Viridian Tears (22 page)

“I wondered if you were licensed to conduct funerals? If you were a licensed minister? I have a funeral party here and no minister to perform it.”

“No, sorry. I should, though, shouldn’t I? It’d be another string to my bow if I were a witch with a license to thrill.” She gave a bark of laughter. “I perform handfastings. It’d be handy to be able to perform civil weddings as well. Birth them, marry them, bury them. That was the function of a witch in the old days.”

“I suppose so. Let me know if you do get the paperwork. I might be able to throw a few funerals your way.”

“I’ll bear it in mind, thanks.”

“You do that. I’d like to be as multi-denominational as I can.” Eden was interrupted by the door opening. She looked up expecting to see Malcolm, or at least Emily, but it was one of the old men from the funeral party. He wandered to the four-foot Swiss cheese plant she had to green up her office and unzipped his trousers. “Sir?” Eden half stood. “Sir? Please don’t do that.” She spoke into the phone again. “Sorry. I have to go.”

She dropped the phone onto her desk and hurried across the room. “Sir? Please don’t urinate on my…oh.”

She tapped him on the shoulder and he jumped. “Eh?” A stream of urine described an arc on her carpet as he turned. “You can’t be in here, love. This is the gents.”

“This is my office, sir.” Eden dodged the stream as it slowed and sputtered into drops. “You’ve just urinated into my potted plant.”

“Did I?” The old man shook his penis, sending more drops flying into the air, then tucked it away. “It looks like a urinal to me.” He held his hand in front of his face and frowned in concentration. “Out of my room, turn right. Walk sixteen steps, turn left and through the door.”

“Except you’re not at the nursing home, sir.” Eden closed her eyes and counted to three. “Let’s see if we can find your fellow mourners, shall we?” She took his arm and led him through the door, back to the reception suite. She paused in the doorway. Emily was fighting a losing battle trying to hand out cups of tea and a variety of biscuits. There had been no buffet scheduled and it looked as though she’d emptied the staff cupboards. The tall Jennifer Glapwell towered over the gathering.

“Miss Glapwell?” Eden’s voice rang out over the hubbub and it died down except for the lone voice of one man asking for another biscuit. It was reminiscent of the child at Eddie Burbridge’s funeral and Eden briefly wondered if were all destined to return to our younger selves. “Miss Glapwell!”

“Yes?” She came through the group like Moses parting the Red Sea. “Ah! You’ve found Mr. Hughes. We were wondering where he’d got to.”

“He was…” Eden lowered her voice. “Urinating in my office. Can’t you keep better track of your charges?”

“I wish I could.” Jennifer took the old man’s arm and shooed him toward Emily. “Have you had any luck tracing the minister?”

“No, he wouldn’t answer his phone. Would there be any objection to me hiring somebody else?”

“As long as they give a good show, no.” She jerked her head toward her charges. “They don’t get out much, you see, so they like to have a bit of a show when they get the chance. That’s why we book Rupert Shepherd. You really feel like you’ve had a good funeral after him. His homilies make the crematorium flames look insignificant compared to the fires of Hell.”

“I see. Well, if you’ll excuse me…”

“By all means, Miss Maguire, but it’s ten-fifteen already.” She tapped her wrist. “Tick tick tick.”

“I know.” Eden headed back to her office, stopping by the canteen to grab a bottle of surface cleaner, a pair of rubber gloves and a roll of disposable towels. She set both by the plant in her office and picked up her phone again, dialing the Humanist Society in Wells. “Hello? Have you got anyone available to do a funeral in Laverstone right now? You do? Excellent.” She dotted down the name of the celebrant, gave her name and address and rang off, relieved that something was going right at last.

She rang the original minister back, relieved she could leave a message instead of having to talk to him personally. “Mr. Shepherd? It’s Eden Maguire here, from the New Eden Cemetery? I’m afraid we won’t be needing you for the Claremont funeral today after all. Thank you.”

She breathed a sigh of relief and reached for her coffee. It had already gone cold but she took a couple of mouthfuls anyway. She had no idea when she was going to get the chance of another cup today. She crossed the room and picked up the bottle of multi-surface cleaner, giving the carpet a generous spray along the arc of urine and several more squirts into the plant pot.

She spent the next few minutes on her hands and knees scrubbing the carpet, unconvinced that the pine-fresh scent was preferable to the smell of old-man wee. She was still in this position, her hands encased to the elbows in yellow rubber gloves, when there was another knock and the door opened.

“Eden, this is Detective Inspector White.” Malcolm came in and stood to one side of the door as the inspector came in behind him.

“We are acquainted, sir.” He gazed at Eden while she hurriedly cleared away the cleaning supplies and got to her feet, stripping off the rubber gloves. “I have some rather distressing news for you, I’m afraid.”

“They’ve found a body. In my compost heap. Murdered.” Malcolm blurted out the words as if they were burning his tongue, nodding his head for emphasis on each phrase.

“I wouldn’t have put it quite so bluntly, but he is, essentially correct.” White looked pointedly from Eden to Malcolm. “If I might have a word?”

“Of course.” Eden walked back to her desk. “Malcolm? Would you see how Emily is doing in chapel one? Tell her the celebrant’s on his way.”

“You don’t want me to stay here?”

“No, Malcolm. I’ll be fine, honestly.”

“Well…ask him about the tractor, at least.” He left the room, closing the door behind him with a soft click. The silence left behind seemed heavy as dust.

The inspector broke the silence first. “Tractor?”

“Our backhoe was stolen the night before last. Your lads found it on the canal bank and impounded it. Now they won’t let us have it back because it’s waiting to be examined for fingerprints. As you can imagine, digging a grave without a backhoe requires a larger workforce than I can currently employ.”

“I see.” White took out his notebook and wrote in it. “I’ll do what I can to expedite its return.”

“Thank you.” Eden reached for her cup before she remembered it was cold. “Can I offer you a beverage?”

“Not for me, thank you, but don’t let me stop you.” He gave her a terse smile. “I noticed you didn’t seem surprised when the gentleman…”

“Malcolm. Malcolm Glover. Gardener, gravedigger and caretaker.”

“When Malcolm told you a body had been found on your property. May I enquire why?”

“I already knew.” She spluttered at the look on his face. “No, no. I don’t know anything about it, but I happened to phone Meinwen twenty minutes ago and she was down there. It was a friend of hers, she said.”

“Yes. A Mr. Joseph Yanuk, formerly Yanukovych. Came over here in seventy-two to escape the communists and fell through the cracks of society. The sort of man everybody knew by sight but nobody knew by name.”

“Such a shame.” Eden shook her head sympathetically. “And how can I help?”

“Well firstly, you can tell me what you were doing between the hours of ten PM and three AM…”

Chapter 23

It was a good position to be in. Michelle smiled to herself as she spooned a generous helping of honey onto her midday toast. Her website was showing more hits in the last twelve hours than it had in the last six months, her Chatter feed was overflowing with hashtags about her seance and her appointments schedule was booked up for the next month and a half. If she’d ever imagined the murder of a client would have boosted her popularity like this she’d have seriously considered bumping one off in the past.

The phone rang. The house phone, not the mobile she gave out the number to on her business cards and website, so it wasn’t a business call. The was no number listed on the information panel so she answered it with a cheery ‘four-five-eight-one-four,’ expecting a foreign voice offering to help claim back her overdraft fees. She was surprised to find the voice sounding more like an English gentleman with a cold.

“Mrs. Michelle Browning?”

“It’s Miss, but yes. Who is this?”

“You don’t know me, Mrs. Browning, but I know you. You’ve become the internet sensation, haven’t you?”

“Who is this?” Michelle’s bravado quivered. “What do you want?”

“What do I want?” There was a chuckle on the other end of the line. “I want what’s owed me, that’s all. Nothing more.”

“I don’t owe you anything.”

“But you do, Mrs. Browning. You owe me the information Mrs. Burbridge gave you before she died so suddenly under your care.”

Michelle pulled the phone away from her ear and stared at it as if it would give some clue to the caller’s identity. “I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about. If you don’t get off the line I’m going to call the police. I’m sure they’re used to people like you.”

“I really don’t think that’s such a good idea, Mrs. Browning. You see, the police might receive an anonymous tip that you know exactly who killed Shirley Burbridge and why.”

“But I don’t. I don’t know anything.”

“You know about the murder weapon.”

“Only because I took a photograph of it accidentally.”

“And where is that murder weapon now?”

“How should I know? The police will find it, I expect. They always do on the telly.”

“I hope for your sake they don’t. Especially not as your fingerprints are all over it.”

“My fingerprints? That’s impossible. I had nothing to do with the murder.”

“I find that hard to believe. Especially with your prints on the knife and your declaration that she was murdered by a ghost. Covering your tracks, were you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Who are you? What do you want?”

“I’ve already told you. I want to know what Shirley Burbridge told you about the missing money.”

“She didn’t tell me anything. That’s what she wanted to find out from Eddie’s ghost. She couldn’t get any money out of their account.”

“She will have told you in dribs and drabs. Piece it together and tell me in a series of Chatter posts. Every third word will be for me. And then perhaps I’ll forget to tell the police where you hid the murder weapon.”

“But I didn’t–” The phone went dead and she stared at it in utter confusion. What was all that about? She replaced it on its cradle. What knife had he been on about? How could the murder weapon possibly have her fingerprints on?

She opened up her pictures folder on the computer, locating the ones she’d taken of the murder scene last night. She zoomed in on the one with the knife in the background. It had caught her attention originally because it had caught the light, reflecting it back to the lens like a camera flash in a mirror. She cropped the picture down to the knife and zoomed in further. At this resolution it looked like a pixilated blur of white. She lowered the gamma correction and raised the contrast, managing through trial and error to increase the resolution from a white blur to a distinguishable object.

She saved it off as a separate image and zoomed in. She squinted at the screen. A silver knife, around fifteen inches long, reminiscent of a cake knife.

Actually, it looked rather like her cake knife in particular.

Suddenly fearful, she dashed into the kitchen, rooting through the drawers and cupboards with an increasing sense of panic. In a fit of desperation, she emptied the whole of her cutlery drawer on the kitchen table and rooted through the all the pieces, sweeping teaspoons and knives onto the floor along with dessert spoons and table forks, meat skewers and tin openers. There was no cake knife.

She cast her mind back to the last time she used it. It was at the tea leaf reading of Shirley and Vera last Monday. She was quite certain Shirley hadn’t taken it. What would the millionaire wife of a building company entrepreneur want with a silver-plated cake knife?

That left Vera. Vera who encouraged Shirley to talk about money. Vera who egged Shirley on about tea leaves and missing millions. Was it millions? No wonder murder was on the agenda.

Vera had sat next to Shirley during the seance. It had been Vera who had screamed about seeing a ghost, thereby distracting everyone. It had been Vera who had cleared the room after the murder, ushering everyone away from the scene of the crime. Only now Michelle realized it was to get rid of the evidence in a safe and inconspicuous manner, leaving her free to plant the knife to incriminate Michelle.