Remains of the Dead Page 13

  We were back in the metropolis by one o’clock. In spite of it, in spite of what London is now, I was glad to be home. Chas took me straight to my place. ‘You’d best lie low,’ he said, steadying the bike with one booted foot as I got off.

  ‘You’re not coming in then?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve got to get to work.’

  ‘Is that wise?’ I said. ‘I mean, I thought you wanted to keep a low profile.’

  ‘I can handle the press, Louise. I’ll be a fifteen minute wonder. Better that than some kind of Ronnie Biggs hounded all over the world by Mr Slipper of The Sun.’

  ‘I’m sure you know what you’re doing,’ I said, walking painfully down the steps, my muscles stiff from the bike.

  ‘I’ll call you later,’ he said.

  ‘Make sure you look over your shoulder.’

  ‘I’m not paranoid,’ he grinned. ‘I know they’re after me.’

  The landlord had pinned a note to my door. Something about the washing machine repair man coming sometime that day. Thank God we had removed the stolen object in the jar. Where was it now, I wondered? In some fox’s stomach, responsible for poisoning some hapless badger? Eddie would have approved of that. Can’t touch me now, Eddie, I thought, but I was wrong.

  As I stirred the nearly sour milk into my tea, I had a definite sense that someone was watching me, but there was no one outside, no one at all. It was Marley’s ghost again, manifesting itself over Scrooge’s meagre meal in the damp old house, making ready to rattle its chains: a case of auto suggestion, I thought, although fact was certainly stranger than any fiction I could construct in Eddie’s case. Why was Eddie haunting me? Was it my sense of guilt about betraying him that was projecting his image onto every situation where I stood a chance of being happy? Or was it his lust for revenge at my betrayal that was pursuing me from the other side of the grave?

  But he isn’t in his grave yet, August had joked. Don’t be premature. So where was he?

  I tried calling August, but the number was engaged. Then I remembered: August had been arrested. The police would search his place and find Eddie. Then Eddie would be subjected to more gawking examinations. Eddie would become a piece of evidence, like the organs were: a means to build a case against a snivelling little monster with a skin-head hair cut that made him look like a hard-faced child, a mannikin that had never grown up, a meretricious little shit.

  You are right about that, Eddie, I thought. But it’s no use blaming me for August. You introduced us, remember?

  When I saw the uniform outside, my heart skipped a beat. But it was only the man who had come to repair the washing machine. When he saw me peering from behind my nets, he tapped on the door, to tell me what he was about and, no doubt, expecting tea and conversation.

  ‘I’m off work sick today,’ I said hoarsely, but preceded him into the bogey hole in case I had left any incriminating traces there. There was nothing, of course, that could betray the fact Eddie’s heart had been stored in that spider-infested corner, nothing except a burning mark in my mind’s eye that fixed the spot in my consciousness, like all the rest of Eddie. He had been unconscious for so long until the ambulance brought his dead body in for Chas and me, but now, it seemed, he had risen again.

  The man took the front off the washing machine, and I went back to the kitchen, guilt prompting me to leave a mug of over-sweetened tea out on my doorstep for him, like a saucer of milk put out for a stray cat. I went into my bedroom and tried to get my head down, but the man was testing the spinner mechanism and the rattling of the drum kept me alert and miserable, going back over the bedroom scene with Chas yesterday, with Eddie coming up between us to push us apart, hooting his foul breath at me. He was holding my dead baby in his arms and popping his eyes at her. Why did I think of it as she? It wasn’t supposed to be viable, just a clutch of cells, a blob of jelly. Desperate for some distraction, I called the Chas at the hospital.

  ‘What’s up?’ he said. ‘Can’t hear you – what’s that noise?’

  ‘It’s the washing machine. What’s going on, Chas?’

  ‘Nothing much. The police forensic team have been around. We’re all sterile again now. I’m about to start on a PM case – looks like another routine coronary. I told you I’d call later.’

  ‘But what did the police say? Did they interview you?’

  ‘They wanted my list, of course.’

  ‘Did you give it to them?’ My stomach churned.

  ‘Yes, there’s a possible charge of indecency, regarding the missing body. They’re talking to Mrs Kronenberg. They’ll also want to talk to you at some point, Louise, as Yorkie’s colleague.’

  ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘It’s routine,’ he said simply. ‘They’ve talked to everyone who worked down here – the Fells, Maggie, of course. The official line is we knew nothing about it, which is true, apart from the Fells, who seemed to have associated personally with Stockyard. I told the police you hadn’t been well for a while. I said Kronenberg’s death had upset you greatly.’

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘Now they’ll be on to me.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Louise. There’s no evidence to implicate you in anything, is there? I mean, you have done nothing wrong. Look, I must get on now. Catch you later.’

  He hung up. He was covering for me, I thought. He was seeing it through. But the list! If the police saw Eddie’s heart logged as the last item, and found it missing, they would surely come looking for me. Outside, the spinner reached a loud crescendo. I rooted frantically in my cupboards for some dope to smoke, then threw it down the loo in panic. Drugs were the last thing I wanted the police to find if they came round to search my premises. The last thing, except Eddie’s jar.

  I sat in darkness in the kitchen, waiting for Chas to come back. Cury-Holmes came in from work, his heavy tread unmistakable on the front steps. Then Ally came home and put on some irritating dance record, raising the volume as she ran herself a bath. Bet she puts patchouli oil in it, I thought. She looked like a patchouli kind of woman. Rob would be back soon and would no doubt dive right in; at which point they would kill the CD player and I’d be forced to listen to Ally groaning on their sorely-tested bed. You made a big mistake in going to bed with Chas, I admonished myself. You crawled out of the jar and washed off all the formalin. You’re vulnerable now, breaking up. He’ll chew you up and make mincemeat of you, just like he did with all those schizophrenics. He’s got you under his thumb. One word from Chas about that heart and I was fucked. Then I remembered his hands on me, and sunk my head in mine.

  He rang me at twenty past ten. ‘The bastards caught up with me,’ he said. ‘They took my picture as I was leaving. I’ve spent the last two hours going through the samples that Jacques returned. At least the police are fully in the picture now. It’s business as usual in the morning. Five PMs and more at the Royal Free waiting to come on to us.’

  ‘I was worried, Chas.’ I swallowed hard. ‘I don’t suppose I could come round?’

  ‘Not a good idea,’ he said. ‘Four of the bastards followed me on pissy little scooters. I needn’t tell you what I think of that.’ I could imagine it. ‘They’re outside now,’ he snickered. ‘I hope they freeze their balls off.’

  ‘So I’ll see you at work tomorrow?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Make the most of your sick leave. You need to rest, Louise.’

  ‘But who’s going to assist you? Yorkie’s gone. That new woman isn’t any good.’

  ‘Yorkie’s under lock and key. It seems they bailed Stockyard.’

  I drew breath, although it didn’t really surprise me. ‘Sir Anton can buy his way out of anything.’

  ‘Irony is obviously not your friend’s strong point. What a fucking hypocrite.’

  ‘So who’s going to assist you?’ I persisted.

  ‘I don’t know. One of the junior doctors, I suppose. There’s a locum coming in to take over the Fell hag’s work. Oh, I didn’t tell you that,’ he said. ‘She’s been suspended, pending
the return of all the samples, but the real reason is that she’s incompetent and the College has finally to get off its arse and do something about the old bitch. Full pay, of course. How’s that for a six month holiday? If necessary, I’ll get some students over. They can use the experience.’

  ‘If not the extra cash,’ I said. ‘How much will you tip them?’

  ‘Look, Louise, if you’re worried about your job, there’s no need.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I wouldn’t appoint anyone else. I told you, this has to work out.’

  ‘Because of the you know what,’ I whispered. There was a silence, then he changed his line.

  ‘Let’s see how it goes tomorrow, shall we?’ he went on. ‘It seems there’s a hospital in the north that has an even bigger collection than we do. The press will be onto that tomorrow. They’ll soon get tired of hounding me. I’ll have my fifteen minutes of infamy and that will be that. If it gets really bad, I’ll sue.’

  ‘I may go to Eddie’s thanksgiving service tomorrow then,’ I said, compressing my lips.

  ‘For God’s sake, Louise. I thought you’d buried that bastard.’

  ‘Not much chance of that now, is there? His girlfriend has made a complaint about the treatment of his corpse.’

  ‘My heart bleeds.’

  ‘Let me know when you want me to come into work,’ I told him briskly. ‘I’ll look out for you in the morning paper.’

  I went into the kitchen and tried to eat my way through a tin of beans. Maybe he was protecting me. That put a new complexion on it. It would have been so unlike Chas, so unlike the rational night rider that he was, to run the gauntlet of the pissy scooters and lead them straight to my door for the sake of what – a cuddle, a quick lay? Or was it because I was such an unreliable witness? A witness to emptied shelves. I have to trust him, I thought. Chas was right. This had to work out. We had to stick together – what had he said, we are all in this together, like the army? But Eddie had thought like that too: Louise is one of us, he told Mafalda, but she had not believed him.

  I was used to going it alone, to all the sloppy thinking that engendered. I was used to my own familiar demons: booze, dope, fixations on past blunders. Why put myself in the hands of another (long white hands used to wielding a saw and a scalpel) who might use them to suffocate me? Just as Eddie had done. Eddie had tried to suffocate out of me every scruple I’d had about the meat industry. I had seen his papers on Britfeed, the record of how they adulterated the product to increase the profits. They had been feeding concrete dust to pigs, and bits of those dead pigs to beef cattle. Chas would recognise the principle behind that, I supposed: the principle about it all being raw material. It was just the politics he disapproved of, like the free-market policies that were dictating process at the mortuary with the private management bid from Last Rites. The difference lay in casuistry, I thought, not root principle. Material was material. Dead pigs, dead humans – it was all the same to Chas: the only difference between him and Eddie was that he stole brains from dead schizophrenics, while Eddie had traded them over the free market. My head was banging now, hot-wired, and I had no more dope to smooth its edges. Why couldn’t I sleep? Why could I not let sleeping dogs lie?

  Anxiety sprung me up at 2:00am. I’m coming, Eddie, I told the shadows in the room. God knows you don’t deserve it, but I’m coming to pay my last respects, then you’ll leave me alone, OK? You will leave me alone. Ignoring the cold (the heating did not come on till seven) I went through my wardrobe for something suitable to don for the Thanksgiving Service. There was a True Blue suit, very Diana Spencer on the occasion of her official engagement to The Prince of Wales when he answered the burning question by saying whatever love means. I had tried to sell this suit several times through local dress agencies, but there had been no takers. It had been too expensive just to give away. To my amazement, it fitted me still: in fact, it was a little loose around the waist. There was a stain on the jacket front that looked like clam sauce. I had been fond of the spaghetti alle vongole at a particular trattoria Eddie favoured, just off Piccadilly, where the waiter wielded the largest pepper pot I had ever seen. Eddie couldn’t stand nouvelle cuisine. He stood for trad Italian cooking (Old Soho), the old school dinners of the Wayfarers’ Club, and what he called proper hamburgers, meaning Burger King’s Double Whopper. I once caught him trying to make a Burger King burger at home. He had equipped himself with a cookery book that promised to let its readers in on such junk food secrets as K-Fried spices and the ratio of tomato relish to mayo in Big Macs, Whoppers, and Wimpys. But he couldn’t get it right. Marvellous marketing ploy, he said as he threw book and burger ruins in the bin.

  My shoes were shot to pieces. I scrabbled under the bed for alternative heels, but found only flats. What a slob I had become. How I had let myself go. Then I thought about it. Even if I turned up at The Commons Church in the True Blue disguise, I knew I’d be fooling nobody. I would never make it through the door. Mafalda would see to that, and all the others, some of whom now sat on the opposition benches. I would be out on my ear.

  Then it occurred to me to ring Gaia Kronenberg. She had asked me to keep in touch. Come up and see me sometime Lise, we’ll have fun, was what she had said. She had also said she would not be attending Eddie’s Thanksgiving Service, but that was possibly bravado – or braggadoccio, to stick with the Old Soho theme. That was just bluff. Gaia was a performer. She liked to be on show. I thought I would easily persuade her.

  I passed the rest of the night in a sort of stupor, brought about by lack of sleep, the mess with Eddie that would not lie still, compounded now by the mess with Chas, who seemed so determined to press my buttons. I thought of dampening down my mood by smoking a joint or two, but I had chucked the last of my stash down the loo in case the police came round. At two minutes to nine, a time I judged what Eddie would have called socially acceptable to call, I dialled her number. She sounded remarkably sober when she answered. Cool, almost tart, not at all like the demented Amazon I thought she was.

  ‘I’m so sick of everybody telling me off about Eddie, Lise,’ she said. ‘The police have been very nice about it, but I can tell they are only biding their time. What the hell business is it of theirs what I do with my husband’s body?’

  ‘Are you going to the Thanksgiving Service?’ I said, as quick as I could. ‘If you are, and you want some moral support, I’d be …’

  ‘You want to come?’ She laughed. ‘But of course you do. So go, Lise. They changed the venue, you know that? Couldn’t get the place they wanted. It’s some stupid little backstreet church somewhere, Saint Something or Other.’

  ‘But you have the address?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I have it.’ There was a pause. ‘Pick me up, Lise,’ she said. ‘It might be amusing. Half past ten.’

  ‘That’s when it starts, or –?’

  ‘That’s when you pick me up. It starts at eleven.’

  ‘But with the traffic and everything, shouldn’t we –?’

  ‘No, no, ten thirty will be fine. See you then.’ She hung up. Then I realised what she was up to: she wanted to be the last to arrive. She wanted us to make an entrance.

  ***

  Chapter Sixteen

  It was a small backstreet church, but its name was apposite enough: St Charles the Martyr, patron saint of Cavaliers – the Royalists, of course, not the cars, which Eddie had thought unspeakable, like grey shoes and off the peg suits from Burton and C & A. There was not a Vauxhall of any description to be seen amongst the Volvos and old-fashioned Jags, the occasional Mercedes and BMW, all in inky blue. Outside the church itself was Eddie’s beloved Alfa Spider, parked on a double yellow line. A policeman stood on the church steps, eyeing the car with studied tolerance.

  ‘That’s mine by rights,’ Gaia said, as the Spider came in view of our black cab. She had been pretty silent up till now, almost quietly dressed in a deep purple suit and black shoes. She had resolved my own shoe problem by lending me a pair of sharp cour
ts into the toes of which I had stuffed two sheets of that morning’s Telegraph. I had not had time to check the papers for Chas’s photo. I would put that on hold, I thought, until I had buried Eddie.

  Strains from an organ, half-heartedly played, came through the open doors. The ushers gaped when they saw Gaia’s legs come out of the cab, then frowned when they saw me get out to pay the driver. I knew both ushers very well: Percy Luckraft, who had stuck to Eddie through thick and thin, in spite of the way Eddie had treated him; the other was a member of the Shadow Cabinet. A hot excitement crept up my spine. Maybe Margaret Thatcher was inside? She often ate lunch at Mafalda’s Think Tank, very chummy.

  ‘So glad to see you, Mrs Kronenberg,’ the Shadow Minister said, with obvious insincerity. He ignored me completely, but Percy Luckraft tried the evil eye to stop me proceeding. Heads turned as we entered the church. A murmur spread through the pews, until from the front a voice I recognised as Mafalda’s gave a sharp, ‘No!’

  But seats were found for Gaia and me on the left hand side which was not, to my amusement, as packed as the right. Imprinting, or what? I resolved to tell Chas, then checked myself. Why should Chas be the recipient of every little gem of wisdom that crept into my head? He had had enough of me.

  After the bishop of some hunting shire had said a few words about our being there to give thanks for the life of Eddie Kronenberg, Gaia looked at me and decided to be expansive. ‘Wouldn’t you like to know where we’ve put him?’ she hissed. ‘I bet they’d give their eye teeth to know what Eddie is doing now.’ People behind us shifted uncomfortably, but because we were in the front pew, no one could turn round and mark their disapproval with a stare. I kept my eyes fixed on the cross behind the altar, avoiding the crucified expression of Mafalda.