Death Day (2 page)

    Lambert sighed and ran a hand through his short brown hair, catching sight of his own pale face in the rearview mirror as he did so. He readjusted it, as though not wanting to see his reflection. The wind rustled quietly around the car, somehow far away. It seemed to him as though, here inside, he was insulated against all snd and sensations.

    He wished it was an insulation against his own emotions.

    As he climbed out of the car, Lambert realized just how cold the wind was. He shook himself and pulled up the collar of his leather jacket before reaching onto the back seat to retrieve a bunch of carnations. He sniffed them. No scent.

    Greenhouse variety. He locked the door and pocketed the keys.

    His feet clattered noisily on the pebble driveway of the cemetery. He wondered why they had never bothered to pave the path. It wound right through the cemetery before disappearing out of another gate a mile and a half further on. That was one of the things which always amazed Lambert. The sheer size of the place. There seemed enough plot acreage to bury half the population of Britain, never mind the occupants of Medworth.

    He continued up the path, passing the first rows of gravestones. The plots were in various states of disrepair according to their age or the consciences of those who had buried someone there. Few of the older graves bore flowers. An urn might sport a few withered blooms but most were bare.

    To Lambert's right, along a broken path, stood the church. Its great steel-braced oak doors were closed. The bell tower, topped by the twisted black spire, dominated the bleak skyline and as he looked up, he could see the battered weather vane twisting in the wind.

    Almost thankfully, he reached the footpath which led off from the main drive. The noise of the crackling pebbles was beginning to grate on his nerves and as he walked along the muddy path between the rows of gravestones he was pleased by the silence. It was broken only by the mournful sighing of the wind in the nearby trees. They stood like sentries, watching him pick his way through the maze of stone memories, and if they could have spoken they would have known this young man. Lambert had been coming here at the same time for the last two weeks and he wondered how much longer he would continue to do so. Perhaps his entire life would be spent edging his way between marked and unmarked graves, looking for one in particular. The same one he came to every morning at nine o'clock.

    Beneath the shade of a huge oak tree, he found it.

    Amidst the brown and grey of the cemetery, the plot stood out with an almost unnatural blaze of radiance. Flowers of every kind were laid across it, some still wrapped with the cellophane in which they'd been brought. He bent and picked off two fallen leaves which had found their way from the low tree branch onto the grave. Lambert lowered his head. He didn't need to read the inscription for he had it burned into his mind. It was there constantly, gnawing away at him like some kind of parasite.

    
'Michael Lambert-Died January 5th 1984'

    He had been twenty.

    Lambert thought that most of his emotion was spent but, as he bent to lay the bunch of carnations on the grave, a single tear slipped from his eye corner and rolled down his cheek. He straightened up, wiping it away. He stared down at the grave. His brother's grave. He gritted his teeth until his jaws ached. He wanted to shout, to scream at the top of his voice. Why? Why did it have to be Mike?

    He spun round in a paroxysm of helpless rage, driving one fist as hard as he could into the solid bark of the oak. Pain shot up his arm but he ignored it, his back now turned to the grave as if he could fed his brother's eyes staring out reproachfully at him. Images flashed into his mind.

    The car. The screaming of brakes. The explosion.

    Oh Jesus Christ, he wanted to scream again.

    Lambert felt the tears running more swiftly down his cheeks now as the thoughts returned with a clarity which sickened him. Living with the memory was bad enough, if only it weren't so vivid…

    They had gone out that night, ten of them including Mike and himself. What was it blokes liked to call it, the last fling? Stag night, booze up, piss party, call it what you like. It had been the night before Mike was due to get married. A right little cracker he was landing too. Sally. He couldn't remember her last name, but he realized what a lucky man Mike was. Lambert himself was to have been the best man. He was going to drive Mike home that night, he was going to be the one who kept his eye on his baby brother. (There was three years between them, Mike was twenty, Lambert had just turned twenty-three.) He was the one who was going to stay sober, let Mike get boozed up, let him enjoy his last night.

    Now, as he remembered how prophetic that statement turned out to be, Lambert hated himself even more.

    They had carried on drinking late into the night but it had been Mike who had remained sober, Lambert himself who had got pissed. So pissed he asked Mike to drive them home. So pissed he had not closed his car door properly (the thing that probably saved his own life). So pissed he'd forgotten Mike had only passed his driving test a few weeks earlier and had no experience at night driving.

    And now he remembered, how the car went out of control as it hit the patch of black ice. How the car swerved and he was thrown clear while Mike struggled with the wheel, trying to avoid the lamp post.

    Drunk and in pain, Lambert had seen the car smash into the lamp post. Seen Mike catapulted through the windscreen, heard his scream of agony as the jagged glass shredded his face and upper body. Then Lambert had crawled across to his brother's body and sat with him, ignoring the blood which had splashed for fifteen feet across the pavement, ignoring the pieces of glass embedded in Mike's face and neck, the final spoutings of his blood jetting darkly into the night.

    When the ambulance arrived, Lambert had been sitting on the pavement holding his dead brother's hand. At that precise moment of course he didn't know that Mike was dead. He only realized that when the two ambulance men lifted the shattered body. There was a dull thud and the head dropped to the ground, the neck severed by the savage cuts.

    At that point, Lambert had collapsed.

    And now, he found the courage to look back at his brother's grave. He wiped the tears away, suddenly becoming aware of just how cold the wind was getting. He shivered, cold in spirit as well as body.

    'Shit,' he said aloud, shaking his head. He inhaled, held the breath then let it out very slowly.

    The family had been very understanding about it.
God, how fucking ironic, how bloody magnanimous of them,
he thought.
Never mind about your brother, it wasn't your fault.
He felt suddenly angry. So, maybe it wasn't his fault, but, he told himself,
what good were consolations when you had to live with the thought for the rest of your life?

    He'd woken screaming for nights afterwards. Debbie understood, she always understood. He thanked God he had her. They'd been married two years but already he wondered what the hell he'd have done without her. If he hadn't had her with him during the last couple of weeks he'd have gone up the wall. Everyone had been very understanding but it had done nothing to ease the guilt. He wondered what would.

    There had been nothing about it in the newspapers. Lambert knew Charles Burton, the man who ran The Medworth Chronicle. The two men disliked one another but Lambert had managed to persuade him not to mention his name in the local rag. It wouldn't have done his reputation much good either. He'd been surprised that he hadn't heard more from Divisional HQ in Nottingham. Lambert, as head of Medworth's small police force, could do without the kind of publicity which the crash might have brought. He was surprised he hadn't been asked to resign or some such drastic measure, but, as Debbie had said to him at the time, he hadn't killed his own brother. He had only been involved in the accident which had taken his life.

    Lambert was the only one who felt like a murderer.

    He lingered a moment longer, then, almost reluctantly, he turned and made his way back along the path between the graves until he reached the gravel drive.

    It was after nine but he was in no hurry. He'd been told to take a month off. Get his thoughts back into one piece. The men under him were all capable. Capable enough at least to run things until he returned.

    He walked, head bowed, collar turned up against the wind. Lost in his own thoughts, he almost bumped into the tall man coming through the cemetery gates.

    The man was carrying a pick over his shoulder and there was a younger man behind wearing a pair of bright orange overalls.

    Lambert sidestepped the pair who continued up the gravel drive, their mud-caked boots making it sound as if they were walking on cornflakes. Lambert saw their council van parked across the road outside the vicarage. There was movement in the bay window of the building and Lambert saw Father Ridley standing inside. He waved cheerfully to the young man who raised a hand in weary acknowledgement. He fumbled in his pocket for his keys and unlocked the car door. He slid behind the wheel, started the engine and swung the car round, pointing it down the hill in the direction of the town. Lambert flicked on the radio but, after a moment or two found that he didn't feel like listening to music. He switched the set off.

    He drove the rest of the way in silence.

    

    

    'It'll take until next Christmas to clear this lot,' said Ray Mackenzie, dropping his pick dejectedly.

    He was looking at a patch of ground about half the size of a football pitch, surrounded on three sides by densely planted trees. Some had even encroached into the heavily overgrown area itself. The grass and weeds were waist high in places and, as Mackenzie stepped forward, he snagged his arm on a particularly tall gorse bush. He muttered something to himself and kicked at it.

    The area was beyond the main part of the cemetery, two hundred yards or more from the central driveway along which they had just come. Situated in a slight hollow, it was effectively masked from the rest of the area. Only the fact that the top halves of the trees poked up above the rim of the crest testified to its existence. The grass was neatly cut only up to the very edge of the crest then it sloped down into the area where the two men stood. Nature run riot.

    'Fancy letting it get in this state in the first place,' complained the younger of the two men. Steve Pike had quite fancied the idea of working for the council at first. Weeding the flower beds in the town gardens, cutting the grass in the park? It had seemed like a good idea. As he surveyed the expanse of twisted gorse, bracken, heather and waist high grass he began to have second thoughts.

    Father Ridley had called the council offices and asked if they could send some men to clear a patch of ground for him.

    'Well,' said Mackenzie. 'Standing here looking at it isn't going to make it go away.'

    With that he drove his pick into the ground, turning a large clod. He grimaced as he saw the size of the worm which clung to it. He broke the clod with his pick and continued digging. Steve stood watching him.

    'Come on,' snapped Mackenzie. 'Get the sickle and cut some of that stuff down.' He pointed to a dense growth of ragweed which was fully two feet high. Steve went to the canvas bag they had brought with them and pulled out the sickle, then he set to work, hacking away at the recalcitrant plants. Mackenzie swapped his pick for a shovel and was soon turning the earth. But it was quite a battle.

    Steve too found that the roots of the bramble and gorse bushes went deeper than he thought. Great thick tendrils of root clung to the earth like bony fingers.

    They worked on. Yet despite the fury of their exertions, both men began to notice something odd. Both were soaked in sweat but both could feel their bodies trembling from the cold. A cold the like of which neither had experienced before. A deep, penetrating cold which was almost oppressive. Mackenzie stopped digging and looked up.

    Another thirty minutes and the men decided that it was time they stopped for a while. Steve looked around. They had done quite well considering the size of the problem. At least a quarter of the overgrown area had been cleared, the earth now dark beneath their feet. Mackenzie looked at his watch. The second hand was frozen. It had stopped, the hands pointing to 9:30. He shook it and grunted.

    'What's up?' asked Steve, taking the fag he was offered.

    'My bloody watch has stopped,' Mackenzie told him.

    Steve rolled up his sleeve, his forehead creasing. He tapped the face of his own timepiece.

    'So has mine,' he exclaimed, extending his arm so that Mackenzie could see. The twin hands were immobile.

    Stuck at 9:30.

    

    

    Lambert parked the Capri in the small driveway beside the house and got out. The next door cat scampered across the front lawn as he walked up the path to the back door and he hissed at it. The startled animal spun round and fled off through a hole in the fence. Lambert smiled thinly to himself.

    He found his back door key and let himself in. It was after nine-thirty so he knew that Debbie would be gone. She always left well before nine, sometimes before he even drove for the cemetery. The kitchen smelt of pine and new wood, and Lambert inhaled deeply. He crossed to the kitchen table and sat down, noting that two letters were propped up against the tea pot. He smiled again. Although the letters were addressed to Mr and Mrs T. Lambert, Debbie had left them for him to open. She always did. He considered the envelopes for a moment then dropped them back onto the table and crossed to the sink to fill the kettle. He stood for a moment, looking out of the back window, thinking how badly the grass needed cutting. The gardens on either side were in a worse state and that, at least, comforted him somewhat.