Dark Undertakings (24 page)

‘If it helps, we already know about the rumours concerning Mrs Lapsford and the dentist,’ said Drew. ‘And the even stronger rumours about Jim and one or two lady friends.’

‘Ah,’ said Sarah, with evident relief.

They finished their tea, and chatted idly about the weather and the changing face of Bradbourne. They asked Karen about her job, and what she made of Drew’s new career as an undertaker. ‘I’m getting used to it,’ she told them, with a rueful smile that made them laugh.

‘It’s an honourable trade,’ said Dottie, reassuringly. The words hung in the air, echoing in Drew’s ears.
Is it?
he wondered.
Is it really?

Before they left, Sarah said, ‘She’s had quite a lot of visitors, of course. Her woman friend, the vicar, people bringing flowers. She seems to be well looked-after.’

‘There was the man from the printworks, too. Jack somebody, I think. He arrived as I was leaving, on Thursday,’ Drew added.

‘So there was,’ she smiled. ‘I’d forgotten him.’

‘But you knew who he was?’

‘Jim’s best friend,’ nodded Sarah carelessly. ‘He helps him in the garden sometimes. Funny little man. Something sad about him, with that awful beard and those glasses. He must be feeling wretched now.’

Drew made no reply. The man had certainly seemed agitated at the printworks the previous afternoon. He was prepared to believe that could be a manifestation of wretchedness at losing his friend and colleague.

‘We’ll be off now,’ said Drew, with finality. ‘Thank you very much indeed.’

‘It was nice to meet you,’ said Dottie. ‘We don’t get a lot of visitors. It isn’t a very friendly neighbourhood, you know. Everyone intent on their own business.’

Drew paused, remembering Roxanne’s remark:
A town without a soul
, she’d said. Wasn’t Dottie now saying very much the same sort of thing?

Monica was feeling abandoned. Since phoning Philip earlier in the day, she’d had no contact from anybody. Solitude gave her too much time to dwell on things that had been said, and her anxieties mounted. If it was true that Jim had been murdered, the only person she could think of who might be capable of it was David. Philip had not appeared to find it too hard to imagine that his brother had poisoned their father. That was the thing which frightened Monica most. If Philip had laughed and dismissed the whole idea as hysteria, she would have felt much better.

Her mind was filled with David as he was when he last visited her – his behaviour bordering on madness, his emotions out of control – and she shuddered. If he
had
done it, then he must be protected. Nothing would bring Jim back, and to lose David as well was unthinkable. She loved him as if he had been born to her, and she reproached herself viciously for letting him find out part of the truth about himself without having first prepared him.

Perhaps it wasn’t too late, even now. Having washed her face, and brushed her hair, she left the house, ignoring the telephone which began
to ring after she had pulled the front door securely behind her.

It took twenty minutes to drive the five miles to David’s flat in Garnstone. Getting out onto the main road entailed a long wait. So preoccupied was she, that she didn’t even ask herself why there was such a hold-up. Something ahead was slowing everyone down, so that they were backed up beyond her junction.
Hurry up
, she repeated to herself, as she edged forward. The time had come to tell him the whole truth about his origins, and she couldn’t bear to be frustrated in her intention at this stage.

Crawling behind slow-moving traffic, she finally understood that something must have happened. It was never like this on a Saturday, even in high summer. Bradbourne was not on a main route to anywhere, and did not go in for big public events which would attract this number of cars.
Must be an accident
, she said to herself, and the instinctive spasm in her gut gripped her, until she knew for sure that it was neither of her sons lying mangled in the road. A mother’s curse, she’d long ago concluded; something you just had to live with.

The incident holding up the traffic had happened on a bend in the road, and did indeed involve a heavy police and ambulance presence. But it was not a car accident. There
were flashing blue lights from two cars parked drunkenly on the grass verge, beside a field gate, and yellow-jacketed policemen trying in vain to wave the crawling traffic past. But nobody was in any hurry to proceed. They were craning their necks to glimpse the scene inside the gate. Monica was no different.

Another vehicle had been driven right into the field, and two men were kneeling over a body laid out on the ground. A big oak tree grew close to the gate, and a bright orange plastic rope dangled from a branch, incongruously vivid. It ended in a crudely hacked-off tuft of strands.

It was all astonishingly close to the road. Had somebody actually hanged themselves, here in full public gaze, in broad daylight? It seemed completely incredible. And yet, she thought, as she tried to see the face of the prostrate form, there was something grotesquely clever about it. How many cars would stop when they saw the jerking, dangling body? The hedge would have partially concealed it, so anyone getting a brief glimpse while travelling at speed might persuade themselves that it wasn’t what it seemed. Horror washed through her. They said that suicide was an act of anger, even hatred, against those around him who had failed to observe his despair. This was surely the case
here. Young children, delicate old ladies, even members of his own family, might have driven past and seen the hanging body. A cruel form of revenge. She turned her face away, belatedly obeying the policeman waving her past.

It hadn’t been David – of course it hadn’t. She’d glimpsed the person’s feet, in black boots with silver studs and buckles, nothing like anything that David would wear. But it
could
have been him. She remembered the anguish on her son’s face the last morning she had seen him, and her hands began to shake. If David had indeed poisoned Jim, then suicide was a very real possibility, given his fragile mental state. Cursing herself, she began to accelerate, following the unblocked flow of cars, now moving at a more normal pace.

She had to save her boy. Whatever it took, however many lies or bribes she had to employ, she must return him to his old self, sure of his parents’ love for him, and free of any cause for self-loathing. Frowning fiercely, she forced herself to prepare for the coming meeting. She would have to be very careful indeed.

Roxanne could not get the image of the fresh-faced young undertaker’s man out of her mind. He had arrived shortly after she’d treated herself to a stimulating mugful of one
of her own herbal mixtures, designed to raise her spirits and remove a few inhibitions. She’d hoped she would feel less morose as a result. When her visitor had arrived, she had wanted to throw her arms around him. Instead, she knew she had talked too much.

When he left, she felt restless and anxious, uncharacteristically bemoaning her isolation. There were events going on in town which she wanted to be a part of. The strangeness of Jim’s death was giving rise to gossip and surmising which she could not afford to miss. Her own part in it could not be ignored. Although nobody could ever prove anything, now she’d disposed of the evidence, she’d said enough to the funeral chap to arouse unwelcome suspicions. What a fool she’d been! Her best hope now was to sniff out others who’d provided Jim with unwonted stimulation. Not least, the irresponsible idiot who’d given him Viagra.

That piece of information had come as a real shock. Jim was well known to be a health freak. He took vitamin supplements and experimented with a wide range of herbal teas. Since taking up with Roxanne, his horizons had broadened significantly, and he haunted the health food shop in town, seeking out new sources of essential minerals and life-enhancing substances. Ginseng, kelp and garlic had all
been his favourites, one after the other. The idea that he would jump on the bandwagon that was Viagra diminished him in Roxanne’s eyes. Somebody has exploited his vanity, his fear of growing old and less potent, and had sold him a powerful drug which in the circumstances could only threaten his health.

It was Saturday afternoon, so Pauline would probably be at home. Without bothering to telephone, Roxanne set out across the fields to walk to her sister’s house. The exercise would be therapeutic, in any case. It was a little over two miles distant, avoiding the roads: a narrow, bramble-choked footpath, scarcely ever used, opened onto the far end of Pauline’s road. It was not an official footpath, merely a forgotten route, crossing the closed-off ends of several of Bradbourne’s older residential streets. Children played on the scrubby land, where nettles and brambles grew amidst the rubble and abandoned rolls of barbed wire. The hilly terrain meant a scramble down into the streets, which few respectable adults would even consider. Roxanne scarcely hesitated before swinging her leg over a single-wire barrier, and letting herself half-slide, half-run down the steep embankment. It was the most direct way to Pauline’s, and that was all there was to it.

The house was modest and inconspicuous.
Pauline had lived there ever since she first married. When her husband had forgotten himself with a young housewife, during a longish building job in the woman’s house, Pauline’s reaction had led to his walking out and never coming back. With much less trouble than most people experience, he had moved in with his customer, enjoying the fruits of his own labour, and ousting the bewildered civil servant who had paid him for his brickwork.

Nominally, Pauline’s son Craig still lived at home, but he spent barely two nights a week there, staying with nameless friends or in Susie’s flat. Roxanne privately considered that he was well past the age when he ought to be independent and finding his own accommodation, and took a cynical view of the excessively close relationship between him and his mother. His friendship with Susie Hawkes had been the only source of hope that he might one day leave home entirely.

Roxanne went round to the back of the house, down a narrow passageway. The kitchen door stood open, and the sound of a radio issued forth. ‘Hello?’ she called. ‘Are you in?’

Pauline appeared, holding a mug in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Her glasses were perched crookedly on top of her head, and she wore a long woolly cardigan and green lycra
leggings. She looked less than delighted to see her sister.

‘Can I come in?’

‘You don’t want feeding, do you? There isn’t much here. I ought to go and do some shopping, really, but I can’t be bothered. I’m in a funny mood.’

‘Me too,’ said Roxanne, following her sister through into the living room. The house was packed with shabby furnishings dating back twenty years. Pauline’s three cats left hairs and footprints on most surfaces, and her habit of knitting something for almost everyone she knew, as well as hoarding ‘useful’ items such as yoghurt pots and paper bags, meant the house was as cluttered and messy in its way as was Roxanne’s caravan.

‘I don’t need feeding,’ Roxanne reassured her. ‘This whole business with Jim is getting very complicated. I had a visit today. Very weird. I need to pass the time until the funeral as quickly as I can, and sitting thinking about Jim isn’t the best way to do it.’

Pauline took the sagging sofa and stretched out her legs on it, leaving a threadbare chair for Roxanne. ‘Who visited you?’ she asked with a singular lack of interest.

‘A young chap from the undertaker’s. I never did really find out what he wanted. I talked too
much for that. He seemed quite bright – unusual for this dump. Seems to have got himself in a state over Jim – something to do with a baby that died when he was working at the hospital. Scared him so much that now when anyone dies, he thinks it’s down to him to make sure everything’s above board.’

Pauline snorted. ‘Sounds cracked to me.’

‘I told him about the henbane,’ Roxanne interrupted, with a tremor in her voice. ‘That might have been a big mistake.’

Pauline’s attention was abruptly hooked. ‘
What?
You told him what?’

‘Oh, you know. Surely I told you? Jim and I used henbane sometimes, for better sex. It’s pretty good – much better than pot or anything. But you have to be careful. It’s poisonous if you use too much. I gave him some on Monday.’

‘Shit, Rox. Did that kill him, d’you think?’

Roxanne grimaced, then shrugged. ‘I only gave him a bit. He had to do a few hours work that afternoon, before going home, so he didn’t want to get too peculiar. But this undertaker chap said he found Viagra in Jim’s bathroom.
Viagra!
Would you believe it? I’d never have imagined he’d bother with something so – well, conventional, I suppose. Like any pathetic old failure. Jim wasn’t like that. He didn’t
need
that stuff. There wasn’t anything wrong with him in that department.’

‘Not when he was with you, anyway,’ commented Pauline. ‘Could Viagra have killed him then? Is that what you think?’

Roxanne shook her head. ‘They’re saying it’s safe enough. But you can never be sure what things will do in combination. I very much doubt whether the drug people have tested it alongside henbane. And that’s a pretty powerful stimulant in itself. And where did he get his blue pills? Must have been the Internet, and that means he wouldn’t have had any sort of medical check first. You know how he was always boasting about never going to a doctor. After Julia died, he vowed off doctors – and stuck to it.’

Pauline laughed wryly. ‘The perfect end to a life devoted to pleasure. Killed by combining too many sex aids. I can see the headlines now.’

Roxanne smiled grimly. ‘I deserved that. But there won’t be any headlines, if I can help it. I owe it to Jim not to let him turn into a laughing stock.’ She then plunged into a complete change of subject. ‘Lorraine Dunlop came to see me, too,’ she added, leaning sideways on the chair, and crossing her long legs. ‘We got on like a house on fire.’

Pauline refused to react. ‘Really?’

‘She expected me to scratch her eyes out, I think. Instead, I was really nice to her. We agreed
absolutely about Jim and the sort of person he was.’