Little Fingers! (20 page)

In the end, we
cannot sit here nervously forever. We make love repeatedly,
earnestly, sincerely, timelessly. It is the old days returned. We
tremble on each others' fingers, we quiver on each others' lips. It
has not been this good for a long, long time.

Then we pack
and leave. L'Inspecteur Herbert will no doubt feel obliged to track
us down. That is fine. So long as he finds us before the mob
does.

I leave a note
on the kitchen table. “Inspecteur, we have gone to Spain for a few
days to avoid any more trouble. We will return shortly.” Maybe he
will not even bother.

We do indeed
go to Spain. In the quiet of the early evening, we race through the
streets of Feyrargues, lest anyone attempts to stop us, and we head
for the motorway. Within three hours we are crossing the
unpatrolled border. Within four-and-a-half hours, we are
luxuriating in the Nh Calderón hotel in Barcelona. The streets are
still lively outside. We wander down to the Rambla. It is certainly
very different from the atmosphere in Béziers. At the bottom of the
Rambla, we are attracted into a small square, and have a late meal
seated outside at Les Quinze Nits. It is very romantic, and a world
away from a few hours earlier. We are safe, physically and as a
couple. Mary is enchanted. She has never been to Barcelona
before.

Meandering up
the Rambla again, towards the hotel, a stealth thief tries to grab
Mary's handbag. I confront him. He protests. I stick my revolver in
his ribs. He disappears down a side street.

“
I hate it,”
Mary says. “I hate the violence of the world. It is
everywhere.”

We decide to
move on again in the morning. I am annoyed. I desperately need to
do Gaudi again. Mary would love him, but she has lost patience with
the city already.

* *
*

Chapter
11

I encounter
Henry Spence in his funeral parlour, next to the post office.
Letters departing for the next town; souls departed for the next
world.

I have never
been inside a funeral parlour. People have died around me (my
sister, my mother, my girlfriend), I have attended several
funerals, and yet this is my first encroachment inside this
incongruous amalgam of a high street store and oblivion.

I am here to
ask after Tom.

The atmosphere
is kept purposefully reassuring and ordinary. Henry Spence is not
planning to do anything unpleasant to you until you die. Having
said that, working in a small village, where he has lived all his
life, and where he has the only mortuary in the area, Henry is used
to laying out the people he knows. In fact, if they come from
Hanburgh, it is more than likely that he will recognise them. Some
he has only heard of, and may have glimpsed once or twice in the
street, others have been close friends or family.

Absolutely the
saddest laying out, he confides to me in a deliberate sort of way,
is that of a child. They look so complete, so miniature, so alive,
and they have been abandoned by life so early. Luckily, he has only
ever had one of those, little Jimmy Cuthbert who drowned in the
beck by the church in no more than three feet of water.

Like all
professionals, he revels in his expertise. Occasionally people
question him about it, deferentially, carefully, late into the
night of a dinner party, and Henry has a repertoire of gruesome
stories to supply, such as the day one client suddenly sat up and
burped at him, propelled by the gases of decay.

“
Who was
that?” they immediately ask.

“
I really
cannot disclose that,” he replies with a pleased twitch of
pomposity. “I cannot reveal my clients' secrets,” although he can
be persuaded to list a few of them anonymously - the scars, the
tattoos revealing unlikely attachments, the operations, the
deformities, the diseases (cancers like footballs, teeth rotted to
the nerves, syphilis). For him, the dead are always his “clients”,
and the family is the “bereaved”. No-one has ever heard him being
disrespectful of either, except to observe that it would have been
sometimes easier to have extracted the fee from the corpse than
from the relatives, and he offers some excellent “don't trouble
your relatives at a time of great grief” forward planning schemes
accordingly.

Henry tells me
about the suicides. There have been five over recent years.
According to statistics, he would have expected to have experienced
one suicide in a village of this size in his lifetime, and for it
to have been a man. In Hanburgh, there has been one male suicide,
Geoff Gibson, who got into overwhelming financial problems, and
four women, two of whom were young girls.

Henry knew one
of the girl suicides well. She was extremely pretty and lively, and
the almost inseparable friend of Kate, his daughter. If you had
looked at her sitting in the garden chatting away to Kate about
boys and fashions and whatever, you would never have guessed that
this girl would go to bed one night and swallow all the
barbiturates she could find in the house, which was apparently
better stocked than most chemists. While she must have been hiding
a great sadness, it was not at all evident to anyone.

Carla Summers
was different. She always was a strange one, and got stranger. She
was into grunge before the rest of the world. You could almost say
she invented it, except that Hanburgh has never been a leader in
world fashion. She dressed like an apple-pie bed, had no friends,
spent a disproportionate amount of her time daubing the wall of the
Berringers' garden with painted insults, physically attacked Mary
Knightly with a knife, and a few weeks later turned the same knife
on herself to slit her wrists. “Poor lost creature!” they all
sighed, repetitively.

She and Jenny
Blair, the pretty one, died within a few weeks of each other during
a hot summer about twenty years ago. It was a difficult month for
Henry because his mother died then too, after fifteen years of
heart trouble.

Henry tells me
that as an undertaker, you never dwell on death. That would make
your job virtually impossible to carry out. However, while “some of
my persuasion” cut out all thoughts of mortality and fatality
except to view them as a source of income (pray God for a long hard
winter with lots of 'flu and pneumonia, we need the money), others
do become philosophical about it. Henry is one of the latter. He
does not obsess, by any means, over matters of life and death, but
he does consider them. Why do children die? Why do the old take so
long? Why do the nastiest people in the village never seem to die,
apart from Frank Welbourne whom Henry is convinced was deliberately
run down by that truck?

Seeing Tom
dead before him really froze his thoughts. He liked Tom enormously,
he says, he had spent all his life alongside him in the village,
gone out with him in his youth trying to pick up the girls (Tom's
invariable success usually left Henry to dawdle home alone having
gained a peremptory goodbye kiss from the last girl he happened to
be dancing with at the end of the evening - a pass-the-parcel
moment). Tom had it all going for him, yet he had built so little.
He had wasted his life “chasing skirt”. Why? He was good looking,
intelligent, sociable. He could have married a thousand girls, had
children, built a business, and left something of substance behind
him on this earth. However, that side of things had never
interested Tom. He was quite content being an ageing roué and a
gifted gardener who could turn a common-or-garden weed into a
charming flower (he specialised in wild gardens long before that
became fashionable).

In his
thirty-six years as a mortician, no bodily sight had ever turned
Henry's stomach. Tom's did. In fact, Henry told young Becker, his
assistant, to stay away when Tom was brought in (Inspector Frampton
had warned him in advance of what to expect). Even Henry did not
have the experience to handle what he had to deal with, and he was
sure young Becker would not cope, however callow a youth he might
choose to be.

Henry looked
at his good friend, his head cut in two accurately down the middle,
his body lacerated in the search for clues. They had looked for
drugs, no drugs. They had looked for food, just freshly consumed
cereal, milk and coffee, no sugar. They had noted the traces of
sperm and vaginal fluids on his penis and around his pubic area.
They had ascertained the likely time of death. They had handed him
over to Henry to dispose of.

“
Poor Tom,
what is left of you as a human being?” Henry asked
himself.

Henry tells me
that Tom's sister, Sally, is arriving today, and wants to see the
body tomorrow afternoon. He offers to show me Tom. He is
surprisingly considerate towards me. He suggests that however
difficult it will be for me, especially as Tom is “not quite
finished yet”, I should steal myself to do it. It will represent a
closure for me. The images may well haunt my dreams, and indeed my
days, for a few weeks, but it will also close that chapter for me.
Many people have told him that after seeing their loved ones laid
out before them. “She looks so peaceful,” they say invariably, “as
if she is sleeping.”

I wonder,
snidely, whether it is not harder to deal with the clichés of
bereaved relatives than with the bodies of old and diseased people
who are ultimately lucky to have died.

Despite
myself, despite his apparent generosity, despite his ability to
analyse intelligently his role in the panoply of death, I find
myself increasingly loathing the man. I look at him and I feel
queasy. I examine his bespectacled face, and I am disgusted by his
cheeks and by the razored stubble-tips lying below the skin. I
cannot explain why. Maybe it is his way of delicately, sensitively,
obsequiously handling sorrow that I detest. Maybe it is his loser
friendship with Tom. Maybe it is because I do not believe a word he
is telling me, or the authenticity of the emotions he alludes to.
He strikes me as a complete phoney, a sour man under a soothing
mantle. You get intuitions sometimes, and I pick up on his inner
thoughts which are barren and cynical, not to mention personally
intrusive. He is stiff, grey-cheeked.

“
How on earth
do I disguise this?” It is a declaration of despair, and I do not
believe any of it. He relishes the challenge, the congratulations
(“You have done an extraordinary job, Henry!”), and he continually
resented the many humiliations Tom incidentally presented him with
during his lifetime. The thought regularly flashes into his mind
that Tom is another one he has survived, unexpectedly. That is his
real response to Tom's death, a suppressed exhilaration of
gloating.

The other
thing I am picking up is his excitement that Tom's death
necessitates that Sally return to the village. He cannot wait to
see Sally tomorrow afternoon. Will she have changed? Will she have
aged such that Henry will ask himself what he ever saw in her? Will
she treat him as a funeral director, or as a friend?

.After Sally
left for London, Henry and his wife Hilary found each other, and it
appears to have been a mostly happy marriage. With Hilary's surgery
job and Henry's funeral parlour, they joke that they have both the
living and the dead covered - a balanced portfolio, as those City
types would say, not that there have been many City types around
Hanburgh. Wasn't Lucy's son in the City somewhere? They have not
seen or heard of him for years. Lucy committed suicide too, come to
think of it. This must be the suicide capital of
Britain!

So Sally is
here tomorrow, and Tom must look at least presentable, as he always
did when alive.

Henry
withdraws the veil from Tom's body. It is a terrifying site. I
search blindly for the toilet. Henry steers me bony-fingered
towards it. I note that he is rather pleased with my reaction. I am
copiously sick. You can try to anticipate the shock for days, make
your preparations, rationalise away your fears. You will never be
ready. It is the mind that captures the sight first and bellows it
out in visual and verbal translation, before the reason can rush
hurriedly around shutting the doors. Tom is quite simply revolting.
I last saw him as an erotic, sinuous, soft body, alive, smiling,
and pleasing. Somebody, within minutes of my imprint of that fading
image, hacked his soul and body apart, and left his remains for the
vultures of forensics to rip the flesh off. I cannot reconcile
myself to his head, parted in two, peeled, congealed, at a crazy
fairground angle. If Henry thinks that the sight of Tom will still
anyone's troubled spirit, he is totally insane. Is he testing my
reaction to unmask a murderess? Is he doing some private sleuthing?
Is he showing off what he can stomach and I cannot? Is he simply a
sadist?

And then I
wonder: did he kill Tom? I rather hope he did. I would enjoy taking
my revenge.

I spend some
minutes thinking this over as I apparently worship at Tom's altar.
Henry has not left me alone. He is hovering, observing, intruding.
I am tempted to ask to be left alone.

Could Henry
have wielded that axe? Certainly. He is tall, fit, and I would
guess strong from manoeuvring so much dead weight. Would he know
where to strike? Yes, anyway it is obvious if you are going to
punch someone's head in two. Could he get intimate, unsuspecting
access to Tom? Of course. Did he really hate Tom? I would not be at
all surprised.