground at her feet, she saw; a warning not to take too long about the bereavement process.  She was non-committal.  “I’ll give you a ring towards the end of the week.”

“Splendid,” he replied.  Then, obviously as an afterthought, he said, “Your father was quite a good pathologist, I understand.”

His tone as he attempted this lame encomium backlit the faintness of the praise in the sentiment.  She felt a sudden surge of anger; even in circumstances such as these, Professor Aubrey Melrose had to point out how important he was, how her father had not achieved his lofty academic height.  “He was a very good one,” she said firmly.

And perhaps it was a trifle too firmly, for he became immediately cold and distant.  “I’ll wait to hear from you then.”  She could imagine that his lips were curved into a smile but his eyes were frosted hard as he spoke.

After that, she cried for the first time since hearing the news.  You bloody sod!  He was typical of all academic medics – so steeped in self-assurance, he seemed not only to excrete it but also to breathe it, the perfect organism that was able to sustain itself on nothing but its own faecal matter.  In the process, he lived a life of supreme serenity, using and abusing either his junior colleagues, medical students or his clinical colleagues, depending on whichever happened to cross his path.  He had his name appended to all research papers for which his department supplied pathological material, no matter that he didn’t actually contribute any intellect; he took pleasure in tormenting undergraduates in his lectures but then, he managed the teaching timetables so that the burden of teaching was undertaken by people such as she.  He was an old letch, too.  Her dignity and pride would not let her openly acknowledge to herself that it might have been as much her looks as her intellect that had got her the job as senior lecturer (and honorary consultant) at the department, but she was not naive enough never to wonder.

She had never deliberately used her looks in her academic career; she had never deliberately turned away from it, either.  At just under five and half feet tall, she was small; most of the people she came into contact with tended quickly to find this to be not at all indicative of her personality.  She was though (or at least she liked to think so) well proportioned.  She could wear clothes well, whether casual or smart, although dark colours tend to favour her because her eyes were deeply coloured and her hair was naturally ash blonde.  Add to these full lips and (she had been told on many occasions) good legs, and the naive – or stupid, or lecherous, or self-deluded – saw only with their genitalia; this rush to judgement usually proved unhappily vainglorious for the suitor.

She often wondered what she would have been like had she not met Will Burnell.  He had been a registrar in the general surgical department at Charing Cross Hospital when she first started practising the pathology in earnest; that had been three years after qualification during which she had spent a couple of years on the wards and a year in senior house officer pathology school.  Will had been three years older than she and a born charmer; unlike many doctors she had known, he was not self-obsessed, but appeared genuinely to be interested in others, be they the patients, his colleagues or others with whom he worked.  He had been a ‘catch’ and she delighted in the signs of jealousy and contempt she saw on other young women in the junior doctors’ mess when they became a couple.  She wondered what her life would be like now, if it had worked out...

The doorbell rang.

12.

“I thought it was about time we had a chat.”

The tone was easy and light, the words both individually and together seemingly indicative of nothing sinister, the man uttering them a picture of friendliness, what with that smile, the one that seemed to come from deep within him and that seemed born of a sense of unalloyed good humour.  Yet Roy Chapman felt pure dread at hearing them, as he sat in Jack Skinner’s study, and nursed a glass of malt whisky, while Jack did likewise on the opposite side of the desk.  He said nothing, knew that he was not supposed to.  Jack continued, “Things have changed, Roy.”

They had indeed.  Roy’s predecessor and partner, Henry Sommerville, was gone; according to rumour, with Skinner’s wife, too.  He nodded but kept his counsel, as did everyone about that particular episode and Jack said, “You and I have a new relationship.  What was, is gone; water under the bridge, and all that.”

Roy knew well that wasn’t strictly true; they both knew it and, perhaps to make it totally plain, Jack suddenly changed the subject.  He stood up and, glass still in hand, went to the book-lined wall to Roy’s left, where he waved it expansively around.  “I read a lot of history, Roy.”

Roy knew that; most people who came into Jack’s orbit found that out, one way or another.  Nevertheless, he said timidly, “Do you?”

Jack was neatly but casually dressed in an open-necked shirt and light grey slacks.  The sun streamed through the windows behind the desk.  Jack asked, “Ever heard of ‘Fulk Nerra’, or ‘Fulk the Black’?”

Roy hadn’t.

Jack explained.  “Tenth century king of Anjou.  Bit of a bastard, but then they all were in those days.  Had to be to survive.”

Roy said nothing.

“His wife did the dirty on him, Roy.”  Jack shook his head sadly at this.  “Nobody’s too sure if it was love, or a craving for power, or maybe sheer bloody madness, but she betrayed him, running off with one of his lieutenants and even holding Angers, the capital of the kingdom, against him.”  He spoke almost as if he couldn’t believe this type of behaviour.  “It couldn’t last, of course.”  He paused and looked for the first time directly at Roy.  “You appreciate that, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” Roy assured him.  He felt as if a shark were circling him, keeping a constant distance and a slow, easy speed.

“Fulk took the citadel back and had his vengeance.”

There was silence in the warm sunshine of the study on that summer’s day, silence that stretched, and yawned, and settled itself over Roy Chapman as he sat with his whisky and waited for the terrible truth, and its awful implications.  Languidly, and with that smile of satisfaction, Jack explained dreamily, “He had her dressed in her wedding dress and, while he watched, he had her burned at the stake.  He listened to her scream, he breathed in the perfume of her spitting, crackling, flesh as it cooked in the heat, and he watched with interest as her face blistered.”

The silence took command again as Jack Skinner dreamed a dream. 

Abruptly, he said to Roy, “It isn’t recorded what he did to her lover, but that’s alright...”  The smile broadened.  “...I’ve got my own ideas on that one.”

Roy swallowed the rest of his whisky, oblivious that it was one of the more expensive scotches, that many Celts would lay charges of sacrilege against him for his treatment of such a wondrous nectar.  His hand was shaking as he did so.  Jack was looking intently at him again.  “So, this vacancy as my personal accountant, Roy; you know the ropes and you know how I operate.  You’ll have no problem.  I assume you’ve got no problem in accepting the offer of the post?”

There were feelings of inevitability and déjà vu as Roy shook his head. 

“Good man,” was Jack’s immediate response, one that held more than a touch of relief, as if there had ever been any doubt.  He held out his hand for Roy’s glass.  “I’m sure you’ll have a refill.”

It was not a question.

13.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Hello, Davey.  She stood aside to let him into the hallway of their father’s house; she had had to quickly dry her eyes and hoped that he wouldn’t notice that she had been crying.  Maggie had been half-expecting this encounter.  “What do you mean?”  Pretending ignorance seemed to her the best way to counter her brother’s anger; it was an approach she had used often and it had its compensations, for it goaded him, which entertained her.

“You’ve been talking to the Coroner.”

She could have corrected him – whatever Walter Haggit was, he wasn’t the Coroner, only one his officers – but she let it ride.  “Yes.”

“Why?”

They were standing in the hall and before she replied, she indicated that they should perhaps go into the kitchen.  Once there, she said, “To find out what’s going on.”

“I’ve told you what’s going on.”

“Coffee?” she asked.  He shook his head angrily; filling the kettle so that her back was to him, she explained, “I wanted to hear it from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.”

“Why?  Don’t you trust me?”

Spooning coffee into the mug, she assured him.  “Of course, I do.”

“So why did you have to poke your nose in?”

She had known that she would be treading on his insecurities and, because Davey’s sensitivities were particularly delicate, she had known that this confrontation would come in some shape at some time.  “I don’t think taking an interest in my father’s death is ‘poking my nose in’.”  The noise of the kettle ended its tumescent crescendo and she poured water over the coffee after waiting a moment.

“This is typical of you.”  She didn’t react to that particular tangential observation, choosing merely to sit at the table and thereby, she hoped, force him to do likewise.  “You gave the Coroner the impression that you thought there was something funny about Dad’s death.”

How astute of ‘the Coroner’, she mused.  “And you don’t?” she enquired.

“No.”

“Really?  There’s nothing about the hypothesis that you think slightly odd, even implausible?”

He was standing and looking out of the window at the back garden, rubbing his left wrist in his right hand, a typically nervy pose.  “Mum says that towards the end, Dad was drinking a lot.”

“Mummy always thought that.  I remember a lot of times when they were still married and she scolded him because she thought he’d had one too many glasses of wine.  After the divorce, it suited her to believe he’d turned into a drunkard.  I suspect it comforted her to think that he was pining for her.”

He swung around, his face showing shocked anger.  “How dare you say that!”

The coffee was too hot even to sip so she put it down.  “Davey, I acknowledge that Daddy wasn’t a saint; he was a womaniser and he treated Mummy abominably, but that doesn’t mean that we have to race to get him buried and any old rubbish put on his death certificate.  I want his death investigated properly.”  She breathed out.  “It’s what I do, after all.”

This did not impress him.  “It’s always been the same.  You have to treat me like some sort of incompetent.  Just because I’m younger than you.”

“It’s because this is my area, Davey, nothing more.  If it was some problem that involved architecture, you’d be the one that had the expertise, and I’d be looking to you to take the lead.”  Actually, this was a lie and she suspected that he knew it too.  She wouldn’t have found it within herself to put aside rivalry and ask for his advice on anything, just as he had never once asked her for help with anything medical; even when his girlfriend, Sophie, had developed an ovarian cyst and they had been told it was ‘borderline’, which he didn’t understand, he hadn’t directly asked Maggie for background information.  “Anyway, this isn’t about me, or you, or even Mummy.  It’s about Daddy.”

“Mum’s got rights, too, you know.”

“Well,” she murmured with a faint grimace, unsure of his meaning.

“She doesn’t want an unseemly fuss made.”

How typical of her mother.  Much better to refuse to look for evidence of anything amiss in the death of her adulterous ex-husband; he had embarrassed her enough already without this further humiliation.  Maggie had the feeling that her mother was afraid that the manner of his death would be something that diminished her social standing; if she felt any grief it would be from being connected with this final faux pas rather than having once been in love with him.

She pointed out, “She doesn’t have any legal rights in the matter at all, actually.”

Davey did not these days deal particularly well with direct contradiction, either of his wants, or his beliefs, or his actions.  It was why she now so rarely bothered to enter a straight exchange of verbal blows with him; there would have been a time when she would have stood up to him and there would have followed a protracted argument that would irritate their parents.  Now their siblingship was characterised by indirect verbal sparring, jabbing at one another as they danced and pranced and skipped around the ring that was their family life.  “What do you mean?  Of course she does.”

“They’re divorced, Davey.  She lost her rights to interfere in his death when the decree absolute was granted.”

He looked petulant again; she had seen a lot of fraternal petulance over the years, she reflected.  “That doesn’t mean we should trample all over her feelings.”  It was a warm, muggy day, perhaps explaining the flush on his face.

“No, of course not.”

He was partially mollified by this.  At least partially, and at least for a moment.  “You’ve put a hold on the funeral arrangements,” he declared abruptly.

“Until the all the results are back, yes.  In my professional opinion, that would be the wisest thing to do.”  She couldn’t stop herself emphasising the first four words of that second sentence.

“But he’s going to...” he sought words that would sound right, but couldn’t find them.  “...Go off.”

There were many answers she could have given to that one – why do you care?...that’s the idea...were you planning to put him on public display? – but she contented herself with, “The results will be back soon.  He’s refrigerated, so a few more days won’t make much difference.”

He had not yet quite finished.  She drank some coffee that was still too hot to be comfortable as he said, “Dr Appleton doesn’t seem to think that there’s anything odd about the way he died.”

She had to keep her lips and tongue from a reply.  She had done some digging about Dr Appleton; not that it had been easy, for he was newly arrived from the US, via the Caribbean.  His qualifications were apparently adequate – that was easy to check – but his precise employment history had proved more difficult to discover.  It had taken the friend of an acquaintance of a friend of a friend to find the scuttlebutt.  Dr. Appleton was an adequate surgical pathologist – the part of the job that involving making tissue diagnoses on biopsies and specimens removed from patients still living – but there were most certainly several questions around his autopsy work.  She was told that an audit of his work in Sacramento five years before had shown an unusually high rate of coronary artery disease among his causes of death – instead of the expected thirty-five percent, he was averaging sixty percent; there had also been criticism of some of his terminology – acute strokes described non-specifically and potentially misleadingly as ‘intracranial bleeds’, for example.  She also learned that there were rumours that he had left Guyana for the UK just after a man had admitted on his deathbed to smothering his wife, which undermined to a certain degree Appleton’s original conclusion that she died after an acute epileptiform seizure.  The case was still under investigation, although the chances of proving matters either way were remote, given that she had been well and truly cremated.

Unlike David, she was well aware that some causes of death could not be diagnosed directly at post mortem examination.  Things such as a burst aortic aneurysm or a severe head injury were almost always obvious, even to the most callow of investigators, but people had the annoying habit of dying from things that left not a rack behind, as if Death had crept in, done his work, and then faded from the scene to observe from afar the results of his love-filled labours.  Epilepsy was one such – as Dr Appleton had perhaps once inadvertently demonstrated – as were asthma and some deaths due to prolonged abuse of alcohol; these were diagnoses of exclusion, and were only achieved when everything – trauma, toxicological factors and macroscopically covert natural diseases – had been eliminated.  By definition, they couldn’t be made until further tests had been performed and the most any prudent pathologist would do would be to issue a ‘presumed’ cause of death because of the circumstantial evidence, and even that was courting embarrassment when all the test results were back.   Drowning was another example; people died in water for many reasons – cardiac disease, respiratory problems, hypothermia, drugs – and most of those required a lot of surplus testing.  She had been taught – and taught well – to treat warily any pathologist who gave a cause of death in such cases too soon.  It smacked of someone who didn’t really care about what they were doing, who took the fee from the Coroner and then probably tried to cheat the tax man.

She had no direct evidence that Dr Appleton was like that, though.  She knew that he was overconfident, but that wasn’t a crime, or even necessarily negligent (if that were the case, probably fifty percent of the medical profession would be up before the GMC).  Time might prove him to be correct about the cause of their father’s death, but since she knew that he hadn’t done any microscopy to exclude with certainty a natural cause of death, but she strongly doubted it.

“I’m sure there isn’t” she said neutrally and, to her own auditory centres at least, rather lamely.  “But until the further tests are back, I’d rather hold back judgement on that.”

14.

Tony Knight had been many things in his life, some of which he now never mentioned, not even to himself, and many of which could still bring him shame.  Now, he was a mortuary technician, although he did not have a permanent job at present.  Accordingly, he had to go where there was work, doing whatever shit job came his way.  His life had been on the slide for quite a long time although, on the whole, he slept better at night than he used to; now maybe, just maybe, things were looking up again.  He had just had had a bit of luck and, together with his business brain, he reckoned he was on to a winner.  He reckoned, in fact, that he was on Easy Street, and that, instead of getting kicked in the bollocks by others, he was about to do a bit of planting of his own size eleven Docs in someone else’s ball sack.  This one was going to be easy.  He had had a fair few money-making schemes in his life – ones that in the planning had looked pretty sure-as-shit successful – but none had yet to work out exactly as intended; this one, he could smell, was going to be different.  He had thought long and hard about it – over a few in The Oak one evening – and he could not see it failing; this time, there were no unknowns; this time – or at least in only a few minutes – he would be very rich indeed.  He knew his quarry, and he knew just how to play the poor bastard.  He was almost certain that he would get no trouble directly from him (although, just in case, he had banked something as insurance with a safe pair of hands), but he didn’t want witnesses to the night’s proceedings.

He got out of his ancient Audi A4, locked it and stretched legs that were stiff through stillness.  He looked around the top floor of the multi-storey car park in Purley very carefully; it was open to the night air and there was a warm mizzle; the lack of a moon meant that it was in deep darkness, but he felt that that was as much an advantage to him as a problem.  The sounds of night time southern Croydon were all about him; the traffic had died down about ninety minutes before, although it never really died in the borough; there were still trains running through the station opposite, although not many and it would not be long before they ceased. The car park was open twenty-fours a day but at this time of night, it was fairly empty; he had spent most of the evening in the pub with Kev, calming down after a row with Bridget, his long term partner, yet becoming increasingly tense as the time for his rendezvous had approached. 

He’d had a stroke of luck, though; one that he hoped was auspicious.  The day before he’d come across an old acquaintance in the pub who (it turned out) had been on the lookout for a twenty-first birthday present for his son.  Tony, he had known, was not infrequently in a position to supply valuable little knick-knacks and, fortuitously, Tony had indeed got just the thing.  A nice second hand, genuine Rolex, and practically new.  It was, the acquaintance had said delightedly, just the ticket.  He had handed over two hundred quid at once.  This suited both parties.  Afraid of putting such a high profile item on Ebay, Tony had been expecting to have pawn the watch to get anything back on it – and that was always a dangerous prospect, since these days a lot of pawnbrokers were honest and those that weren’t were harassed by the police and therefore a bit squeamish about taking anything too ‘identifiable’.  Tony had been around the block a few times and was fairly sure that this particular birthday present was someone’s list of stolen items somewhere – the kid in whose pocket he had found it was a right toe-rag in Tony’s educated estimation – and therefore disposing of it carelessly might bring out about Inspector Knacker’s unwelcome attention.

Pleased by this stroke of fortune, he had sallied forth and spent the last two hours sitting in his car just watching as people and cars had come and gone, all of them potentially suspicious, none of them definitely so.   The glow of satisfaction had gradually ebbed as the air had cooled.  Now, it was ten minutes before the appointed time and, if truth were to be told, he was feeling a bit shit scared.  He was as satisfied as he could be, though, that he was at that moment alone.  Still looking all around, he hurried down the ramp to the next level, where the darkness was even greater.  

He had thought very hard about how to arrange this.  The moment contact had been made and the man had agreed to his terms, his euphoria had been tainted by uncertainty on the finer points, such as how to ensure privacy and success without placing himself in danger.  Not that he thought there was much to be frightened off in this particular enterprise, not if he knew his adversary, and he felt he did; Tony had once been a hard man, using his fists and worse for a living, and he felt he could still hold his own; after all, in the mortuary he still frequently heaved thirty stone bodies around without the assistance of a hoist.  He had opted for the Trenchard Street car park in the early hours of the morning for privacy and because it enabled him to scope the area out well beforehand.  When his contact came, he would be in hiding and watching.  His extremely early arrival was probably unnecessary, but it never hurt to be cautious.  There was, he knew, always a small chance that the unexpected might happen.

This knowledge did not help him when the baseball bat – newly adorned with three six inch nails driven through just so – swung through the air from the darkness behind a pillar at the bottom of the ramp.  All three nails punctured Tony’s left temple, driving into his temporal lobe just before the main body of the bat compressed and fracture all the bones at the base of his skull, disrupting his orbit and exploding his left eye.  Unsurprisingly, he obeyed the dictats of gravity and fell to the floor.

The bat was dropped and Tony’s car keys, still in his hand, were snatched.  The assailant sprinted back up the ramp to Tony’s car, got in and drove the car quickly back to the body.  With a great deal of difficulty, but no swearing, Tony was lifted slowly onto the back seat.  The car was driven into one of many free spaces – a particularly dark one – and a search made first in the car and then in his pockets.  The first thing that was found was a padded envelope, about six inches by four, in the glove compartment; in it was a small box and, in the box...

...There was a quiet sigh of relief in the car park’s pungent silence.

The search continued, though, this time for Tony’s car park ticket; it was found in his leather jacket, now extensively covered with Tony’s blood, some shards of parietal bone, a smattering brain tissue and vitreous humour from his exploded eye.  A copy of that day’s Daily Telegraph was used to cover his warm corpse and then the car was driven sedately out of the car park towards the Godstone junction of the M25.

15.

I’ve always grown a few things in the garden.  Not many – I would never have described myself as an enthusiastic gardener, and never been arrogant enough to think I would do anything other than waste a municipal allotment – but the urge has always been there.  I suppose it’s the desire to achieve something – that’s what Sandy used to say when I’d come into the kitchen after watering and she was dishing up the evening supper (say mince and dumplings, or – a favourite of mine, she knew – chicken stew served with ratatouille) – and I suppose she was right.  She was right about a lot, was Sandy, but I didn’t realise it then.  She said I killed Jake and I thought at the time, in the midst of the shock, she was just being spiteful, because there was no way that I had anything directly to do with it, but I knew really she was knew she was right, and that I was just denying that fact to ease my conscience.  Actually, she didn’t know the half of it, although I wonder just how much she did know... 

They never caught the driver who ran down Jake, but the signs were there that it was no accident; no skid marks on the road, ten o’clock in the morning of bright April morning, a long straight road; maybe the driver had a momentary blackout, or maybe he was under the influence, or possibly he was refusing to see the doctor about his cataracts and didn’t feel the jarring thump as his nearside wing destroyed a young man’s pelvis, practically blowing it apart and mashing his guts...

But I suspect maybe not...

I was a chief inspector of police, working out of Croydon nick.  I was involved in several cases at the time and had helped to put away a fair few number in my career, so without an ID on the car or a witness, I’ll never know.  There were a fair few nasty cunts around at the time – still are, I know – and there was always work to be found in trying to put them away, but the biggest and meanest of the lot was too big.  Jake was just promoted to detective sergeant in the CID; he had had brains but was too smart for his own good.  He thought he’d make a name for himself.  When an opportunity to bring down someone as high profile as Jack Skinner came along, he didn’t think twice and he should have done.  I should have told him the facts of life – you don’t tigers with a water pistol - but I didn’t because I thought I couldn’t, because we’ve all got secrets even from our loved ones, and Jake paid a hefty price for my fear of not wanting to appear such a wonderful Dad after all.

Anyway, I used to buy grow-bags of compost and stick in maybe half a dozen tomato plants (usually three cherry tomato, and three of a reliable old variety like Moneymaker) and three courgette plants.  Every so often, I’d go a bit radical and grow runner beans (Sandy used to like those, but I’ve always thought they’re tasteless cow fodder) or onions; too much like hard work to do it every year, though.  This year, though, was difficult.  This year, I knew that I might not see the end of the season.  This year, I knew that I almost certainly wouldn’t be doing any horticulture next year.  Yet, I knew also that if I didn’t at least do something, I would look out of the back room windows and see my own dying in the lack of those tomato plants.  So I compromised; just tomatoes, and to make me feel alive, it was three of a variety of cherry tomatoes (I really really like their sweetness) and three of a kind I’d never tried before – Golden Sunrise.  Somehow, somewhere in my head, I got excited about that bit of innovation; it helped a little at the time.

Not now, though.  Now I am tired and I am tied to these plants, obliged to tend them because not to do so would mean not only their demise, but also a small kind of death for me, and that is somehow more frightening than what is soon, inevitably to happen.  Still, the sun is warm on my back, and that eases the dull ache in my kidneys; I sometimes think that to pour petrol over my back and set it alight with a tiny Swan Vesta match would be the perfect way to cheat death of its breathless, anticipatory glee.  That’s all that seems left to me now; I will never win, but I dream of losing on my own terms.

“Sam?”

The voice makes me jump as I am pinching out side-shoots; the hot weather is bringing the tomatoes on well; I’ve already had quite a crop – too many for me, but Gemma seems to love them, so I give them to her – and there are many more coming.  I have just watered them with liquid fertiliser; the only trouble with grow-bags is that the plants get dry very quickly.  I straighten up through the pain of my age and look around.  It’s Dev.  I like Dev although his wife, Debbie, strikes me as a stuck-up bitch; we live in a terrace in a suburb of Hereford, for Christ’s sake, but she prances around like a supermodel on a West End catwalk.  I suppose they could be worse as neighbours, though. Their children – I can’t remember their names or ages, but they’re under ten – sometimes get a bit noisy, but I don’t mind that.  And, at least with Debbie there’s no attempt to hide her discomfort at everything that isn’t perfect; she should try being a police officer, because then, not only do you realise that perfection is not a right, that perfection is a delusion, but your nose is rubbed into the detritus that is normal living, even in this so green, so pleasant land, this ‘sceptred-fucking-isle’.

“Oh, sorry, Dev.  I didn’t see you.”

“I just wanted to tell you that we’re going away on holiday tomorrow.”

“Somewhere nice?”

He smiles.  “Florida.  Disney World and Universal Parks.”

“Harry Potter world, isn’t it?”

“That’s one of them.  The kids are very excited.”

“I expect they are.”

There is a pause.  My world is divided into people who are brisk and friendly and caring – the professionals – and those who are wary – the rest; ‘the rest’ look worried all the time, not I suspect for me, but for themselves because dying is such an embarrassing thing to witness.  “Will you be all right?”

Now there’s a question.  “Yes,” I say, because that is what you do say, and I say it with bravado, that is what you should have.  “No problem.”

“Oh, good.” 

“Have a wonderful time,” I tell him, as if he’s thinking of doing anything else.

“We will,” he assures me with a grin.  He begins to make his way back to the house; there are excited shrieks coming from inside.  Suddenly he stops and turns back.  “My sister in law will be popping in now and again to water the plants and sort through the mail, so don’t get alarmed.”

“Righty-ho,” I reply with a nod. 

His smile suggests a return of his embarrassment.  I turn back to the tomatoes trying to work out if I give a fuck about what happens next door, and deciding within short order that I don’t.   The whisky bottle awaits.

16.

On late Monday morning, Maggie drove to Sainsbury’s in Hereford to replenish her father’s fridge and store cupboard.  When she had first arrived, she had brought with her some fresh foodstuffs that she had bought on the way from the airport and these, together with tinned stuff and dried foods from the larder, had kept her going but she craved a little more variety, including some halfway decent white wine (her father drank only red).   

She had learned practical self-sufficiency early in her life, at medical school; it was perhaps the start of the deterioration of her relationship with her mother, because she suspected that it had been interpreted as rejection.  Possibly it was, but it was never a scornful rejection, just a near subconscious realisation that a doctor who was reliant on someone else would never be any good to patients, could never properly fulfil the authoritative part of the role; her father, she knew, had accepted as such.  What she had not known then, was that there as more to self-reliance and independence than just the ability to feed oneself and pay the utility bills.  There was a whole universe of dependence that involve the other cerebral hemisphere, the right one, but it had taken her relationship with Will Burnell - and its subsequent catastrophic end – to make her realise this.   It had been a viciously hard learning, but it had worked. 

Another reason for going to the supermarket was that she was also keen on a break from sorting through her father’s belongings – many of them actually her belongings, and even those that she could not actually lay absolute legal claim to were hers by dint of being the building blocks of her experience and life.  The ancient book covers that she saw in the many bookshelves, the faint familiar odours that she did not smell but that she was somehow aware of as she opened them, the colours of the faded carpets and curtains, the meaningless and cheap trinkets that lay scattered around the time capsule that her father had lived in, that she subconsciously wished she had never left; all these were hers in a way far more fundamental than any judge might decide from a high place in a wooden courtroom, with due consideration of all legal precedent.

The worst place had been the loft, as she had known it would be from when she and Davey had searched for the will.  Pulling the staircase down and thus allowing the trapped odours and dust – vague damp, airlessness, bewebbed darkness and a tangible sense of sadness - to fall about her had induced an almost paralysing sense of melancholy on that occasion, and doing it again did not diminish the response.  Up in that dark place – nominally it was a bedroom, although she had never known anyone to sleep there and, as a child, the idea that anyone would do so had induced in her the same sort of terrifying incredulity as the tales of Hoffman or the fairy stories of Middle Europe – her grief was greatest.  It was the memories that scared her, the fear of their effects that crushed her.  And what memories they were!  The large tin of Lego with which she had made houses and aeroplanes; the ancient Meccano set with which Davey had constructed tall cranes and even once a windmill; the sets of Monopoly, Mousetrap and Buckeroo!; dolls and teddies, all showing their age and yet swinging her back in a giddying tumble to her youth and, just as painfully, the younger days of her parents, when they protected her with ignorance and happiness.  

They’re Davey’s too, she had reminded herself on numerous occasions during the past few days.    Were they, though?  The divorce settlement meant that these had all been owned by her father with her mother giving up all rights to them; the will gave her and Davey equal shares in the monetary value of the estate, but her brother’s decision to disassociate himself from his father surely counted for something; if not so in a terrestrial court, then surely in a realm more celestial..?

Nice try, Maggie.

The real world, she knew, operated on different rules.  Morals and ethics were all relative now, and a relative was as likely to be by second marriage as by blood.  She would have to retrieve what emotional laggage she could from the double shipwreck of her parents’ break-up and her father’s death, hoping to hold a little part of her childhood together, defying entropy.   

She unloaded the car, took the bags into the house and then disbursed her new possessions appropriately.  She had had the foresight – and was quite proud to have done so – to buy a bottle of Chilean Cabernet Shiraz to drink while the white wine chilled.  She sat down in the kitchen, surrounded by American oak and grey marble, and sipped at this as she waited for the laptop to crank up, sitting patiently as it uploaded, downloaded, updated and generally came round, as if it had been stuperose and drunk for the past twelve hours, and was only now remembering that there was a world out there.  She logged into Hotmail and checked her emails, finding only the usual ones from supermarkets, networking sites, and Amazon; nothing from the Coroner’s office, but she knew the toxicological results could sometimes be slow in coming.  She thought about her afternoon ahead, thought that she ought to make a start on her father’s extensive wardrobe, then thought that she really wasn’t in the mood for displacement activity, even if it was very practical.

She could not but help dating everything these days around the day that Will had left her – Before Will (BW) and After Will (AW); somehow it was hard to spend all her waking hours back in the BW time as she was these days, perhaps because she had been a different person then.  There was little in the house that was AW, and she felt more comfortable in AW time, because in that time she had perspective on life, on what it could do to you; it wasn’t just that she was now an adult and that she was looking back on her childhood – she revelled in her memories of her early life – it was also because it reminded her of how naive she had been, because she had not then been aware of what was one day to happen to her.

Stop it!

She was there because of her father’s death, and he deserved her total concentration at that moment.  To dwell too much on Will would be to, in some way, sully that.  Which thought brought her back to the death, and the autopsy, and her nagging ideas concerning its thoroughness.  No matter what Dr Appleton concluded, she would have trouble believing it given what she learned of the man’s professional history and his apparent tendency to jump to conclusions.  She had no proof, though.  She came abruptly to the realisation that she had been putting off her duty to her father’s memory.  Perhaps, at the same time, she could use the opportunity...

She picked up the phone.

17.

Sean Hooke sat in his car and waited, and thought, and inevitably had to fight back panic.  He knew that he was in big trouble, that it was his own fault, although he knew the latter only at a subconscious, submerged, almost detached level, too far down to allow him to recognise it as something that had significance for him.  He appreciated that he had made a contract, and he had over the years benefitted greatly from it; the price he had paid until now had not been too great, either.  Mostly it had come in the form of gathering of intelligence that was then sent to Skinner, but there were also the odd favours, the occasional ‘lost file’ or ‘mislaid evidence’ that meant a suspect went free, not infrequent parking violations quashed, and once or twice something put somewhere that it might be found when a colleague was searching someone’s house or place of work.  This latest payment that had been asked of him, though, was something different.  It had occupied him increasingly for many weeks, and the pressure had been building upon him during all that time; the discussion at the golf club had been merely the latest.  Merely the latest, but in a way entirely different, because in that meeting, he had been vividly reminded of the ‘small print’ of the contract.  The use of the terms ‘inducement’ and ‘humiliation’ were keywords, red flags, that anyone who knew even the smallest amount about Skinner knew were of dreadful importance; they meant that Skinner was becoming impatient that he should see serious return on his investment in Hooke.

Hooke had known that there was ‘small print’ right from the word go.  Skinner’s reputation meant that he knew, because everyone knew.  Just because it was a verbal contract did not mean that there weren’t clauses; just because they weren’t mentioned didn’t mean they weren’t enforceable.  They were written in Skinner’s reputation, in his body language, in that smile that never faltered not even when you were in the deepest of shit.  The devil was very much in the detail.

Looking back, he supposed that he hadn’t expected them to come into play.  Normally, Skinner didn’t ask much that wasn’t easily in his gift.  Everyone knew about Skinner, but no one had yet found a way of dealing with him other than ignoring him or embracing him; unfortunately, sometimes Skinner made it impossible to be ignored and, in that case, you had no choice at all – at least not one that wasn’t painful and probably fatal, if not for you, then for someone you loved.  Hooke still remembered his first gift from Skinner.  It had been thirteen years ago now and Skinner had met him in a dilapidated office that overlooked a disused factory, just off the Purley Way.  Sean had been surprised that Skinner should be there in person, because he understood the imperative of no one being able to establish a relationship between the two of them, and it seemed to be asking for trouble for Skinner to be doling out the money in person.  He had been relaxed and chatty, telling Hooke to spend the cash that he had just given him wisely, all the time smiling and putting Hooke at his ease.  Hooke had been grateful – it would pay for an outside cabin on a Mediterranean cruise – but that wasn’t enough for Skinner; he worked using inducements that were not just financial.  He said suddenly and with an abrupt change in the course of the conversation (another characteristic of his), “You’ve been having a spot of bother with some little ragamuffin called Kenny Gibbs.”  It wasn’t an enquiry.

“Yes,” Sean had admitted.  He had done so hesitantly, unsure where this was going.  The money felt full and fat and warm; the buff envelope was slightly damp.

“He’s a bad sort, Sean.  He’s not the kind of person we want around here, and yet your lot haven’t been able to do much about him.  I can’t understand that.”

Again, there was no hint of interrogation about this; he was a man dealing out facts, not requesting confirmation.  Jack Skinner never asked for anything.  Sean said, “We’re working on it.”

“Heroine, amphetamines, crack...  Why can’t you just have a word with him?  Tell him not to be so naughty?  I mean, he’s breaking the law, isn’t he?”

The envelope suddenly felt very damp indeed.  Sean tried to explain, although he knew he was just being fed his lines, and that the play had been written and nothing in his dialogue was going to change the plot.  “We just can’t get the evidence against him.”

Skinner was still smiling, as ever, even though he now shook his head.  “You see, Sean, that’s the difference between us.  You know he’s breaking the law, yet you can’t do anything about it because he’s too clever; you can catch the thick, stupid ones, but not the ones like him.”

“We’ll get him eventually.”

“No,” was Skinner’s flat contradiction.  “You won’t.”  If Sean thought to argue, Skinner was not going to let him, for he carried on, “You see, he’s breaking the rules, too.”

“What do you mean?”  It was early in their relationship, and Sean had not appreciated the distinction, nor the importance of it and Jack had to explain.  “You,” he said, his hand outstretched and palm upwards so that Sean could see that it was calloused and scarred and he wondered why, and then wondered why he had thought to wonder, “Uphold the law, whereas I,” and the hand came down flat on the silk of his red, white and blue striped tie, “Uphold the rules.”

He then gestured at the window that was behind Sean.  It overlooked the factory floor, about fifteen feet below them.  The lights were on, as they had been all through their meeting and Sean could see that the factory had been partially stripped, but there was still a good deal of heavy plant and machinery; there was a lot of debris – packing crates, sacks of something or other, discarded and torn newspapers on the floor.  From the far end three men entered in a line abreast.  The outer two were dressed in anoraks and jeans; they were tall and muscular and Sean recognised one of them although he couldn’t recall the name; he was a bouncer at one of Skinner’s nightclubs - one in Streatham, he thought.  The man in the middle was dressed in a tee shirt and army-style trousers, his head was covered in a brown hessian sack and he walked with the support of the other two, his hands clearly tied behind his back.  Skinner came and stood behind Sean as they looked down on the scene.  The three stopped about twenty feet inside the building, perhaps thirty feet from the bottom of the stairs that led up to the office.  Sean could guess that the one in the middle was Kenny Gibbs, although he wondered why he was so compliant, because Kenny was a vicious little sod.

Jack said quietly, “I find it’s easier to sedate them.  Saves trouble and, for someone like him, it’s kind of ironic, don’t you think, to give him a slug of his own wares?”

The envelope was so wet in Sean’s hand, it was almost dissolving.  “What are you going to do?”

Skinner’s voice was almost paternal; he was a head taller than Sean and his words seemed to come from the authority of that higher place.  “I’m going to do both of us a favour, Sean.”

    Gibbs was steered to his right, to stand in front of a large machine that stood about twenty feet high so that the top of it was level with Sean and Skinner; Sean couldn’t work out what kind of machine it was and he didn’t like to ask.  The two men made Gibbs bend at the waist and put his covered head into the machine; they were now turned to face towards Sean and Skinner’s right; one of the men stood aside to let them have a good view.  Skinner said softly, “It’s a heavy duty metal press,” answering the question that Sean had dared not ask.  “It’s due to be decommissioned.  I’ve had it customised, just for this.”

The man furthest away was holding Gibbs bent down, and doing so easily; the one nearest, the one that Sean did not recognise looked up; even at that distance, Sean could see that he was looking at Skinner, not him.  He was not aware that Skinner made a movement, although he must have done.  The man turned, reached up high and flicked a switch.  The pistons on the press – four shiny, oiled steel cylinders, one at each corner and showing through holes in matt black casings, shot down with a loud, compressive bang that drowned out any other sound.  Kenny Gibbs collapsed, leaving his head still in the sack in the press, and fell to the floor, his neck spurting blood, the two men stepping away because they clearly didn’t want to get themselves too messy.   Only in his own head did Sean hear the cracking the bones, see the instantaneous bulging of the face of the head in that sack.

He knew that if he said anything, if he showed compassion or shock or even squeamishness, Skinner would not forget and perhaps not forgive him, but it was so hard to squeeze back the tears; they weren’t tears for Gibbs, though, but tears for himself, for his family, for his very soul.  Skinner put a gentle hand on his shoulder and that was the first time that Sean fully realised that there was an awful lot of fine print in the contract he had signed with Skinner; Skinner had just read it out, every syllable.  He said happily, “Problem solved, Sean.”

There was a knocking on the car window and Sean jumped slightly.  Angry, he pushed the button to open it.  A uniformed police sergeant was leaning down; it was raining quite hard and he looked uncomfortable.  Detective Chief Inspector Sean Hughes demanded irritably, “What is it?”

“The premises are secure, Sir; the suspect’s in custody.  Forensics are on their way.”   If he thought it odd that DCI Hughes had declined to take an active part in the raid on the home of a suspected rapist, then he was old enough and ugly enough to keep it to himself.

“OK.”  The window went back up.  He sighed raggedly; the fate of a sex offender – a grubby, slab of greasy obesity - was of little consequence to him at that precise moment.

18.

A God who doesn’t care is one thing; a God who thinks He’s a funny fucker is something else entirely.

“It looks sore.”  Gemma sounds full of sympathy, but then she could be reading out the electoral roll and she’d still sound compassionate, even sexy.  I don’t reply because I’ve already told her how fucking sore it is, and I’m gritting my ill-fitting teeth; not only that but at that point she touches a particularly tender spot and I nearly squeal.  “I’ll put some antiseptic cream on it...  I promise I’ll be gentle.”

After which we’ll have some coffee and she’ll try to forget what she’s seen, and I’ll try to forget that she’s trying to forget it.

When I was a copper, I came across all sorts; most of them were criminal and – basically – scumbags.  I had occasion to talk to the sufferers of the social disease that is crime, of course, but they are somehow anonymous, or at least I don’t retain a memory of them, which says something about me, or about life.  Most of the rest were stupid, though, thank God.  Most of them, anyway...  Some of the scallywags were rich, many were poor; men outnumbered women, the young outnumbered the old; occasionally I came across someone who wasn’t a victim and who was innocent, but not often; generally, if I encountered them and they hadn’t had something done to them, then they were guilty – if not of the crime I was investigating at the time, then of something else at some previous time. One or two I liked, the great majority I had contempt for, but there was only ever one I felt sorrow for.

His name was Neville Fite and he wasn’t much of a human being – on a scale of one to ten, where one is Adolf Hitler and ten is Buddha’s nicer younger brother, Neville would probably score about three and a quarter, but he didn’t cause me a lot of trouble and, to supplement his income as male prostitute, he was quite a useful informant to me.  He was a ‘nonce’, everyone called him a ‘nonce’ and he knew he was a ‘nonce’; he was proud of it, too because (I suppose) it gave him a sense of importance as everyone knew him and he could get free drinks in pubs.  He minced and dressed outrageously, affecting a lisp and exaggerated deference to women (although I think he hated them all, without exception and without cause, other than his own insecurity).  He was a ‘celeb’ in the locality and, boy, did he love it.    

Trouble was Neville couldn’t stop mixing business with pleasure.  Some hairy great bugger from the wrong end of Thornton Heath (not that there was ever a particularly ‘right’ end), who had breath like the wind out of hell’s khazi and body odour strong enough to stun a fly in midflight, would be charged exorbitantly for Neville’s services at one end or the other, but some nice young man with no dandruff and a pleasing smile – especially if he was ginger (‘I can never resist a copperknob’, Neville used to say with a sly wink and a lascivious emphasis on the last word, as sat in the saloon bar of the Wheatsheaf Inn) – would be given the full benefit of Neville’s knowledge and experience without the need of having to open his purse.  That was Neville’s undoing, because he fell in love with a very ‘coppery knob’ indeed and, when Neville fell in love with someone, it generally meant that he got them into bed (or up against a wall, or in a toilet cubicle) as soon as he possibly could.  The trouble was that Gareth was only fifteen and his father was very Jack Skinner, although I don’t think Neville knew that when he seduced the young lad.  He was heard boasting about it in a snooker hall in the West Croydon shortly afterwards, and he would never have done that if he’d appreciated just what he’d done and who he’d done it to; or rather, whose son he had done it to.

Neville went missing shortly afterwards.  No one saw him for three days, but then dustbin day came in West Norwood where he lived.  They found his body in a black plastic sack inside one of the big bins at the back of the Taj Mahal Indian takeaway on South Norwood Hill, the one that was always being done by Croydon borough council because of roaches and mice.  He was naked and gagged, and his eyes had been slit open, and his ears cut off; it looked as if a razor had been used to make hundreds of long, deep cuts into his flesh all over his body, with as many areas where slivers of skin and muscle, large and small, had been cut out.  I remember particularly that the pads on his fingers and toes had been shaved off and he was coated in blood – there must have been pints of it – and anyone who saw it knew that it had been done slowly.  The pathologist counted over fifteen hundred individual wounds and I recall wondering how he could have counted them without going slightly mad.  Neville was tied up into a foetal position exposing his backside; his genitalia had been cut off and stuck up it, the ball sack hanging out.

I am now in a similar foetal position, lying on my side with my trousers and pants around my fish-white, hairless ankles as Gemma tends my red-raw backside and I hope that I’ve been able to clean up properly down there, what with all that stinking diarrhoea.

Yes, God is a very Funny Fucker indeed.

19.

She hadn’t seen Mick Chadwick for a couple of years, and he looked older.  When he answered her ring at the side entrance of the chapel of rest at Hereford Royal Infirmary, she saw at once that the mortuary technician had been deeply affected by the unexpected death of her father, a close colleague of his for over twenty years.  He clasped her hand in his and she felt how strong and calloused his skin was.  “I’m so sorry, Maggie.”  He called her by her first name because they had known each other for many years now, since the first time she had been shown around the mortuary at Hereford by her father, shortly after she had started as a medical student at Birmingham. 

She hugged him and, after a small hesitation born out of surprise perhaps, he responded.  “Thanks, Mick,” she said softly.  How much did he know about Will?  He would have known that Will had died, but what else had her father told him?  These were questions she asked herself every time she met someone who knew her from the BW time.  Rarely, indeed, did anyone bring the subject up, and this always left in her a sort of limbo of ignorance, uncertainty and anxiety.

He took her into the spacious office and made some coffee using powdered whitener; the mugs were the ones she remembered from many times before and she mused that they were probably decades old.  The mortuary was always cool, even at the height of summer, although the lack of natural light in the office had always bothered her.  She said, “I’m sorry to be a nuisance, Mick.  I’ve been putting this off, I suppose.”

“No problem.”

“You haven’t got too much else to do, I hope?”

“Nothing that can’t wait until you’ve paid your last respects.  Everything else is secondary.”  Mick had always believed strongly that the relatives came first.  “I’ve laid him out a treat.  I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.”  He took an enormous amount of pride in his work, too; at times it came across almost as arrogance, although she now recognised it as just someone trying to do their best.  He began to say something, then stopped.

“What is it, Mick?”

He made a face, as if he had committed a faux pas of monumental proportions.  “He was in the water a fair time, Maggie...” he said and his voice was agonised.

For a moment she was nonplussed, thinking as a pathologist, but then she realised that he was talking to her as to a relative.  “Oh, that’s alright.  I understand.”

“I’ve done my best, but there was bound to be a lot of degeneration...”

“No problem, Mick.  I know you’ll have made Daddy look as good as possible.”  He nodded, happy that his professional abilities would not know be questioned; it was typical of the man that his overriding concerns were ultimately about his reputation as a mortician rather than about hers as the daughter of the deceased.  She asked, “Has David been to see him?”

“No.”  He said this with a touch of contempt.  He was well aware of the family situation.  “Nor his mother.”

She decided taciturnity was the best course, wondering why life seemed always to be about taking sides and casting opinions about like missiles.

Their coffee finished, they went into the chapel. The lights were turned down low; it gave a suitable reverential atmosphere as well hiding the grosser aspects of post mortem decay.  Her father was laid on his back on the bier and covered from chin to feet in a thick, embroidered cloth of cream-coloured brocade; his head rested on a pillow.  The effect was wonderful, but she knew that it was just that – an effect.  Her father had never slept on his back and had snored every night of his night; she remembered the Mummy had once said that he never closed his mouth when asleep and using to dribble so much she had to change the pillow cases twice a week.

“I’ll leave you alone.”

“Yes, please.”

Mick left her and she approached her father.  There was a plug-in air freshener but she was too well attuned to the smell of bodies fished from the river to fail to spot the characteristic odour.  She was stunned by a sense of shock like nothing she had experienced up until that moment; he was lifelike and yet artificial; he was no longer the idea of a dead father, he was the embodiment of it.  The emptiness she had felt in his house was suddenly solidified in her psyche as if until that moment she had been able to be apart it, but was now trapped within it; the sadnesses that had chased around her mind over the last few days were immediately sharp, vicious harpies, ripping into her whole existence.  She was used to viewing the dead, but only as things, only as puzzles, only as others; in front of her lay a man who was the very antithesis of those.  His death was also her death.

There were no marks on his face, although even Mick’s attentions could not totally disguise the ravages that the river water had done.  The eyes were closed, but that was also artifice, a sleight of hand brought about with two spots of quick-drying adhesive.  He looked peaceful, but most dead people did, no matter how awful or violent the mode of dying.  She looked around, saw that the door was slightly ajar, and hurried back to it to close it quietly.  Then she turned up the lights in the chapel before hurrying back to the body.  The greater light wasn’t fantastic, but it was enough to shine through the arts that Mick had used; it was plain that a small stitch had been put through the lips to keep them together; there was powder on the skin to give it some tone; even though the hair had been washed, there were small pieces of water weed behind the ears.

She pulled the cloth down to expose the upper half of the body, dressed in a white shroud.  The hands were clasped on his chest.  She breathed deeply just once, then grasped the wrists to separate them; God, he was cold – refrigerated, of course – and damp.  Stiff, too.  The soft suppleness of life had been replaced by something viscerally repugnant, and she felt sick; handling of a corpse without gloves was against everything she had been taught in terms of hygiene and safety, to have the additional knowledge that it was her own father’s dead flesh was almost too much.  Another breath, as if she were inching along a ledge one cautious sideways step at a time, eyes not looking at what she was doing, only peering into a mythical horizon.  The irony was that under normal circumstances she would have felt exceedingly uncomfortable handling a corpse that was anything but cold; now she abhorred feeling the frigid doughy feel of her father’s skin.  With his arms more or less at the sides, she reached behind his neck - not looking at his face, holding her breath and keeping her mouth tightly shut – whilst she felt for the knotted tapes of the shroud and pulled at a loose end to unravel them.  She wanted to cry and she wanted to vomit but most all she wanted to beg her father’s forgiveness for this violation of his rest, but she kept control and pulled the shroud down to expose his upper torso.

It had been many years since she had seen him shirtless and to do so in such a manner was pornographic.  Until that moment, she had not considered the previous post mortem examination on him, the one had that left him with an incision running from the top of his chest all the way down the front of his pallid torso, crawling down his abdomen, she knew, to his pubis; it was coarsely, cruelly sutured with thick twine.  And there was also the coarse dark red reticulation of the pallid skin of his chest, and the vivid green discolouration of the abdominal wall that were the signs of a decaying body.  The realisation of what she was doing struck suddenly at her with an intensity that caused her to catch her breath, as if her throat were narrowed down to a slit, and as if it had been heated to cracked stone.  She backed rapidly away, turned and was almost blinded by emotion but was at once aware that she was not alone.  Mick Chadwick was standing just inside the room, staring at her.

20.

I have a home help.  Actually, I have a lot of them; too many to count, even if I could be bothered.  They call twice a week, these anonymous, uncaring carers, to dust and clean and, I do declare, some of them do it a bit, too.  Once a week one of them gets the shopping for me, from a list that I jot down; they drive to the local Sainsbury’s and come back with most of what I nearly want, but they’re not always so accurate.  I get my own whisky from the petrol station at the end of the road (it’s only a hundred yards or so away), because I have little privacy and even less dignity; my house is no longer just mine and I just want a tiny corner that is for me and me only.  My world is one through which pass too many people I do not love and who do not love me, people who care as a profession (with feelings of empathy that are paid for and therefore manufactured), who only remember me when they let themselves in, who forget me when they drive away to their next ‘client’.  I can still walk, you see, only not as far or as quickly as I could; the radius of my circle is growing smaller in this, as it is in my spiritual and social life.  I suppose that’s what dying is; a contraction into a singular, dimensionless point.

I don’t buy anything else at the petrol station – it’s too expensive with no choice and generally crap goods; of course, I have to pay an extortionate amount for the whisky, but it’s my one remaining vice – now that toking, swingers’ parties and the non-stop world travelling have dried up – so I figure I’m entitled.  Anyway, there’s no one to leave the money to, other than my nephew, Andy.  I’m sure he’s a very nice man – he’d be about thirty-five now – but I can’t say for sure, because I haven’t seen him since my divorce.

I’ve made plans for when I can’t make it the petrol station – at the rate of contraction of my world, I would reckon I’ve got maybe four weeks left; I’m going to order a couple of crates of scotch online.  That may be too much, but I wouldn’t really care about that; the carer who discovers me can have a couple of bottles, maybe, as a sort of prize.  I’ve thought about letting them all in on this scheme – Sam Fisher’s Lottery of Death, so to speak – just to spice things up a bit for them, but I won’t, because I don’t trust some of them not to start to pinch it before the time comes, before the end of the contraction of my universe, and I go whimpering into the darkness.

Next door have been gone for a couple of days now, and I can’t say I’m missing them; the peace suits me.  We have a common wall and these houses, built in the nineteen-thirties, act like resonators, especially if there’s a lot of thumping on the floor, the kind you get with young children.  I don’t think they have carpets down either (they’ve never invited me in, so I don’t know for certain), which doesn’t help with matters of noise insulation.

There’s no more about Neil Carson in the paper or on the local news websites.  I haven’t bothered ringing Wally again, because I got the feeling old times don’t count for much with him.  Not that the old times with him were fantastic.  Just people working together; helping each other out on occasion, yes, but not actually bonding, not like I felt I bonded when I was in the force.  There’s something about being a policeman that is like no other job.  I suppose serving in the armed forces gives something of the same feeling, but it’s subtly different, because someone in the army or navy or air force is facing a defined enemy, something that is entirely separate from, and different to themselves.  In the police, we were put up against criminals, and working to serve and protect the people, but it’s the people who keep producing the criminals.  One moment the man who called you to report a burglary was a victim of crime, the next we were investigating him for sodomising his children; some bastard who’d just done ten years on the Isle of Wight for armed robbery would no sooner be out and probably planning his next job than he would be banging his fist on the police station desk demanding his ‘rights’ because some teenage herbert has ‘twocked’ his car.  It didn’t take long to realise the only people who weren’t potentially your enemy were your colleagues; a victim was just another name for someone who had yet to commit a crime, or who had already done it but was too smart to get caught.  That brought you together.  ‘Siege mentality’ I suppose, but by God it was strong.

It wasn’t long before you looked at every civilian you came into contact with knowing that they were wearing exchangeable badges, as easily they changed as their socks.  One day they were pretending to be a good citizen, the next you were digging up their back garden to find the thirteen teenage runaways who’d at last been linked to them.  You became suspicious of everyone; to put it another way, you came to realise the true nature of humanity.  Everyone has at least a spark of bad in them; it only takes the right circumstances to blaze into a flame, or to be uncovered by chance.  Some, of course, have more than a spark, more even than a flame; some are themselves a conflagration, something that ignites those around them, that consumes and devours others.  If they were clever – most weren’t, but even the most stupid harmed at least someone (if not more) before we could stop them, because that’s one of the rules of the game – then they got away with it big time and it didn’t matter how much paranoia and siege mentality we armoured ourselves with, we couldn’t do a thing about it.  And we did try.  Please don’t believe we were happy to live with people like that, because we weren’t.  These people, though, are almost impossible to eradicate, at least not without doing too much damage; the internet tells me that this would be called a ‘Pyrrhic victory’, which sounds good.  We did our best to stop them, but by dint of wits and character and money, people such as this always managed to use those aforementioned ‘rules’ to ride it out.  We had to live with them, hoping that we could limit the damage, knowing that they were an incurable ailment, an inevitable by-product of society.  Some of my colleagues inevitably decided that if they couldn’t get rid of people like that, then maybe they should do more than just ‘live with them’; some of them decided that it be as well to ‘use’ such people, ‘oil the wheels’, take a bit of ‘sweetener with the coffee’.  It was rare that any individual copper was incriminated, although there were always rumours swirling through the thick, foetid atmosphere of the station about someone or other, and once or twice someone resigned after those rumours became a little too potent and odorous to be ignored, but it was rare indeed for any sort of official sanction. 

Everyone knew that they existed amongst us and I think that everyone was aware of who they might be, but I think the preferred option was to pretend that they weren’t there, or that they might have been there, but that they weren’t important, that they were just parasites, like lice or crabs or ear mites, that they irritated and perhaps caused pustules, but never serious disease; or that it was easier to coexist with them. 

Except that Jake died and I know that, in more ways than one, it was because of me.  After all, not all parasites are harmless; some will cause serious disease; some won’t be satisfied with a few grams of blood.  Some grow and grow, and then give the host brain fever or blood poisoning or end up maiming it; or, possibly even worse, reversing matters and making the host dependent on them.  In which case, I was involved in the death of Jake just as surely as the driver of that car was; just as surely as the man who paid the driver to do it was.

Jack Skinner.

I need a drink.

21.

The house in Chipstead had always been quiet.  It was set in five acres of grounds and surrounded by a high wall; Jack Skinner employed a private security firm to guard it both electronically and with regular patrols of the external boundary, and the only access was via solid iron gates that were controlled from the house.  Tall trees occupied much of the peripheral part of the grounds, providing even during the winter an effective screen from those who might wish to see in from outside.  It did not at first sight look particularly forbidding, but it was close to impregnable.  Jack Skinner and the other occupants of the house had little contact with those around them and they were to these something of an enigma.  There were rumours – some of which were close to the truth – but no one knew precisely what Jack Skinner did.  The visitors were few, for Jack conducted his business in South London, and knew better than to bring it home. 

Gareth hardly remembered the previous house, on Purley Way, South of Croydon.  It hadn’t been a small house, but it had not been as isolated.  At that time, because Jack was less of a target for both the police and his rivals, he was more open in his dealings and Gareth’s memories contained traces of recollection of a lot of people – mostly men – visiting for purposes of which he was then ignorant.  He never thought to ask any questions, knew now that it would have been fruitless.  He guessed that his father’s life then had been more dangerous, although his recollection could provide no evidence of that; his father remained unchanged except by some of the physical ravages of time.  The image of an eternally smiling, forever calm, yet infinitely distant man was constant.

Gareth did, however, recall one regular visitor to the Purley Way house who had continued to visit the house in Chipstead.  He had never directly questioned anyone as to this man’s identity, but he had discovered early that his name was Henry Sommerville, and he was his father’s accountant.  Henry Sommerville was a tall, thin man who struck Gareth as reserved, precise and somewhat timid; very much an archetypal accountant and, to all intents and purposes, a man of fearsome intellect.  It was entirely logical that Jack Skinner, as a businessman of whatever stripe, should have a close acquaintance with such a professional; as he became cognisant of the exact nature of  the ‘business’ that his father undertook, and his understanding of the world in general increased, the importance of the relationship became glaringly obvious.  Henry Sommerville was a very important individual indeed.  He knew secrets about Jack that made him valuable and that made him dangerous.  Looking back, Gareth could only wonder at the emotions that Sommerville must have experienced as he dealt with Jack, how he must have worked hard to convince him that he was completely trustworthy.  He did not know, but he guessed that it would have become an exceedingly close relationship, perhaps even worthy of the name of friendship; his betrayal would be all the more cataclysmic because of it.

He had never once guessed that his mother and Sommerville were in any way at all close, and it was certain that Jack Skinner had not.  He knew his father well enough to suspect that the surprise to everyone would have been unexpressed and perhaps even more vehement for that.  He did not want to think what vengeance Jack Skinner would exact should he find the absentee lovers.  The shade of Neville Fite - an effete, pathetic and quavering thing, just as he had been in life – haunted his speculations.

22.

Once I was out of the force, things were different.  Although most of the Coroner’s officers were ex-police, the nature of the job meant that there was never to be blame attached.  The Coroner is specifically charged with finding out how people come by their death without apportioning individual responsibility.  He can hint at it in his verdict, but he has to remain schtum as to specifics, at least in public.  Everyone we talked to as Coroner’s officers had to be treated as bereaved and affected by the death; no one was a potential ‘perpetrator’; and that was initially hard.  I’d spent nigh on twenty-five years thinking all the time – whether I was at work or in the pub, or in the supermarket, or in the garden – that I was part of something other, and better, and worth being part of.  Now, I was just someone else doing just a job.  I suppose you could say that there was a sense of loss in me; I didn’t recognise it as such, but now I have the mother of all senses of loss, so I look back on those days and think I was a self-centred prat.  In fact, I find that in every memory I have, I seem to have been a self-centred prat; at least in a few months’ time I won’t have that to live with.

Without the cohesion of being in a group apart from the rest of the world, I became like any other office lackey.  It isn’t that we didn’t get on with each other professionally, and help one another, and have the occasional drink after hours or go to office meals, it was just that we were following rules and procedures without a feeling of intense comradeship.  We were ordinary, but ordinary people don’t adhere in quite the way that police officers do.

Somehow, I hit it off with Neil Carson, although I can’t say why.  He was a good laugh, helpful when it mattered, and always ready for a drink, but that doesn’t explain it.  I had that with most of the other Coroner’s officers including Wally; with Neil, there was definitely some tangible feeling of amiable companionship – born of genuine like and not just enforced professional proximity – between us.  It was there from the go, and it only strengthened, until his personal problems and then my cancer happened, and somehow it was suddenly not strong enough.

I am sitting at the computer, just idly browsing.  I do not much actively participate in the internet, except for occasional purchases of books or DVDs; I am a passive observer, an absorber, because that is really all that is left to me now.  I absorb what is done to me, be it kind or cruel, good or bad, earned or unearned.  It is how I found out about Pyrrhus and his victory in the Trojan War.  I surf without much aim; the act of browsing on the computer has become my aim, because most else has been amputated from me, and because I can never do anything with the information I discover.

Oh, yes.  I have plenty of personal experience of ‘Pyrrhic victories’, because I think that Jake’s death was a kind of one.  When he found someone willing to talk - someone who had seen things and heard things - he thought that he’d made the big breakthrough, the one that would finally bring Skinner down.

Look what it got both of them.

23.

“I’m not a pervert.”

Mick said nothing.  She recalled how he had always had the knack of showing an impassive face, one that could be read either as censorious or sympathetic, depending on your mood.  Her mood did not help her this time. He had said very little more to her since coming back to his office, only making more coffee without being asked.  An undertaker had come in to collect a body – a relatively longwinded process involving not only heavy lifting, but also paperwork (got to check it’s the right body, that the funeral director has the right permission slip, that the valuables are all accounted for), gossip and maybe bawdy jokes, and the deposit of a small, traditional gratuity on the bench by the mortuary register – and Mick had just returned.  She explained, “I wanted to check something.”

“What?” he asked.  “I laid him out all right, didn’t I?”

“Of course you did, Mick.”  His professional pride trailed along behind him and it was always so easy with Mick to tread on it.

“The stitching’s pretty crap, I must admit.”

“It looked all right to me.”

“Naw,” he scoffed.  “I could have done better wearing boxing gloves and a backwards balaclava.”

She abruptly realised what should have been obvious to her; Mick hadn’t assisted at the post mortem examination.  He wouldn’t have done, since he had known the deceased so well...  But this realisation only made her feel even guiltier about what she had just been caught doing.  “The autopsy was done by a locum called Dr Appleton,” she said.

Mick snorted.  “That’s right.”

She knew that he rated the pathologists with whom he worked, broadly into good, adequate and ‘crap’.  From his present attitude, she judged that her father’s pathologist fell straight into the last category.  “What’s he like?”

She knew what he would say before he said it.  “From what I’ve heard, I wouldn’t pay him in tiddley-winks.”  This was common opprobrium for the many who languished in Mick’s ‘crap’ category.  “He’s buggered off somewhere else now.  The Middle East, I heard.”

Which would explain why she hadn’t been able to contact him.  “Who assisted him?”

“An agency chap.  Tony Knight.”

“Where were you?”

He looked at her for a short while before replying, “On holiday.”  His expression and tone of voice suggested that he was curious about why she was interrogating him.  “Just been spent a month in Australia visiting my daughter.  It was the holiday of a lifetime.  We haven’t seen Andrea for five years, and we’ve got a grandson now, you see.  You can imagine the shock to hear the news when we got back...”  He stopped.  She had begun to cry.

24.

When Gareth Skinner was five years old, he had asked his mother, Melanie, what his daddy did for a living and, as far as he could recall, she had replied in a proud voice, “He’s an important businessman.”  He had been aware from an early age that his mother was beautiful and lived in the centre of something that he could identify but not until later name; it was an air of refinement and elegance, one that she had somehow continued to emanate throughout his childhood and adolescence; only latterly had the effulgence faded, although it still remained about her, perhaps only visible under certain circumstances.  Her beauty had undoubtedly waned, but far from entirely; her fine features had inevitably coarsened slightly, although cosmesis aided her in hiding this and, as far he could tell, she still remained attractive.  He came to appreciate that much of this was the inescapable price of a passage through life, but the dimming of her vitality was possibly not so.  Gareth was aware of it but, because of his immaturity, did not analyse what was happening, or wonder why it should be so.  Only on reflection in his early twenties did he begin to understand the reasons for the changes he had seen in his mother but, by then, he was also well aware that the term ‘businessman’ was so generic as to be meaningless.

He was never to be particularly close to his parents, not least because they did not wish it.  He was bright, but by the time he was intellectually capable of questioning why they might have birthed a child and then chosen effectively to ignore it, he was too inured to his condition, and too steeped in Jack Skinner’s ambience.  It was an unconscious descent.

At eight, he began boarding at small preparatory school in east Surrey, from there gaining entrance (again as a boarder) to a large independent secondary school near Brighton; both schools were boys only.  It was only during his holidays that the reality of the life he had been born into had chance to diffuse into him (and then only slowly) but, at the same time, familiarity to the atmosphere, to his father’s seemingly benevolent yet somehow vaguely menacing patronage, and to his mother’s distant pulchritude, seeped in and did their work.  There was only one discrete incident from his youth that he recalled in later life with clarity and, at the time he certainly did not appreciate that it had special significance;  he found later, though, that retrospect is powerful.  It illumined not just the world’s attitude to his father, but aspects of his own personality that were at this time not apparent to him.

It happened at his secondary school when he was twelve years old.  It was winter, just before Christmas, and it was his year’s afternoon for sports.  They had been playing rugby – the school was big on rugby and every proud of its first fifteen.  Gareth hated it (especially on a damp, cold day in early December) because wasn’t particularly athletic and there was a tradition amongst the more vicious boys of using the games as an opportunity for what the Master of the school – a tubby, elderly man who wore his university gown as if it conferred the powers of godhead – called ‘deliberated antagonism’, something that Gareth and all the boys knew well was more properly called ‘bullying’ by the normal world.  Thus, games of rugby were for him an ordeal of cold wet mud, shouting, swearing, bruising contact and vicious acts such as kicking, gouging and stamping.  He found it repulsive.

The time after this regular ritual of humiliation was a chance to bond with fellow sufferers in the sweat-filled heat and shiny white tiling of the changing room.  He did not then rationalise the feelings that he experienced, but he found something immensely comforting in that place with its showers, shouts and babbling boys.  Flicking with wet towels was common and painful, but only when the teacher in charge and the prefects were absent; it was part of the atmosphere and the camaraderie of life after the battle was pervasive and powerful.  Unfortunately, deliberated antagonism was not confined to the rugby field.  Gareth Skinner was aware of it but, until then, he had been lucky not to have been a victim.

Justin Croker was in year eight, one of the oldest boys in the school.  Puberty had arrived early for him and done so without thought or compunction.  He seemed to resent this change that had thrust upon him, his impossible situation, positioned as he was between childhood and maturity, surrounded by people that he despised because he could no longer be one of them.  He wasn’t stupid, but he was impulsive and disruptive.  He and another boy in year eight, Marcus Du Plessis, entered the steam-soaked atmosphere of the changing room; they were on a study period but were looking for some entertainment, which they hoped to get by extorting spending money for the school cafeteria.

It was loud with treble shrieks and laughing chatter.  Gareth had just come out of the showers and was drying himself with one of the threadbare towels that were provided.  The first time that Gareth was aware of their presence was when Croker, having come up behind him, reached out and put a large hand to grab the back of his neck.  He shoved him forward so that the side of his face thudded painfully into the pale yellow emulsion of the wall; the presence of condensation meant that there was an added, faint, smacking tone.  Croker’s nails were bitten and rough, jagging into Gareth’s skin as he was pushed hard into the wall.  Croker’s other hand came around his naked body and grabbed his genitalia, crushing his testicles.  Then Croker leaned on him and breathed into his ear, “You want this to stop, little boy?”  Gareth could hardly breathe, let alone speak, but Croker’s grasp was tightening and the weight of his body was increasing.  He squirmed against the wall to no effect.  “Well?” enquired Croker.

“Croke!”

Gareth couldn’t see what was happening, could barely hear.  He thought he could make out someone whispering something, although not to him, then the pressure was slightly reduced and so too did some comprehension.  He heard one word in the whispering that Du Plessis was urgently doing into Croker’s ear.

“...Skinner!”

And suddenly Croker had released him and, when he turned to look at his assailant, expecting he knew not what precisely, he saw an expression of shock, regret and perhaps fear, while Du Plessis stood just behind with his hand on Croker’s shoulder; his face was also oddly fearful.  And then, looking resolutely ahead of them, they left the changing room, through baffled boys, all standing and looking either at the retreating would be bullies or at Gareth; they, too, seemed perplexed. 

“What’s going on here?”  The teacher in charge came into the changing room from the opposite end and broke the oddly charged atmosphere.  No one answered him.

Gareth could not understand what had happened, but was very grateful for this seemingly supernatural phenomenon.  It was many years later that he was able to understand through overheard gossip and rumour that there was a good reason why he was left alone by ‘deliberated antagonists’, and why some of the people he met throughout childhood changed demeanour when they learned his name.  It was, though, one thread, that ran through his life and helped to contribute to the man he became.

25.

Maggie didn’t know who was more embarrassed, but she suspected that Mick won by a short head.  His reaction to her breakdown was begun by a muffled, Shit, followed by a frantic search for a box of facial tissues; he failed and ended up offering her a couple of paper towels from the plastic dispenser above the sink, ones which were only marginally thinner and more absorbent than plywood.  “All the tissues are in the chapel,” he said in excuse.  “I’d offer you my handkerchief, only...”  His voice gave up all resemblance to life as his shoulders shrugged minutely, and she guessed that he was implying that it wasn’t perhaps fit for human consumption.  She found a small handkerchief of her own and recovered a little. 

“I’m sorry,” she said. 

“Don’t be daft.”

They sat in awkward silence for a while, their coffees cooling into oblivion.  Another funeral director called; different body, different banter, same process – it was just another tick of the clock of the life of the mortuary.  While Mick was saying goodbye to the undertaker and his young assistant, the phone rang in the office; there was an extension in the body store and Mick answered it.  A few moments later, he came back into the office; intuition whispered to her that something had changed, but she couldn’t say what.  Maggie said immediately, “He got drunk and he drowned, then.”

Mick sat down at his desk.  “Apparently.”

She frowned.  “Do you believe that?”

He looked hard at the desk in front of him on which were a computer, a pencil sharpener in the shape of a coffin, a pot of pens and pencils and an empty in-tray.  On the wall behind the desk was a year planner that was blank; as far as Maggie could remember, the year planners had always been blank, but Mick always put one up.  There was a white board on the wall behind her on which were a few postcards from places near and far, and a cartoon of a zombie under which were the words, YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE DEAD TO WORK HERE, BUT IT CERTAINLY HELPS.  She waited for him to speak.

“I’m not sure,” he said at last. 

Her relief – that she wasn’t the only in the world who doubted it – was so great that she almost began to weep again, but sternly suppressed the tears, although her watering eyes were, she suspected, plainly visible to him as she enthusiastically nodded her head and said, “No!  It’s rubbish, isn’t it?”

He looked slightly alarmed.  “I didn’t say that,” he protested cautiously.

But she had at last found someone who hadn’t shut out the possibility completely and, scared that she would lose this potential convert, she rushed to push him through the door of her certainty.  “Of course it’s rubbish, Mick.  Could you see Dad being so pissed he’d just fall in the river and not get out?”

“It happens all the time...”

“Not to people like Dad.”

But he said nothing, which even her enthusiasm found discordant, and she was forced to reappraise what he was saying to her; with a shock she suddenly appreciated that he was not wholeheartedly in her camp, that he was at best an agnostic and perhaps not, like her, another closet heretic.  Slightly confounded by the shock of this realisation, she heard her words as confused.  “But...You surely can’t think that it’s true, Mick...It’s absurd!  It’s...” she looked around for just what it was, at least in her mind, but the identity of the idea that Daddy drowned accidentally after drinking one over the eight, or maybe two, three, four or five over the eight, would not come out of hiding.  She discovered more tears raised up and ready to roll, and she was damned to hell for all time if she was going to let them loose again.

Mick said, “No, of course not.  Right from the first moment I heard about it, I thought that was something funny about it all.”

“Exactly.”

When he next spoke, it was almost sheepishly.  “Mind you, there was a few times in the past year or so where I saw him going at that bottle pretty hard, Maggie.”

She knew that getting angry with Mick Chadwick would be unwise; he was a stubborn man and her father had often told her that to get the best out of him you had to go with his flow and sometimes bite your tongue.  She decided to appeal to his experience.  “Daddy would never have given a cause of death of ‘accidental drowning’ straight after the autopsy.”

“No,” he admitted.  “When I heard about that, I thought it was a bit odd.  Appleton was like that, apparently.  Full of bullshit.”

“No tissue samples were taken for histology either.  He could have had a heart attack and just fallen in the water.  You wouldn’t necessarily know that unless you did microscopy.”

“Absolutely,” he agreed.

“And I don’t trust Dr Appleton either,” she said.  It was a thought that had been riding around inside her heard like a ball around a roulette wheel and, in saying it to Mick, the ball had just settled into a slot in.  “I think there’s strong possibility that he might have missed something.  Which means that even if the blood alcohol level comes back high...”

“It has,” he interrupted her.  She was momentarily halted in surprise.  He explained, that it had been the Coroner’s office on the phone just now.   “The blood alcohol was two hundred and sixty-eight.”

Which was high; very high.  A level such as that was likely to make you fall down a lot, even if you were a regular, heavy drinker.  She didn’t know quite what to say, but she didn’t need to, because Mick spoke in her place.  “Because of that, the Coroner’s agreed to release the body for disposal.  That’ll please your brother, I should think, because he’s been pestering me for a couple of days now.  He’s got the cremation all fixed up for the day after tomorrow; the funeral director’s going to pick your Dad’s body tomorrow morning.”

26.

Juliette did not now feel at all uneasy as she moved around the house, although that hadn’t been exactly the case when she had first been bedded by Jack.  She hadn’t meant to become a gangster’s mistress.  She hadn’t meant to become anyone’s mistress; at the start, she had thought that was just a fling with a powerful, rich man, but in the middle she hadn’t thought much at all and, at the end...  And there the analysis stopped, cut short by her anger at herself, at her shame.  She hadn’t realised, she now knew, because she hadn’t wanted to; it had been too easy, and she had taken the path of least resistance.  That much was depressing enough to her, but it had proved not to be the worst, she later realised.  Her position became to her shaming enough but, she belatedly realised, how she came to occupy it was almost intolerable. 

She had taken a job as the cook and housekeeper for the Skinners, and through that had somehow drifted first into being also Jack’s squeeze, thence into being his mistress, and eventually into being, effectively, his secret wife.  At the time, it had seemed a natural progression, nothing more.  She had been enticed by Jack’s easy opulence and seemingly easy manner and, when Melanie Skinner had seemed not to mind if Jack chose to entertain himself with the staff (just as, she had subsequently discovered, he entertained himself with the wives and girlfriends of his acquaintances and staff), she had unwittingly entered the gilded palace of sin that was his world.   It was increasingly common for her to regret that oh-so-effortless journey into the dark heart of Jack Skinner’s smile, but it was now clear to her that there had never been anywhere to turn round, and road went on and on in just the one direction, forever forwards and, it seemed, downwards.

At the start, she had tried to avoid meetings with Melanie (even to the extent of hiding once in an airing cupboard), although – as large as the house was – it was sometimes impossible.  Melanie, though, had never treated her badly; if relations were not exactly warm, Juliette had gradually discovered that Jack’s wife was (at the time inexplicably) not openly hostile.  She initially decided that it was because she could hardly do anything else; Melanie knew well, even if until then Juliette had not appreciated it, that Jack’s feelings were the only ones in that household that mattered and, were she to show any dissent in any matter of import to him, she would have been ruthlessly dealt with.  Juliette’s appreciation of the true position had been an epiphany; she had been horrified, almost physically sick.

From the start, she had been employed not as a cook who had become her master’s mistress, but as a mistress who could cook.  As if that were not demeaning enough, it suddenly became obvious that it had all been engineered by Melanie Skinner.  It was she and she alone who had interviewed for the post of cook and housekeeper; Juliette had not met Jack Skinner until the day that she started work at the house.  Looking back, Juliette saw that Melanie’s eyes had never once looked at her, only over her, as if buying horseflesh.  Subsequently, Melanie Skinner had done nothing so obvious or open as to engineer opportunity for the Juliette to become entangled with husband, but she had known her husband well.  Juliette was not tall, but that only enhanced the fact that she was statuesque; she was only thirty-eight with a childless figure; she had bright eyes and a quick wit.  All these were lures for Jack Skinner; that she was an excellent cook was a bonus, not a requisite.

But why?

The question, once asked, was only momentarily unanswerable.  It was a way for Melanie to please her husband and, thereby, to remain alive.  On a cost benefit analysis, this was the best option.  Jack and Melanie occupied separate bedrooms, and had done so for some years.  In all other ways, Melanie was a model wife for Jack, at least to the outside world; being the daughter of a now-deceased bishop of the Church of England, she could even be said to give him some respectability.  Juliette assumed that in bed she was either unwilling or unable to fulfil the uxorial role.  Rather than displease her husband –with consequences that were potentially unthinkable – Melanie had (either with or without Jack’s connivance – Juliette couldn’t say which) solved the problem by the introduction of a surrogate.  Such was the life around Jack Skinner, and such were the lengths to which those who knew him would go. 

When Melanie had disappeared, her immediate assumption had been that Jack had had disposed of her, although she could not have said why; she hadn’t been aware of any change in the atmosphere or in the relationship between husband and wife.  As far as Juliette could see, Melanie remained courteous but detached, playing the part of the wife when so required, but somehow absent.  This had not changed.  Jack’s demeanour, of course, did not alter either.  Nor, as she had come to know, would it.  It made him easy to underestimate, perhaps another reason for his success.   Perhaps she had given him cause for doubting her loyalty; although Juliette thought that she had never once actively participated in Jack’s activities, she would inevitably have been exposed to secrets.  Or perhaps – and this was a truly frightening thought - it had just been a whim on his part. 

Perhaps, perhaps...  There were a million reasons why Jack might have taken it into his smiling head to kill his wife of twenty-seven years.  Her shock when she had learned the truth – that Melanie had left her husband and done so, moreover, with another man – had been so profound as to be almost vertiginous.  She marvelled at it.  Call it bravery, call it foolhardiness, call it stupidity, the size of the effrontery left her breathless.  No one crossed Jack and then did not regret it and, she knew well, there was a direct relationship between the size of the insubordination and the size and cruelty of the response; she could barely conceive of the scale of his revenge that would follow being made a cuckold. 

He never spoke of it and, she guessed, did not wish to have his humiliation paraded before him.  She had thus never dared talk directly about it to him, nor even to hint at it.  Melanie had become a non-person in that house, quite as absolutely as the enemies of communist states had been made so in the past.  So too was Henry Sommerville, the man who had taken her.  She could thus only guess at what was passing through Jack Skinner’s head, at what efforts he was making to rectify matters, at what punishments he was preparing for the perpetrators, as desperately as she wanted to know.  Had her relationship with Jack’s son, Gareth, not been so strained, she might have risked talking to him about it; she did not resent Gareth Skinner’s attitude towards her, but she did not feel able to trust him.  Her world was one of constant vigilance, for she was well aware that her position was not irredeemably safe; perhaps Melanie’s had once been, had she not chosen to offer defiance, but hers was not.  She was replaceable; she suspected that her fate was inevitable and that she could only hope for mercy on Jack’s part when her built-in obsolescence became too much for Jack to bear, but she saw no reason to hasten her fate.  She was always now exceedingly careful, and becoming more so with each passing year.

Or so she thought.

27.

“I appreciate that this is a very difficult time for you, Dr Carson.”

“I’m just asking that the release of the body be delayed whilst further enquiries are being undertaken, Mr. Roberts.”  Maggie had tried to adopt her court attitude, so that her voice would not sound too desperate, but she could hear that she was failing.  She suspected that the West Mercia Coroner, Isaac Roberts, could also hear that. 

“Why?”

She was standing in the pathologist’s office in the mortuary on her mobile phone.  It wasn’t permanently occupied, and was just a space for whichever pathologist was performing autopsies that day to dictate the findings, perhaps have a discussion about a case with a clinician or a Coroner’s officer; accordingly, Mick also used it is a storeroom and junkyard, so that there were boxes of paper shrouds, piles of old mortuary ledgers, dysfunctional computer equipment, several crutches and Zimmer frames, two thermostatic water baths and a prosthetic leg  (her father had told her that Mick was in the habit of taking regular trips around the hospital grounds to ‘rescue’ items that were going to be discarded from departments as diverse as the maternity ward, IT, surgical theatres and the hospital restaurant).  She said without hesitation (because she knew that to show such would be disastrous), “I’m not convinced that it was an accident.”

She had never met the man; he sounded self-assured, but then a Coroner who didn’t sound as if he or she were constantly on the hot line to God( just to check) was no good as a Coroner; what was most important was not they reached the right verdict, only that they spoke convincingly.  She imagined him to be tall and saturnine.  “You think it was suicide?  I understand the preliminary reports talk of a broken marriage, but we have nothing thus far to suggest that he took his own life.”

“No.”  He waited.  “I think it might have been foul play,” she continued.

“A third party?”

She thought for a moment that he sounded startled, then she realised it was incredulity that had made his voice rise in tone.  She wondered why it was always ‘third party’ involvement – if the first was the victim, and the third was the killer, who was the second?  God?  He was ever-present, true, but it seemed a little over the top to point it out when you’re talking about murder.

“I don’t think that’s been definitely excluded.”

“My pathologist saw no evidence of anything untoward on the body of your father, Dr. Carson.”

Coroners tended to acquire pathologists, and to talk about them as if they were pets, which in some ways they were; she supposed the use of the possessive emphasised the hierarchy.  “He might have missed something.”

“The police investigated the circumstances thoroughly.”

She knew that was a fib.  They might have asked around a bit at the scene where her father had been retrieved from the river, and they might have talked to his neighbours in Mordiford, but they wouldn’t have consumed too much valuable resource in these straitened times on it, especially not with his loving son sadly telling them right at the start that his poor father was a piss-head who had gone to pieces over his marital breakup.  She pointed out, “No one saw what happened.”

“Exactly, Doctor.  No one saw anyone do anything to your father.”

“Yes, I appreciate that...”

He cut in.  He wasn’t harsh and he wasn’t rude, he was just a Coroner; like any court judge – and the office of Coroner was very much a judicial appointment, made by the Lord Chancellor and directly answerable to no else – he would be well used to having the right to talk when he wanted to talk, and telling others what they should do, and what they could say.  “I’m sorry, Dr Carson, but if I acquiesced every time a relative contacted me to tell me that I was investigating a murder, I would be both extremely unpopular with my police colleagues, and probably retired because of dereliction of duty.”

She had to breathe in so deeply that she actually felt slightly giddy at the end of it, as if she wasn’t breathing oxygen but some sort of intoxicant gas.  She knew that tone very well, even though she had never before met Isaac Roberts.  She was being told, as only a court official can, not to take it any further.  “I understand.”

“Good.  I assure you that my officers are not stupid, Dr Carson, and they are very experienced.  If there was even the slightest doubt that your father’s sad death was in any way suspicious, they would have referred the matter immediately back to the police.  I’m sure the South London Coroner’s officers are equally proficient.”  It was a masterful mix of sympathy, threat and condescension.

Another breath, although not quite as deep as the last, and she felt more in control as she said, “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

“Not at all.”  He now sounded quite jovial, but his next remark was anything but.  “I am sure you don’t need reminding, Doctor, of the strictures of the Human Tissues Act of 2004.”  Just in case she did, he went on, “Although I have released the body of your late father, it is solely for the purposes of proper and respectful disposal.  Should it come to light that there was been any unauthorised interference, the police will take an active interest, and prosecution with the possibility of imprisonment may follow.”

She accepted what he said with alacrity but, after she had rung off, she sat and looked for a long time at a laminated sheet of paper that was stuck to the wall in front of her.

IT WAS MURDER AT WORK TODAY.

28.

She had never seen shock on Mick’s face before and did not, therefore, immediately recognise it as such; she saw only a stillness there, a complete flaccidity, almost as if he didn’t understand what she had just said.  He had, though.  “You’re fucking joking,” he suddenly said; not loudly, but forcefully, almost aggressively. 

“No...”

“That’s fucking disgusting.”  A pause, and then, “I’m sorry to use language like that.”  He sounded anything but sorry.  He sounded righteous, she thought.  He was right, though; it was a disgusting proposition, and illegal, to boot.  She had no direct evidence from which she could robustly argue her case, only an intuition based on professional experience of suspicious deaths that was limited, but personal experience that was immense.  At heart, she did not, and never would, believe the proposed series of events that attempted to explain her father’s death. 

She said, “Do you think there has been an adequate examination of my father’s death, Mick?”

“They’re still investigating it at the Coroner’s office.”

“No, they’re not.”  She didn’t raise her voice.  “They’re taking statements to support the hypothesis that everyone has decided is the most likely, and the one that will prove least troublesome.”

She could see that he was bothered, but he was a long way from agreeing to her proposal; he let out a long breath.  “If it’s the most likely...” he began.

“But I don’t think it actually is the most likely.  Oh, yes, I think it it’s the easiest to swallow, especially for my mother and brother, but also for the Coroner and the police.  It means that they can clear up another death and then move on to the next.”

“Why are you so sure you’re right and everyone else is wrong?”

It was her turn to take a deep breath.  She knew Mick, she hoped, both from some personal experience and from the many things that her father had said about him; she was quite deliberately looking for buttons to press, levers to pull, strings to tug.  “I don’t think an adequate autopsy has been done.  From what I’ve learned of Dr. Appleton, I have serious doubts that he did anything more than slice and dice the organs and then write down the cause of death that was easiest on everyone.”

“You can’t know that.  You weren’t there.  Neither was I...”

“Exactly...” she interrupted.  For a second she thought that she had made a mistake because there crossed his face a fleeting expression of anger, but he stayed silent and listened to what she had to say.  “You weren’t there either.  Appleton, himself a locum, was assisted by another locum.  What do you know of this chap Knight?”

As she had suspected it would be, Mick’s response was not wholly favourable.  He’s got a bit of a reputation.  I didn’t want him, but I was over-ruled by management...”

She gently interrupted what she knew from her father was a familiar refrain.  “What sort of reputation?”

“The reason he’s on the locum circuit is because he suddenly left his permanent job at his local hospital; all very mysterious it was, but the rumours are that he got caught doing some kind of fiddle.”

“But that’s only a rumour,” she pointed out.

“And his work’s pretty shoddy.  I mean, look at that stitching on your Dad.  It’s disgraceful.”  She smiled as he realised what he had said and dropped his head.  “Sorry,” he mumbled.

“So he might not have noticed if Appleton had overlooked something?  Noticed it and then quietly told the pathologist, as you would have done.”

“Almost certainly not,” he agreed emphatically, unaware of the blatant flattery that had just been showered over him like pungent perfume. 

“So we have no way of knowing if something important was missed.”  She did not quite conclude her argument with a verbal flourish, or go so far as to add ‘QED’, but she thought she’d done pretty well in proving her case. 

Mick was by no means stupid; as she said this, the frown told her that she made a point and that he knew he had helped her to make it.  “No.”  She waited; her experience as a court witness told her that at certain times, saying nothing was a far more effective way of saying a lot than was using words.  He made a face, not looking at her.  “What you’re suggesting is illegal.”

“I know that.  But I think it’s morally justified.”

A shake of his greyed head.  “You’re asking me an awful lot.  If we get found out, it’s the sack for me.”

“And for me...  And probably referral to the GMC...  And quite possibly a prison sentence...”  She saw that he was still uncertain and went on, “I can protect you, Mick.  You can say you left me so that I could some private time with my father.  I did what I did completely out of the blue.”

“And they’ll point out that, because I didn’t immediately raise some sort of alarm, I’m an accessory after the fact.”  He used the terminology of the criminal law as if he were extremely familiar with it, she noted at the back of her head.

She changed her point of attack because he was absolutely right.  “Has anyone else been to see Dad yet?”  She didn’t think either her brother or her mother would have done and she was right.  “No one need ever know, then, Mick.”

He shook his head.  “I’d know.  I don’t fancy working on someone who was as good a friend as your Dad was to me.”

And she ‘didn’t fancy’ having to do what she would have to do either, but something was driving her to do it.  She was proposing to do something that filled her with total horror, but she still knew that she had to do it, because no one else cared.  She said nothing of her own feelings, though.  “I couldn’t live with myself wondering if his death wasn’t straightforward, Mick; it would be too awful having people think that he was just an old drunk.”  He said nothing; his facial muscles did some talking, though.  She waited for a short while and then said calmly and quite deliberately, “It’s our job to get at the truth behind unexplained deaths, not just to write down whatever’s most convenient for one and all, even it means doing things we don’t want to do.”

She knew exactly what she was doing because her father had often told her the pride with which Mick did his job.  It was, Dad had said, very much ‘Mick’s mortuary’ and anyone who worked in it – even the pathologist – had better come up to his high standards.  She suppressed a small pang of self-contempt at what she was doing.  Then she waited.  He stared at the worn blue carpet with its unhealthy looking staining, his lips working.  It was a long time before he said in a low voice, “Okay, we’ll do it.”

29.

Whenever Jack was away, Juliette always felt uncomfortable in the house, even after she came to appreciate that Melanie was not necessarily her enemy, and even with Frankie Brown still around; it was as if without him around, she felt that she had no legitimacy.  The two of them kept away from each other and were happier because of it; they were polite but not close, two rivals for the affection of another, each needing the other and not particularly liking it.  Juliette still prepared the food, but they consumed it apart; Melanie always eating in her room, Juliette bringing it for her.  It was on one such occasion that Juliette learned something of the context in which she now lived.

She knocked on the door, tray held in the crook of her right arm.  There was a long pause before Melanie’s voice bade her enter; she thought at once that Melanie sounded odd.  Her voice was low and dignified, yet sad and, also, distant.  Juliette opened the door.  Melanie was standing in the middle of the room in her dressing gown, the cerulean one.  She was looking directly at Juliette, and her face held a cold expression.  Was she trembling?  Juliette rather thought she might have been although, because her arms were wrapped tightly around her chest, it was difficult to say.

“Put it down there,” she said, indicating with her chin the dressing table to her left.

Juliette realised that the tone was not one of distance, but cruelty.  Puzzled, she did as she was asked.  When she turned back, Melanie was no longer holding herself tight about the chest.  She was in the act of undoing the belt of the dressing gown.  As Juliette watched, she let the ends fall to her sides and pulled the gown open.  She stared intently into Juliette’s eyes, regarding them as they saw what was there.  A mastectomy scar replaced the right breast.

It was a moment of shocking intimacy, but the barrier between the two women was too high ever to be crossed.  Juliette found herself colouring, but Melanie’s face found no such warmth.  Still staring, she said, “I thought you ought to know.  You’re not the first.  I’ve been finding women for Jack for years, ever since this.  I would so hate there to be any misunderstanding of your position.”     

She had hurried from the room with speaking, aware of Melanie’s angry eyes upon her constantly.

30.

“Are you all right, Sam?”

“Yes.  Why?”

Gemma points at my handkerchief that, I discover, is hanging out of my trouser pocket.  She can see the dried blood upon it.  “Oh, that.  That’s nothing important.”   It is late in the afternoon and I am very tired.  We are sitting in my front living room, drinking tea that Gemma has made; I’m sure that it’s very nice.  The formalities of the day are done.

“How can you say blood’s not important?” she demands with anger that is only half joking.  “Where did it come from?”

“It was there when I blew my nose.  It’s not much.”

“Let me see, please.”

Her hand is held out.  She treats me as mother would treat a child; why do I like that?  Why, then, do I at the same time hate it?  I try to hang on to some dignity as I comply.  She holds it between pinched fingertips; it isn’t that disgusting, I think.  As I grow old – not older, but old – and as I run out of life, I find myself being treated as a child; is it because I behave like one that others react so?  Or is it I who am reacting to the way they behave?  Are all the dying seen as children?  Do all carers automatically become as parents?  Is it right to lust after my ‘mother’?  Gemma asks, “Has this happened before?”

She adopts a tone that she might use to a small boy caught shoplifting.  Before realising I have spoken, I enquire, “Do you have children, Gemma?”

Startled, for a moment she does not reply.  “Yes,” she admits.  “Two.”

“They’re very lucky to have a mum like you.”

Once more she pauses before she laughs abruptly; it is a lovely, warm sound.  “Sam,” she says chidingly.  “You are a very naughty man.”

She doesn’t know the half of it.  Before I have need to respond, she says, “You’re avoiding the question.”

And I am embarrassed and can only say, “Sorry,” with a small smile; again I am the child. 

“Has it happened before?”

“A couple of times in the past week.”

“You should have told me.”

“It’s nothing.”

Giving me back the handkerchief, she says, “You should have told me at once.”  I say nothing; there is nothing to say and one mustn’t answer back to one’s mother.  “You’re going to the hospital tomorrow, aren’t you?”

“My appointment’s at three-fifteen.”

“Be sure to tell them about this.”

Maybe I will; maybe I won’t.  “What does it mean?”

“Probably nothing,” she lies.  I love her even when she is deceiving me; surely that is a definition of love?

“So why tell him?”

She shakes her head in mock anger.  “Sam, you’re behaving very badly today.”

“I am, aren’t I?”

And she laughs, but I just twitch my lips and she doesn’t seem to notice.  .

She gets up and takes the empty cups into the kitchen; I hear her washing them up before she comes back in.  “I won’t call in tomorrow, then; not if you’re going to the hospital.”  Does some sort of expression cross my face?  Perhaps it does, because she adds quickly, “I can, if you want, though.”

“No, that’s fine.”  My smile is so reassuring, and then a thought occurs to me.  “I’m going out the day after tomorrow.”

She is surprised.  “Really?  Somewhere nice?” she asks with a smile.

“A funeral.”

Her face collapses, as much in embarrassment at her gaffe as in sympathetic sorrow.  “Oh...”

“It’s all that’s left of my life, Gemma,” I tell her harshly.  “Funerals and hospital visits.”

31.

To most people – even to some doctors – the very idea of what Maggie did for a living was incomprehensible.  They couldn’t comprehend that anyone should, if not happily then certainly willingly, undertake the dissection of another human being.  She was well aware, of course, that the great majority of them had no idea of the reality of what she did – they were informed only by various forms of low grade entertainment and their own eagerly acquired and closely held misconceptions – but she knew that the truth would probably find them as shocked.  Without the rationality of intellectual curiosity to protect a them, the various tasks that were part of an autopsy would probably result in severe psychological damage to pathologists, unless he or she were some sort of sociopath.    That was why you never did a post mortem examination of someone known to you, let alone someone who was close to you; let alone your own father.  What she was proposing to do was not a full post mortem, but it would still involve doing something that she felt instinctively was totally abhorrent.  Her only defence would be the conviction that what she was doing had a higher purpose, that no other course of action was available to her, and that he would have approved.

Mick’s reluctant, gruff consent to abet the second autopsy on her father had not been without conditions.  He agreed only to leave her alone with the body of her father in the dissection room on a trolley, and he agreed only to ‘go for a walk’ around the hospital for thirty minutes.  He  insisted that he would give her no longer and that she should be done by the time he returned; he said that he would be able to reconstitute the body using the same stitch holes as Tony Knight had used and that no one would know that any further examination had been made.  As he laid these conditions down, his voice was clipped and she saw that he was under great strain; he didn’t meet her gaze.  He then got up from his desk and said one last thing.  “And, for fuck’s sake, find something, Maggie,” before leaving her alone.  She waited in his office whilst he moved the body from the viewing chapel to the dissection room; he then went straight out of the department without even calling out to her.

She quickly went into the female changing room and put on scrubs.  She didn’t have time to don full personal protective gear, and had to content herself with a green plastic apron, rubber gloves and a mask.  It took her many precious seconds and many deep breaths to summon the courage to approach the body of her father.  It was by far from the first time that she had been alone in a mortuary dissection room, but it was by far the worst; there was an ethereal, almost adumbrative atmosphere as she stood beside his head and tried to concentrate on why she was there and the reason for her act of desecration.  Early in the period of her life after Will had gone from her, when she had been completely ungrounded and her work had accordingly suffered grievously, it had been her father who had taken the time – and she only now appreciated that it had been a considerable amount – to instil again within her an understanding of what autopsy pathology was all about, to make her remember again how extremely important it was to the bereaved to have the truth about the death of their kin, that what they did was actually one of the high marks of civilisation.  She had not wanted to know any more about death and told him so, but his reply had made its mark; “It’s a fact of life, Mags.  Get over it.  You’re going to die like me, and just like the rest of us.  Only an idiot ignores it completely.”  Not that these sentiments had had immediate effect, but they had lain within her and been some of the ropes by which she had gradually pulled herself back.  She tried now not only to bring the words to mind, but with them his voice and his spirit.  It still took titanic courage – amounting almost to deliberate psychosis – to start.

Mick had pulled the shroud back up to his neck, although he hadn’t tied it again.  She again pulled the shroud back down to the waist and, in the much brighter light of the dissection room, the changes that had been wrought upon her father by prolonged immersion in water were inescapable.  The body was white as if bleached and the ‘washerwoman effect’ on the fingers and toes was starkly obvious.  It took her a long while to come to terms with what she saw and it was only with considerable effort that she began to try to think like a consultant forensic pathologist and not like a bereaved daughter; only slowly did she begin to acquire the necessary mindset and...

His wrists.

Her father had not been particular hirsute, and someone who had not known him very well might well have failed to noticed that his forearms, for perhaps two inches above the wrists, looked less hairy than the skin higher up.  She lifted the right arm, felt her soul shrivel at the cold, doughy feel to the flesh and the stiffness of the shoulder joint (indeed, the near immobility of the elbow joint which had probably not been bent by outside forces since his death), and bowed down to look more closely.  She was right; the left arm was the same, although her examination the ankles revealed nothing untoward; it suggested that his wrists but not his ankles had been bound by strongly adhesive tape, tearing away the hairs when removed.  External manipulation told her that there was no evidence that any of the bones of the arms or legs were broken.

She looked carefully then around the upper torso for abrasions and bruising.  An abrasion – a break in the skin continuity without the depth of a ‘laceration’ - might mean everything or nothing at all; everybody – every body – had them, although they rarely came to notice.  Bruises were even worse.  Bruises, abrasions and lacerations are like oases in the desert, she recalled one of her forensic pathology teachers saying.  The lost pathologist – starving and intolerably dehydrated because of a prolong lack of findings – will see these ephemera and rush towards them, only to find them fading to nothing under the clinical glare of the court room.  In other words, ‘Be very careful’.  They were difficult to find, easy to imagine and impossible to age; their significance was almost always open to interpretation and therefore dispute.  She had to look, though, because there was little else she could do and she discovered what she had already guessed; her father was like everyone else and had plenty of each type, almost all of which were most certainly inconsequential.  On the sides of his neck in the soft behind the ears and beneath the angles of the jaws, though, there were faint signs of bruising; nothing marked, but strikingly symmetrical.  She thought that they might be the kinds of marks left by the fingers of a hand forcing the lower jaw down...

So that Dad was forced to open his mouth while he was restrained...  So that someone could pour alcohol down his throat...

She was unaware of a subtle shift in her thinking, of a move from a bereaved, frightened daughter into a consultant pathologist registering and collating findings, building a picture of what might have been of significance in someone’s death.

Her father had had a full head of thick hair that was grey-flecked auburn in colour and, although not long, was a long way from a crew cut.  Searching through it was a tedious process and took precious minutes; she though it unlikely that she would ever meet Dr. Appleton, but she had in her head the idea that he would not spend too long in doing it.  She was glad that she did, though; deep within it, over the occipital protuberance at the back, she found an abrasion about an inch in diameter.  It could, she told herself, have been caused as he father had accidentally fallen into the water, developing in the minutes that he had still been alive – almost every finding on a dead body was open to more than one interpretation – but it could also have been caused by a blow to the head just before death.  It spurred her to find the incision low in the scalp that the mortuary technician would have made to access the skull and extract the brain; she almost forgot what she was doing and whom she was doing it to.

The brain is not easy to get at, as it is housed in a bony box.  In order to ensure the maximum cosmesis (so that the body is acceptable to any bereaved who may wish to view it afterwards), a single incision from ear to ear is made low across the back of the head, through the hair.  Then the upper edge of this is grabbed and the scalp pulled upwards and away from the underlying skull bones using nothing more delicate than the most brutish of force.  It is hard work the first time it is done, but the flesh comes cleanly from the bone; the whole scalp can be then folded forward over the face.  From the thereby exposed skull, a wedge of bone is then cut, comprising perhaps half of the vault and exposing the back of the brain which can then be cut free of the top of the spinal cord and the cranial nerves.  After the autopsy, the dissected brain is not replaced in the head but joins the other organs in the main body cavity; the cranial cavity is instead stuffed with cotton wool, the wedge of bone and the scalp flap replaced, and the single incision sown up with nothing more specialised than kitchen string.  Maggie now reversed this process; to do so she had to stand at the head of the body, thus easing her sense of nauseated incredulity at what she was doing to her father’s body.  What she discovered beneath the abrasion helped, too.

There was pronounced, fresh blood clot in the scalp, and there was a hairline fracture in the skull bone beneath it; not a displaced fracture and easily missed unless one looked for it by holding the wedge of bone up to the light, but definitely there.  Perhaps six inches long, it slipped quietly through the left parietal bone. When she rapped the section of skull on the side of the stainless steel dissection table, there sounded the slight deadening of the sound she expected.

It was again not definitive.  After all, the same possibility – that all these injuries had occurred following an accidental fall into the water, perhaps because her father had struck his head on the way down, or been swept onto a partially submerged rock as he struggled – still existed, but she felt with each new discovery, that the picture of accident was becoming less tenable.   

She looked up at the clock on the wall.  She had less than ten minutes left which was not enough time for anything detailed.  Mick had stressed that he wanted her out of the dissection room when he returned, and she had known by the tone of his voice that he meant it.  There was insufficient time to look at the organs and, in truth, she did not wish to do so.  She was unlikely to find anything that would help her, and it seemed a step too far, as if she had not already gone beyond what was acceptable... 

She began to unpick the stitching of the incision that ran down her father’s torso, going carefully so that she would make no other extra marks, not letting herself look at his face – that would have been too much to bear and would have destroyed her mantra that this was just another autopsy, that this body meant nothing to her.  As she expected, the organ mass – now either in slices or completely opened up for inspection of their internal structures - was in a plastic bag in the cavity.  She lifted it out with her eyes closed tightly, placed it between her father’s legs, and breathed deeply for as long as she dared, her mind still on the clock. 

She looked in the cavity, eyes staying away from his face.  Nothing untoward, she decided.  She was just about to finish, when her eye was caught by a small area of congestion on the right hand side of the ribcage, just over the sixth rib, towards the spinal column.  Apart from the sternum and the very front of the ribcage, the chest wall had been undisturbed by Dr. Appleton and, she had been taught very early on in her forensic pathology training, that could mean some important findings of trauma had been overlooked.  She looked up.  She had four minutes to go.  If she took too long, Mick would be angry...

Perhaps Mick would just have to be angry, then.

She begin quickly to cut down on the ribcage, which meant cutting along the line of the ribs through the muscles between them, so that they slowly separated like curved, bony talons, the whole ribcage becoming an exploded deconstruction that grasped the air above; only in this way could an undisplaced rib fracture be discovered. 

Which there was.      

The right sixth rib, beneath the area of congestion, was cracked. 

32.

For his entire life, Gareth Skinner had known his father’s smile, but he looked on it now with very different feelings to those he had had when very young.  If every child’s journey through life is one of attrition of a state of grace, eventually revealing the sordid truth of reality, Gareth’s was far, far harder than most, for his grace was purer, the reality more sordid than normal.  Although the world into which he had been born had been the one in which he still lived, at the start it had been to him normalcy.  He was now incredulous that he had looked on it so, but he had had nothing with which to compare it, and no reason to question it.  His had been a sequestered upbringing in which he found himself complicit in his father’s empire; he had enjoyed its favours and, through nothing more heinous than naiveté, he had participated in the means by which they were achieved.  He hadn’t, of course, appreciated at first just what those means were, and certainly it wasn’t until episode of Neville Fite that all the ramifications of what his father did and how he did it were fully borne in upon him.  By then, though, it was too late; he was  not just totally immersed in his father’s world, he was suffused with it, completely taken over by it, even dependent upon it.  He came for the first time to appreciate his obscene culpability in the actions of his father.

Yet, if the fate of Neville Fite had demonstrated well what kind of man Jack Skinner was, his own fate over the episode had also shown his own special position.  His father might not have particularly loved him, or what he was, but the bond of blood between them was unique to Jack.  Gareth felt that he was in a special place; his mother and Juliette were outside of the space between father and son, no matter how little they had in common, how little they made contact with each other.  He asked his mother not long after Juliette’s arrival both at the house and then in Jack Skinner’s bed how she felt about it.  That she had replied simply, “It doesn’t matter,” intrigued him.  He saw it now as a sign of weakness.

He still did not know all of the details of the last hours of Neville Fite, partly because of his own weakness, and partly because of the fear that was in others, but he knew enough, and there were the rumours, and vague allusions, and overheard whisperings.  All these had conspired to give him a picture of the man who had fed and clothed him, given him the best of bought education, and allowed him whatever he wanted.  The death of Neville Fite – the manner of the death of Neville Fite – had brought home to him, though, the true meaning and implication of this picture.

And, as if all this were not bad enough, he had now to live with one more terrible secret, one that he thought that no one else knew or would ever know.

His fling with Neville Fite had been more than an infatuation on his part, or an attempt at deliberate seduction on Neville’s; it had been something other than youthful experimentation or bored licentiousness, or innocence and lust.  He had known exactly what he had been doing when he had first approached the ageing, slightly clownish figure that was well known in the bars and gay clubs of southerly London.  He had done so hoping for a reaction – any reaction at all – from his sedate, controlling father.

And, although his father had never ceased to smile, he had succeeded in getting a reaction, but it was of a nature and of a magnitude that he had not foreseen, and he had afterwards felt sick for a long time.

Not even the disappearance of his wife could shake the appearance of Jack Skinner, no matter that it appeared to represent a huge affront.  It was not mentioned, nor had ever even been alluded to.  She had vanished and, to all intents and purposes, it was an event that did not perturb her husband in the least. 

33.

She stayed in the changing room shower for twenty minutes, to no effect.  She still felt dirty, would always feel so, despite trying to tell herself time and time again that her findings vindicated her actions.  They didn’t, though.  Not even the cracked rib.  Painful, yes, but not a stab wound or a bullet hole.  The picture of her father that was being promulgated was of a man who had taken to drink; such people not infrequently fell and cracked a rib.  He was so pissed, be probably hardly noticed.  And what else, precisely, had she found?  She could imagine a barrister going through her findings.  The commonest technique was to ignore the picture that the totality of the evidence presented and to take each individual piece, hold it up to the brightest of lights, turn it so that every angle was examined, and then point out that it was nothing, that it meant nothing.  And if every item of evidence was small and insignificant and baseless, then the greater picture at which they hinted must, de facto, also be insignificant and baseless.  The cracked rib, the bang on his head with the hairline skull fracture could all have been accidental and explained by his intoxication.  The bruising on the sides of his neck and the vague impression that his wrists might have been bound were too insubstantial to allow her to confess to anyone what she done.  In effect, she had nothing that would convince someone who did not already believe it, that her father’s death was anything other than an accident.

She felt ashamed, not because she didn’t still believe that she was right, but because she had done something terrible and illegal – and made Mick her accomplice – and still could prove nothing.  What the hell had she been thinking?  Despite the water splashing on her face, she blushed with shame and regret.  She did not think that Mick would want to see her, and she found that she was glad of that.  By now, he would be in the dissection room making good her desecration.  She was well aware that she should do something – apologise, or give thanks – but she could not face it.  She knew from what her father had said about him to know that he wouldn’t ever talk about what she had done that day, but she also knew that he was angry.  He would be incandescent if she admitted that she had failed to find unequivocal evidence of foul play.

She dressed quickly and left the changing room, ready to hurry away, surprised and dismayed to find Mick standing in the office just opposite.  She stopped involuntarily and he turned to look at her.  His expression was odd, she thought; it ought to have been one of contempt and perhaps that was there in part, but there was something else, something that she couldn’t categorise.  She was about to say something (although she did not know what) when he spoke in a voice that was almost embarrassed.  “I hope you found something useful.”  She opened her mouth, still not sure what she could or would say, but he carried on.  “There’s been some sort of problem about Knight’s pay while he was here.  I phoned the locum agency and they gave me some news.”  He was frowning as if trying to work something else.  “Tony Knight’s been murdered.”

Her immediate reaction was shock, but that quickly passed, pushed out of the way by elation.  It wasn’t something that Mick seemed to share, though.  She began to speak but he cut her short.  Raising his hand, he said in a hard voice, “Now, if you don’t mind, I never want to see you again.”

On the way back to her father’s house in Mordiford, Maggie had to stop her hire car in Hampton Bishop where, by the side of the road, she vomited again, and again, again, unheeding of the cars that passed.

34. 

“The latest scan doesn’t show much improvement, I’m afraid.”

Really, Doc?  Afraid, are you?  Come over this side of the desk, if you want a hands-on, no-holds-barred, once-in-a-lifetime crash course on fear.

“No?”

“Still, it’s early days.”

But it isn’t; not for me, anyway.  It’s very late days indeed.  I say tiredly, “Good.”

He’s a consultant oncologist and his name is Lawrence Wade.  We sit in a consulting room in the oncology centre at Cheltenham General Hospital; it is fifteen minutes shy of four o’clock and I have just got into see him for my appointment that was scheduled for a quarter past three; the waiting room has BBC 24 hour news with the sound turned down; there are subtitles that are occasionally idiotic.  It passes the time but I can’t help feeling that the one thing I do not wish to be doing is idly pass any more time.  He emanates concern and empathy but, unlike Gemma, he does not know me and, perhaps for this reason, it is patently false.  He is acting this part; he has done so a thousand times before, I suspect, and will probably do so a thousand times again; for me it is a one-off performance, and the difference makes me hate him.

“Any severe side effects?” he asks, making a note in my medical record.  His eyes are not on me; nor is his heart, I think.

“What of?” I enquire.

A moment of perplexity causes him to stop writing and look up at me.  “The medicine.  He looks down again at my record.  The Tarceva.”

“No.”  Then, just as he is nodding and writing, his eyes back away from me, I add, “And no severe effects, either.”

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t work.”

This gives him another moment of uncertainty.  “Not yet, no.”

“No, not ever.”

“You mustn’t give up hope, Mr. Fisher.”

“And the other stuff makes me feel like shit.”

He looked at me; it is a small recompense, but I enjoy being able to tease people, to watch them suppress their immediate reaction when, for the first and only time in my life since I was four years old, I say just what I want to say.  Dr. Lawrence Wade smiles after a moment.  He says, “Now, now, Mr. Fisher.”  He is patronising but at least he doesn’t call me ‘Sam’ which some of the nurses do.

I don’t bother to reply.  The phone rings.  He picks it up and has a conversation about another patient.  It is a business conversation, much as a sales manager might discuss a shipment of knick-knacks, or a football coach might talk about the merits or otherwise of a player.  I understand that he has to remain clinical, but I’ve been around enough doctors to know that this all to easily mutates into casual contempt; that they effect empathy when talking directly to the ill just emphasises this impression.  The whole place reeks of institutional contempt, in fact.  Then, when the phone is satisfied and again quiet, and his attention is back on me – or at least on my notes – I say, “Can I have some more morphine?”

Yet again he pauses.  He glances up at me.  “Why?  Isn’t your present dose enough?”  He is suspicious, as well he might be.  In truth, I don’t really know why I’ve asked; maybe I just want to keep my options open.  “Not always.”  There is some truth in that.

He stares at me intently; I know that look – I’ve used it myself enough times – and I know that he is suspicious of my motives.  I also know that the most potent defence is passivity; the successful suspects don’t care – they’re the hardest ones to bring to justice.  There is a knock on the door that echoes slightly in that small room without a carpet, or any sense of humanity.  The door opens and one of the nurses puts her head around it.  She sounds annoyed as she says, “Dr. Snell’s outside.  He wants to discuss...”  She looks across at me and then back to him.  “... A patient with you.”   She pauses again and, when he doesn’t immediately respond other than with a frown, then adds, “He says it’s urgent.”  Her tone suggests that she doesn’t believe this.

Dr. Wade gets up at once.  His apology to me is thrown over his shoulder as he walks out and the door closes behind him.  He is gone perhaps ten minutes; it is quite enough time for me to read the scan report that he has left on the monitor screen, but I am back in my seat, good as gold, when he returns.  He sits down, then closes the computer window.  “I’ll increase the dose to the maximum.”

I thank him, but can’t keep the sourness from the words; not that he notices.  Doctors are observant of much, unseeing of a lot more; I suppose they have to be.  I walk out of the examination room and wait in line to book my next appointment at the desk and to ask them to let the hospital driver know that I am ready for a lift back.  You have to be good liar to be a doctor and, in this at least, Dr. Lawrence Wade isn’t very good.  It didn’t surprised to see from the report – most of which was long words and dense jargon – that the mass in my belly is bigger.  The phrase used was that it ‘had grown through the therapy’.  I’m not medical, but then I don’t think I have to be to understand that.

Some fucking wonder drug.

35.

Maggie hadn’t expected any concession from the Coroner’s office of West Mercia, but it was the attitude of Mr Haggit that she found most difficult to take.  “I’m sorry, Miss Carson, you’re asking the impossible.”  His tone was peremptory and almost contemptuous, certainly exasperated.

She was quite certain his refusal to use her proper title was quite deliberate and she ignored the slight.  “If you would at least discuss the matter with the Coroner...”

“Mr. Roberts isn’t due into the office until this afternoon.”

“Well at least stop the removal of my father’s body from the mortuary until you’ve had a chance to get his opinion.”

“I think I’d know what his opinion would be.  To do as you ask would upset the funeral arrangements, and I can’t allow that.”

“But surely, the killing of Tony Knight suggests that there might be something odd about my father’s death.  They worked together only a few weeks ago.”

He didn’t actually tell her ‘to grow up’ but that implication was loudly clear as he said, “That’s hardly a significant connection, Miss Carson.  I don’t know the details of Mr Knight’s death but, even if it is as you describe, the fact that your father worked with him a few weeks ago for five days is laughably tenuous, especially as there is absolutely no evidence that your father’s death wasn’t anything more than an unfortunate accident brought about by the consumption of too much drink.”

God, how she wanted to tell him what she knew...

But she couldn’t.  When she didn’t say anything, Walter Haggit said, “Now, unless there’s something more, Miss Carson, I have other matters to attend to.”

A bad day turned worse a couple of hours later.  She was sitting in her father’s study telling herself that she was sorting through his books and records, in actual fact reciting in her head all that she knew, all she suspected, and all her frustrations, when the doorbell rang.  It was her mother and her brother.  That they were there at all wasn’t good, and their expressions heralded big trouble.  Her brother barely spoke as she opened the door and he pushed past her; her mother stood for a moment on the doorstep and looked reproachfully at her before following him.  As she closed the front door, Maggie grimaced at nothing in particular.  She turned to see her mother moving through the hall looking around, her head moving up and down, then switching repeatedly from left to right and back again.  She might have been a visitor to a stately home, admiring the accoutrements of gracious eighteenth century living; Maggie suspected, though, that her motivation was more likely born of memories of long dead married life and, conceivably, suspicion that some of the things she saw should have gone to her after the divorce.  David had gone into the kitchen and was standing with his back to the sink, his arms folded, every half inch the outraged brother; she had seen it before and repetition did not make it any less risible, any more entertaining.  Her mother took a seat at the kitchen table, her hands clasping a rather nice shoulder bag that she had put on her lap; it was of pale yellow leather that was certainly very expensive and probably had a designer label.  She looked down at the table, taking her appointed position in the montage.  Maggie knew the situation well; David was going to play outrage over something, underlining all at once his love for his mother, his sister’s disregard for same, his assumption of his natural place as leader of a father-depleted family and, unconsciously, his own intense insecurities.  She came in and said, “Coffee, anyone?”

“What the hell have you been doing?” demanded David and thereby struck at Maggie’s only cause for concern in this encounter; did he know something of her illegal activities?  Had Mick talked, or had perhaps the funeral director noticed something awry?  If her brother did have wind of what she had been doing, she genuinely feared for her safety, because she had always suspected that he had inherited their mother’s penchant for cruel revenge. 

She looked at her mother, but she was busy playing the wronged woman; it was a role she had perfected over many years both during and after her marriage.  Maggie said carefully, “I don’t understand what you mean.”

“Yes, you do,” contradicted David, and he unfolded his arms and flung his right arm out, indicating for some reason somewhere else, somewhere in the world around them.  “I’m not stupid, you know, and neither is Mum.”

“Most definitely.”

David was about to respond but their mother said then, “You’re being a terribly selfish girl, Maggie.”  She was looking at her and Maggie defined a look on her face that was a composite of remorse, regret and the kind of sorrow that small children exude when a pet guinea pig dies; she had to stop herself from laughing either from hysteria or disdain.

“How do you work that out?” she enquired in a low, measured tone, her heart pumping loudly enough in her ears to let her know that she was being very reasonable, all told.

“We’ve just come from the undertaker’s...” said David.  Instinctively, Maggie thought, Don’t call them ‘undertakers’, they get very upset.  Call them ‘funeral directors’.  Unaware of his semiological faux pas, her brother continued, “He told us that you’re still trying to get Dad’s funeral cancelled.”

It appeared that Walter Haggit liked a good gossip.  “Not ‘cancelled’, just delayed. I don’t see why there’s such a big hurry.”

Her mother suddenly dived into the bag and found, within its deeps, a small folded handkerchief that she held to her nose with her eyes closed; there was no actual evidence that she was weeping, but she had the stage prop ready and Maggie knew well that the sprinkler system was very sensitive to even the slightest sign of daughterly defiance.  David said, “Do you know what you’re meddling has been doing to Mum?”

It might have been especially rehearsed, Maggie mused, although she knew that it was only repeated performance over the years that allowed such precise synchronisation; now it was used against only her, once it had also been used against her father as well.  She was relieved, though, to deduce that they didn’t know quite how far her ‘meddling’ had gone.  Relieved, and tired, and rather frustrated; all she had done was to stoke up her own suspicions, and antagonise everyone else.  Suddenly, she wondered if she had not been staggeringly mistaken and, with that speculation, came the certainty that she had been.  She went over to her mother, sat beside and her said gently after a long sigh, “I’m sorry.”  She took her mother’s hands.

David scoffed.  “Oh, come on, Maggie...”  The sentence stopped a beat too early as he saw his mother responding in a positive way.  It seemed to Maggie that he had quickly to redeploy his forces before saying, “That’s all very well...”  This time the sentence didn’t just stop, it crashed because he could see that his mother was softly gripping Maggie’s hands.

Maggie said, “I should have had more thought for you.”  And yet she wondered as she said this if she really meant it; wasn’t she acting a part just as much as her brother was doing?  She was horribly afraid that they were both just using their mother; she was just as fearful that it was this that they had been doing ever since the divorce.  Quickly, lest these unwelcome glimpses of a greater reality give David some advantage, she added, “I know that there’s no point in keeping on about things.”

Her mother nodded and smiled below watery eyes.  But we’re all just manipulating each other, thought Maggie.  It’s just a game of emotional diplomacy, a past-time of sentimental one-up-manship.  And then David said, “You just can’t do this kind of thing, Maggie.  I know you feel you’ve got something to prove, but I really do think that this was the wrong time to try to do it.”

His hypocrisy – as rank as carrion and painted across his face like mucus – provoked her.  This was the brother whose business had failed twice despite generous handouts from his father, who had never come to terms with her own relative success, and who had drifted from feckless relationship to feckless solitude and back again a hundred times.  This was David, who had put them all through hell when, as a teenager, he had been unable to come to terms with his own homosexuality, causing huge rows week after week just as a way of not thinking about his own inadequacy.  “How the hell do you dare say that to me?” she flared, withdrawing her hands from a somewhat surprised mother and standing up.

“Very easily.  I said to Mum as soon as you abandoned her in France, you’re just trying to get one over on me.  It’s had nothing to do with ‘something fishy’ about Dad’s death.  Everyone knew what he was like, what he’d become.  It was just about being the top dog, as it’s always been.”

“That’s crap.”

“Is it?”  He was starting to sound shrill, just as her voice was lowering in pitch.  It was as if he were on a go cart gathering speed as it ran down a hill and, although there were brakes if he wanted them, he was going to prove to one and all that he was a brave-hearted soul.  “You should examine yourself sometimes, Maggie.  To those who are close to you, there’s a pattern, one in which you have to be the one on top, the one who’s best and who’s most successful.”

“Children...”  Their mother’s interjection was weak and ineffective, an ancient call to attention that had long ago lost its potency, and she knew it.  Maggie was shocked, perhaps even hurt, to realise that the wronged widow had been grieving, and felt outrage at this discovery.  Her mother had no right to mourn her husband’s death, surely?  Not after all he had put her through, or she said that he had put her through.  It was this epiphany – because it seemed to her as some sort of betrayal that her mother should not be consistent in her contempt for Maggie’s father – that made her really angry, as hurtful as David’s remarks had been.  This, too, seemed to Maggie to be rancid hypocrisy.

“Why don’t you just take a good look at yourself, David?” she suggested.  “Why should I have a problem?  I’m successful in my career.  I haven’t drifted around, dabbling here and there in various hopeless, airy-fairy construction schemes, using Daddy’s money to fund a vacuous lifestyle while whinging about the economy and people’s lack of intelligence and bravery, just because they take one quick look at your ‘business plans’ and ‘going forward projections’ and laugh into their glasses of Pouilly-Fume.”

It felt good to say, at least for a moment.  Her mother’s small, surprised and (Maggie suspected) rather fearful gasp seemed to happen in a moment of dreadful tranquillity.  Then David, more angry than she had known him for several years, almost screamed at her, “You fucking bitch!”  His face was a livid pink. Tears – possibly of rage, possibly of sorrow – rimmed his eyelids.  And she thought for a moment that that was going to be it, that her words – perhaps the fact of their utterance, perhaps the facts they had conveyed – had rendered him temporarily incapable of his normal quick ripostes and defences which would usually ensure that no emotional damage was done. 

She was wrong.  He advanced towards her and, gathering calm from somewhere and risking a quick glance at their mother, said with a tight, vicious smile, “At least I don’t kill my boyfriends.  You know what they called you on Facebook?  Spidergirl – because of what you did to Will.”  He withdrew, his face still flushed but now bearing a look of triumph, albeit adulterated by some fear and perhaps, already, some regret.  Before he could spoil the effect of his attack, he glanced down at their mother, still sitting at the table, her own expression one of horror.  “I’ll be in the car,” he told her, with which he walked out of the house.

36.

When Maggie was a medical student, she had been on good terms with most of her year, but she had been particularly close to just three others – Heather Avery, Louisa Chase and Debbie Mitchell.  They had gravitated towards each other in the first year, being on the same dissection team in the anatomy laboratory; this meant that they dissected the same body of the course of the year, seeing it turned from an elderly man with large ears and a beaked nose, to an emptied, limbless torso (the chest, abdominal and pelvic organs  teased apart over many months, the legs and arms removed and cut open to show the musculature), that was then  cut into two lengthways.  In the third year they had moved into a house together; it had been a small but end of terrace house about a mile from the hospital.  The small garden had been overgrown when they had moved in, but within a month they had a useable space in which to have their first autumn barbecue, due mainly to the efforts of Maggie and Louisa.  Perhaps it had been then that they had grown particularly close.  Nothing sexual, just very devoted.  They had both had boyfriends, they had never once kissed, or touched one other.  They had just each found the other great company.

At the end of the fifth year, over Easter, Louisa’s parents had taken her skiing in Colorado.  It was a tense time, what with finals coming up in just two months, and the idea had been to give her a last break before the hard slog of revision and examination that would determine the rest of her life.  In the event, it was a tragic decision; after four days, she fell just after starting a black slope, colliding with a spruce tree and breaking her neck, dying instantly.  The shock of this news affected the whole year, but none more so than Maggie, who had been so shaken that she actually considered deferring her finals; only gentle persistence from her parents led her to change her mind.  In the event, the concentration required probably helped her through her bereavement.

Louisa’s funeral was the first that Maggie had attended.  It, too, was good for her, because it gave her some perspective on her grief, allowing her to see that she was not alone in her reaction; it was, though, simultaneously chastening to discover that in the hierarchy of grievers, she was low, perhaps not even on the roster.  She also appreciated for the first time that the funeral was not for the deceased but for the bereaved, just as a wedding was not for the bride and groom but for their families.

Now, at her father’s funeral, she was most definitely high within the hierarchy but it was an honour she discovered belatedly that she could have done without.  Her mother was talking to her – albeit in a slightly restrained manner that might or might not have been due to the circumstance – but David barely acknowledged her presence throughout the cremation and wake except to present the appropriate fictional face of a family united by grief; nor could she be bothered to make her own attempt at reconciliation and she reflected sourly that her father’s death had left her family just as dysfunctional as it had been during the latter years of his life.  She did not cry during the ceremony, although she saw her mother weep and tried not to think cynical thoughts; David held his face grave, but she thought that his expression was the kind that young people adopt when attending a Remembrance Day service, where they know to look solemn yet cannot stop looking detached.

She had left it to her brother to make all the arrangements, but now regretted that passivity.  Not that he had done a bad job, just that she now felt that she had owed to her father to show more interest.  She was almost exactly split down the middle by this reaction; neither her father nor, indeed, anyone else in the family had had much belief in anything more than a Church of England, middle-class, take-Me-or-leave-me kind of God, and she was too much of rationalist to imagine that he was now looking in from some other place and taking an interest in the disposal of his rotting earthly remains.  Yet, she was acutely and distressingly aware that the term ‘duty’ was something other and greater than a fear that an eternal being or the deceased might be a bit grumpy about their loved one’s lack of engagement.  She should have taken an equal share of the organisation of her father’s interment for herself at least, because a small piece of her that was her father and would always be so.

So she had to endure a functional service that she did not own, conscious that neither did her father.  The priest who read the encomium prior to the cremation did a good enough job from a technical, purely theatrical point of view – he didn’t fluff his lines or miss his cues, and he seemed to have a good grasp of scripture – but there was a perfunctory air as he described a man he had never met and talked in terms that suggested that they had been bosom buddies, one born of a long run on the stage.  She disagreed with the choice of hymns because she knew they were favourites of her mother, not her father, and the brief tribute by David was a short story about a man she could not for the life of her remember ever having met, and who she doubted had ever had corporeal existence.  It was with some difficulty that she kept her composure as her brother sorrowfully referred to his father’s ‘problems’ following the divorce (which he had already openly stated was due to ‘weakness of will’).  It was a perfect piece of subtextual aggression; character assassination by unspoken words.  She ought to have been angry – she tried to be angry – but it wouldn’t come.  She felt nothing towards his small, slightly effeminate figure with its flop of fine, sandy hair and perpetual (if faint) pout, as he massaged the aggrieved and grieving widow’s feelings and relieved the tension of his own conflicts whilst destroying whatever remained of the deceased’s reputation.

Afterwards, they assembled at her mother’s, about twenty in number, and ate the provender of a local catering company – sandwiches, canapés, small cakes, soft drinks, tea and coffee – and it was all very nice.  Her mother’s good taste was on prominent display as they assembled in the double-facing lounge, with the French windows opened on to the sunlit patio, so that the garden came into play; she had always prided herself on her eye for colour and design both within the house and without, and today was the perfect day to show it off to a disparate crowd.  The company allowed multiple hidden yet substantial divisors to dictate proceedings; those who were medical and those who were not; those who had inclined more towards her father’s side in the divorce and those who hadn’t; the ones who had worked with him, those who had known him socially.  Navigating the choppiness of the emotional ocean produced by these cross-currents left Maggie exhausted, something not helped by aggravation that three of David’s social circle had turned up and seemed (in her mind, at least) to disrupt the delicate balance of forces that streamed through the event. 

She circulated amongst the guests receiving their condolences, as did David and her mother, but inevitably they all favoured some over others.  There was a group of three she did not immediately recognise, although David didn’t seem to know them and she had the impression that her mother deliberately snubbed them.  They didn’t help themselves by standing self-consciously at the far side of the patio, only occasionally and briefly acknowledging eye contact, she noticed usually from her father’s ex-colleagues.   Eventually, the imperative of social convention forced her to approach them, the excuse being to offer them a choice of tea or coffee.  One was a tall woman with long black hair tied into a pony tail; she had hard eyes, Maggie thought, and a mouth with a firm set.  With her was a tubby man with a sour expression and hair that was unfortunate enough to be a wig; only the dandruff on the shoulders of his worn black suit suggested that he was not epilated.  The third of the group was also male but shockingly cadaverous; his suit seemed to be slipping away from him, as if flowing to the floor, and there were shadows around his eyes, while his bearing suggested to Maggie that he was holding something within himself, something that was hot and acid and angry.   She thought vaguely that he was familiar, but she could not immediately find a name for him.   On the short time it took to come across to them, a huge, ugly thought blossomed.  He’s dying.

Her job had brought into near daily contact with death for many years now, and often the death was a horrible one.  Not all bodies rested peacefully.  Those who had died of severe trauma were, not surprisingly, often left bodies that were difficult to bear; and those not discovered for some time and who were therefore well advanced in decay and insect-infested were difficult even for the trained pathologist to bear.  But decay, she knew, did not always wait until death.  It was by far from unknown for those who had succumbed to severe postoperative complications or severe sepsis, or who were undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, to live in bodies that had started the process of dissolution with indecent haste so that by the time they came for pathological opinion, they appeared well advanced in decay.  She well remembered her time as a very junior doctor on an oncology ward where there would often be patients who seemed uncannily like zombies, to be looking out at her from animated corpses with yellowed eyes; their flesh was waxen, greasy and cold, there was often a sharp, inhuman odour of putrefaction about them.  This was one such.

“Sam?” she asked before she had thought to frame the question, her surprise at placing his face overcoming her.  “Sam Fisher?”

37.

I think at first that she doesn’t recognise me. 

I’ve been to better funerals and perhaps I’ll even get to go to a few more.  I was surprised that Maggie didn’t take more part; there were times when she didn’t even seem to be taking much interest, which surprised me.  It struck me that the ceremony was her brother’s show although Eleanor, Neil’s widow, did her bit.  That was interesting because, to judge from what Neil told me on more than one occasion, Eleanor had wanted him to die (and preferably in the most painful manner possible) and David had almost completely severed contact with him.  Still, I’ve been to enough funerals to know that very few are ever tarnished by the truth.

I didn’t want to go back to Eleanor’s house for the wake, but Diane did and she’s giving me a lift, so along I came like the slightly disreputable family dog, one that is prone to unfortunate accidents, but is still loveable enough not to be put down.  The experience has been as excruciating as I expected.  Eleanor doesn’t know either Wally or Diane, and had never particularly taken to me; she has her own coterie to administer to and always seems to be busy doing something whenever one of us tries to catch her eye.  David and I have glanced at one another once and once only.  Since - perhaps with a sense of social awareness he must have grown since the last time I saw him - the Coroner himself declined to come (citing pressures of work), the only other people who know us well enough to offer acknowledgement that we exist at all are from the pathology department.  I’m too long gone from the world of work to know most of them, save for two of the pathologists and Gail, Neil’s secretary.  After a brief round of expressions of mutual sadness, we have drifted apart and the Coroner’s office contingent have been left therefore to talk amongst ourselves, which is awkward because Wally and Diane spend all day in the office together and, when it comes right down to it, neither of them can find that they have much to say to me, at least not much that we all feel comfortable with, what with my cancer and my grievance against the way I was retired. 

Maggie looks older – perhaps I should say, ‘more careworn’ – than I recall.  She’s never met either Diane or Wally so, when she finally comes across to us, I do the introductions.  Her attitude to Wally strikes me as interesting; not quite aggressive but clearly she feels a bit bruised by her previous encounters with him.  Wally’s a typical ex-copper – he has thick, insensate skin– and he’s got few social graces; his condolences reek of insincerity and he behaves as if he couldn’t give a toss what she thinks of him, which he can’t.  Diane – who is actually an ex-nurse – manages the empathy bit slightly better.  We decline more tea and coffee and then (after weakly indicating the food that has been laid out on a table just inside the French windows) Maggie makes an awkward exit.

Wally says, “She’s just as I imagined her.”  He sounds as if his imagination had conjured a right bitch.

“She’s a nice girl,” I argue.

“She seemed alright,” adds Diane in my support.

Wally is a few stone overweight and drinks too much; he should try my lifestyle.  He was always a martyr to acid indigestion, I remember, and this tended to make him short-tempered.  When he was a copper, he got a reputation and two unofficial warnings for and ‘overenthusiastic’ approach to making arrests.  He finishes his apple juice and makes a face that seems to imply he doesn’t much agree.  “She’s like all the fucking doctors we come across in our job.  She thinks she’s got rights.”

Diane points out, “She does.”

“Not special ones.”

“I don’t know.  Everyone seems to be getting more tricky to deal with these days.”  Diane muses.  “Look at the Jimmy Prescott case.”

“You getting grief on that one?” I ask.

“Tell me about it.”  She scowls.  “Bloody Prescotts.”

The Prescott family have a reputation in Hereford.  Every town or city has at least one such; a clan who eat a disproportionate amount of public resource such as welfare benefit, police time, and legal aid, who suck the life out of the place they live in, and who foul the social fabric.  There are three generations of them, sponging off the state and up to everything and anything that requires no work and that makes a profit, all of it illegal and a lot of it with violence.  When I was a proper copper, there wasn’t a week went by when the name of ‘Prescott’ wasn’t at least being mentioned, if not written down on a charge sheet.

“What’s the problem?  The paper said it was an accident,” I say.

She nods.  “Fell off a wall onto his head.  Served him right, too; the police think he’d just tried to do over Bernie Gough’s place.”

For the first time, the conversation becomes quite interesting to me.  Bernie Gough is a famous name from my past.  He’s only got one criminal conviction – and that for VAT evasion – but everyone knows he’s been using his building and decorating business as a front for money laundering and fencing of stolen goods for decades.  He’s got one advantage over most criminals – the likes of the Prescotts, for example – in that he’s got a few functioning  brain cells.  “Really?”  I say.

She nods.  “The wall was at the back of Bernie’s yard.”

“What about Bernie’s dogs?” I ask.

Bernie didn’t employ humans to patrol his yard, he used Rhodesian Ridgebacks; they’re the dogs that mummy Dobermans scare baby Dobermans with if they don’t say their prayers at night.  She explains, “The police think Jimmy had the bright idea of getting his mates to smuggle him into the yard during normal hours of business so that he could hide himself away amongst all the stuff that Bernie’s got there.”  Bernie Gough’s yard was about three acres in area and covered in piles of reclaimed building materials of all sorts – huge stacks of bricks, blocks and tiles, wooden beams of all sizes, cabling of all diameters, and pipes that went from copper central heating size up to main sewer size; there were a hundred places to hide. 

“What the fuck did he hope to achieve?”

“The theory is that his mates chucked a load of steak into the yard well away from Jimmy, which allowed Jimmy a clean run at the office and any cash or valuables that might be lying around.”

Wally laughs; it’s rarely a nice sound and this time it’s acrid.  “As if Bernie’s stupid enough to leave money lying around, even with those bastard wolves he’s got roaming the yard at night.”

“Jimmy didn’t get anything?”

“Nope,” replied Diane.  “And the police think he was probably only just ahead of the dogs when he scaled the wall, slipped and fell into the road outside.”

“Is Bernie in shit because of this?”

“There’s no proof of anything.  Bernie’s denying there was a break-in and Jimmy’s mates claim he was on the wall because he was drunk, which he was.”

“Jimmy was always drunk,” observes Wally.

“So why are the family giving you grief?”

“They say that Jimmy had a valuable watch on him that’s gone missing.”

“Like anyone believes them,” adds Wally, ever ready with the light quip.  “What’s a piece of pond life like Jimmy Prescott doing with a Rolex?”

Diane shrugs.  “That’s what they claim.”

“Even if he did have one – which I seriously doubt - it was almost certainly stolen.”  But all three of us are well aware that accusations such as this – true or not - mean a lot of hassle for a humble Coroner’s officer.  Wally continues his game of Top Trumps.  “At least they haven’t kept on about a second post mortem.”

“No...” agrees Diane.

“She did.”  He indicates Maggie.  “She reckons her Dad was killed.”

“She’s not the first,” I point out.

“But she wouldn’t leave it alone.  Just because she’s a pathologist, she reckoned she knew more than our guy did.  She even went to the Coroner himself.”

Which explains why Wally is so irritated.  Wally gets very defensive very quickly, and the thought of someone going over his head is not designed to keep him a contented Coroner’s officer.  I ask, “Did she get anywhere?”

“Of course not.”  Wally has quickly become calmer as he talks of his victory.  “Mr Roberts put her in her place.”

“Well, then...” I reply thoughtfully.

Diane says suddenly, “Come on, Sam, you look cold.  Time to get you back home.”

I realise that I am cold, despite the sunshine.  It frightens me, although I do as she says.  To quash my fear, I think about Maggie’s qualms about her father’s death, thinking that I, too, have had them.

38.

The house smelled of her memories of her father that night.  As soon as she had returned to there – and that as soon as convention would allow her to leave the wake – she had gone into his study; there, she had sipped a large brandy, feeling somnolent but all too aware that sleep was not to be hers that night.  She did not feel menaced by ghosts, but she was made restless by them; it was, though, the living that compounded her agitation and insomnia.  We shouldn’t waste any time in sorting out the estate, had been her brother’s valediction, an ominous one if ever there was one; the tone had been light, the face had been smiling, and yet the implication of the words had been worrying.  David, she knew too well, would treat it as an exercise in accounting, as much as for emotion as for money and, all the time, there  would be the misty, milky eminence grise of her mother ever present in the background.  Each item would be assessed in terms not only of monetary value but of sentimental weight and thereby used as an instrument with which to batter the memory of their father.  It would be not just hell, but an extenuated one and, she feared, in the course of descending through its seven levels, she would end up not just without a father but without a mother and brother too.

And, after that, would come the inquest.  She knew well that it was written in law that an inquest was ‘not a trial but an enquiry’ and that it was ‘not its purpose to apportion blame’.  She also knew well that although the Coroner did not specifically apportion culpability, witnesses often did in very voluble terms.  Her father’s drunkenness and infidelity would be mentioned and paraded, his character dissected with far more precision and avidity than Dr Appleton had used on the body.  Her mother would use the occasion – would need to use it – to justify her actions and opinions, to broadcast yet again the hideous treatment meted out to her by the deceased.  A verdict of suicide was not supposed to bring shame to the deceased, but she knew how often it did.  She could not allow that to happen, but how could she avoid it?

39.

DCI Sean Hooke’s desk was neat; his sergeant’s considerably less so.  That was the way of things.  His sergeant did the paperwork and hard graft, his boss the thinking and the worrying.  There was only one file on Hooke’s desk at the present, but it was a very interesting one.  Every morning, a digest of all ongoing investigations, as well as all new incidents, was circulated via email amongst senior officers in police headquarters in Croydon, South London.  This included all local incidents (for which there were hyperlinks giving all the information that was at present known, including any forensic reports, witness statements and names of any suspects), as well as (in less detail) ongoing investigations in neighbouring constabularies and beyond.  All of the entries bore the name of the Chief Investigating Officer and the contact details.  It was intended to make sure that everyone knew what everyone else was doing, to ensure that all information was pooled and that broad patterns of criminality within the area and beyond might be detected.  Sean Hooke’s motives for his close scrutiny of these daily documents were two-fold; to help him in those investigations he was undertaking, and to ensure that Jack Skinner was also well aware of what was going on.  Jack’s motives were also multiple; he wanted forewarning of when police activity was impinging on his own areas of activity, the better to evade incrimination; he wanted to know also when others were undertaking acts that he thought were his own territory, the better to ‘have a word with them’, and thereby ‘put them straight’ about the inadvisability of what they were doing.  Sometimes, he used the information that Chief Inspector Hooke passed to him to improve his position in what he described as ‘the game’, by which Hooke understood he meant an unholy amalgam legal and illegal business.

At the top of the list of newest incidents logged by Surrey Constabulary, Hooke read about the discovery of a body identified from fingerprint evidence to be that of Anthony Reginald Knight.  He had been found in the boot of his own car; the pathologist’s report was quite definite that the cause of death was a blow to the left side of his head that had fractured his left temporal, frontal and maxillary bones result in disruption of the left orbit with considerable traumatic injury to the left frontal lobe of the brain...

Sean stopped reading that paragraph.  He saw quite enough of such stuff from day to day without wading through such gruesome detail written by some over-educated ponce who wouldn’t have lasted two minutes on the front line.  Knight had a record; one conviction for assault – for which he had done a hundred days of community service and been bound over to keep the peace - although he had been tried and found not guilty on a further three occasions for crimes of violence, including one of grievous bodily harm.  All four charges had resulted from his work as a bouncer at The Pretty Flamingo in the centre of Croydon, one of five nightclubs owned by Jack Skinner, and that had been many years ago.  For the past thirteen years he had worked as mortician, first at University Hospital in Croydon, subsequently as a locum up and down the country.  Knight had stopped associating with Skinner just before Sean had begun his, and had never actually met the man.  Would this news be of interest to Jack Skinner?  

Every snippet of information he passed to Jack Skinner was another danger; every snippet he didn’t pass was potentially painful if Skinner considered that he had failed him.  He had to be so careful; nothing was passed electronically, only directly by word of mouth or, if it had to be written down, then as anonymously as possible.  If he had to print something off (such as this), then he would incorporate in the midst of a host of other items, so that a pattern would not be established.  Even so, every item of information he passed on exposed him; passing on useless items was just stupid. 

There was nothing to suggest that incident was anything other than a random act of violence, probably sparked by drink or drugs; an act born of almost certainly of Knight’s petty villainy.  He thought about what he should do for a long time; it was the memory of Kenny Gibbs that decided him.

40.

The doorbell rings, which it doesn’t do very often these days; it sounds tired at first but then picks up some vigour.  I think that, like me, it’s getting old but, unlike me, it’s go t a few years left in it.  The fucking thing will outlive me; that’s what I do now - I look at people and objects and compare their lifespan with mine.  With every day that passes, the list of things that will live beyond me grows ever more rapidly longer.

It takes me a while to get there; my arse is on fire because of the disgusting yellow shit that’s been coming out of it, and my mind bobs along lightly as if unattached to the ground, so that I feel at once giddy and groggy.  I’ve given up calling out to the odd visitor who happens to call, asking them to wait; if they’ve got better things to do, so be it and Gemma, the only important person left in my life, has a key.  This one is persistent, though; I don’t recognise the distorted image that is waiting outside.  It’s female, I think, and quite short; vaguely familiar.  I open the door having got my breath and find Maggie Carson; at first she looks nervous, almost ill, then surprised.   Something else I’ve given up doing is having my false teeth in except when I go out; they don’t fit very well anymore, which means I look like a right fucking prat every time I say something and, anyway, the mouth ulcers make it too fucking painful.  I suspect part of her reaction is because of that.   She smiles, but it is a tentative, timid thing, all a-flutter.  “Hello, Sam.”

We had hardly spoken yesterday.  She had looked pretty distracted and Wally had been none too friendly towards her.  I reply, “Maggie?  This is a surprise.”  Which it is.

“I’m sorry to bother you...  You’re not busy, are you?”

Bless her.  I stifle a sour laugh in the interests of civility and shake my hairless head.  “No,” is my assurance.

“Can I come in?” she asks, which is a surprise for me.  The idea that someone should want to call on me, and spend time with me, is ridiculously novel.

“Oh...  Of course, of course.”  I stand to one side and she steps in, wiping her shoes on the coconut mat.  “The first on the left.”

The door shut, I hurry after her into the front room where she is standing looking around.  “Sit down.”  I indicate the sofa.  “Tea?  Coffee?”

“I don’t want to put you to any trouble...”

“Rubbish.  No trouble at all.  What’ll it be?”

She smiles.  “Coffee, then.”

“Milk?  Sugar?”

“Just a splash of skimmed, please.”

When I come back with it, she is sitting primly on the sofa.  “Thanks for coming to Dad’s funeral.”

“No need for thanks,” I reply and I hear that maybe it is said too gruffly.   “He was a good friend to me, as well as a good colleague.”

“All the same, I appreciate it.  It can’t have been easy...”

She stops, embarrassed, which makes me angry.  “You’ve upset Wally.”

“Wally?”  She is momentarily nonplussed.  “Oh, Mr Haggit.”

“He said you’ve been a pain in the arse about your Dad’s death...”  She hasn’t touched her coffee.  I can see that she’s upset, although she’s tried to hide this with make-up - if anything, she looks even more tired and drawn than yesterday – and I stop my tongue before it cuts her even deeper.  Thank Christ she doesn’t cry or anything like that.

“Wally Haggit’s a lazy, good-for nothing jobsworth.”  When I say nothing to this announcement, she says, “I’m sorry.  He’s not a friend of yours, is he?”  She doesn’t sound sorry.

It’s made me think, though.  There would have been a time when I would easily – unthinkingly, perhaps – used the term ‘friend’ to describe Wally, but now I am not sure.  Now, I have a different perspective on things like that, and from the place I now occupy, I have say to that I have serious doubts about my relationship to Walter Menzies Haggit, as I doubt my relationship with quite a few other people.  The decline from life tends to change the way the light reflects off things around me; sometimes these new perspectives are shocking, most times they’re just depressing.  I reply at last, “Not really, no.”

She nods.  “I know from what my father said about you that you wouldn’t have been so obstructive.”

She hasn’t even looked at the coffee; can’t really blame her, though.  A wave of light-headedness passes through me as if I am already a ghost.  “Do you know how many times a Coroner’s officer is told by the family of the deceased that it was really murder, that the pathologist, or the police, or the ambulance, or the social services got it wrong?”

She is taken aback, I see.  I continue, “I should think it happens about once a week.”  She is about to speak but, as old and sick as I am, I get there first.  “And do you know how many of them are right?”

“Hardly any,” she guesses with something of a sigh.

“That’s right.  In fact, I don’t think I ever came across such an example of it in my entire career.”

A shake of her head; it is a resolute gesture.  “It’s happened this time.”

“Wally’s good at his job.”

This time, she pauses before responding, as if gathering her thoughts.  “In my practice, I probably get to see ten cases of leukaemia a year.”  There’s not a lot I can say to that but it turns out she doesn’t want a helping hand.  “By the time they get to me, of course, it’s easier, what with the number of medical staff who’ve talked to them and examined them, and all the tests they’ve been through.  They’ve been given the label of ‘leukaemia’ a long time ago.  When I do the autopsy, I’m usually trying to find out which effect of the disease killed them.”

My mouth is dry, which is bad because it makes the ulcers worse, so I sip some whisky; they’ve told me not to drink alcohol, but I’m sometimes inclined to think they’re a bunch of self-righteous pricks.  “What’s your point, Maggie?” I asked bemusedly.

At last she sips her coffee.  “The first person they see is they’re GP, of course.  Do you know how many cases of leukaemia the average GP sees in a year?”  I shake my head; of course I fucking don’t.  “The average family doctor will only see five new presentations of leukaemia in their entire professional life.  They’ll be randomly scattered among the three thousand patients that they see each year, so spotting them requires a good deal of clinical acumen.”

“They’re well paid.”

“The problem’s even worse when you consider that leukaemia usually presents with everyday symptoms such as a cold or urine infection, or perhaps tiredness or nosebleeds, and maybe double vision or a funny, itchy rash on the hands.  Just the kind of trivial thing that clogs up a GP’s waiting room.”

I can see what she was trying to say; it isn’t hard, considering she’s ramming it home with a jackhammer.  “Easy to miss, then.”

“It’s astonishing that they ever make the diagnosis at all.”

I can see that she has experience of giving evidence in court in the way she uses words.  I say, “I liked your Dad.  He wasn’t hung up on his position and his learning, which isn’t always the case.”  A grimace told me that she knew what I was talking about.  “He was drinking a lot, though, towards the end.”

Maybe I should just have smacked her across the face; certainly it would have had the same effect.  It took her a moment to locate an answer and, when it came, it was complete with strained, emotional top dressing.  “He liked a drink,” she allowed.

“Too much,” I insisted and, just to show what a nasty cunt this disease has made me, I take a swig of delicious whisky.  Why am I being so horrible to her?

“So you believe it, too, do you?  That he got so completely shit-faced that he fell into the river?”

It is my turn to be taken aback by her use of language.  That, and the way she puts it, reawakens my qualms about the affair.  I am conscious of a not inconsiderable degree of irony and – let’s be honest, now – hypocrisy as I drain the whisky glass.  It gives me time to ponder matters.  “Not altogether,” I concede.

Her delight at this hint immediately takes flight; it is a joyous, beautiful thing and just begging to be shot down by a bad-tempered old git.  “That’s a long way from believing fairy stories about murder, though.”  It seems I missed, that I didn’t kill the bird, merely clipped its wing; she is still strangely elated as I go on, “A lot of people die in odd circumstances; a fuck of a lot more than are done in by someone else.  A surprising number lose their lives in stupid ways; even the bright ones like your dad.  Anyone can be an imbecile for a second, and that’s all it takes, Maggie.”

“I know that.”

“We might not know the exact circumstances, but we do have the post mortem evidence that there was no one else involved.”

“What about Tony Knight?  Doesn’t that change things?”

Tony Knight?  I know that name, but not why I know it.  Cautiously, I ask, “What do you mean?”

“He’s dead; murdered, in fact.” 

But the name remains elusive.  “And..?”

“He was the mortuary technician who worked with my father the week before he died.”

Tony Knight?

That Tony Knight?

Oh, shit...

But she hasn’t finished.  “There’s something else,” she says, and suddenly she is almost shy, it seems to me.  I am distracted by memories of Tony Knight, though; lost in memories and associations. 

“What’s that?” I ask, but I’m not listening.

She picks up the coffee cup, looks at it, puts it back down, still refusing to take a sip, then adopts an expression that suggests she’s about to cry.  Then she looks suddenly across to me – directly into my watery eyes – and says distinctly, “I have evidence of trauma to the body.”

When I look up her, I think that there is some vacancy in my eyes, but her next words soon chase that away.  She admits, “You see, I’ve done a second post mortem on him.”

41.

Jack Skinner received information from divers sources and by complex, continually changing routes.  This was to protect the identity of his sources from those who might pry – he was well aware that the quickest way to detection (be it in the natural or the criminal world) was to behave in a predictable way, to fall into a pattern, and he was studious in ensuring that he did not do this.  Thus his informants were enjoined to memorise their information rather than write anything down whenever possible (he was well aware that this was not always advice that was followed), and pass it on by word of mouth; they were only ever contacted indirectly, usually through at least two intermediaries who then uploaded the information via a website that automatically encrypted it and sent it to him at an email address that was used for one week and one week only before being discarded; he had a new tablet PC every week, as well.  Only he had the ability to decipher the information it downloaded.

He did not consider this unnecessarily over-complicated.  It was a system that he himself had devised with the help of one of the world’s leading computer security companies, and one that he was constantly revising.  Protecting his sources meant also that he was protected; the option of terminating a source was, of course, always there, but such an action would mean that he would have to come out of hiding, potentially exposing him, and he preferred to do such things only when necessary...

...Or when it gave him particular pleasure.

The termination of his wife and her lover would give him such a lot of pleasure...

He abruptly returned to his reading, aware that to lapse like that was uncharacteristic.  The pain in his kidneys had returned, albeit only a throbbing beat at the base of his consciousness, and it was distracting him.  He sipped orange juice and turned again to the document on his tablet.  Most of it was uninteresting, but one item momentarily caught his attention.  Tony Knight had been murdered.

His memories of Tony Knight were clear, as they were of all his acquaintances and all those who had worked for him.  A short, ugly man with a willing temperament and little intelligence; such men were ever useful to Jack Skinner.  The trick was to give them tight, clear instructions, a sense of purpose, and a sense of belonging; such men wanted without knowing it to be members – not leaders – of the pack; he spoke to their atavistic desires with stealthy, mellifluous words; they craved guidance and without direction were not only useless but dangerous.  With it, though, they were the perfect tools.

Yet loyalty through adoration was not enough.  Another important component of Jack Skinner’s success was to understand that allegiance was born not just of desire but also of fear.  He and his clan were blood brothers, bound together by the atrocities they had seen and not stopped, the slaughter they had done at least once, the audacity of the pain they had brought into being.  Tony Knight had done his fair share of bad things for Jack, and done them willingly.  He had, Jack recalled, fallen for one of the constellation of young girls who, in those early balmy days, had drifted around, the time before Jack had consolidated the relationships around him, strengthened his armours and retreated to play the world at an arm’s length and more.  He couldn’t recall why he had allowed Tony to leave (and the lapse in memory worried him more than it should have, and he wondered why, trying to recall if the doctor had mentioned such symptom) but he was sure that he would have been satisfied that, in doing so, Tony was not a risk to him.  Tony, he remembered, was pathetically loyal to him; the girl – ‘Bridget’, he thought (had she been a prostitute, or a dancer) – knew little of substance.  In those days, if he felt that someone could be trusted he would allow them to go, providing their future careers did not impinge on his own activities; now, such a laissez faire attitude was beyond him.  It was the uncertainty of age, he supposed.

A blood clot.  That’s what a memory lapse might indicate.

The realisation of why the uncharacteristic memory lapse had worried him was sudden and distracting, intruding rudely upon his reminiscence.  Perhaps time was shorter than he had hitherto appreciated...

Who had Tony Knight angered?

The last Jack had heard, he had gone into mortuary work; had Knight ever, Jack wondered, appreciated that particular irony?  It was doubtful; his recollection of Tony Knight suggested that the pugnacious little man would be incapable of appreciating anything less than the heaviest of sarcasm.  Probably, though, he had continued petty criminality at a level too low to interest Jack Skinner yet, presumably, at a level high enough to provoke someone to murder.  The report claimed no evidence as to a likely perpetrator, but did suggest Tony Knight had had a small internet trade in sundry items of uncertain provenance. 

What did you steal, Tony?  Who did you upset? he mused idly.

It was of no immediate account to him but, as with all such occurrences, he noted it, just in case.  Doubtless, the name of Jack Skinner would come up in the course of the investigation, and the police would want to talk to him; this prospect did not darken his day, would not have done so had he actually had anything to do with Knight’s death.  He wondered if Sean Hooke would be tasked with the interview; that would be mildly amusing, to him if not to Sean.  Hooke’s going to shit bricks if that happens.

42.

Maggie walked back to her car, her mind a giddy calliope of regret, fear, shame and incredulity.  Had she really just confessed her crime to this man?  Her previous hopes of finding help from her father’s old friend was now patently absurd.  As she walked away from his house, she saw him not just as a stranger but as a potential enemy.  She had naively assumed that because he had been a friend of her father, he would be eager to be her ally, but his reaction had shaken that conviction.  He had been shocked by her admission and far from convinced that she had uncovered anything suspicious.  In any case, she suddenly appreciated, what had she thought he would be able to do?  She should have realised when she had seen him yesterday at the funeral and wake that he was beyond giving her aid.  He was a husk of a man, his flesh seemingly permeated by the cancer that dwelt inside him; waxen, pungent and sour, both in spirit and flesh.  He had peered at her with sunken eyes from a death’s head that was little more than skin covering a skull filled, it seemed to her, with nothing but resentment.  Yet she could not blame him.  There had been an air of abandonment about him yesterday, even when he was with his former colleagues, and in his own home this was only magnified.  His problems were infinitely greater to him than were hers.  She had not until just now appreciated just how close to death he was.

What, then, was left open for her to do?

The answer was not long in coming.  As she drove away from the house, down a road that was lined on both sides with cars and subsequently only just wide enough, she heard too stridently within her head just two words. 

Give up.

She tried to hide it, but I could see on her face that she felt revulsion when she first saw me.  Or perhaps it was when she first smelt me.  I’ve seen that look too many times before; they always think they’re being considerate and smart in hiding their reaction to an odour that is unique to cancer’s death, that is composed of decay, sweat and despair; but you quickly learn to catch that expression, however fleet it is, however suddenly it smugly and patronisingly hides itself away.  I thought at first that she had come to reminisce about her father; then I thought that perhaps her visit came out of misplaced pity.  God, how wrong I was!

At first, I thought that she was joking about autopsying her own father, though it would have been the sickest of jolly japes.  Then I thought that she was perhaps delusional, forced that way by grief.  I’ve seen a lot of grieving and grievers in my time.  It gets people in different ways, and ways that you can’t predict.  The commonest is anger; often it’s at the doctors or nurses and, not infrequently, it’s well deserved.  Coroner’s officers get to see a lot of medical incompetence, a fair amount of negligence, and a whole stinking heap of ignorance, all disguised by pomposity.  Usually, though, anger is just a bloom of emotion that’s rooted in regret or shame, in past arguments or previous slights; suddenly someone is dead and the bereaved are astonished to discover that there’s a lot of business that will remain forever unfinished. 

Some go loopy, though.  I remember one case – ironically, Maggie’s dad was involved – in which this old bloke died but his widow refused to accept it.  She kept on at the police, telling them he’d been kidnapped, even though she’d been the one to discover the body in the garage, and had been there when the doctor had certified life extinct.  Maggie’s dad had done the post mortem and given a cause of death as heart disease, but the widow had turned up for a viewing at the chapel in mortuary and claimed that the body wasn’t her husband’s, that it was an actor lying there.  Eventually, her general practitioner had been called and she’d agreed to go home, but only after two hours.  She kept on, even then.  She used to write letters to us, to the police, to the local radio station, always claiming that her husband was still alive; sometimes he’d been taken by the KGB, sometimes by terrorists, sometimes I recall by aliens.  Only her own death ended the campaign.

Maggie must have gone down her own particular path of loopiness.  Either she’d really gone and taken a knife to her own father’s body, or she only thought she had; either way she’d lost a few sandwiches on the way to the picnic.  She couldn’t have really done it, could she..?    

Jesus H Christ...

How sick would you have to be to do that? 

Either way, she needs help.

My stomach is roiling.  Perhaps it’s just coincidence, but I can’t help feeling it’s at least in disgust at what I’ve just heard.  I am back in the sitting room and sipping whisky, hoping that the morphine will settle it.  The alcohol stings my sore gums, but its vaporous caress is somehow pleasing. I ought to tell someone.  After all, that young woman is potentially dangerous, if only to herself.  Duty of care and all that shit.  But who?  I can’t quite bring myself to try to contact her mother; I never really got on with her and I know that Neil didn’t, at least not in his later years.  And as for that smarmy brother of hers...  I feel even less inclined to talk to him, not after that unctuous performance yesterday at the funeral.  It would seem somehow disloyal to Neil...

...And to Maggie?

That’s a queer thought.  Why should I feel loyalty to her, after what she’s just told me she’s done (or perhaps imagined that she’s done)?   Yet I, too, have had my doubts about Neil’s death.  I might have confided more in her, had she not dumbfounded me with her announcement.  This sudden realisation makes me feel almost giddy and, almost at once, my certainties are liquid.

A cracked rib and a hairline fracture of the skull.

These were at heart her smoking gun, the new evidence that hinted (certainly no more) that the death might be more than drunken misadventure.  It wasn’t particularly damning, though.  Taken individually, each might be easily explained away as accident; even taken together, they were hardly sufficient grounds on which to hang a man.

Even so...

And yet the only certain conclusion to be drawn from all her other findings was that the first post mortem examination hadn’t been done very well.  Welcome to my world, Dr Maggie Carson. 

I quickly discovered when I became a Coroner’s officer that a lot of pathology reports are little short of fiction, and that a lot of clinical doctors – ‘proper doctors’ as I’ve come to call them – think so, too.  There’s usually no one to check up, you see?  Pathologists do their stuff, stuck away in a mortuary where no one else normally goes, and then come up with a cause of death that no one’s going to question; the body is then stuck six feet under into the ground, or incinerated, and everyone moves on with their lives.  Few people read the report and those that do usually only see a list of jargon terms.  On quite a few occasions, I’ve had general practitioners or other doctors ring me up because they’re incredulous at what’s been written, as if I’m somehow responsible for the rubbish that’s in the report.  Sometimes, I’ve wondered if they’ve even bothered to open the body up at all, let alone dissect the organs and think about what they’ve found.  It must be bloody tempting, I’ll own.  After all, if no one’s going to check up on you, why bother to spend your time hacking around in blood and shit, slicing up brains and weighing livers?  Most people who come to post mortem examination die of heart disease, so why not make an educated guess and put that down?  You can occasionally write the death off as due to a blood clot on the lungs, or liver disease, or pneumonia, just so that it’s not too obvious what you’re doing (or not doing), then carrying on pocketing the cheques.

It’s only when things go consummately shit-shaped that anyone takes a closer look at what the pathologist has said, like when someone confesses to the murder, and they have to dig the body up to discover the knife wound in the back; or (it has been found not infrequently) the skull fracture.  Harold Shipman knew that, being a general practitioner.  He was well aware that even the deaths that he wasn’t able to write off on his own would go to some pathologist who would probably only do half a job, not check for opiates in the blood, and sign it out as ‘cardiac failure’.  I know lot about morphine, you see.

Neil Carson was always a drinker but never, I think, an alcoholic.  I know, though, how easy it is to slip from one to the other.  I’m an alcoholic now, but I like to think that’s because my grip on life is being loosened, finger by finger, by the cancer in my belly; we all need to cling on to something, and a boozy death strikes me as the next best thing to a sober life.  Especially when the booze is laced with morphine.

So who should I call?

43.

“Are you alright, Bee?”

The words didn’t evoke an appreciable reaction, so the man reached out and put his hand on her arm; when that didn’t have an effect, he grasped it and shook it gently.  “Bee?”

Awareness came into Bridget Knight’s face and her mouth closed as she looked at it him.  “Oh...I’m sorry, Kev.  I was miles away.”

“You can say that again.”  Kev would have been smartly dressed had his suit not been smooth and shiny at the seat, his shirt not grubby and frayed at the collar and cuffs, his tie not peculiarly stained.  His full facial hair – originally a lustrous black but, after several decades of clinging on to the front of Kev’s slightly overlarge head, now rapidly declining into grey - was unkempt and tangled.  “Do you want another one?”

She briefly examined the inside of her empty glass and then held it up for him to take.  “Please.”

The public bar of The Oak was, as ever, uncrowded and he was back with a fresh pint of cider inside five minutes.  She took the glass from him, placed herself outside a large gulp of its contents, and only then proffered thanks as he sat beside her.  The room was gloomy and bare; it was a pub for drinking in and, like its patrons, it was serious about it.  The upholstery had been abused over the many years of its career, so that sitting down in The Oak was not something that the faint of heart would have done with any ease; indeed, the whole atmosphere of the place was not conducive to conviviality, and especially so towards strangers; only people who had imbibed there for many years tended to pass through its slightly battered doors.

“How you doing, Bee?”  Kev had been Croydon Hospital with a bout of pancreatitis since before the shocking news of Tony’s murder, and it was the first time they had met.  In truth, he had not travelled far, for the hospital in question lurked on the opposite side of the road to where they now sat.

She considered.  “Not good,” she at last admitted, and she sounded as if she were close to tears that would not, for reasons of their own, come.

Her candour brought an uncomfortable silence from him for a moment.  His words – “I’m sorry about that” – were heartfelt, though.  In latter years, he had been Tony’s closest friend.  “I miss him, too.”

She smiled briefly and they both took a swallow of drink.  He said, “I can’t understand it.”

Neither could she.  She had known well that Tony had been forever teetering on the edge of the chasm that was a return to criminality; she had been very aware when she had first met him that his job working for Jack Skinner, although glamorous, had been shot through with streaks of villainy (and some of it, she was sure, very nasty villainy).  Even though he had moved away from that life into one of superficial honesty, he had always had a talent for misdemeanours in one form or another.  She genuinely did not know why his head been bashed in, although the police did not entirely believe her in this, as in many other matters.  They had questioned her persistently about Jack Skinner but, as far as she knew, Tony had had nothing to do with him for many years.  They had analysed his computer and discovered that Tony was in the habit of selling small articles – mostly items of jewellery.  What, they had asked, did she know about that?  Nothing, had been her reply, which was sort of true.  Where did he get these things that he was selling?  Since she didn’t know that he was selling them, she could hardly be expected to know where they came from.  Could they be stolen from corpses in the course of his work?  She said that she didn’t know about that, but they had not looked convinced.

“No,” she replied.  “Neither can I.”

“He was a bloody good bloke, was Tony.”  There had been times when Bridget Knight had wished she had never met Tony, when she had wished him in hell, but now all she could think about was how she desperately missed him and how desolate she now was without him.  Kev opined, “He was a grafter.”  This opinion was offered with a fond smile and the consumption of some more cider.  He had been unemployed for all the time she had known him – getting on for ten years, she thought – so he didn’t appear to follow that particular dictum himself.  He continued, “Chasing work all over the country like that.”

She was drinking again, which lead to a delay before her reply. “Yes.”

Kev said conversationally in a happy, reminiscent tone, “He was on good form last time I saw him.”

“Was he?”

“Oh, yeah.  He was talking about coming into some money pretty soon.” 

He stopped quite suddenly, as if to consider.  She might have taken more notice, but she was thinking all the time how Tony had just disappeared, and he had never done that before.  They had had plenty of arguments – and some of them had been toecap to toecap slanging matches - but two things he had never done were to hit her or to walk out on her; she might never had told him – she might never have told herself – but she respected him for that.  Still, they had been rowing a lot more lately, and it wasn’t all his fault; she was nowadays so desperately tired, and her legs ached so much.  And the last time she had seen him, there had been an argument, and a good one, too; a straight down the middle, dig-down-to-the-bottom-of-the-arsenal, yelling feast in which she had accused him (not for the first time) of a being ‘a lazy, good for nothing, stupid twat’ and he had been reduced to calling her just a ‘cunt of a cow’ (which was his favoured pet-name for her).  And then the phone had rung and he had picked it up and his whole demeanour had changed; suddenly he was no longer angry and upset, but triumphant and assured in a way she hadn’t seen for a long time.  She had watched as this strange metamorphosis had come over him and, even then, she had been afraid, although she couldn’t have then said why.  The police had traced the call to a public phone in Victoria Station, but there the lead had faded.

Kev liked to think that his intellect spent its time on a remote pinnacle, although it was one that was so high it was apparently starved of oxygen and therefore semi-comatose; every once in every while, some passing thought or occurrence would flit past it and, unsettled, it would begin to roll; its motion would be slow at first but it had a sort of unstoppable disdain, like an avalanche.  It travelled on and on, stopping only when it met an immoveable object.  He said brightly, “He gave me something!”  She didn’t follow.  “He asked me to keep it safe for him,” he explained. 

“What?  What did he give you?”

“Just an envelope.”  He was defensive.

She knew that this was important, although she couldn’t have said why.  “Where is it?  Have you got it?”

But he didn’t.  “It’s at the digs.”  And then, in case she should think otherwise, he added, “I haven’t opened it.”

Her curiosity twitched.  “He just gave it to you?  What did he say?”

Kev’s recollection was now mushrooming.  “That I shouldn’t tell anyone but you about it.  He called it an insurance policy for you.”

Tony had refused to tell her who that final call had been from, or what it had been about, (although she suspected the police thought otherwise) but she had heard enough to surmise wonder now if didn’t connect with this talk of Kev’s about insurance policies.  Tony had been obsessed with schemes designed to make large amounts of money; most of the time they were the schemes of others, some of the time they were his own; it didn’t matter, because the expected fortune never materialised, except in the guise of ill-fortune.  The best outcome had usually been when he only lost a little money; the worst she knew about was that he had lost a lot of it, or his job (as in the case of forging cremation documents).  She had been wondering if his death had been a consequence of one these, and Kev’s information seemed to confirm this speculation.

She didn’t have to think much about her next question.  “Can we go and get it now?”

44.

“Jack?  Are you alright?”

He was sitting on the side of the bed, his broad back to her, his head bent down so that his chin rested on his chest; he was very still and seemed to her almost to be paralysed.  This impression was strengthened by the long pause before he responded; when he did so, it was abrupt, as if he were breaking free from bonds, and it was in the form of a deep breath.  She said, “What’s wrong?”

He turned around and he was, of course, smiling.  In all the years she had worked for him, she had rarely seen him without that upwards curve of the lips.  “Nothing.”  His voice was not reassuring, merely informational; she was being told not pursue the matter.  He stood up, easy in his nakedness before her, and walked to the en suite bathroom, closing the door behind him.  While he was gone she lay back in the bed.  These episodes were becoming more frequent and more intense and they would not, she knew, abate.  He was ill, that much was clear; she wanted to help him but she knew also that to push things with him would be useless, even for her.  Jack Skinner was not beholden to anyone and even those he loved were not necessarily given the privilege of his acquiescence in anything; those who were allowed to live with him might hold a degree of immunity from the harm that he sometimes had to do in the course of his life, but they didn’t hold even the weakest of holds over him.  It was the price she willingly paid for a place in his bed and a life of enviable opulence.

Yet she was not stupid.  She had been there when the doctor had first called – Jack Skinner did not ‘go to the doctor’, the doctor came unto him - although she had been dismissed and had not been there during the consultation.  That had been after the third such attack; they were nothing dramatic, just a moment or two in which Jack would suddenly stop and stare, as if receiving hidden communications or as if he were seeing something invisible to all others, but she sensed that they were troubling him.  She had asked casually that evening if anything were wrong but he had told her nothing.  He had not done so in a voice that betrayed anything other than unconcern, yet the attacks were becoming not only more common, but also she could see somehow more deep-seated, despite his controlled expression. 

She wanted desperately to do something for him, but didn’t know what.

He came back into the bedroom and climbed back into the bed.  “I’m hungry,” he said; it was their private code.

As she lay back, her legs open and her arms stretched down by her sides, she reflected that of late he had become more voracious and more energetic in bed; perhaps it was her imagination but she had a feeling that it wasn’t.  It was the only side to his character and behaviour in which she thought that perhaps she could detect something other than assurance and self-confidence, for she was certain that she could see beneath the veneer something in his lovemaking that whispered of desperation.

45.

The West Mercia Coroner’s offices were at the back of the fire station in Commercial Road, Hereford, on the top floor, with a view of the dustbins and the petrol filling station garage next door.  The accommodation consisted of a general office, an office for the Coroner (although he only occupied it for at most an hour a day tending to do most of his work in his private office in the city centre) and an interview room; it was cramped and had needed redecoration for the past ten years.  There was a smell of musty dampness that intensified when it rained, and they were placed at the end of the hot water run so that the radiators rarely radiated anything much more than a rather weary warmth; in the summer, the predominant odour was one of Wally’s feet if the windows were closed, baking garbage if they were open.

Diane put the phone back on its base after yet more verbal sparring with the Prescotts’ solicitor, and said quite distinctly to the empty room, “Fucking bastard.”

Such unladylike language was no longer unusual.  First Sam Fisher and then Wally Haggit (who was at present in court) had schooled her relentlessly and with unintentional enthusiasm over the years.  It helped, though, to make her feel a small bit better when she came across grade A arseholes like the Prescotts’ solicitor.  She was well used to solicitors and generally got on well with them, but this one – Archie Phillips of Phillips, Philips and Nephew – was something else.  From what she had gleaned from her colleagues in the constabulary, he was well known to them as a difficult customer, and she was realising what they meant.

It had all started the day after Jimmy Prescott’s plunge from the wall.  Preliminary police investigations had established no direct connection between Bernie Gough and the death; Bernie had denied any evidence of a break-in at this yard and they had found none.  There had been no marks on the body – the odd bite wound might have been a tad suspicious but they hadn’t even found saliva – and (ever mindful of the public purse) the police had been happy to forego a full, forensic post mortem for the ease (and cheapness) of a standard Coronial autopsy.  Perhaps someone less experienced and less weary of the world than Neil Carson might have baulked, but he had been happy to comply; the Prescotts, through Archie, had made their displeasure known but had been unable to prevent this.  Neil Carson had duly found that death was due to the effects of the fall and a very high level of alcohol in both blood and urine, with no evidence of third party involvement.

Having lost that skirmish, Archie then moved on to the infamous Rolex.  Where was it?  It had been a gift from Jimmy’s now deceased grandfather.  Yes, it was genuine.  Why was it in his pocket and not on his wrist?  Because he had kept it in a special leather pouch to protect it – it was very valuable, apparently...

What a load of cock.

But, cock or not, Diane was bound by duty to investigate the matter.

The undertakers who had removed the body to the mortuary had no recollection of a watch, either on the wrist or in a pocket.  Neil Carson – even had he not been dead – would have been unlikely to have been much use in this respect, as pathologists were not concerned in the tallying of the deceased’s possessions; that was down to the mortuary technician, and that week – the last that Neil Carson had been alive – there had been a locum called Tony Knight working.  He had gone and got himself murdered, though, which was inconvenient and rather selfish.  She had rung the chief investigating officer in the Surrey Constabulary to ask if a Rolex watch was among Tony Knight’s possessions and been told ‘no’.  She hadn’t been surprised but, inadvertently, she had started a hare running.  Perhaps, the voice on the other end of the phone (Detective Chief Inspector George) had suggested, it was the reason he had been murdered; he was known to have done a trade in various knick-knacks that his widow Bridget denied knowing anything about, and the theory was that he sourcing some of these from dead bodies.  A Rolex was, admittedly, far more valuable than most of the gee-gaws Tony Knight had usually traded in, but it would have been motive aplenty for murder.

Somewhat alarmed by his enthusiasm, Diane had attempted to retreat from a position of exposure.  There was no evidence that a Rolex had ever existed, she pointed out.  DCI George, though, was already checking Tony Knight’s eBay account to see if it had been offered for sale; his disappointment when he could find no trace was almost palpable. 

“Could you write to my boss confirming that you’ve uncovered no trace of a Rolex watch in the course of your investigations?”  Diane asked.  Of course, he had replied, and she was not to know that  DCI George  had plenty to do already and had no intention of getting around to it any time soon.

Archie Phillips was unsatisfied, though, and had spent the last fifteen minutes detailing the avenues of legal recourse that were open to him, including suing the Coroner and his officers.  Diane’s jaw was now rigid, her neck muscles tetanic with the effort of self-restraint.  Feeling she had done all she could with the problem, though, Diane turned her thoughts to eating.  Wally would be having lunch in the backrooms of the magistrates’ courts, not that that caused her much sorrow, as Wally too was being a bit of cunt at the moment.  When she had idly mentioned the death of Tony Knight to him, and then said (half in jest) that maybe there really was a murderer loose, one who had killed both Knight and Dr Neil Carson, he had exploded and aggressively demanded, “Are you trying to wind me up?”

This was typical of Wally.  He was always on the lookout for individuals who had it as their aim in life to irritate him, and he had remarkable success in finding them.  She had been hurt by his reaction and there had followed a blazing row terminated only by the arrival of their boss, Mr Isaac Robert, Coroner for the district of West Mercia.  At the present time, they were speaking only in childishly formal terms.

Although she generally brought in or some sort of salad in an air-tight contained, Martin, her husband of seventeen years and two miscarriages, was away in North Wales with his angling cronies; at present, Diane’s mornings were therefore taken up with caring for her four English cocker spaniels, with no time for breakfast, let alone lunch.  She would treat herself to a bite to eat from Marks and Spencer, she thought.  The phone rang again and she was at once struck with the idea that it might be Archie Phillips again (he called at least three times a day); the corollary of this thought was to escape the office at once, but her sense of duty forced her to reach out and pick up the handset.  “West Mercia Coroner’s Office.  Diane Lyell speaking.”

It was with modified rapture that she heard Sam Fisher reply, “Hello, Diane.  It’s Sam.”

“Sam!” she said, with slightly overmuch delight born of relief.  “Are you alright?”

“Yes, of course.”  His voice was vaguely affronted.  “I need a favour, Diane.”

46.

“What kind of favour?”

Diane’s voice is wary.  I can’t blame her I suppose, although I would hope that she knows me well enough to appreciate that I wouldn’t ask her for anything too outrageous.  I reply, “Neil Carson’s death...”

“Wally’s in court,” she interrupts, rather abruptly I think.

I’ve already checked on that, otherwise I wouldn’t be phoning at this particular time.  I say, “Oh, well perhaps you can help me, instead.”

She moves from wary to cagey.  “What are you after, Sam?”

“As you know, Neil was a good friend of mine...of all of us, really.”

“Well...” she demurs.

“I’d just like to be absolutely certain that there’s nothing funny about his death.  Call it a sixth sense, Diane but, whatever Wally says, I just wonder...”  I sip some whisky, ingest a tad more morphine.  Whoever said that opiates were anything but a gift from the gods?  “I’m sorry if I’m a nuisance.”

Had things been different, I think I might have made it with Diane.  She’s a big blonde, but she’s got the curves and the nurse’s view of life, the one that knows that life is going to be shitty at some stage, so why not enjoy yourself?  She’s got a prat of a husband, too; one of those dickheads who thinks that the marriage ceremony is the end of the hunt.  I never had the time to consolidate these yearnings, though.

I hear a sigh, but can’t tell if it’s one of exasperation or commiseration.  “As it’s Wally’s case, I haven’t been through the statements in detail, Sam.”

“I realise that, Diane.”  A racking cough interrupts me; my chest has been sore all morning.  “Does the name Tony Knight mean anything to you, Diane?”  I hear from her silence that it does.  “He was the technician who worked with Neil Carson just before he died.”

“I know.”

“I’ve heard he’s just been murdered.  Is that true?”

“So we understand, Sam.”  Her pauses are getting longer, I think.

“Is there any possibility that the two deaths are connected?”

No pause this time.  “Wally says, ‘no’.” 

I sense something in her words – or perhaps between them – that leads me to ask, “What do you say?”

In the end, Diane was very helpful to me.  I got the impression that she and Wally weren’t on the best of terms; maybe they’d even had a row, although she didn’t say so for certain.  I promised her that I would be very discrete.  I think that Diane thought I was quite mad by the end of the telephone conversation and I suppose I could be described as slightly deranged.  Being terminal, I have an excuse, though; she gave me far more information than she might otherwise have done, I think.  Mind you, I wish to a God that (depending on the state of my guts or gums, I either hate or don’t believe in) that we hadn’t been having that particular conversation.

Tony Knight.

It’s not an uncommon name, but it had to be the Tony Knight from my past, because the one I knew had become some sort of mortician, and had lived in South London, just like the one now dead, and that makes the odds that they’re not one and the same astronomical.  Not that I ever met him, but his name brought with it all sorts of associations, all sorts of rancid memories that had always been there, pulsing and slug like, that I had managed to seal off under a putrid crust.  Back then, he had been hired meat, not required to think, only to act and usually to do so violently.  He had worked for Jack Skinner, and that was a name I had hoped never to have to encounter again.

So Knight was beaten to death, but not in any old way; to all appearances, it was not an act done without something approaching gusto, if not positive enjoyment.  Exactly the way that Jack Skinner sometimes used to approach the act of killing.  For Jack, killing was usually something to be done quietly, efficiently and at arm’s length, but at other times it was done as a message writ large for all the world to see, a wordless warning.  Occasionally even, if Jack had a personal interest in the deceased, it was done for pleasure – even exhilaration –  and done so in person.  From what Diane said, Tony Knight’s murder had all the hallmarks of such a killing.

Neville Fite.

The name is whispered without sound in my head.  I shudder.  Literally, I shudder.  More whisky; that’s what I need, with or without morphine.

Yet it can’t be related to Neil Carson’s death.  It can’t.  Even if Maggie Carson’s not delusional, even if someone did untimely end her father’s life, it was done with subtlety, done not to advertise the killer’s strength but terminate his life and make everyone think that it wasn’t in any way suspicious, that it was just a drunk’s drunken finale.  And what connection could an elderly Herefordshire pathologist – one who had never ventured into forensic pathology – have had to do with a South London gangster?

But then, what connection did Neville Fite have with Skinner until the last few weeks of his life?

No!  It’s just a coincidence.  It’s nothing more...

I’ve gone through my daily dose of morphine and whisky, and it’s only two in the afternoon.  I’m not pissed, though.  I wish I was, but I’m not.

Tony Knight had only been working at the department in Hereford for one week, and during that time he had only worked with Neil Carson on three autopsies.  I’d made Diane tell me the names, but I don’t know why, because maybe the dead man isn’t the same Tony Knight who use to work for Jack Skinner and, anyway, maybe it wasn’t Jack Skinner who killed him, and almost certainly all of it has no connection at all to the accidental drowning of Neil Carson, who drank too much, and had never done a bad thing in his life, except screw around once too often.

In the summertime heat, I can smell my own cancer.

The sound of a key in the front door makes me jump, and my heart thuds viciously against my breastbone.  I am breathless as I hear a cheery voice.  “Sam?  Sam?  It’s Gemma.”  Because I have difficulty in speaking, she asks in a more concerned tone, “Sam?  Are you alright?”

“Yes, yes...”

She bustles into the front room.  “What’s wrong?” she demands, clearly used to mendacious patients.

I don’t have to lie exception by omission.  “My gums are fucking sore, I’m tired, I’ve got an arsehole that’s hotter than a fucking flamethrower and I feel sick.”

She bursts into not unkind laughter.  “Oh, Sam!  I thought something serious had happened!”

47.

“I think the ceremony went very well.”

  Maggie’s mother wandered about the house in a vague, almost distracted manner, stopping irregularly to pull out and examine a book, or make a closer inspection of an ornament, even once running her finger along a high shelf and then rubbing it with the ball of her thumb, as if judging her demised ex-husband’s standards of cleanliness.  Maggie wondered what memories were being evoked, what emotions aroused, what regrets resolutely crushed in her mother’s soul.  Perhaps there was none, but Maggie suspected that there such feelings, albeit stillborn, crippled ones.

David was upstairs, looking through his father’s clothes in the hope of salvaging something wearable. When Maggie said nothing and just continued to go through the bric-a-brac in the drawers of her father’s desk, she asked, “Don’t you?” in a slightly petulant manner.

“Yes...  I suppose...”  Maggie was hesitant.  Her mother had spoken as if discussing a birthday party or the first night of a play.  How was she to judge her own father’s funeral?  Had it ‘gone well’ because no one had got drunk and sicked up in kitchen sink, or because the preacher hadn’t had a stroke, or perhaps because the deceased had stayed decently dead?

“David did well, didn’t he?”

“Yes...”

“It was a wonderful speech.”  She was now looking out of the window out across the sloping front garden to the river beyond, her tone lost, perhaps in reminiscence.  “He’s got quite a way with words.”

Maggie couldn’t suppress a sigh as she said, “If you say so.”

Her mother turned at once.  “Are you alright, Maggie?”  Her words were dressed in a sharp tone.

“Yes.”  But she wasn’t and she had spoken too quickly.  Most of everything in the desk was proving to be rubbish.  In fact, most of everything in the house was proving to be rubbish, save for the furniture and some good jewellery; the carpets and curtains were all threadbare, and she had yet to identify any share certificates or treasure maps among the thousands of documents that her father had squirreled away; she suspected that even the two ancient microscopes that he had rescued from work and that now stood on the mantel shelf in the dining room were probably worth little.

“You don’t sound it.”  She spoke as if she were put out.  It was, for her at least, a day of celebration and she seemed unable to see why her daughter should not share in the gaiety, was not putting out the bunting.  She eyed Maggie judiciously.  “You must be coming down with something.”

It was a pronouncement that held resonant echoes.  Maggie was aware of far too many occasions in her life when her mother had issued similar diagnoses, and always when Maggie had not performed to expectations, when she had been out of step with her mother and brother. ‘Coming down with something’ was maternal code for ‘misbehaving’ or ‘being wilful’.  “Perhaps,” Maggie murmured.  She could not get that look on Sam Fisher’s face out of her head; its implications, too.

David came in.  He was wearing their father’s tuxedo and, to Maggie’s eye, looked ridiculous, and not faintly so either.  Their father had been short and – as Maggie was – forever trying not to look overweight, but David had taken after his mother, with a stretched frame and a physique that looked slightly angular; the jacket sleeves were just slightly too short and his shoulders almost completely lost.  “What do you think?” he asked.

She was spared the agony of a lie by their mother.  “You look just like your father!” she exclaimed and even for meaningless badinage it was outrageous.

David looked down at the material, pulling the too-short sleeves down by grasping the cuffs in his hands and jerking hard.  “Do I?” he asked and Maggie could tell by his tone that, bizarrely and despite all he had previously thought and said about his father, he was pleased by this comparison.  She wondered at the plasticity of human minds.

“What do you think, Maggie?” enquired her mother, a touched pointedly.

“If David wants it, he’s welcome.”

“I remember he wore this for my twenty-first,” said David.  “He slipped while he was dancing and spilled red wine on the waitress.”

“He was drunk,” observed their mother abstractedly, starting another circuit of the room, finding new things to observe and perhaps more memories to scratch.  It was the second time since the death that her mother had been back in the house, and she was behaving exactly as she had the first time.  Maggie thought, You were waiting to get back here for a long time, weren’t you?

“We all were,” observed David.

“Maggie’s coming down with something.”

He looked at his sister.  “Oh dear, are you?”  He thought about this.  “You probably got it off that walking corpse who was the funeral.”

Maggie was shocked at her brother’s flippancy.  “Sam Fisher?” she asked.

“That’s the one.”

Their mother said sadly, “He didn’t look well, did he?  I was speaking to one of his colleagues who said he hasn’t got long left.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Cancer of something or other, I think.”

“The pancreas,” said Maggie, trying to keep her temper.

“He looked yellow,” was David’s informed opinion, proffered as though this were somehow inexcusable.

“That was jaundice.  Pancreatic cancer often causes it.”

Maggie’s mother said emphatically, “I think he led Neil astray.  They used to go out together drinking till all hours.  I’m not sure it was altogether appropriate.”  She uttered the last word with an emphasis that seemed to suggest all sorts of vague but unsavoury things.  Then she added, “He never liked me.”

“He didn’t like me, either,” said David.

Maggie felt that somehow it was incumbent upon her to say something but she chose her words unwisely.  “I can’t think why.”  She immediately regretted it, for she had been unable to keep her tone neutral, but it didn’t matter because her mother was busy rehabilitating her husband and didn’t hear.  “Poor Neil was always easily led astray.”

David had taken the jacket off to lay it reverentially on the back of the Chesterfield.  “He liked being easily led astray.”

It was the wrong thing to say; he had misread the zeitgeist and was thus out of step with his mother.  She said in a lofty tone, “Your father was a very sociable man.  It wasn’t his fault that people took advantage of him.”

The emotional atmosphere was changing and what had been so recently an easterly had become a west wind, blowing warmer nuances over the corpse of Neil Carson.  David was momentarily taken aback and Maggie remained silent, letting him hang in this breeze.  She wanted to defend Sam Fisher, but was prudent enough not to; in any case, she was all too well aware that she might soon have cause to curse him, should he choose to act on their recent conversation.  Why should he, though?  What good would it do?  Neil Carson’s body was no more, and the rights and wrongs of what she had done were nothing more than legal debating points.

Perhaps purely out of spite, almost certainly to divert attention from his faux pas, David said then to his sister, “I found this upstairs, Maggie.”  A look of resentful shame flashed across his face, she noticed; she had seen it often before, and she suddenly felt uneasy.  Their mother, too, was at once wary.  He was holding out an envelope.  “It was in Dad’s bedside drawer.  I guess you’re the most appropriate person to have it, Maggie.”

She took it, thinking that it was some sort of trap but unable to work out in what way.  The flap was just tucked in. Inside was a newspaper cutting, a report of the inquest into the death of Will Burnell, and on the verdict of suicide.  She looked up at her brother to see his expression a mix of satisfaction and shame – a strange concoction that made him look constipated, she decided, as the shock settled into her like acid rain, while her mother looked merely puzzled.

The telephone rang.  David, who had been staring intently at his sister started; Maggie was relieved by the interruption and went to pick it up.  Her mother, though, was nearer and clearly saw nothing amiss in answering a call made to the house of her dead ex-husband. “Hello?” she said.

There was a pause.  “May I ask who’s calling?”

Her eyebrows smoothly ascended her face as she listened to the answer and then held the handset out to Maggie.  “It’s Sam Fisher,” she announced, her voice holding more than a smear of curiosity.

48.

Maggie’s mental state when she returned to Sam Fisher’s house was turbulent, her thoughts only briefly and randomly making contact with that which was around her.  In her shoulder bag was the envelope that David had given her that morning; she had not looked at it since, and did not intend to do so in the near future; her possession of it – and its subsequent imprisonment in its cavernous deeps that were hers alone to plumb -   seemed to her to be a chance to contain the daemon.  Although she knew that the newspaper report would contain nothing she and all around her would not already know, its sudden appearance served to stir deep emotions within her, just as her brother knew it would.  Sam’s gruff invitation to her to call back had allowed her to slip the cutting back into the envelope, then to secret it in her back pocket; her mother had been greatly intrigued by what David had given her, but had been even more interested in why Sam Fisher should call, and had not thought to notice Maggie’s sleight of hand.

“He wants me to call in on him,” explained Maggie, handing the phone back to her mother.  David had slipped from the room.

“Really?  Why?”  Eleanor Carson was incredulous, for a reason that Maggie couldn’t see.

“He’s old and he’s dying.  Maybe he just wants to have someone to talk to.”  There were black lies, white lies, and refractive lies, Maggie thought, the ones that just led the listener to look in slightly the wrong direction.

“Why you?”

“I met him a few times through Dad.”  She shrugged, which she knew was an admission of a lie in good old, not-so-easy-to-read body language, but her mother knew only Franglais and a smattering of Spanish.  “We talked after the funeral.  I expect he just wants to reminisce.”

And here she was, still hurting from the unhealing wound that was her lover’s suicide, still fearful that she had talked too much to this dying old man, perhaps with fearful consequences.  She rang the doorbell and waited nervously, knowing that it would take him some time to get to the door; she was surprised, though, that the door opened quite quickly, as if he had been lurking close by in the entrance hall.  Apparently paradoxically, then, he peered at her with jaundiced eyes from a stiff, waxen face for a second, as if he were surprised that she should have called.  Then, commanding her abruptly to, “Come in,” he turned away and hobbled back down the hall.  She shut the door and followed him, startled by the malevolence with which he had greeted her and, indeed, his whole attitude.  Before, she had found him difficult, true, but she understood why, she hoped; on the phone, he had sounded, if not supplicatory, then at least somewhat more welcoming.

She found him in his habitual chair, the decanter beside him half full, two glasses – one with whisky in it - on the silver tray next to it.  “Sit down,” he said.

She did so.  He asked, “Did you remember to bring the scotch?”

She opened her bag and pulled out a bottle of Bell’s whisky; she could not help but catch another glimpse of the envelope as she did so.  As he took it, he said approvingly, “A litre.  Thank you.”  He almost managed to sound grateful.

Polite as always, she replied, “That’s all right.”

He hefted it in his bony hand as if enjoying the weight whilst examining the label.  Then he enquired of her, “Want some?”

Momentarily she was surprised.  “Yes.  Why not?”  She suppressed the answers that occurred to her as he poured some into the empty glass – you don’t like whisky...  you’re driving...  it’s two o’clock in the afternoon... 

Having handed this to her, he poured some for himself, but from the decanter, not the bottle she had just brought him.  When he glanced up and saw her look of curiosity, he smiled his so sour smile.  “This stuff is my special jungle juice.  You have to be far along the road to the Pearly Gates before you can have it.”

She didn’t know what he meant, but didn’t like to interrogate this bitter old man.  Instead, she asked, “Why did you ask me to come, Sam?  Was it just to bring the whisky?”

He laughed, took a large sip.  “No, although I admit I took advantage of your visit to get it.”

“Then why?”

Another, perhaps slightly smaller sip.  Apparently the question was a tricky one for him to answer.  He said at last, “I thought I’d come to terms with what’s happening to me.”  She didn’t say anything because she had no words in her head.  It didn’t matter, because Sam Fisher was no longer interested in a conversation.  “I am dying.  In three, maybe six, months, I will be dead.  There, I said it, just as I’ve said it a thousand times before.  And repetition helps, you know.  Say it often enough and the words no longer scare you, and even the meaning no longer seems quite so constantly terrifying, although there have been times when in the early hours of a grey, rainy morning when it’s caught me yet again unawares...”  His voice trailed off momentarily and still she had nothing to contribute.  Suddenly, though, he was angry; he looked at her malevolently and, because of his sepulchral emaciation, his eyes burned from deep sockets.  “Until you came.”

His voice was low and furious.  “Me?” she asked.  “What did I do?”

“You came here with your memories of what I once was, and you were shocked.”  That this was true she could not argue but, equally, she felt that she couldn’t reasonably be held culpable.  He continued in a rising voice as if she had tried to argue, “I saw it in your eye.  You were sickened, although you tried to hide it.”  Only a brief pause before he nearly spat out the next words.  “You’re a polite, well brought up girl, so you bit your lip and pinched your noise, and you said nothing.”

“I...”

“...but because of you I saw my own decay again.”

“No, Sam...”

He was relentless.  His voice had lost its venom but would not be silenced and was laden with sadness.  “I awoke this morning and I smelt once more the stink of my living putrefaction all about me, just as you did.  In every movement, I feel the mouldering of my body.  And I had managed to forget those things.  You see, I had accepted that I was dying, but not how I was dying, not the awful fucking way in which this thing inside me is devouring me, turning me into something rotted.”  

For some reason, she thought at that moment, as this angry old man railed at her, of Will Burnell and the newspaper cutting in her bag that little brother David had so solicitously given to her, and it all seemed too much to bear.

Shit!  I’ve made her cry.

I’ve gone too far, but I couldn’t stop the stream of invective that was born of fear cavorting with self-loathing, and anger, frustration.  It’s not her fault.  The trouble is, nor is it mine, and I’m filled to the brim with pain and bone-deep regret.  My son is dead and unrevenged, my marriage a source only of more longing; I sit in this arse-wipe of a hovel and, day-by-day, inch-by-inch, I disintegrate.  Earth to earth, dust to dust, and ashes to ashes, as the paedophile priest who oversaw my son’s cremation so incomprehensibly put it. 

“You don’t want that,” I say.  It hurts my stomach and back to move too quickly, but I heave myself out of the chair and grab her glass from her.  “I’ll make you some tea.”

“No...”

But I ignore her; learning how to ignore what others say is one of the things that the police teach you very well.  My hands are shaking as I fill the kettle and there is a prolonged clatter as it hits the tap.  From behind me she says, “Let me do that for you.”

Call it what you will – hitting a nerve, treading on my corn, getting under my skin – I react badly.  Turning as fast as I can to face her, I shout, “Don’t you fucking patronise me anymore!”

And there, in her tears, I see again what she sees.

A piece of human shit, who’s making a fuss because he’s doing what everyone else eventually has to do, most of them a million times more gracefully.  There is only one thing in my mind that I can proffer her.  Until that moment I haven’t been sure what I will say to her, but my own nastiness – born, as it is, from guilt at the all the bad things I’ve done – has finally decided me.  I ask, “How much was the whisky?”

Miserably, almost timidly, she names the price.  I say, “Call it my fee for helping you.”

She starts.  “What do you mean?”

“I’ll help you find out who killed Neil.”

“You believe me?  You really think he was killed?”

I discover that I have thought someone murdered him right from the moment I heard he was found dead in the river.  Maggie is pathetically grateful, but she does not know that I really only need to prove to myself that one particular man didn’t kill him.

49.

Over tea that Maggie has made – although there is an ever present taste of mucoid pus in my mouth that means I can’t fully appreciate her efforts – I explain all that Diane told me about Tony Knight’s death.  How he was been battered to death. 

She considers things for a moment, finishing her tea; mine is untouched.  She says suddenly, “It’s odd, though...”

“What is?”

“The two deaths are so dissimilar.  It would seem that whoever murdered Tony Knight wasn’t too bothered about everyone knowing it was murder, whereas my father was killed in a way to make it look like an accident or suicide.”

I should have expected this, but I seem to have forgotten that she’s a trained forensic pathologist, which means that she’s used to looking at matters like these and drawing relevant conclusions.  I have been looking at her with the same eyes I had ten years ago; a fuck of a lot has changed for both of us since then.  “That’s been bothering me,” I admit.

“And how do you explain it?”

“How do you?”  I counter.  It abruptly occurs to me that I was wrong; I thought that I would be the one doing all the thinking in the investigation, she just a remotely controlled pair of eyes, ears and hands.  I would be wise to listen to what she has to say.

She thinks, and it is patent that she does so methodically and profoundly.  “You say that Tony Knight’s body was hidden?”

“It was in the boot of his car, which was parked in small copse near a place called South Nutfield in Surrey.” 

She thinks some more, this time even more deeply and for much longer.  “If we assume that there is a connection...”

“You wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t assuming that,” I interrupt.  Whereas ten minutes before she might have been wounded – even I can hear the astringency of my words – now, she merely takes what I say and continues in her deliberation.  It is as if I have triggered something within her, some intellectual force that merely required my assent to run free.

“...then we have to take it that it’s the same killer.”

When I started as a copper, it would have been a ‘man’ doing the murdering until proved otherwise, but Maggie is a child of modern mores, and she has been trained not to be sexist, even when discussing a predominantly male occupation.  I say nothing, just in case I should bring forth daemons or, at least, one particular daemon – Jack Skinner.  Is it just speculation that makes me fearful to name him?  She doesn’t need me to speak, anyway.  “My father’s murder was planned, whereas Tony Knight’s was rushed,” is her conclusion.

“That’s possible,” I allow.  I wonder why I am so determined not to mention  the other possibility that haunts me – that there are two killers working for one man, that Jack Skinner has returned to torment me?  Possibly it is because I do not want her to be contaminated by the name.  Hell!  Why should I bring the name of Jack Skinner into matters, anyway?  He’s probably got nothing to do with this, and I’m almost certainly just a scared old man with too much past to bear.  She asks, “Do they have any suspects for Tony Knight’s killer?”

“Not as far as I know.  I can make a phone call or two to find out, though.”

“What about a motive?”  When a shrug brings my bony shoulders up the sides of my scrawny neck, she says, “People don’t get battered to death every day.”

“People like Tony Knight do.  He had quite a few criminal associations.”

She is surprised.  “Really?  How did you find that out?”

Shit, she’s sharp.  I say vaguely, “I think that Diane mentioned it.”

“But you agree that there must be some sort of connection?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“So what do we do?”

She sounds excited, as if we’re a subcommittee of the Five Find-Outers, with bread and honey still for tea; suddenly, in a stroke of grotesque irony, I’m ‘Fatty’, the one who knows what to do, which makes her ‘Lucy’ (or some such), the plucky, always optimistic pal.  I have to fight down the irritation.  “As far as we know, your father’s only connection with Knight was one week in which they worked in the same department.  In that time, Knight assisted your father in three autopsies; as far as we know, nothing more.”

“It must be one of those, then,” she says eagerly.

“No...”  Do I sound impatient?  I try not to.                Having poured more of my special whisky, I explain, “As far as we know, I said.  It’s important to make sure of that.”

“How?”

“Do you know anyone in the department where your father worked?”

She considers.  “I know his colleagues – John and Ken – slightly...”  She brightens.  “And there’s Gail, his secretary, of course.”

“How well?”

“We haven’t spoken for perhaps two years, I suppose, but I got to know her quite well when I was a medical student and I used to spend a lot of my spare time in the department.”

“But you could talk to her?  Ask her about that week, about what contact your father had with Knight, and what sort of relationship they had?”

“I suppose so.”

“Good.  Diane’s going to send me copies of the three post mortems that Neil did with Knight.”

“Isn’t that against the rules?”

“Yes.”  I meet her eyes in a challenge to her to say something, but she declines.  “It’s a long shot, but you can go through them and see if there’s anything odd that might give us a clue.”

“What will you do?” 

Is she asking because she thinks I might shirk?  No, of course not. “I’ll look into the backgrounds of Knight and the three deceased that your father worked on with him.  Also, I’ll try to find out what the current police investigation of Knight’s death has uncovered on him.”

When Maggie got back to the house, she showered, trying to wash the smell of Sam Fisher’s dying from her hair, finding it still in her nostrils when she came back downstairs in a dressing gown and poured a glass of wine. 

I’ll have to wash my clothes.

The thought brought her no relief because, she knew, her unease was born of guilt.  Sam’s state wasn’t his fault and yet she found his presence unsettling and (she dared hardly admit) slightly abhorrent, and not just because of the odours that surrounded him or the look of him.  It was as much his attitude and not just to the world and to his disease, but also to her.  He seemed to believe that she bore personal responsibility for his illness, if only because she didn’t have it.  It was a coping mechanism, she supposed, but it made him difficult to be with.

Yet who else did she have to turn to?  She had foolishly chosen to confide in him and, seemingly against huge odds, he was helping her.  No one else could or would.  She had a momentary flash of insuperable remorse at what she had done to her father’s body in the name – she had told herself at the time – of justice.  Few others would accept that as an excuse.  At best, most people would have turned away; at worst, reported her to the authorities.  Why hadn’t Sam Fisher, she wondered?  His demeanour, she now appreciated, had changed when the death of Tony Knight had been first mentioned.  Was that really only because of the close temporal proximity of the two deaths?

She sat down at her father’s desk, put her elbows on the oak surface and held her head in her hands.  She didn’t know the answers to these questions.  There was so much that she didn’t know.

50.

It was six months to the day since Bridget Knight had been diagnosed with ‘sugar diabetes’.  She hadn’t understood what the doctor had said at the time and she still didn’t; he had talked about her diet and the importance of losing weight, and she had done what she always did – she had nodded and repeated what she guessed were the most important words in each sentence (as if cementing them into her cerebrum with quick drying glue, so that they would be there for future reference) – and, along the way, had concocted her own picture of what was happening to her, one which interacted with reality only tangentially, and which satisfied her need to carry on exactly as she always done.  She understood that at some point she had eaten too much sugar, which had given her the diabetes, which meant she had put on too much weight.  She should therefore watch her weight, but it was important that she should eat a ‘balanced diet’; it was unfortunate for her arteries – although fortunate for her near  insatiable cravings – that her concept of a ‘balanced diet’ was eating as many different things as she could.  Her increased urine output (an unfortunate symptom when in combination with her weak pelvic floor and inadequate personal hygiene) required her to drink lots of cider.

She worked in a small supermarket on the London Road in West Croydon that was run by a Greek man called Nikos; she did long hours in there and, by the end of shift, even her liberal use of body spray surrendered to the ever present odour of stale urine, so that custom all but dried up in the two hours before she closed.  Nikos had usually left long before this (he had a mistress who lived by the cash and carry, so he tended to do his ‘restocking’ in the evening, prior to going home to his loving wife and six children) and was unaware that Bridget was driving away custom.  Bridget wouldn’t have cared much if Nikos had made a fuss, since she was well aware of what her employer did in the early evenings, and she was quite prepared to enter hard negotiation with him if he took it upon himself to remonstrate.  She had continued to work there, even through the trauma of Tony’s disappearance and the subsequent reappearance of his corpse, in complete ignorance of why she had felt compelled so to do.

Bridget had once been half the weight she was now, and something of a ‘looker’; in her twenties, she had led quite a glamorous lifestyle in South London, acting as a paid escort.  She sometimes looked back on those days with some nostalgia, but not too often, not these days, because to do so was too painful.   She had never thought to find the words to describe her present situation but, even allowing for her colossal abilities at self-deception, ‘glamorous’ would most certainly not have been among them.

She climbed the stairs to her first floor maisonette at her usual time of nine-thirty in the evening, very tired.  She had a headache and her leg ulcer ached; it had seeped through the bandage and was adding its own notes to the perfume of eau de micturition.  She was short of breath, too, something that had been getting worse for a few weeks now; what with that and her swelling ankles, she was in a bad mood.  She had a carrier bag that was filled with items from the supermarket – they were mostly close to their sell by date and she had an understanding with Nikos that she could help herself to them, although she suspected that their definitions of ‘close to the sell by date’ might differ quite radically.

Once she would have let herself in to find Tony at the computer, a thought that she could not suppress quickly enough and made her want to cry again.  She went straight to the small kitchen, put the carrier bag into the fridge without emptying it and then found a smeared glass on the draining board in which to empty a cold can of drink.  When half the cider had fallen down her gullet, she went back to the doorway between the kitchen and living room, leaning on the door jamb, looking into the living room of the flat, imaging the squat, puggish figure of Tony hunched, as he so often was, over the computer, her problems suddenly looming larger as her grief exploded yet again.

She had known that she loved him, but not how much; she hadn’t had the right scale by which to measure it.  When he had been alive, all that had mattered was the irritation that he had seemed to bring out of her, the aggravation at his habits, at his wild money-making schemes, and at his refusal to do as she wanted; in his death, these didn’t matter.  When she had met first met him in South London, he had been quite handsome in an over-masculine, almost hackneyed way that, at the time, she found enchanting.  Their friendship, later a sexual relationship, had drawn her into an exciting and hedonistic world of nocturnal smokiness that she had only gradually realised was deeply criminal.  She had never discovered exactly what Tony’s involvement had been, but she had heard enough for the implication to live with her still, to still give her sporadic chills, to this day.  And, if age had not been kind to him, she had sufficient insight to know that time had been fairly cruel to her as well, and such things had come not to matter to either of them. 

“Fuck you, Tony,” she whispered, and drank again.  She did not recall that they were the last words she had ever spoken to him, that they had rung out across the living room as he had slammed the door after their final row.

Her eyes flicked to the cheap wooden dining table just to her right, where the envelope that Kev had retrieved for her now lay.  It was a big and brown.  Her name was written on it in Tony’s habitual, coarse capitals.  Also on the envelope were the words CONFIDENTIAL and ADDRESSEE ONLY.  When Kev had given it to her, he had said, “I hope it’s something good,” and had immediately been washed away by embarrassment as Bridget had begun to cry.

“Sorry, Bee,” he had muttered.  Then, because he wanted to feel good about himself again, he assured her yet again, “I didn’t open it.”

Bridget had, and then at once resealed it, and had not dared to look at the contents again.  She now stood beside the table on which it had lain for several days. 

“What the fucking hell happened, Tony?” she asked, again in a whisper, as if the spirits don’t answer pleas that are shouted, perhaps having sensitive hearing.  Tony had always been slightly deaf, especially in the right ear – she gathered from what he had said that it was the result of a blow with a length of lead piping on that side of his head – and maybe this was the reason for there being no answer.  She went back to the kitchen and another can of cider, then went and plonked herself down in the sagging, diverticular pit that had formed from the two-seater sofa after too many years of too much obesity dropping too heavily upon it.

She was scared, but she was exhilarated, too.  Her eyes kept swinging to the parcel – Tony’s final gift to her – almost as if she were afraid it might have moved, or even vanished.  She knew that it was part of the mystery of Tony’s death, but she had not the least intention of confiding in the police; that had not been Tony’s way, and it wouldn’t be hers.  She knew exactly the significance of the envelope’s contents – as Tony had known she would – and with that recognition came realisation of the danger of her position.  It was valuable - potentially immensely so – but also, because of its provenance and the information that it held, it was almost in her head a mystical thing; it was like the Grail, one of the thirty pieces of silver, the gold at the rainbow’s end, because it could transform her life.  Much of her fear came from not knowing quite what had happened to Tony, in what way that slim envelope had brought about his death. 

Tony had left strict instructions for her, written carefully on the back of the single photograph that the envelope contained.  She hoped that they gave her an alternative to his own course.

51.

Gail Carter had been only too keen to meet with Maggie.  Gail was over sixty years old and in that time had given birth to two children; she was, though, trapped in motherhood, so that the loss of her children to adulthood had left her lonely and begging for someone, anyone, everyone to succumb to her proclivities for affectionate caring; she exuded maternal feelings and was forever looking for opportunities in which she could lavish them upon people around her.  In her head, they were always transmuted so that they became phantasmagorical children begging for love.  Since Maggie had so recently lost a father, and since Gail had never taken particularly to Eleanor Carson, she wasted no time in clucking and sighing and uttering sympathetic lamentations over her.  It was, Maggie reflected, an execrable experience but one that she endured because Gail had another, not entirely unconnected attribute that was useful to her; Gail was indiscrete. 

They sat in the cafeteria just beside the main entrance to the Hereford Royal Infirmary, she with a cappuccino, Gail with some tea and an iced bun (‘I shouldn’t, I know’) that had presumable once been young, but now looked as desiccated as Gail. Around them were a lot of people and, being the place it was, an inordinate number of them were over seventy, or coughing, or breathless; or all three.  They were past the more cringe-worthy of Gail’s exaggerated sympathies and protestations of shock at Neil Carson’s death, her assurances that she was unbelievably upset, and her prurience as she unsubtly tried to discover what the official post mortem report had said.  Maggie had steered them onto a course where Gail was happy to paddle in reminiscences about working with him.

“Of course, Mick Chadwick was away that last week, wasn’t he?” said Maggie.

Mick didn’t like Gail, and this attitude was enthusiastically reciprocated; Gail thought Mick ‘coarse and rude’, whereas he though the secretary a ‘pious prig’.  “No,” she said as if he had got his come-uppance in being absent, “He was away on leave.  Australia, I think, although how someone who works in a mortuary can afford...”

“So there must have been a locum working on PMs with my Dad?”

Gail completed her demolition of the iced bun, pursing her lips in a show of impudence that she should have been so naughty as to consume something so sodden with evil calories.  “Tony Knight, his name was.”

Maggie guessed from the tone in which she spoke that Mick’s replacement had not been received with much enthusiasm.  “Did Dad get on with him?”

Gail shook her head with happy determination.  “He was a funny man.”  She shivered with some theatricality.  “He gave me the creeps.”

“Why?”

“There was something...”  She sought a word.  “...Shady about him.”

Maggie knew Gail well enough not to be fooled into thinking this to be an important clue.  Gail’s dislike of mortuary technicians was universal and fine, well-fertilised ground for finding fault in any she met.  She was therefore about to enquire as delicately as she could if anything in particular formed the basis of that judgement when Gail volunteered the information.  “Dr Carson had a terrible row with him the last day he was here.”

“What about?”

She looked around, suddenly emanating a sense of cosy conspiracy, and Maggie guessed that Gail lived for moments such as this.  “Your father wasn’t one to gossip,” she said, oblivious that the gods of irony were splitting their sides and wetting their divine underwear as she spoke.  “But I gathered he suspected Mr Knight of some sort of dishonesty regarding the deceased’s possessions.”

“Did he do anything about it?”   Even as she asked this, she was speculating furiously about what, if any, relevance this had.

“It was a bit embarrassing, actually,” sighed Gail.  “Your father contacted not only the widower, but also the funeral director to corroborate his story but they supported Knight; they all said he was mistaken.”  A deceased’s possessions had to be carefully listed to ensure that theft did not occur.  This was usually done by the funeral director and the post mortem technician between them, then signed by both to ensure honesty.  “Your father felt awful.  He apologised profusely to Knight.”

“Was he alright about it?”

“He was very gracious, I remember.”

Nothing there, then. 

Now they were at the nub of the conversation, Maggie was finding it a strain to sustain the pretence that this was not an interrogation.  “Had Tony Knight ever done a locum in the department before?”

She need not have worried.  An inveterate gossip like Gail was quite used to answering queries that could not possibly have any relevance to the person asking them.  “Oh, no.  It was his first time.”

Her father had spent all of his professional life in that department, so this made it extremely unlikely he would have come across Tony Knight before.

After that, the conversation drifted back into shallower waters of inconsequentiality and grounded completely when Gail realised she was already ten minutes late in getting back to work.

52.

“You seem brighter today,” announces Gemma judiciously, or is it slyly?  She has just taken my temperature, having looked at my mouth ulcers. 

I look up from the computer.  “I don’t why.  I hardly sleep a wink because of the pain in belly, and when I went for a crap it felt like I was sitting on top of fucking flamethrower.”

She looks at me judiciously.  “Perhaps I should ask them to review your pain relief.”

“I did.”

“What did they say?”

“Dr Wade graciously promised to give me a higher dose of morphine.”

“Well, then...”

I’ve turned back to the computer.  “Slitting my sodding throat is the only way I’m going to get any proper pain relief.”

She sighs and says, “I’ll make some tea.”

Beside the computer are print outs of the three post mortem reports that I asked Diane to send me.  They are accompanied by a brief note – For God’s sake, don’t tell anyone you’ve got these and erase the files as soon as you’ve done with them – and I offer a silent apology to her that I can’t do as she wants.  As a first tactic, I’m just running the names of the deceased through various search engines to see what, if anything, that throws up. 

“What are you doing?” asks Gemma.  She’s nosy which normally I accept as part of her charm and perhaps as a necessary attribute for the job.  I hastily minimise the window as she puts the mug of tea down on a mat by the monitor. 

“Online dating.”

Her face lights up.  “You rogue!” she declares, but does so delightedly, as if this were evidence that I’m not quite dead yet.  A pause.  “You’re not, though, are you?”

“I’m arranging a date with a twenty-two year-old pole dancer.”

Perhaps it is the sourness of my voice that tells her I’m having her on; it certainly can’t be the image this conjures.  Even this, though, seems to be evidence that I’m a changed, happier soul.  She laughs and says, “You’ve certainly got your sense of humour back.”

“You won’t go out with me,” I grumble, and I ask myself why I’ve just said that.

She is delighted.  “I wish I could, Sam.  Believe me.”  It’s a lie, but we both know it’s a lie so that’s all right then.  She is grave as she adds, “I’m not sure my family would approve.”

And that is the end of what Neil used to call, ‘persiflage’.  I spend the rest of her visit wondering if she might be right, if Maggie’s problem might have given me something of a reason for living just that little bit longer.

It’s a dangerous thought, as I discover when she shouts her farewells and closes the front door.  There is an immediate pain in my belly and the ever-present nausea changes, becomes huge and hideous.  The pain, making me feel as though I’ve been stabbed with an acid-soaked skewer in the back, begins quite suddenly and I just make it to the kitchen sink before I vomit pure red blood.

53.

“Oh, dear.”

That, for the moment – for a very long moment, in Maggie’s head – was all that Professor Aubrey Melrose said in response to her news that she need a few more days off.  The silence that flowed silkily across the radio waves between them brought with it a distinct sense of discontentment.  She was forced to say after a while, “I’m sorry.”

And even that failed to produce an immediate response for it was only after another prolonged interlude that he sighed and said, “I see.”

“I hope to be back in a week or so.”

“Dr. Carson,” he began and she knew at once she was in the shit because her head of department was being formal, which was sign that he was irritated.  “I am sure that we all sympathise with your present predicament.”

“Thank you.”

“However, your absence is most inconvenient.”

“But there’s no teaching to be done at the moment,” she pointed out and immediately realised that this was a tactical error, born both of a deep misunderstanding of her leader’s reasons for raising objections and temporary amnesia concerning the kind of man he was.  Professor Melrose didn’t need to be told about the commitments of the department; he was well aware of the medical school curriculum.  At heart, she reflected, his problem was that he was a bastard.  Academia – medical academia in particular – was overpopulated with them.

“I understood that your father has been interred,” he said, exhibiting some puzzlement.

“He has...”

“Then why do you need further time away from the department?”

“I’ve still got arrangements to make...”

“I hardly think,” he interrupted thoughtfully, “That such activity can be regarded as requiring compassionate leave, Dr. Carson.”

“I’ll take annual leave, then.  I’ve got four weeks left before my leave year ends.”

She could imagine him wincing as he said a tad sadly, “But it’s normal to give six weeks’ notice.  Your unexpected absence from the department has already caused some difficulty to your colleagues.”

She doubted that many of them would begrudge her the time off but she knew better than to call his bluff on that one.  “Just to the start of next week.  That’s all I need, Professor.  It’s all been a bit of a shock.”

There was a pause, one suffused with silent remonstration that the younger generation was so lacking spinal stiffness that the death of a parent led to such pusillanimous behaviours as grieving.  “Very well.  I won’t expect you back until next Monday.”

“Thank you so much...”

“However, if you do not return then and you do not have good reason, Dr Carson, I will consider you absent without leave.”

“I understand.”

She cut the connection.  I understand, all right, you nasty old man.

54.

The day had started perfectly normally.  She had risen from Jack’s bed whilst he was still asleep and switched without thought into housekeeper mode.  Because it was summer, there were no fires to be lit, but there was breakfast to be prepared, the milk and papers to be brought in.  The latter she took up to Jack to read whilst his eggs were cooked, his coffee made.  On this occasion, when she re-entered the bedroom, Jack’s form in bed was immobile and inert, bearing a pallor on his face.  She rushed forward and shook him.  “Jack?  Jack?”

He was back again, almost at once, but not before a moment’s pause in which her look into his eyes brought to her a weirdly unsettling lack of life, a deep void.  Animation was quick in its work and the smile – oddly and somehow terrifyingly absent when she had first rushed to the side of the bed – was back.  He shook his head, as if clearing it, then asked, “Juliette?  What’s wrong?”  His tone was dangerous; curious, but nonetheless menacing.

“I...”

He explained kindly, “I fell back asleep.”

“I thought...”

“You kept me up too late.”  There was a nearly imperceptible hint of warning in his voice.

Whatever she was about to say went.  She knew well what her part in this scene was to be.  She said hesitantly, “I’ve brought you the papers.”

55.

“Are you okay?”

The eyes, she knew, were always bloodshot, but now they stared out at her from livid sockets set in a greasy, pallid face.  There was a tremble about Sam Fisher as he stood in the doorway to his house that Maggie hadn’t seen before.  It took him a moment and a licking of the lips to say venomously, “Yes.  My only problem is I’ve got fucking terminal cancer.”

Without another word, he turned and walked back into the house, leaving her once again to follow him.  She saw that his gait was slightly unsteady.   When she joined him in the living room, he was already seated and greedily taking a drink of his ‘jungle juice’.  She sat down in her customary place on the sofa and asked him gently, “Has something happened?"

She saw him take a deep breath before shaking his head.  “Just the pain.”  He was short of breath, she decided.  “Don’t worry.  I’ve been here before.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

A smile flashed across his face, one that died before it had barely breathed, and one that wasn’t fathered by anything that had known happiness.  “No...”  He added but only slowly and grudgingly, “Thanks.” 

She looked around the room, saw properly for the first time the photograph of the young man on the mantle shelf.  “Is that your son?”

His eyes looked at her lividly.  “Yes.”  His voice was dull but she failed to spot that.

“He’s a good looking young man.”

“He’s a dead one.”

Then she heard his voice.  “Oh...”  Feeling mortified, she said quickly, “I’m sorry, Sam...” 

He interrupted, “What have you got for me?”

She was too relieved to be rescued from embarrassment, and too pleased with the upshot her labours, to rebuke him for the way he phrased the request, the way he assumed he was in command.  After she had recounted what Gail had told her, she said, “So we’ve got proof that Daddy and Tony Knight had never met before.”

“Possibly.”

She thought that he was just being deliberately sour.  “Of course we do.  Gail worked for Daddy for years...”

He shook his head.  “When a witness tells you something, the chances are it’s wrong in at least one respect.  If you’re lucky, though, it’ll be something that doesn’t matter.  Let’s hope that’s the case here.”

“What are you talking about?”

He snorted.  “You think it’s easy, don’t you?  Investigating things.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you think it.”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

He stared at her for a moment made long by its intensity.  He was still trembling, but less so, while the pallor remained.  “A lot of people lie.  Some of them lie through and through, as though the truth hurts them and they have to stay away from it; most of them lie and don’t even know they’re doing it.  They remember what they want to remember; what’s nice and makes them feel good about themselves.  They let slip away the bits and bobs of their lives that make them uncomfortable.  I don’t blame them...”

...The picture of Neville Fite’s eyeless, lacerate corpse returns unbidden.  No clanking chains or howling midnight winds, but it’s a terrible ghostly thing that will not leave me. 

Maggie’s looking at me.  God, I must be a sight!  Ironically, it’s only the deep pain in my belly that’s keeping me from unconsciousness; the world around me sways and my head might be filled with helium so tenuous is gravity’s hug.  With difficulty, I continue, “I’m not saying that this woman’s lied to you, only that we have to be careful about totally relying on what she says.”

“How else can we prove it?” she asks.

“I don’t think we can, with our resources.”

“Well, then...”

She’s right.  I’m just being a difficult old git.  “We’ll have to proceed on the assumption that the two of them only knew each other for that one week.  In which case, something happened during that time that led to their deaths.”

“Which strengthens our assumption that it was something to do with one of the autopsies they did.  There’s no other explanation.”

There’s something tenuous about the whole chain of reasoning I don’t like but, stuck here as I am, and with as little influence as I have, there’s little I can do about it.  Then, something occurs to me.  “This fuss about the jewellery.”

“What about it?”

“Did she say which was the deceased in question?”

“She didn’t say the name, but she mentioned a ‘widower’, so it was a woman.  Is this of any relevance?  My father made a mistake.” 

I don’t answer that; her question is yet more proof that, for all her learning, she’s naive.  Clues aren’t usually diamonds buried in the shit; in most cases, they’re the shit itself.  I look to my table where, beside the decanter, the copies of the three post mortem reports are piled.  “These are the reports of the three autopsies your father did that week with Knight assisting,” I explain tiredly.  I quickly scan the first page of each, a vague idea taunting me.  “Interesting,” I murmur.

“What is it?”

It might be something, but it’s nothing on which you can hang a man, or stop a man from being hanged.  “When you work in the Coroner’s office, you get to know all the local undertakers; the ones you’d trust with your own, and the ones who use chipboard and plastic on their coffins, that kind of thing.  Two of the deaths were brought in by Betts and Bradley.  They’re a good, decent firm; I’d quite like to be done by them myself, if you’re taking notes.”

“I’ll remember,” she says drily.

“This third body, though, was handled by Manleys.”

“What about them?”

“Bunch of fucking crooks.  They charge the earth, use the cheapest materials, and handle the bodies as if they’re sacks of horseshit.”

“And?”

“They handled the only female body that was post mortemed that week.” 

She still doesn’t see.  “What does it matter who the undertaker was?”

“Look,” I explain and try not to sound irritated, “It’s not unknown for a mortuary technician and a dishonest undertaker to do a deal.  They spot a bit of cash or a nice bit of jewellery on a body, one pays the other to keep quiet, then the list of possessions is signed by both to say it was never on the body.”

“Do Manleys have a record of doing this in the past?”

“Of course not.  They wouldn’t be in business if they did.”

“Well, then...”

“It’s widely suspected that they do it, though.  No one’s ever been able to prove anything, is all.  They’re careful to restrict it to people who don’t matter.  Single people, usually.”

“Can I see the report?”

I hand it over.  It isn’t long before she says, “This lady – Elizabeth Bagshawe – wasn’t single.  She was married.  In fact, I remember now that Gail said mentioned that the widower denied anything about missing jewellery.”

Fucking smarty-pants.  “It was just a fucking idea, okay?  We won’t get anywhere unless one of us comes up something to work on!”  She stares at me and, the bitch, she makes me ashamed again.  “I’m sorry,” I mumble.

“Apology accepted,” she says with a small smile.

“But before you dismiss the idea completely, there is something you should know.”

I tell her about the supposed disappearance of the Rolex from Jimmy Prescott’s body.

“A Rolex?” she asks incredulously.

“So they say.”

“Does anyone believe that?”

“No.  The Prescott’s are famous around here for all the wrong reasons.  There are two brothers, one wife, two ex-wives, three sons, one daughter and, at last count, three baby grandchildren.  One brother runs a garage, the other is unemployed.  The whole clan is into low-level stuff – theft and benefit fraud, mostly – with season tickets to the magistrates’ court.  Jimmy was the son of Dave, the unemployed one.  The assumption is that they’re probably just taking the opportunity to cause trouble.”

“Even so,” she muses.

“It’s interesting, isn’t it, when we have this business about the Bagshawe woman.”

“Can I see the other reports?” Her voice is gentle, damn her.

I hold them out to her.  “Here.”

She takes them and I say, “The first, done on the Tuesday of that week, was Jimmy Prescott; he with the Rolex.” 

She has scanned the report.  “He fell off a wall.”

When I inform her where the wall was, she is surprised.  I shrug my shoulders.  “Again, there’s no evidence of foul play.”

“Like my father?”

I nod slowly.  “Perhaps.”

She turns back to the reports.  I say, “Elizabeth Bagshawe was done on Thursday.  As you can see, she was a fifty-three year old woman who tripped up in a churchyard in Ledbury  Poor bitch hit her head on a gravestone.  She was taken to the Emergency Department immediately but never regained consciousness.”

“Traumatic subarachnoid haemorrhage.” she reads.

“A bleed in the head, right?” I ask.

She nods.  “It can happen spontaneously, usually associated with a history of high blood pressure, but it’s more often due to a serious head injury.”

“I haven’t been able to find out much about her,” I admit.  “There’s nothing on the internet, anyway.”

She turns to the third report.  “Arnold Brown.”

“They did that one on the Friday.  He was a dentist who’d been married for forty-seven years, then found out that his wife had been having an affair with his practice partner for twenty-seven of them.  He’d also recently been charged with drink-driving and there’s been some local newspaper talk that he was in financial difficulty.  He hanged himself in his partner’s surgery room.  Making a statement, I suppose.”

“His blood alcohol was over two hundred,” she remarks.

“High, but not high enough to make him totally incapable of stringing himself up.”

“Was there a note?”

“Nope.”  We both know that means nothing; for many suicides, the act itself is all that needs to be said.

She sighs, apparently disappointed that there are no quick answers.  I watch her and wonder if she’d thought that police work was easy.  She asks suddenly and brightly, “What about Tony Knight?”

It catches me off my guard.  “What do you mean?”  For some reason my heart is suddenly thumping angrily.

“You’ve looked more closely into his background, surely?”

“A bit...”

“And?”

Why is it suddenly so difficult to speak?  But, then again, why is it necessary to ask myself that?  I sip some whisky because my cracked lips are dry and the stinging at the back of my throat is so very good.  “Tony Knight was fifty-one years old.  He lived in Croydon, South London.  He’d been mortuary technician for thirteen years.  He used to be based at a local hospital, but there was some trouble – it’s not clear what – and he left.  He’s been working for a locum agency for the past four years, going and up and down the country.”

She asks, “What about before he worked in mortuaries?  You implied that he had some sort of criminal connections before.”

“He worked as a bouncer in night clubs and as a hired heavy.”

“Did he have any criminal convictions?

The words ought to emerge easily, but strangely will not.  “One...”

“When you were a policeman, you were based in South London, weren’t you?”

What is this - an interrogation?  “For my sins.”

“Didn’t you come across him?”

I manage to notice through the stress that I feel that her tone is not accusatory, merely interested.  “It’s a big place,” I point out, and the truth tastes good.

She nods.  “But he probably had underworld connections, didn’t he?”

Oh, yes...He had those alright.   “That’s possible.”

“You could look into those, couldn’t you?”

“Don’t worry, I will.”  I pour myself some whisky.

She is back to thinking things over, damn her; it is as if I am being teased, although I cannot explain precisely why.  I say suddenly, “But why should your dad have been murdered?  It doesn’t make sense.  Even if Knight was once a criminal, your father most certainly wasn’t.” 

Suddenly I feel easier as she nods and, diverted, replies, “Yes, I know.”

“The key to this is going to be explaining why someone would want to kill and pathologist and a post mortem technician.”

“Because of an autopsy they did together.”

More whisky.  “But what about it?” 

She thinks again.  “I suppose the most obvious possibility is that one of the deceased during that last week was really murdered, and my father and Knight were killed to cover it up.”

“No.”  Is she so stupid, I wonder?  She looks surprised because I sound, I realise, contemptuous.  “For a start, your father was an experienced pathologist.  If he’d had the slightest suspicion of foul play in any of those, he’d have stopped immediately and called for a proper forensic post mortem by a Home Office pathologist.”

“Maybe, some new information came up after the examinations had been done, then.”

“There’s no record of that.  Diane would have told me, and the police would be all over it by now.”

“If they know about it,” she points out.  “It’s possible not even my father appreciated the significance of it.”

Perhaps she’s got a point.

But it doesn’t feel quite right to me.

“I can’t see why both the pathologist and the technician would be targets in that case.”

Her ideas are coming quickly now.  “It could have something to do with Knight’s past.  If he came into possession of some piece of information that cast doubt on any of these being an innocent death...”

  Knight’s past is too close to my own.  “In your experience, is it possible that any of them are suspicious?”

She picks up the reports again; I pick up my glass.  There is silence broken only by the sound of cars passing the street outside, muffled by double glazing that needed replacing ten years ago.  “Elizabeth Bagshawe had a witnessed collapse and was pronounced death in hospital.  The only way that could be anything other than natural is if we postulate poisoning.”

“How likely is that?”

“It’s not.  In real life, the number of poisons that can cause sudden death like that – without any other signs or symptoms – is small and difficult to they’re administer by an oral route, unless we’re in the realms of super-sophisticated neurotoxins and suchlike.”

“James Bond stuff.”

She nods.  “The dentist was hanged.  It’s possible for one or more third parties to hang a man against his will – especially if he’s incapable through alcohol or some other drug, or bound in some way – but in the latter case there are usually defence injuries and signs of a struggle; as for the former, all of the toxicology was negative except for ethanol.  I don’t think his alcohol level was high enough.  I doubt he would be completely comatose, unless he was totally unaccustomed to drink, which I see from the history he wasn’t.”

“Isn’t insulin undetectable on toxicology?” I ask.  “I seem to remember a case where that was postulated as a means of murder.”

“It can only be administered by injection.  Dad would have spotted the injection site.”

I give up my resistance.  “So we’re back to the Prescott boy.”

“Who fell off a wall.”

“Or was he pushed?”

She is excited again.  “From the point of view of a pathologist, if someone just gave him a slight shove, or tapped his ankle, there’d be no sign at all.”

“There’s no evidence that anyone was anywhere near him when he fell,” I point out.

“Is there a witness to that?”

“His pals were nearby.”

“But outside the property.  They wouldn’t be able to see what was happening on the other side of the wall.”

“No, but they heard nothing except barking dogs.”

“Which might have covered up the sounds of a security guard or something.”

It’s time, I think, that she calmed down a bit.  “Look, even if his death wasn’t purely due to his own stupidity, what the fuck would it have to do with the killing of your father and Tony Knight?”

I’ve seen her type before.  They think criminal investigation is exciting.  Too much television, I suppose.  She reads the report on Prescott’s autopsy again and says, “The property that the wall ran round was some sort of builder’s yard.”

“A reclamation yard, yes.”

“And the police assume that Prescott tried to break in to steal something.”

“It’s a reasonable assumption.”

I watch her as she lowers her head to read again the report.  There comes an impulse that I can’t resist; maybe that I don’t want to resist, God help me.  I ask, “You were engaged once, weren’t you?”

She looks up and she carries a heavy, wary, almost guilty expression.  “Yes.”

“What was his name?  Burnett, or something?”

“Burnell.  Will Burnell,” she corrects me.

She just stares at me then.  Her father never told me what happened, only that something had happened.  That was enough, though.  The internet is garrulous beast, but it is just a gossip, not a deep thinking thing; although I know the facts of what happened, I don’t the real story, although I have my suppositions.  I ask, “What happened?”

“Why do you ask?”  I see fear in her eyes, hear it in the minuscule tremor of her voice.

Why do I ask?  Is it merely spite?  Is that all I have left?  Suddenly, abruptly ashamed, I say, “Nothing.  It doesn’t matter.”

But she just stares at me for a long while before saying, “He committed suicide.”

“I’m...sorry.”

But she won’t release me.  I get what I deserve, I suppose.  She goes on, “He killed himself by jumping from a bridge over a railway line on the night that he asked me to marry him, and I turned him down.”

Her voice becomes stronger as the sentences curls towards its barbed end.  Now we are both wounded, she by the memory and the guilt, me by my nastiness.  I can only wonder what made me ask.  I have to drain the glass before I say, “Bernie Gough was more than a builder’s merchant.  He was a fence, although too clever to have been caught.  It’s highly likely that Prescott was intending to look for stolen goods.  It’s not surprising that Gough’s denying anything went, even if he was cleaned out by Prescott.”

“The Rolex?” she suggests.

I shake my head.  “Either that never existed, or it really was Prescott’s.  It’s the Prescott family that are making a fuss about it.”

“But maybe Jimmy Prescott had heard that there was a stolen Rolex to be had, and told others in his family.  Gough wouldn’t want anyone to know that he’d had, and the bereaved family are trying to reclaim it for themselves.”

“Firstly, if Bernie Gough had a stolen Rolex, he’s not going to advertise the fact to toe-rags like the Prescotts.  Secondly, it’s a Rolex.  Those things have serial numbers.  They’re not so stupid as to get the police and Coroner’s officer involved in trying to locate it when it goes missing if it’s just been nicked.  If you come into possession of a stolen one, you keep it or you only sell it to someone who’s a fucking good friend.  Part of the reason no one really believes the Prescotts is that they haven’t got a certificate of ownership; they say it’s been lost.”

“Perhaps it wasn’t stolen.  Perhaps Gough acquired it legally.”

She’s being stupid, but I’ve hurt her too much already today.  “Then there’s no reason why he wouldn’t have told the police about it, is there?”  I ask this in as gentle a voice as I can manage.

And, at last, she leaves the idea to die a decent death.

When she’s gone I cannot stop my eyes from searching out Jake’s photograph, the only one I’ve got out on display, because it’s the only one without his mother in it.  She has a knack of making remember what I was, who I am, and what I soon will be.

Damn the bitch.

56.

And so she phoned Gareth.  They rarely spoke with each other and she could not recall if she had ever before called his mobile phone.  He was understandably surprised and wary.  Gareth might not have been close to his mother, but Juliette well knew that he had never been able to stomach the woman who now occupied her place next to his father; there was consequent silent hostility between them.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Gareth.”  Jack had left the house half an hour before, in the company of two policeman, the senior of whom was Sean Hooke.  Hooke, she had thought, had looked nervous and uncomfortable, although Jack had not appeared at all bothered.   She did not know the exact reason for this occurrence, and she had not directly asked, although she had caught the name ‘Tony Knight’, which meant nothing to her.  No one had volunteered any more information, and for that she was grateful.  She knew instinctively that knowledge could only ever decrease her life expectancy.

“What is it?”  Gareth was sitting in his office, playing spider solitaire.   As it was only ten thirty, he had not been there long and, since he had a round of golf booked for two forty-six, he would not be tarrying late.

“I’m worried about your father.  I think he’s ill.”

Gareth took more interest.  “What do you mean?”

She told him of what had happened that morning, and of previous things she had noticed.  She was alone, but she whispered, and she suspected that she had several hours before Jack returned, but she talked quickly.  She judged that Jack would be initially angry when he learned that she had confided in Gareth, but she hoped that he would quickly see that it was done because she was so concerned about him.  She had not formulated her thoughts thoroughly, but somewhere in her actions lay the hope that Gareth would have the courage to make Jack see reason and get something done about his condition, whatever it was.

Gareth listened without saying anything, and his computer saver screen – two scissor sisters – came on, but he paid no attention to it.  At the end he asked, “What do you want me to do about it?”

“Can’t you speak to him?  I’m so worried about him.”

Sharon, his PA, came in with some coffee.  She was very attracted to Gareth – she had thing for redheads - but the feeling wasn’t reciprocated, but she didn’t see that as an insurmountable problem.  He had grown into a tall, good-looking young man with full mouth and sharp, intelligent eyes.  She had heard rumours that his father was some sort of criminal, something that only served to increase her desire to get to know him.  As usual, though, he ignored her and concentrated on his phone conversation.  When she had left the office, he pointed out, “But you said he’s already seen the doctor.”

“But it’s getting worse and I don’t think he’s taking it seriously enough.”

He already knew the answer to his next question.  “Why don’t you try and persuade him to see the doctor again?”

Her hesitation confirmed it; she was too scared.  His father might not take kindly to her dogged persistence, even if she had his best interests as a motive, and sometimes, when Jack Skinner ‘did not take kindly’ to something, there was sorrow.  She said as artlessly as she could, “He’d take more notice of you.”

Would he?  Gareth had no illusions about the relationship between he and his father.  He was despised for what he was; tolerated because of a blood tie but, nonetheless, despised.  “You really think he might be seriously ill?”

She rushed to answer.  “I’m sure of it, Gareth.” 

He paused only a short time before responding.  “Okay.  Leave it with me, Juliette.”

57.

“Mr. Hooke?”

“Who is this?”

“My name’s Bridget Knight.”

“What do you want?”

A pause.  “Are you Chief Inspector Hooke?”

“No.”

“I want to speak to Mr. Hooke.”

“Unless you tell me what it’s about, that’s not going to be possible.”

Another pause.  “My husband was recently killed.  I may have some relevant information, but only for Mr. Hooke.”

“Hang on, please.”

Detective Sergeant Gordon Manley pressed the privacy button on the phone and looked across at his boss, who was distractedly reading the Sun.  He did not like Hooke, and it was mutual.  “This woman says she has information about a murder.”

Hooke looked across in annoyance.  “Take down the details, then.”

“She says she’ll only talk to you.”

Exasperation made Hooke’s frown deepen.  “I’m busy,” he declared, insistently at odds with the reality of the situation.  “Make a note of her name and the number and tell her I’ll contact her when I’ve got the time.”

Manley shrugged. To the phone he said, “I’m afraid he’s not available at the moment, Mrs. Knight...”

He wasn’t looking at Hooke and so did not see his superiors sudden glance across as he mentioned the name.  Nor did he get any further, because Hooke interrupted him.  “Give that phone to me.”

58.

Maggie wandered around the Wye Valley Reclamation Yard for over an hour, not quite sure why she was there.  The site was huge and disorientating, something like  cross between a scrap yard and a builders’ merchant.  All around were materials reclaimed from demolished buildings; they ranged from the prosaic (such as bricks, tiles, stone pillars, benches and fountains) through the interesting (statues, huge iron gates, water troughs and gazebos) to the completely exotic (a T34 Russian tank, gothic arches and a small mock Grecian temple).  Some of the piles of bricks and flagstone rose above her head, and there must have been hundreds of them.  At one end of the site was a large warehouse.  It stood in front of a high brick wall; the rest of the site’s perimeter was a chain link fence running between concrete posts and topped by exuberant spirals of razor wire.  The mainline from Hereford City to London ran alongside the site; loud, bullying rumbles from passing trains punctuated her visit, but they served only as an intermittent background to the continual barking of dogs that came from a compound at the far end of the warehouse.  The walls of this were ship-lapped wood that shook frequently as heavy bodies inside the compound banged into to them. 

Feeling useless because she was achieving nothing, she went into the warehouse and discovered an even more bewildering array of things – wooden staircases, iron spiral staircases, bookshelves in abundance, tables, chairs, sinks, baths, light fittings...

“Can I help you?”  The voice was highly accented and, she could not help but think, slightly and deliberately intimidating.

“Just browsing,” she said.

He looked at her suspiciously.  He was dressed in dirty jeans and a tee shirt promoting the band Megadeath.  Perhaps thirty years old, with cropped hair and facial skin that was still a battleground for acne, he pursed his lips.  “We don’t sell to the general public.”

“My builder advised me to come here.”  She was quite pleased with that one.  “I’m having my house renovated and I’m looking for ideas.”

He was no less suspicious.  “For what?”

She found inspiration in her peripheral vision.  “Newel posts,” she said.

He gestured behind him with his thumb.  “Over here.”

She followed him between about twenty large, porcelain vases on the left and an array of wooden gargoyles to the right.  The barking was louder here.  She adopted her most ingenuous tone.  “What is that noise?”

“The dogs.”

“Do they have to make such a row?”

He was contemptuous.  “No one else has ever complained.”

“How many are there?”

“Five.”

“What are they for?”

They had reached the newel posts and banisters.  She estimated there were at least five hundred in all, ranging from plain to ornate, pine to beech to oak.  “They’re our security.”

She began to look over the collection before her.  “Do you have a big problem with theft?”

“Not with those buggers let loose at night.”

She didn’t feel that she was getting anywhere.  It was hot and dusty in the warehouse and perhaps that was why she was perspiring and felt that she was blushing.  “What about jewellery?”

He looked startled, she decided with excitement.  She was wrong.  “What the fuck are you talking about?” he demanded angrily.

“Do you get jewellery in?  Watches, that kind of thing?”

He stared at her for what seemed to be a long time.  “Get the fuck out of here,” he said steadily.

59.

“Hello, Bill.”

His voice is officious, but then Bill George always was that kind of bastard; he had a reputation as a bit of an uptight cunt, if you want the truth.  “Who is this?”

“Sam Fisher.”

There is a pause, which I suppose is natural; it’s been a long time.  What isn’t natural the tone of his response.  “Hello, Sam.”  The lack of life is bad enough, but he follows this with, “How did you get this number?”

Rather a rude thing to say to an old colleague, I think.  “Diane Lyell at West Mercia Coroner’s Office gave it to me.”  Even at this time of my life, I still find it amazing that a silence can convey so much meaning.  This one is so dense that I briefly wonder if he’s not toddled off for a pee.  I add, “As a matter of fact, when I left the force, I went to work in that same office.”

“I remember.”

Oh.  That tone again.  It doesn’t sound good and makes me wonder what rumours have swirled around in the swill of gossip since I’ve been gone.  “I was just ringing to see if you could answer a few questions for me.”

More silence of a similar tenor.  Before I can say anything else, he declares, “I’m busy, Sam.”  The subtext is obnoxiously clear.

“With Tony Knight’s murder, for one.”

“Yes...  Along with a lot of others.”

Bill George had only been an inspector when I went.  We had never worked directly together but I remember that we were perfectly civil to each other.  “I’m doing a favour for a friend.”

“Oh, yes?” he asked knowingly, giving the impression that he equated a ‘favour for a friend’ with nothing less than the most despicable corruption.

“Tony Knight worked with an old friend of mine here in Herefordshire just before he died,” I explain, suppressing any urge that I have to tell him how angry I am.  “He’s died as well.  I’m just trying to reassure his daughter that Knight’s death is unconnected.”

The nature of the silence now is weirdly different; it is one of a leavening of suspicion.  “Why would she think that?”

“She’s seeing ghosts in the shadows, Bill.  Everyone here’s happy that the death was accidental, but I told her I’d just ring you to make sure it couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with Knight’s killing.”

“Well, you can reassure her that there’s no evidence linking Knight’s murder with his occupation, if that’s what you mean.”

“You’ve got a motive, then?”

Bill George’s reply belies his avowed certainty about that.  “No,” he admits.  “Not as yet.  If anything we’ve got too many.  Knight had history of violence.”

“I thought I recalled the name.”

“Yeah.”  Abruptly, his tone indicates his mood reverts to hostile.  Knight’s not the only one to have history, it seems.

I say quickly, “You’re sure it had nothing to do with a Rolex watch?”

“How do you know about that?” he demands.

“Diane told me.”

I hear a faint grunt that might, might not, have disgust in it.  “It seems that, although Knight hadn’t been on our radar for quite a few years, there were rumours of him nicking stuff from the deceased, although nothing had ever been proved.  Anyway, the Herefordshire police tell me there’s no evidence that this mythical Rolex ever existed.”

“But a Rolex would be a good motive for robbery and murder.”

He’s goaded by my insistence, which is good because he forgets to be uninformative.  “According to your chums in Herefordshire, the parties claiming that Knight took this watch all have alibis, and I’ve got too many better things to do before I go charging off to the sticks to interview the yokels.”

My next question is my last, although I didn’t intend it to be.  “And what about Jack Skinner?  Could he be connected with it?”

That silence returns in even greater intensity than before, “I think I’ve told you enough, Sam,” he says quietly, and puts the phone down.

60.

“You look beautiful.”

Compliments did not often come from the lips of Jack Skinner and Juliette felt a warm feeling flood through her.  Since Melanie had absconded, she had felt fear; she tried to tell herself that it was an unreasonable fear, but she could never quite be persuaded.  Jack’s surface passivity was a dangerous trap, a thin skin over a black yawning chasm from which, she knew too well, could come ferocious daemons.  “Thanks, Jack.”

It was the evening of her fortieth birthday and they were on the way to dinner.  There was thunder in the air and the atmosphere was hot and humid, although the car’s air conditioning told them otherwise.  He leaned across to kiss her, a rare display of affection outside the house.  Not that the back of the Jaguar was exactly public – it had privacy glass -  but they were not alone for the car was being driven by Frankie Brown, Jack’s chauffeur; she had not before known Jack to display fondness for her – for anyone – in front of a member of staff.

It was then that she appreciated for the first time that something was wrong.  She looked up into the rear view mirror and caught Frankie Brown’s eyes looking at her; they were expressionless.  She tried to suppress panic; she had always been scared of his gaze.  “Where are we going?”  She had asked this before in the day when Jack had announced that they would be celebrating the occasion by eating out; it wasn’t extraordinary that they should eat out, but they didn’t do so often.  He had said simply, “You’ll see.”

This second time that she asked, he said again, “You’ll see.”  His tone was exactly as it had been before.  There was nothing of menace in his voice or his words.  If anything, there could have been excitement that he was treating her and that she would be delighted when she saw what he had arranged for her.  He looked ahead, over Brown’s shoulder, his chin raised; his right hand held on to the strap above the door.  There was, as ever, his smile.

She said no more; there was nothing at all that she could say.  She could think, though; think and wonder what had gone wrong.  With every second, every yard that the car covered, she became increasingly convinced that things were seriously awry, and that the end result would not be good for her.  The sound of the wheels on the road was muted; Frankie Brown did not have the hi-fi system on.  All she could hear was her silently screaming terror.

They passed, she thought, through Dorking.  Jack looked out and said thoughtfully, “Man will never be free.”

“What do you mean?”

But he didn’t respond directly, saying apparently irrelevantly, “I no longer dream, Juliette.  Isn’t that odd?  I used to dream all the time, and they were almost always good dreams.  Not now, though.”  Before she could reply, he went on, “You heard of a man called Diderot?”

“No.”  It was Jack’s habit to ask questions like that, she knew, but there was something she did not like about the enquiry.

“Eighteenth century French philosopher.”

“Yes?”

But again, his next words did not connect.  “It’s pride that sets us above the animals, you know that?”

“I don’t understand, Jack.”  Despite her fear, she was concerned.  Yet, again, he wasn’t behaving as she had come to expect.  As terrifying as the normality had been, she suddenly found that it was greatly preferable to this inexplicable change.

Still he wasn’t looking at her, his attention focussed on exterior.  They were in the outskirts of the town now.  He announced, “Gareth came to see me.”

“Did he?”  She was pleased, but also afraid to say more.

“You were out.  At the beautician’s.”  He would have had the beautician come to the house, but she had insisted that she be allowed this regular, luxurious release; it was her single escape, the thing that she thought allowed her a tenuous touch of reality.

As pleased as she was that her plea to Jack’s son had worked, she still found herself unaccountably anxious.  “What did he say?”

“I was so pleased to hear from him.”  As good as these words were to hear, she saw that there was a subtext, one that she could not discern.  He added, “He said you’d contacted him, saying you were worried about me.”  His tone spoke of pleasure.

“I am.  You’ve been...”

But instantly his left hand came up, palm out towards her and he shook his head slightly but firmly, looking directly at her at last.  Say no more.  There some things that even Frankie Brown was not to hear.

The car slowed and turned right off the road, heading along a minor country road.  They were heading into forest. It began to rain; big, slap-dash drops that hit the tarmac and foliage with wet exuberance.  He was looking ahead again.  “You know, talking to him, I remembered how important family is.  I admit I’d forgotten that. Gareth had drifted away from me emotionally.”

Her head was buzzing and she didn’t extract the huge irony that these words were offering her.  All she could think was that it was no restaurant she was heading for, and wonder what she had done to deserve this.  She said nothing, because there was no words in her head that were relevant.  After about a mile, the car stopped in a small clearing  surrounded by dense woodland that bowed over it; ferns and brambles ringed it tightly except for the road in and the one out.  There was a picnic table.  There was dark green Range Rover already parked there.  Brown switched off the engine and got out.  He strolled over to the picnic table sat at it, seemingly unaware and certainly uncaring of the pouring rain, and Juliette found herself counting out her remaining life in deep breaths as she desperately tried to work out what she had done to merit this.  She gave up the puzzle and asked for the answer, as if the final clue in the crossword had proved too difficult.  “Why?”

Jack looked directly at her.  He was smiling and his voice was gentle.  “Sean Hooke leads me to understand that he might have information regarding Melanie’s disappearance.”  What did he expect her to do?  Celebrate?  He then said, “The main artery in my belly is swollen.  Like a bubble, the doctor said.  He felt it at the back of my abdomen, pulsing there like a baby.  I can feel it, too, now I’m aware of it.”

She was driven to speak.  “Is that why you’ve been having these attacks?”

“It’s called an aortic aneurysm.  It’s leaking, causing back pain.”  His voice was so gentle, yet she didn’t hear self-pity in them.  “One day – perhaps soon – it’s going to blow.”

“Oh, Jack.”  She found that she was genuinely distressed by this news.

“Until Gareth phoned me, I couldn’t be sure he was family.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s my son, but that didn’t automatically mean he’s family.  I thought he’d chosen to live a separate life.”

“That’s good, then.”  She was unsure where this was going.  “That you’re reconciled, I mean.” 

“You shouldn’t really have told him.”

“But...”

He shook his head.  “It’s OK, though.”

They looked at each other, and he leaned towards her and they kissed, full and deep on the lips.  To her it was intoxicating and perplexing...but not for long.

With liquid grace, he pulled away and slammed his open palm across the front of her throat, grasped and then squeezed.  He was a big, powerful man and the effect was immediate.  She couldn’t speak, could only see red mist and hear rasping breath.  He looked directly at her, the smile still there, and he said, “You betrayed me, Juliette.  I depend on a reputation of invincibility.  I can’t allow those around me tittle-tattling.  Who knows where it will end?”

He carried on squeezing life out of her for over a minute, after which he pulled away and just sat there calmly.  He murmured, “’Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.’”  His voice held something faintly declamatory; as if it were some sort of heaven sent sign, the rain abruptly eased and the low evening sun slanted through the trees.   He got out of the car and went over to the Range Rover without looking back, nor even glancing at Brown, who in turn didn’t appear to notice him either.  He drove out of the wood, heading west, and Brown got out of a cigarette and began to smoke, enjoying the taste.  Gradually the sounds of birds began to be heard.

61.

Mr and Mrs Arnold Brown had lived in Much Marcle, a village that Maggie had always thought attractive.  It was on the southern edge of Herefordshire and its layout, together with its position gave it an air of openness that she found invigorating.   It was dominated by the Marcle Ridge in the geographic background, and the home of Weston’s cider in the economic background.  The house that Maggie was looking for was part of a modern development of six houses close to the primary school, although this could not be seen as she pressed the brass doorbell button to the right of the royal blue front door.  It hadn’t rained for a long time in the county and the small front lawn looked browned and dusty; there were some dying shrubs on either side of her; she wasn’t in any way a gardener, but the sight was sad to her, as if she were bearing uncaring witness to abandoned, starving children.  There was no answer to either the first or the second rings, nor to her loud knock on the door.  She declined to peer through the letterbox or in at any of the windows, not least because of a sense of dignity and fearing to feel like a bailiff.  She had no other option but to walk back down the short path and back to her car; she could not resist looking up at the bedroom windows before getting back in.

“You won’t get any success if you want the Browns.”  The voice came from behind her.  She turned to see a young black man dressed in a dark grey suit, just about to get into a BMW that was parked in the drive of number eight.

“Away, are they?” she said.

He laughed as he opened the back door, swung a metal briefcase into the back, and shut it again.  “Dr Brown’s no longer with us.”  He drew a slow forefinger across his throat with a grimace on his face.

“Doctor?  He was a dentist, wasn’t he?”

The man shrugged.  “Called himself ‘doctor’.”

“What about Mrs. Brown?”

He laughed again.  “She didn’t hang around too long after the funeral.”  He opened the front door of his car.  “Gone on a long, long holiday with lover boy, if you believe the pub gossip.”  With which, he nodded at her, said, “See you,” and got in the car. 

62.

This is my world.  This morning I bled from my gums for all of half an hour and then had diarrhoea.  Not just any old diarrhoea, though; this was super-duper black, tarry stuff that clung to the bowl as if the toilet were made of wool.  It smelled odd, too.  I’ve never seen anything like it before, but I’ve read enough medical reports to know that it was melaena, which is a consequence of a bleed into the gut; it means a big one, too.  I can hear the clock ticking and see the hands converging on the midnight hour of my life.  I forgot to mention it when Gemma asks about my health, which ought to make me feel shame, but doesn’t.  She’s brought my month’s medicines, including the increased dose of morphine that Dr. Lawrence ‘Up My Own In A Big, Big Way’ Wade has graciously consented to allow me.  When she’s gone, I settle down to the computer to try once again to find out a little more about Neil Carson’s last three patients.

Since I retired, I look to think I’ve become quite proficient at using the internet.  I spent over a year researching my family history and I like to think I did quite well, even unearthing the name of one of Jake’s great, great grandfathers, a man who was involved in the slave trade in Trinidad.  We are all either sinners, or the sons and daughters of sinners, it appears.  Inevitably, there has been a lot to find out about the James Peter Prescott, but most of it comes from the local press and details his various court appearances and punishments; a single positive reference concerns his early years when he took part team that once won the annual Herefordshire school nature competition.  Arnold Brown’s presence on the worldwide web has proved smaller, restricted to listings in various websites concerned with choosing a dentist, a single academic publication regarding injuries to teeth caused by electric harmonicas, and a letter to the Hereford Times regarding the use of polytunnels on the farmland around Much Marcle.  Despite my best efforts, I have yet to find out anything about Elizabeth Bagshawe.  She was, as far as the cyber world was concerned, invisible.  Searching for her name produces no results at all – or, at least, none that is relevant to the one who died and was autopsied by Neil Carson just before he drowned.  There are a fair few other Elizabeth Bagshawes – a dress-maker, a champion dog trainer and several authors – but none live (or lived) in Herefordshire. 

This is not unusual, though; many of those alive, even in the electronically connected, so-called civilised western world, have not made their mark on the computer age.  It is, though, bloody useless to me.  I could try to call in a few favours, but my stock is low and the conversation with Chief Inspector George from Surry Constabulary has left me wary.  There seems no route to the truth in that direction.

I open a sachet of morphine into the decanter, swirl it around and pour out a glass of deliciously adulterated whisky.  The taste in mouth for the moment masked, I return to the problem.  The alcohol hits my belly and just for a while the delicious burning sensation blots out the pain that claws at my guts; it is growing again.  Thus invigorated, I return to the problem.  Why kill a pathologist and then the technician who helped him?  Something about one of the bodies, obviously.  Either the body itself...

The logical consequence is that one or both of them had recognised something about a body...

Or someone was afraid that they had.

Someone who wanted to remain hidden.

In which case, it would be someone without an internet presence.

...But then perhaps it was something on the body.

Knight had a history of stealing from the deceased, and could have done a deal with the undertakers to cover it up.  There is, after all, an allegation that he stole a valuable watch from one of them.  Maybe that’s an irrelevancy, though.  Maybe he stole something from one of the other two bodies that someone wanted back.  What, though?  What could be so valuable that it’s worth two murders?  It would have to be worth a lot of money, but it would also have to be something secret, or else why not just tell the police?  It was interesting the Neil Carson had thought that Knight had done just that; Elizabeth Bagshawe’s widower had denied any such theft, but perhaps he would, wouldn’t he?

And quite suddenly, everything points to Elizabeth Bagshawe’s autopsy as the one that’s central to all this.

It’s all too good to be true, and almost completely beyond proof.

There is something about her PM report that has been nagging at me, but doing so in such a gentle way that I haven’t been aware of it until now.  I look at it again, knowing that most of it is beyond my comprehension; bits of the body that I’ve never heard of, comparisons that sound disgusting, a lot of words that are just there to confound the layman.  The description of the external appearance is more explicable.  It uses technical terms such as ‘contusion’, ‘oedema’ and ‘lymphadenopathy’ – words that I’ve seen in a thousand reports but never bothered to understand – but at least it gives me something of a picture of the deceased.

A middle-aged Caucasian woman, consistent with stated age.

...Which is fifty-nine.

Identification was by Coroner’s name bands around the left wrist and right ankle.  There is no evidence of significant external trauma.  There is no evidence of...

There follows a long list of terms, only some of which I fully understand; ‘oedema’, ‘cyanosis’, ‘finger clubbing’, ‘petechiae’...             

An oblique linear scar, one hundred and twenty-five millimetres long, runs across the left upper chest consistent with a mastectomy.

Fair enough.  Not uncommon, unfortunately.

Another, eighty-five millimetres long, runs across the anterior neck, possibly indicating previous thyroid surgery.

And the nagging identifies itself; two scars that form a hieroglyph; each in itself not uncommon, but together something quite rare and, in the context of Tony Knight and his history, perhaps unique.

There is something terrible forming on the horizon, perhaps worse even than the death I have imagined.

63.

Bridget remembered the smile; God how she remembered it!  It brought with it an attendant dread, even though she had never

really experienced anything directly connected with it that might lead her to such an emotion.  Jack Skinner’s reputation amongst those with whom she had once lived, Tony’s own vague allusions and his reactions whenever Skinner’s name was mentioned, and the terrible rumours had all combined to make him a monstrous bogeyman to her.  She felt as if she were verging on unconsciousness as she made her way to the rendezvous that Hooke had arranged with her.  It was an empty office block in Streatham, just off the high street.  She did not know that Jack owned it; or rather that he owned the company that owned it.

She still did not know whether she had done the right thing, but she certainly knew that the expression of Jack Skinner was not going to tell her.  Not too long ago, Tony had had a similar meeting with someone about this subject, and he was now dead.  If it had been Skinner, then she would also die; it was as simple as that.  She could only hope that it had been with someone else, and that Skinner would be interested in what she had to offer; she hoped that he might even be grateful.  She was, though, very aware that dealings with such as Jack Skinner were very dangerous indeed. 

She had been given the address by Sean Hooke over the phone that morning; that and a time to attend.  When she had rung the doorbell as the rush hour traffic rumbled grudgingly through its own dust, she had been sweating profusely, and not just from the heat of the late afternoon.  A man she didn’t know opened the door at once; he wasn’t particularly big, but he exuded a degree of violent tension that suggested he might snap at any moment and that the effects on those nearby would be shocking.  He said nothing as he led her across what had once been an open plan office, was now just a space speared by dirty square pillars; above them the false ceiling was half absent, exposing pipes, ducts and wires.  At the back of the building they went up the stairs, where she saw rat droppings and smelled urine.  Jack was standing at the window of an office at the front of the third floor.  Her escort had opened the door and stood aside; when she entered Jack, who had been looking out of the window at the Streatham Common across the traffic of the street, had turned.  “Bridget!  Good to see you!”  She didn’t reply.  She couldn’t reply.  His eyes went to the envelope that she was clutching.  “Is that what you’ve got to show me?” he enquired mildly.  He didn’t hold out his hand.  He wore a pale green linen suit and a bright blue tie; she absently thought that the colours clashed slightly.

  She held it for him.  He took it and asked, “How are you?  It’s been quite a few years.”

“Yes.”

That room was stuffy.  The windows were closed and the sun showed her how much dust there was around them.  Her legs ached and she felt both short of breath and about to explode with air.  She wanted to be sick.  He said joyfully, suddenly, “What am I thinking of?  Let’s sit down.”

There was a desk in the corner, behind her to her left.  On either side were two chairs; they looked clean, as if they had been put there especially.   Gratefully, she went across and sat in one; he followed her slowly, eyes on the photograph, his face frozen, still smiling.  He did show his disgust at the odour she had brought with her as he slowly sat down on other side of the desk.  More minutes passed in that derelict office in the south side of London after he turned it over and read Tony’s screed.

He looked up at her.  “Tony was a good man.”

She nodded.  She did not want to cry but, as with so much of her life, she was no longer in command of matters.  Skinner said, “I was sorry when I heard what happened to him.”

She experienced some relief.  “I did what he told me to.”

“So I see.”  He considered the picture again, his unblinking eyes devouring the image of two rings; one a wedding ring, the other a distinctive engagement ring.  The former could have been anyone’s but the latter was undoubtedly Melanie Skinner’s.  “You know what these are, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” she agreed eagerly.  “I still remember that day, Jack.  It was a wonderful occasion.”

A long time passed; she guessed that he was remembering and did not dare disturb him as he did so.  He pursed his lips and took in a long breath.  And still he smiled as he looked back at her and said, “Thank you, Bridget.”

She was pathetically relieved to hear what she thought was genuine gratitude, “You’re welcome, Mr Skinner.”

But he was back in the photograph.

The heat stretched in that dusty, dirty place while she waited and sweated for her reward, and Jack Skinner just remembered.  Her next remark was born of rising desperation.  “Tony always said what a generous man you were, Mr Skinner.”

He did not react.

After a long time, Sean Hooke stepped into the room, but Jack Skinner ignored him, was perhaps unaware of him.  He gestured to Bridget Knight that she should come away.  It took her a moment to understand, and even then she looked across at Skinner as if wanting his permission to leave, or perhaps wanting her reward.  Courage failed her, though, and she didn’t put voice to her thoughts.  When she joined Hooke outside the room, she whispered petulantly, “Don’t I get anything?  I deserve a reward at least.”

But DCI Hooke was tired.  He led her down the stairs while she followed like an expectant bitch.  Only at the bottom, and as she repeated the question even more impatiently, did he bother to reply acidly.  “You’ve had your reward, Bridget.  You’re still alive.”

64.

Hooke returned to the top floor office.  Jack Skinner still stared at the photograph, his position exactly as it had been when Bridget Skinner had left him.  Having entered the room, the DCI stood just inside it, almost like a mourner at a funeral; he tried not to look at Skinner, but there was nothing else of importance in his world at that moment.  It was just possible that he had discharged at least part of his debt, that he could that night sleep more easily.  The minutes, though, were in no hurry and it was only after a long time that Skinner said to the picture in front of him, “So she’s dead.”

“Yes.”  Hooke did not dare say more or less.

Skinner blinked and it was with surprise that Hooke realised that he couldn’t recall ever having seen the man do such a thing before.  Was he crying, he wondered?  Skinner still smiled, even so.  He asked, “You’ve followed this up, of course.”

Hooke was still very nervous, as if he were in the cage of a hungry wolf.  “I’ve contacted the West Mercia Coroner’s Office and confirmed Knight’s account.  He helped out at the autopsy of a fifty-three year old woman during a week spent in Hereford.  As it says on the back of the photo, her name was given as Elizabeth Bagshawe.”

“How did she die?”

Nervously, Hooke said, “A bleed into the brain.  No funny business.”  Skinner sighed; perhaps it was born of sadness, perhaps of frustration.   Hooke went on, “Her address is one in Ledbury, a market town...”

“I know where Ledbury is.”

Hooke shut up.  Skinner had not stopped looking at the rings.  “What about Sommerville?”

“I’ve had the address watched.  Someone’s at home, but keeping low.”

“What story have you given?”

“That it’s the address of a suspected fraudster.”

Skinner grunted.  “Which he is,” he murmured.  But he did not move.

“What will you do?”

Skinner laughed gently.  He smiled a great deal, but he rarely laughed.  “Go and see him.”
65.

“I’m sorry, Sam, I haven’t got time at the moment.”  Diane sounds stressed.  There are times in the Coroner’s Office that are like that, I remember. 

Tough shit.

“I know you hear people say this a lot, Diane, but it is important.”

“Things have gone really shit-shaped, Sam.  The Coroner’s doing his nut.”

“Run out of custard creams again?”

“No.”  She is angry, I realise; truly angry.  “That stupid girl – Neil Carson’s daughter - has only gone and shat on all of us.”

“Oh...”  She doesn’t realise how alarmed I am to hear that.  I’ve been thinking I feel as bad as you can without being dead, but God’s always got a few surprise left up those fucking big sleeves of His.  “Mick Chadwick says she cut open her father’s body.  He says she gave him  some story about potential ‘foul play’.  He told her to go home and calm down, but she apparently came back after he locked up and left the mortuary.”

Christ...  “How did she get in?”

“He reckons her father had a spare set that she must have found.”

As a story, I’ve heard worse, but it still stinks.  “Why did he wait so long to say anything?  Neil Carson was buried days ago.”

She replied grimly, “It wasn’t actually Chadwick who initially came forward; it was his wife.   She says he didn’t tell her until this morning.”

I vaguely recall Sandra Chadwick as something of an untameable shrew.  I used to feel sorry for Mick Chadwick, not now though.  “What’s happened to Maggie Carson?”

“The police want to talk to her, the Coroner’s as angry as a bear with a burning brick up his arse, and Wally’s wandering around saying, ‘I told you so’.”  I get the feeling it’s that last she’s finding hardest to bear; whilst I am pondering this, she asks in a peculiar tone, “You’ve got nothing to do with this, have you, Sam?”

“Don’t be stupid, Diane.”

There is the briefest of pauses before she responds in a relieved voice, “Good.” 

Lying is like any other talent; the more you practice, the better you get at it.  And deceiving yourself is easiest of all, of course.  “I can’t believe she’d do something so stupid,” I add.

“Well, apparently she has.”

“But there’s no proof.  I mean, the body’s been burned.”

“There’s still been a serious allegation made that she has to answer, Sam.”

“Of course.”

“So, what did you want?”

“Elizabeth Bagshawe.”

“Who?” 

I can understand that reaction.  A lot of people die, all the time and, if it doesn’t become an inquest case, then the memory of the Coroner’s office is short.  “She died of a bleed in the head whilst out shopping a few weeks ago.”

“What about her?”

“Do you remember the case?”

I expect her to have to think about it, but she doesn’t.  “Yes.”

“Anything at all unusual about it?”

“Not at the time.”  What does that mean?  Before I can ask her that very question, she tells me.  “Not until Croydon CID start asking questions about it.”

I am winded by this; literally, unable for a second even to breathe.  I manage to ask eventually, “Who in Croydon CID?”

“Chap called DCI Sean Hooke.”

This time I’m speechless for a long, long time; so long that Diane says, “Sam?  Are you okay?”

But I’m not and all I can do is put the phone down.

“What is it, Sam?”  Bill George has my name in the phone’s memory, which isn’t particularly good; his tone is particularly fucking bad, though.  “I really haven’t got the time.”

“Please, Bill, I have to find out just one thing.”  I sound like a needy old man.  “One minute of your time.”

“I told you last time, Sam.  I don’t think you and I should be talking.”

Then why did you pick up the phone?  I don’t ask him that question, because we both know the answer; his hands are dirty, too.  It’s not Jack Skinner’s shit that he’s rummaged around in, but shit is shit, whatever bread you spread it on.  “Tell me about Melanie Skinner.  Is she well?”

Does he gasp?  I cannot be sure.  There is certainly a long pause in which there might be buried some deep breathing.  I ask, “Bill?  What about Jack Skinner’s wife?”

He says guardedly, “The word is she’s gone AWOL.”  Another blow of a hammer seems to strike me.  “I’ve heard it said she ran off with a man called Henry Sommerville.”

The name is familiar to me; in this context, though, it is ludicrous to hear it.  “Henry Sommerville?  Jack Skinner’s accountant”

“So they say.”

The Henry Sommerville of my memory was many things – including a brilliant accountant – but cuckolder was not one of them.  Tall, refined, balding and seemingly detached from the world in which Jack Skinner breathed and bred, he was the very antithesis of a lover boy.

I barely hear myself say, “Thanks, Bill.  I won’t bother you again.”

66.

“Mr. Bagshawe, if you’re there, I suggest you pick this up.”

Of course, he doesn’t.

“Mr. Bagshawe, please...”

Nothing.  I wait.

“Mr. Bagshawe...”  And I go for broke.  “Mr. Bagshawe, I know that you’re really Henry Sommerville, and that your wife’s true name was Melanie Skinner.  I suggest you disappear, because I think someone’s coming for you.  Someone who’s going to hurt you very badly.”

I wait but there is no response.  Either he’s gone already or I’m too late

And then the phone is picked up.  Before I can speak again, a voice familiar from my past, like Nemesis, like a ravenous beast thirsting for the blood of the killer of its cubs, like the devil himself, says in a quiet, measured tone, “Hello, Sam.  Long time no see.  We must catch up on old times.”

I put the phone down, stunned.  I don’t believe in all that mystical sixth sense crap, yet I have known that this moment has been coming for a long time now, ever since I first heard Tony Knight’s name mentioned.  I don’t believe either that there is an inevitability about the past catching up with you, but this isn’t to say that life, or whatever powers it, doesn’t enjoy creating coincidence that sometimes kills.

I can’t run and I can’t hide.  All I can do is prepare.  I was going to die in the not too distant future, and it wasn’t going to be a nice, pain-free one, but what I fear from the hands Jack Skinner promises pain an order of magnitude greater than I expected from that bastard cancer.  I wonder what he’s done to the man who stole his wife, but only for a moment, and even that is too long, and too terrible to dwell on.

It is six o’clock in the evening and I am going to die tonight.  That is a sobering thought, even to one who is already half-cut from whisky and medication. I need to do something, though.  I want to die on my own terms.  That is the least and the most I can ask for; I just wish I knew what or who I am asking this of.  As I rise from my chair, an overwhelming feeling of nausea comes into me and I hurry as fast as I can to the downstairs cloakroom where I puke pure blood once more.  Perhaps it won’t be Jack Skinner who kills me, then.

67.

He put the handset down and turned away from the window.  The man in the corner stared at him with wide eyes that spoke clearly of his terror.  Behind him, Frankie Brown stood as ever impassive, his gloved hands on the back of the chair, as he waited; he had been here before.  The room was carpeted and furnished, but it held a lacquer of impersonality because of the stains and the chips and age of the woodchip wallpaper.  The furniture was cheap and the lampshade that drooped from the ceiling was faded.  There was an odour of disregard, like cheap cologne, that small, foetid breeze coming through the open casement window could not hide; there were grubby net curtains that moved only sluggishly in a torpid air current.  The stream of cars and lorries in the street outside was loud and yet from a different world.

Skinner felt a surge of joy, but it was not as it should have been, and he felt cheated.  He had never actually got around to looking out Melanie’s bridal gown, but her death had robbed him of pleasure, and he did not like it.  His revenge on Henry Sommerville, the man he now faced, would be enjoyable, but not the ecstasy he had presumed.  He was not a man to let this show, however.

“Well, Henry,” he said and he did not let his smile show his frustration.  “Here we are.”

The man opposite – he who had dared to steal from him, who had thought to cross him and commit a dreadful betrayal of his trust – did not answer, although he was not gagged.  He was secured with heavy tape that ran around his body several times, binding him to the chair, while Brown stood behind him, pushing down on his shoulders.  The fear within him, though, was palpable.  If Brown thought or felt anything, he failed to allow it to surface.

Skinner moved into the room and felt in his pocket; he had on a boiler suit; it was freshly out of its wrapping.  He produced his razor.  “You didn’t steal any of my money, Henry.”

The room was not double-glazed and the sound of the traffic was intermittent but loud; Brown thought that he would not have liked to live her.  Skinner said, “I would say that was good of you, but unwise.”  He looked at the blade; it could have been pristine.  “Why not, I wonder?”  His face suggested that he was thinking about it.  “Is it because you consider yourself to be an ‘honest’ man, Henry?  Stealing my wife is okay, but dipping into my money is a step too far, something that a straight, upright sort of a person wouldn’t do?”

Henry Sommerville was gaunt, more so than Brown remembered him; he felt the bone of the shoulder blades through the green jumper.  Was Sommerville’s hair thinner than he recalled?   Quite possibly.  And Brown saw that bags of a deeper hue underlined the eyes, while they were circumscribed by more sharply etched creases.  Skinner did not care what this man looked like.  Sommerville said in a voice that was pathetically defiant, that sounded to all the ears that heard like that of a man who was being sucked into abject terror, quite possibly from a place of total despair, “I’m not sure you’d be able to understand why I did it, Jack.”

“Try me.”

But Sommerville either couldn’t, or wouldn’t, or daren’t say more.

Jack’s sigh was theatrical – they all knew that.  He asked scathingly, “Was it love?”

“Something like that,” was Sommerville’s reply, but only after a long time in which an ambulance went by with its siren blaring.

“You think I didn’t love Melanie?  Is that it?”

But Sommerville didn’t take up the challenge, so Jack Skinner looked again at the blade.  For a short while, there was no sound and the only movement of the man in the chair was to close his eyes in a prolonged blink that brought forth tears.  Skinner asked, “Did you think you were being clever by sitting tight in this...  this shit hole?”  He indicated the squalid room.  “Not much a place to die, is it, Henry?”

He went back to window to look out on to the road.  The sun was beginning to set and cast long shadows down the hill towards the centre of town.  His attention was only momentarily distracted however, for after a second or two of looking out through imperfect grimy glass, he slammed the window casement down.  When he turned back to the room, the smile had gone and it was as if something else were there, something angry and implacable, something that could never create, could only use and, ultimately, use up.  The transformation was shocking, not just because of its speed, but also because of it was unheralded.  These two men knew Jack Skinner well, and neither had ever seen its like before.  His constant smile had been one kind of insanity, and this was yet another; if his usual demeanour suggested a man who was removed from the violence he committed, this one shouted without noise of a manic glee in savagery, a daemon who was ready to exult in brutality, all the more so because he thought that he had been wronged. 

“Tell me why you didn’t run to the ends of the earth, Henry.  I would have found you eventually, but it strikes me as unwise to just hunker down...here.”  He gestured with the blade that was still in his hand.  His grip was tight around the ebony handle so that his fingernails were uncharacteristically white.  He did not see the puzzled look in Frank Brown’s eyes; saw very little, in fact.

Sommerville had always known what Jack Skinner did, but it had been at a large remove from him and he had been knowingly ignorant of the details.  He had before looked only at numbers on a screen, enjoyed a feeling of satisfaction when they behaved; they hadn’t been connected with anything particularly unpleasant or criminal.  He was thereby an innocent man, a normal man, a widower and although, like everyone, he had been terribly afraid of Jack Skinner, but he had fallen in love.  At the age of sixty-one, fully fifteen years alone and unheeding of any passion other than that for detailed arithmetic and fine legal interpretation, he had become romantically entangled.  He had never thought it at all likely to happen, had certainly never sought it, but once it had found him, it had proved an irresistible thing, both alluring and uncompromising, able to distort perception.  Only now did he fully appreciate just how much his judgements, his assessments of risk, his very wisdom, had been twisted.  Melanie Skinner had been attractive – to his eyes beautiful – but with her came awful danger.  He had someone known that, and yet also not appreciated it.  He did now, though.  The rumours of what Jack Skinner had done more than once to those who had crossed him – never once absent but somehow before insignificant – would not now leave him.  He said sorrowfully, “Her mother’s buried here.”

“You what?”  Jack fairly roared, unheeding of the possibility of being overheard.  He was, in truth, unheeding of much.  He seemed outraged.

The accountant tried to summon something that might pass for courage.  “Her mother’s grave.  It’s in the churchyard.  You wouldn’t let her go to the funeral.”

Jack looked at him, then frowned abruptly, pulled his head back and breathed deeply in.  He gave the impression of incredulity, or possibly he was a man trying to recall some small detail.  He said slowly, “She asked, I remember...”  More dredging of his memory.  “We were due in Ukraine...  An important deal...”  The frown deepened as he said wonderingly, “She didn’t make a fuss.”

Henry began to cry; tears of loss, not fear, although Jack could not differentiate.  “We were just passing through, heading for Swansea and then on to Dublin by ferry.  It was so silly.  She just tripped over an uneven paving stone, and hit her head on gravestone.  It was quite sudden, quite without warning.  She briefly cried out, but never spoke again.  I called the ambulance, but...”  He sounded as if he were apologising to her widower for his negligence; if he was, it was without obvious effect.  “She was taken to hospital and put on a ventilator.  There was a lot of discussion about surgery, but eventually it was decided she wouldn’t survive it.  They told me that it was best to let her be, that she would die, probably quite quickly.”

Jack Skinner said brutally, “You should have run.”  He had spoken quickly, almost as if he did not wish to dwell on something.

“She was in a coma for four weeks.  Although they said she would never survive, you hear about these things, don’t you?  Miracle survivors, suddenly coming back after weeks, even months or years.”  His laugh was short, sour and almost explosive.  “She got pneumonia.  That’s when they said it would be kinder to switch the ventilator off.”

His tears overwhelmed him.  Skinner’s scrutiny was clinical.  “You’re a romantic, Henry.”  He clearly had no time for such people.  He played the flat of the blade against the side of his nose as if making a judgement, then pointed it at his captive.  “That was your downfall.”

Sommerville had run out of words but Skinner still could not follow his thinking.  “You could have run after she finally died,” pointed out.

Henry Sommerville looked up at him and his face suggested pity that Jack Skinner could not understand.  “What was the point?” he asked simply.

The doorbell rang.  Immediately, Brown put his hand over Henry Sommerville’s mouth as Jack Skinner looked down out of the window.  The bell sounded again.  Skinner pursed his lips, considering.  Without turning, he said to Brown, “Tape up his mouth, then go downstairs.  She’s on her phone at the moment.  When she finishes, follow her discretely and see where she goes.”

68.

The address on the PM report of Elizabeth Bagshawe told Maggie that she had lived with her husband at 203b, The Homend, Ledbury.  It was a small, upper floor flat, not far from the local Tesco supermarket, even closer to the Baptist Church.  She rang the doorbell, already feeling that she was going to relive her experience in Much Marcle; the silence that followed strengthened this suspicion, and it was confirmed when a second press elicited nothing once again.  She looked around; this time there was no one around who might volunteer information; the road was busy with traffic but bereft of pedestrians.  She decided that she would have to conduct unofficial house-to-house enquiries and this she would have done, had her phone not rung.  It was David.

“David?”

“You’ve really done it this time, Sis.”  She heard the anger before she understood the words, emotion that was conveyed by a combination of a tremor in his voice, its low tone and a heightened sibilance, as if he were shivering with cold.

“What do you mean?”  She knew, though.

Oh, Mick.

“You’ve been accused of desecrating Dad’s body.”

“David...”

“Did you?  Did you?”

“David...”

“Oh, my God.  You did, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about...”

She heard the lie, and so did he.  “How could you?  How the fuck could you?”  His voice had risen majestically through the octaves, carried there by indignation, always a potent fuel for her brother.

“You don’t understand...”

She was well aware that she was never going to finish her justifications; David hadn’t rung her to hear anything from her, only to listen to his own fury expressed.  “Mum’s gone to pieces.”

“There’s something going on, David...”

This time, she was not interrupted, though; discovering that he had lost his place in the script, she was herself momentarily without words.  Her confoundment was interrupted by him demanding, “Well?”

It was as if she were having to explain a joke; the thing lost all meaning.  If she told him of her findings, she would just sound juvenile and silly.  Instead, she asked, “Was it Mick Chadwick?”

“Yes.”

She couldn’t blame him, even as she cursed him; according to her father, this was the man who had, as a youngster, often gone joyriding and once set fire to a derelict house.  She didn’t  think  him the man to judge her harshly.  She was familiar, though, with humanity’s weakness for self-righteous hypocrisy.  As if on cue, David spoke.  “The Herefordshire Police have received a copy of his letter, as has the West Mercia Coroner.”

Suddenly, she didn’t feel like playing detective any longer.  She cut the connection, got back into her car and decided to return to her father’s house where, David grimly informed her, the police would shortly be calling.  She had no interest in her surroundings and had no idea that the door before which she had just stood had opened and a man had quickly and efficiently run to a parked car just up the street outside the Italian restaurant. The man in the car parked outside the Italian Restaurant.  He at once switched on the engine and began to follow her at a leisurely pace.

69.

Maggie had expected the police to be waiting when she got back to her father’s house, but they were not there.  She let herself in and sat down in his study, just staring at the wall.  Her overwhelming emotion was of frustration, that she had failed to show that her father had not just been a careless drunk, that he had been murdered.  She did not consider that she had broken the law, at least not a law that mattered; the guilt she felt came not from illegality but from failure.  She had hoped for her father’s forgiveness for the desecration of his body when she had shown the world the truth, but now she felt that she did not even have that.  She was lost.  She sank into something of a despond and time for her slowed...

The doorbell roused her.  She made her way to the front door, purposefully composing herself, but not actually able to think what she might be able to say, whether to bluster it out or to make a full confession; strangely.  She felt that her decision would be best guided by what her father’s reaction would have been, but that was not apparent to her; would he sanction her bare-faced denial of the crime of which she was accused in the interests of justice?  She could no longer say.

She opened the door to a well-built man with fair but greying hair that was cropped.  He was dressed in an expensive grey suit and bright blue tie, over which was a dark blue woollen overcoat that was unbuttoned.  He said, “Dr Maggie Carson?”

She stood to one side to allow him in.  He walked past her, an air of authority coming from him and, as he did so, she saw the spot of blood on his collar, the one that had been previously hidden by the overcoat.  She stared at it, unable to comprehend its significance, yet sure that it some.  Then he turned to look at her.  Just as he had been when she opened the door to him, he had on his face a smile, one that reached all the way to his eyes.  She opened her mouth to say something but he had spotted in her face her uncertainty.  His hand shot out and grabbed her arm.  His grip was hard, unheeding of any pain it might cause. 

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

Still smiling, he said, “I think you’d better come with me, Dr. Carson.”

“You’re not the police...”  She tried to shake loose but his arm barely moved.  If she had any doubts about her assertion, the appearance of another man - this one with a fearsome handgun pointing at her – quickly obliterated them.  She was pulled away into the hall and the door closed.  She pleaded, “What’s going on?” and she heard a lot of fear in the words.  The new man – the one with the gun – was shorter than the first, and he didn’t smile; she couldn’t decide whether that was better or worse. 

The one gripping her arm said by way of introduction, “My name’s Jack Skinner.”

It meant nothing to her, and his disappointment was profound, although somehow, incredibly, his expression did not change as he said sadly, “Surely Sam’s told you about me.”

“Sam?”

“Sam Fisher.”  He relaxed his grip, just slightly.  “We have a mutual friend, you see.”  Before she could react, he went on, “He hasn’t mentioned me?   Why, I am surprised.”  He shook his head.  She made a sudden dart to escape his hand but he was quick; God, he was quick.  The grip tightened again at once.  He suggested, “Why don’t we go and have a chat with him?”

70.

There is a soft knock on the door.  I have been sleeping in the chair.  I do not have to look into the mirror over the fireplace to know that I am pallid, but I do so anyway.  I catch sight of Jake as I do so.  I make my way along the hallway, breathless and having to lean against the wall, to the front door where there is a shadow, a hulking thing that I seem to recognise, even after all these years.  I open the door to Jack Skinner. 

“Hello, Sam,” he says politely.  Jack Skinner is never rude.

“Hello, Jack.”

I step aside to let him enter, assuming he is alone, as I have begged God he would be; God, of course, hasn’t been listening to me.  He comes in, but from the shadows of the porch appear too more people; Frank Brown – Jack’s long term employee and security man – and Maggie Carson.  She looks terrified, as well she might; Brown has some sort of automatic pointed at her head, his other hand grasping the back of her neck, almost as if she were a mewling puppy.  Jack says, “I believe you two know each other.”

“Sam?  What’s going on?”  I admire the attempt at calm; it is, though, only an attempt.  Before I can reply, Skinner takes hold of her and pulls her into the hall; she is pale and moves stiffly, but she has no option but to do as he wants.  To Frank Brown he says, “Wait in the car.”  To me, as if we’re the oldest and dearest of friends, and as if he isn’t dragging someone with him, he asks, “Is it through here?  On the left, I take it.”

What can I say?  What can I do?  My plan is ruined.  I follow him into the room as quickly as I can, hoping that perhaps I can salvage something of my plan, fearful that he has already upset them by sitting in the wrong chair.  It is with a small measure of relief that I see him sitting on the sofa, still clinging onto Maggie who is perched beside him.  I park myself in my usual chair and he looks around and says mendaciously, “Nice place.”

“No, it’s not.”

He doesn’t argue.  I shiver which, of course, he spots.  “You cold, Sam?”

“Just tired.  It’s late.”

“And yet you’re not tucked up in bed.”

“And you’re a hundred and fifty miles from home.”

“I had business this way.” 

Maggie looks at us as we indulge in this verbal play, her face pale but full of disbelief.  He says, “You haven’t been well, I hear.”

And yet he, the bastard, looks as well as ever.  I discover that he can draw blood even without a blade.  Is he really a daemon?  He seems unchanged by time.  “No,” I admit.  Why do I feel ashamed?  I can hear my breath too loud in my ears.  I am thirsty, too.   

“Would you like a drink?”  I gesture at a bottle that I’ve put there, in place of the normal decanter.  “It’s a single malt.  Rather a nice one that I think you’ll like.”

I hold the bottle out for him to see.  He examines the label, while Maggie looks on and does not comprehend.  “Ten year old Ardbeg,” he says approvingly, then a faint frown crosses his forehead, gone almost before it has come.  “Expensive.”

I take it back from him and say, “I’m dying, Jack.  This is my only luxury.”

He nods understandingly.  So I pour both of us a large glass of whisky into my best Stuart Crystal tumblers and give one to him.  He sniffs it.  It is an Islay malt, very smoky indeed.  Holding it up, he says, “Cheers.”

I notice, though, that he waits for me to drink, and drink deeply, before he tastes it.  “It’s good,” is his verdict.  So it should be, because I’ve kept it for months, telling myself I would only drink it when I knew the end was near.  Then he frowns and I find my guts suddenly squeezing themselves into tight tangles.  He looks at the liquid, as if from on high and says, “It’s sweeter than I remember.”

For a moment, I am sure that all is lost to me, that I have been a fool to think that I could outwit this thing that is supernaturally evil.  Before I can stutter an explanation that will surely show me for a poor excuse for a killer, Maggie says loudly, “What about me?  Don’t I get any?”

He glances sharply at her, then at me.  “That’s a point, Sam.  You’re falling down on the job of host.”

We are at a point in the path surrounded by traps, and there are hungry, angry people watching me.  I try to speak to hide my uncertainty, totally uncertain of what I will say, discovering that there is nothing that I can say that will not alert him to trickery except, “You want whisky?”  I try hard not to sound false.

She looks at me intently and says, “Yes, please, Sam.  You know I quite like a drop.”

“Go on, Sam,” urges Jack.

I pour her some out.  Not too much, though.  She takes it and sips it.  Does she realise?  I think that she does.

Jack relaxes; we all friends again.  “Maggie and I were chatting in the car on the way over.”

“Were you?”

“You haven’t told her about us.”  His tone is chiding.

“No.”

To Maggie, he say, “Sam used to work for me.  On an unofficial basis, as it were.”

Her look is damning.  “That was a long time ago,” I point out.

He shrugs but his face tells me that it is not yet long enough ago.  “She also told me how you and she have been investigating her father’s death.  Very noble.”

“I was a policeman a long time ago.”

That makes him laugh.  “Yes, you were, weren’t you?”

He takes a drink, is surprised when Maggie suddenly asks loudly, “What the hell’s going on?  Who are you and what are you doing here?”

“Like I said.  Sam used to work for me.  I was in the neighbourhood and thought I’d look him up.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“Ah...”  His voice is teasing and he doesn’t answer.  He asks me, “How did you find Melanie ?”

Maggie interrupts my response.  “Who’s Melanie?” 

“My wife...”  He doesn’t look at her.  “My dead wife.”

“I don’t anything about this.  I don’t know anyone called ‘Melanie’.”

“You know her better as ‘Elizabeth Bagshawe’.” 

“Oh...” 

This silences her for a short while into which Skinner murmurs, “Terrible name.”  He shakes his head, apparently at the folly of man.  Then he says of me, “So, how did you make the connection?”

“From the PM report.  It described the mastectomy scar, and the one she got after thyroid operation.  I remembered her having the surgery. 

“Very astute.”

“I contacted the Coroner’s office for more information on her, and they mentioned Sean Hooke’s sudden interest in the case.  That was pretty conclusive.”

He shook his head sadly.  “Sean’s not as reliable as you were, Sam.  He’s not as bright.”  It’s not a comparison I enjoy.  He continues, “You’d have been a little more subtle about it.”

I need to keep him talking...

...Drinking.

“I can’t understand what took you so long to come here.”

He is perplexed.  “What do you mean?”

I drink some more, hoping that it will prompt him to do the same.  It doesn’t.  “Tony recognised the body as that of Melanie when he did a locum down here.  Shortly after he died.  You did that, right?  You killed him.”

I try to ignore Maggie who clearly can’t believe what she is hearing; her eyes are wide, shocked.  She is learning the hard way about the man I was.

“Not me, Sam.  Not that one.”

“Then who?”

“Henry.”

“Henry?  Henry Sommerville?”  That is impossible.  First I am to believe that the meek, intellectual who had worked to clean Jack Skinner’s manner, who had always seem totally subjugated, had stolen Melanie Skinner from his boss, yet now I am told that he is a murderer too.  “Henry Sommerville?”

He laughs.  This time he drinks.  “Amazing, isn’t it?  I’ve had a few weeks to get used to the notion that old Henry all the time had more to him than he was letting on.”

Timidly, but clearly thinking to show bravery, Maggie asks, “Who is Henry Sommerville?"

“My accountant.”

If all that has gone before has perplexed Maggie, this answer – so mundane, so unexpected - serves to leave her nearly speechless.  “What?”

But I have problems of comprehension of my own.  I ask carefully, “You’re telling me Henry killed Tony Knight?”

“Now you know.”  He looks into his empty glass in a way that seems to me to be odd; he is somehow a changed man, I think.  He holds out the glass for more; an imperious gesture but one that I am only too happy to comply with.  “My closest ally,” he whispers as he takes it back and I refill my own.

And the smile is gone.

It is a shocking moment, like seeing one’s father naked, and I am alarmed by it.  What does it mean?  What does it portend? 

Then the smile is back, all the way to the eyes; the cosmos having held its breath, sighs and spins on.  “And we mustn’t forget your father,” he says to Maggie.  It is a particularly vicious thing to do.

“Daddy?”

A quizzical expression crosses his face but he doesn’t comment.  There is no compassion as he simply explains to her, “Henry murdered him as well.”

71.

“Oh, God,” she whispers, as if this news is a shock, as if the last few days have been some sort of intellectual exercise, not attached to reality, not in any way something about the extinction of lives. 

It is such a fucking middle class reaction to what is nothing more than a horrible business.  It makes me angry to see.  She’s got what she wanted, so why is she upset?  Turning away from her, I ask Skinner, “Why?”

“Knight recognised Melanie.  He took her wedding and engagement rings and photographed them; he thought he’d make some money by blackmailing Henry, threatening him that he’d tell me where he could be found unless he paid up.  He badly misjudged things.”

I suddenly see it.  Sommerville went to terrible lengths to stay hidden and, as I sit before Jack Skinner and go through in my mind all that he did, I see that I, too, would go to any lengths if I thought Jack Skinner were looking for me with murder in his eyes.

Maggie demands, “But it was nothing to do with my father, was it?  He wouldn’t try to blackmail anyone.”

“Poor old Henry didn’t know that at the time.  Your ‘Daddy’ was collateral damage.”

Neil Carson had contacted the widower when he suspected Knight of stealing the jewellery, but it had been denied.  Of course, it had; the last thing Henry Sommerville had wanted was a fuss.  It must, though, have seemed to Sommerville that the pathologist was implicated.  After all, Knight probably hadn’t made his own identity clear when he made his blackmail demand.  So he killed Neil Carson, making it look as natural as possible, hoping that, in doing so, he would end his problems.  Then Knight made another demand and Sommerville realised his mistake and panicked.

Maggie is learning the lesson that the truth rarely sets you free, usually only brings you to your knees.  I enquire, “Where are the rings now?”

Skinner reaches into the pocket of his jacket.  He holds them out on the palm of his hand.  “Henry was only too keen to give them back to me,” he explains.

I take a long drink as he says this.  I don’t want to ask, but I have to.  I cannot control the tremulousness in my voice, though.  “What did you do to him?”

Jack pauses as if recalling the events with pleasurable deliberation, much as a newlywed might remember her wedding day and relive the joy.  As usual, he feels in total control of the situation.  This attitude defines him.  “I thought long and hard about what I would do.  Whatever it was, I knew that it would never be enough, though.”  He sounded aggrieved by this thought.  As I wait, I look at Maggie and see someone who has just discovered that the world is not as she thought, that it is a far sicker, more stomach-turning place in which she finds herself; waiting for my death has not been, I think, as unbearable.  “I was going to take out his eyes and make him eat them.”  He drank again.  Was he becoming sluggish?  I have put as much morphine in the scotch as I dared; it doesn’t have much of a flavour, but Jack Skinner is no fool.  “And then maybe ‘necklace’ him as they used to do in South Africa.”  His contemplation of this arrests him for a few seconds before he continues dreamily, “In the end, I opened his groins, let him bleed to death...”

But there’s more, I can tell and, despite Maggie’s horror, I have to ask in a low, fearful voice, “What else did you do?”

He laughs modestly.  “I gave him the traditional punishment for a cuckold.  I took his balls off and made eat them, one at a time.  Made sure he swallowed, too.  He just got finished before he bled to death.”

Maggie looks fit to be sick.  My own head is beginning to swirl; the high dose of morphine, and the whisky and blood loss are three, potent insults.  Please God, don’t let me lose consciousness now.  He laughs, suddenly.  “The look on your face, Sam.”  Another laugh.  “You always were squeamish, weren’t you?”

When I say nothing, he drains the glass and holds it out for thirds.  As I fill it, he says, “It spoiled you.  You could have made a lot of money if you hadn’t been such a pussycat about what sometimes needs to be done.”

“I’m not a sadist, no.”

If I think that might goad him, I am quickly disabused.  “Which is where you’re completely wrong, Sam.  I’m not a sadist.  I do what has to be done.  The way I do it, though, is suited to the job.  It’s important to get the details right.  There’s no point in killing just for the sake of killing; if you’re going to murder someone, make sure it produces other results than merely the death of another human, no matter how puny.  Make sure it sends a message, achieves what you want in the market, allows you a freedom.”

“What did the death of Neville Fite achieve, other than your gratification?”

“That one really bothered you, didn’t it?”

With every sentence I heap guilt upon myself, and see more revulsion in Maggie’s gaze.  “You didn’t have to do what you did.”

He ignores my accusation.  “Why, I wonder?”  Before I can answer, he asks, “Was it because he was your friend and he trusted you to come with you when I told you to bring him to me?”

“He was no friend of mine.”

“But you felt responsibility for him.”

I am looking at him, but it is only Maggie I can see.  Whatever she thought of me once has been destroyed, flung into disgust.  “He was a grass, nothing more.”

His stare is intense, a dissection of me, and I recall how his intellect always frightened me.  The room is hot, or it’s cold...I can’t decide which.  My mouth is dry, my tongue swollen.  With difficulty I reply.  “I thought it was gratuitous.”  I slur the last word and this seems to please him.  He drinks more scotch, more morphine.  Then, to my horror, I see Maggie drain her glass.  Has she forgotten?   Perhaps she never understood.  Perhaps she has not appreciated the adulteration of the whisky.  But I dare not say or do anything, because Jack Skinner is a strong man and he has yet to succumb, damn the man!

“I did it that way because I needed to send a message,” he explains.

“Who to?  All the other nonces?”

He shakes his head and laughs.  “No, not all.  Not them; I don’t care about them.  Let them get on with what they do, as they don’t break the rules.”

“Then who?”

“To Gareth, Sam.  To my son.”  Once more, I don’t understand the way his mind works; that it works amazingly well is beyond my doubting, but the end results always left me way behind.  He says, “It’s taken a long time for him to see but I think, at last, he does.”

My head floats oddly, but in my stomach the pain grows again.  “See what?”

He can’t understand my apparently wilful obtuseness.  “That my way is the only way, Sam.” he says simply and in puzzlement that I should not have guessed already.  He suddenly leans forward and the smile broadens.  “The only way!”

Why won’t he drop?  I am used to the morphine, but even I am beginning to sink beneath the weight of so much of it.  Is he truly something other than human, as I have so often speculated?  Yet he is definitely becoming sleepier, I think. 

And so is Maggie...

He drains the glass again and demands more.  I have to concentrate to stop my shaking show and to get the whisky into the glass safely.  It is just a casual glance across at Maggie, but the sight of her closing eyes arrests him in the movement.  I can almost see him begin to wonder why she should fall asleep, given the circumstances, the things she has just heard.  Again there is pain in my guts, one born from the cancer, no doubt, but also from panic.  Surely, it won’t go wrong now?  Surely, I deserve to succeed?

Perhaps I would never have dared ask, had the situation not seemed to be slipping away, We’re close to the end and finally I find some courage to ask the only question that has ever really mattered.  In a desperate attempt to tear his attention away from the conundrum of Maggie, I demand, “Did you have Jake killed?”

It is a moment before he pays me attention.  His reaction is slowed, perhaps because of the morphine and whisky, perhaps because he is wondering what is wrong with Maggie.  “Jake?”

“My son.”

This catches him unawares, and then he has to think about it for a while.  He looks directly at me as he says quietly, “Why, yes.  I believe I did.”  And that is it.  There is not a trace of apology, but that is not what most astounds me; apologies were never Jack Skinner’s currency, after all.  No, it is the insignificance of the act to him, even as he admits his guilt of it to the father.  It is then that I know that, even if I am damned by someone’s god somewhere, I am doing the right thing by myself, and that is all that matters.  “But, of course, you know why, Sam,” he adds.

And I do, to my dishonour.

“He broke the rules,” I mutter and I am ashamed to say that, as I do so, I still do not have the bravery to show my anger, or perhaps I am too tired to feel it now.  I have tried to escape his world, but his world clings and it is no use running any more.

He laughs.  “That’s right, Sam.  That’s absolutely fucking right!”  There is tinge of madness in his voice; it has always been there behind his face, but now it has leaked into his dancing, sparkling eyes and onto his tongue.  If I thought to tell him what a bastard he is, this dangerous man’s behaviour makes me think better.  It is as though he is momentarily under the control of strange impulsions.  He has just downed the glass, which he now examines closely at from all angles, before examining  me.  I see the dawn of realisation, followed by something I have seen once and once only before on his face, when he faced Neville Fite on the last day of that poor man’s tawdry life.  It is a moment that I have known and dreaded would come, when the drug had yet fully to overcome his senses, and when he worked out what I was trying to do.  I have seen this man’s monstrous anger once, and I do not want to see it again.

There is a look of wonder on his face as he glances at Maggie, now definitely asleep, then back to me.  “You crafty old bastard.”  I think perhaps that I hear admiration.

But then he is rising from my crappy old sofa, dropping the glass and pushing down to gain purchase to rise.  He is groggy but, oh lord, he is strong.  I can see the mad but determined effort in his still smiling eyes, his face becoming congested, as he struggles to rise.  I am paralysed by the sight, a dying old man who is about to be murdered, and cacking myself.  A slight moan escapes his throat as he sags back slightly – a low thing, almost one of exasperation – and for one moment I think he is going to fail, that at last Jack Skinner is going to be defeated.  Have I won?  I think I have...  

But he comes again, finding strength from somewhere that normal people –the rest of us – do not know about, and it is with a load groan and almost a flourish that he finally stands and turns his livid, insane face on mine.  “Naughty boy, Sam!”  It is a whisper and it is a vile, poisonous thing, a sliver of invective that has a toxic life of its own.  He licks his lips, sways slightly.  “You ought to know not to do things like that.  Not to me.”

From his pocket he produces a blade.  It is the same blade, I think, which I saw him brandish in front of Neville Fite’s eyes.  “Now,” he wonders, “What am I going to do about it?”

He takes a drunken step forward.  At last and too late I find the wit and the strength to try to rise, but the room is small, and his reach is long, and he grabs my shoulder.  Even through the morphine’s somnolence it hurts.  “Too late, my friend,” he whispers.  He raises his hand and I am again back in the workshop where Neville Fite began and ended his slow death, except that now I am no longer in the shadows at the back, but at the centre of it all.  He is standing before me; although his features are obscured by the bright ceiling light directly behind his head, I can still see the pleasantness that he seems to always to feel.  A shadow from his arm brings definition to it for a brief second and then the arm begins again to descend...

There is a loud crash and his head jerks.  In the lamplight around him a thousand crystals fly, and he jerks up just a bit, very briefly, before that fucking smile fades at last and he collapses to the floor.

72.

The last hour had been so unlike anything she had ever before known, she herself felt dislocated.  This was an uncharted land, one that she had not really believed had actual existence beyond fiction.  Until now, her professional experiences had been limited to casual murder - domestic disputes gone too far, drunken brawls unintentionally ending in fatal head injury or stabbing, dangerous driving or perhaps drug disputes – but she knew at once she was in a place where dangerous men thrived, men who did not see a problem (other than the practical one that it was illegal and therefore open to prosecution) with using death as a tool. 

Jack Skinner – he had been very polite and introduced himself – had spent the journey between Mordiford and Hereford asking her question after question; he had appeared very pleasant whilst he did so, but the gun and the look in the eyes of the man who now drove them had told her that the appearance was mendacious.  And, although his voice was controlled and his smile constant, his grip on her arm had been firm and unwavering. 

Why were you calling on the Bagshawes?

What do you know about them?

Does the name Tony Knight mean anything to you?  What do you know about him?

What was the relationship between him and your father?

How do you know Sam Fisher?

Has Sam ever mentioned my name to you? What do you know about me?

She answered as truthfully as she could, guessing that to do otherwise would not be a good idea.  In turn, she learned about Jack Skinner.  That he was intelligent and calculating, and that he was going to kill her.

As terrifying as thought was, as real as it became at the back of her mind, still she could not fully grasp it; the unreality of her situation would not allow her full sentience.

When she had asked for some of the whisky, it had been an instinctual reaction; she  had guessed before what Sam had meant by ‘jungle juice’ and she had quickly appreciated that Jack Skinner was suspicious of the sweet flavour that the oral morphine had given it.  She had been stupid, though, in actually drinking more than she needed to in order to allay his suspicions.

But the revelations had shocked her.   The matter of fact descriptions of such sick cruelty, the casual account of Henry Sommerville’s murder, and the appreciation that Sam Fisher – previously to her just an irritable old man being eaten by cancer – had not only moved in that world, but had been an active player, had all served to change her sense of unreality into one of profound abhorrence.  She had drunk the adulterated whisky while effectively in a state of astonishment.  She tried to fight its effects, but as their conversation moved onto talk of Sam Fisher’s son, even the offhand confession of Jack Skinner of murder had been lost in rapidly deepening greyness.  No matter how hard she tried, the lethargy became hard to battle; now in total darkness, she continued to struggle, effectively having only one thought – that to give up would be to die...

...She stopped struggling...

...There was nothing...

She heard a groan.

Her eyes didn’t open completely, but there was no longer total blackness.  She could see the dark orange of her eyelids.

Which darkened slightly.

She opened them, did not immediately take in what she was seeing, only slowly coming to any sort of realisation, and even that was a vague, nebulous thing of shapes and shades and colours. 

...Standing...

...A man...

...Arm raised...

...Sam’s sitting room...

...Menacing...

...I am afraid...

She pushed herself forward, little able to think of much;  a few more or less firm concepts  - that she must be quiet, that Sam was in danger, that she was barely conscious – bobbed upon an ocean swirl of emotions and fears and terrors.  She did not know with any precision what she would – or. indeed, what she could do – but her knowledge that she had to something – anything – and do it quickly, was one of the fixed points in her head.

She managed to push herself up to see Jack Skinner’s hand begin to move downward.  She spotted the blade for the first time.  She could do nothing other than raise her crystal tumbler and charge forward to crash it down on the back of his head.

73.

She stands there, swaying, looking at her hand which is bleeding freely from a jagged cut through the palm; I hope it’s the final wound that Jack Skinner ever inflicts. 

“Maggie?”  She doesn’t answer; her eyes are unfocussed.  “Maggie?”

I doubt whether Frank Brown has heard anything, but that’s not the problem.  Skinner is still stirring.  “For fuck’s sake, Maggie!”

I push myself out of the chair.  Skinner is on the floor between us, moving sluggishly.   “Maggie?”  When I put my hand out to her, she reacts all right.

She jumps, looks at me and then her face contracts.  “Get away from me!”  She sounds drunk.

“Maggie...”

“You bastard!”

Jesus Christ.  The stupid bitch has lost leave of her senses.  “Maggie, listen to me...”

She pulls away.  Skinner moves again.  She says, “You’re as bad as he is.”

Maybe – no, definitely – I am.  But that’s not the point.  Now at this precise fucking moment.  She catches sight of her hand, amazed that it should be in that state.  That’s what morphine can do for you; shame it can’t do it for me anymore.  I’m beyond being polite.  “Get away of here.  Go out through the back door in the kitchen; at the bottom of the garden, there’s a bolted gate onto an alley.  Just run as far and as fast as you can.”  She still bears an expression of contempt, but there is also a sign of comprehension in it.  She looks down at Jack Skinner. “Go on,” I urge.  “There isn’t much time.”

Slowly, she does I command, holding her bleeding hand away from her side, almost an automaton.  I feel behind me in the chair and pick up a cushion.  I just hope that I have the strength to finish things.  At the door, she stops and turns to me.  Apparently not understanding my intent, she asks, “What will you do?”

It is a fucking stupid question, I think. 

“End it.  End it all.”

I cannot help sounding bitter.  She leaves, probably not really understanding, and I am left to finish the job with a cushion over Jack Skinner’s face.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Keith McCarthy has written over a dozen novels and nearly as many short stories.  Please visit his website: keithmccarthy.co.uk