Burial

25

In the morning, Holly woke him with another Lemsip and a kiss goodbye.

He drank the Lemsip, then pulled on a tracksuit and thick socks and his dressing gown, and limped to the office.

Holly's workstation was a chrome and glass table: a Compaq desktop, replaced every couple of years; a filing cabinet, a cheap plastic desktidy, stacked in-and out-trays, a desk diary, a mobile phone charger. Nathan kept a smaller workstation in there - a corner desk, a laptop, not much else.

He logged on and skim-read his work emails. Later, he would answer the more important of them, because he wanted his bosses and colleagues to consider him a martyr and a workaholic. Then he logged on to the Internet and ran a search on the proposed Cabot Green estate.

There were dozens of hits - Cabot Green had been a local interest story for years now. According to the published minutes of the Sutton Down Action Group, Graham and June Fox had declined an invitation to act as group secretaries. (Probably they'd have thought it hypocritical to accept, given Holly's chosen career.) Holly must know about this proposed development - all the local developers seemed to know and enjoy gossiping about each other. She might even have mentioned it, over dinner or breakfast: Nathan had probably acknowledged her and immediately forgotten all about it, having little real interest in the matter - no more interest, say, than Holly had in the wholesale of greetings cards.

The final appeals had failed. Planning permission had been granted. Building work was due to commence.

Nathan navigated to the development company's website and found his way to a map of the proposed Cabot Green estate.

It took some time to make sense of the plans, but not as long as it might have -- Holly often discussed similar proposals with him, and he'd learned how to read them.

Whoever now owned Mark Derbyshire's estate had sold off a good portion of it -- including the woods that ran to the main road. On the map, Nathan was easily able to find and identify the lane. It was simply marked, given no name. He was able to trace the wiggling brook beside which they had laid her.

Superimposed on this map in dotted, coloured lines was the ghost of the housing estate to come. Around the brook, there was to be a modern playground with climbing frames and, across a small bridge, a picnic area. Nathan knew that such facilities were often designed into new estates' proposals -- and were often dropped at the last minute, as a cost-saving exercise; such projects always ran above budget. But factoring in designated recreation sites helped get the project past the protesters. It helped foster the illusion that a new community was being designed from the ground up.

He could see written into the plans that Elise would be found. She would be disinterred by a mechanical digger, or by some boys who'd scrambled over the chain-link fence, drawn to the unexplored moonscape behind it, or she would be sniffed out by badgers or foxes or a domestic dog tempted by the thick, sweet smell of old carrion.

He cleared his Internet history, as if he'd been viewing pornography, then accessed his work emails. He answered several of them on corporate autopilot: they seemed to address problems that had arisen decades ago, and did not greatly interest him. Then he logged off and went back to bed. He couldn't sleep. He dragged the duvet downstairs and, wrapped in it, watched daytime television.

As a student and as a doley, he'd watched and thoroughly enjoyed daytime TV -- but now the charm seemed to have gone from it. He watched tawdry, depressing quizzes, a sordid freak show disguised as a discussion programme, cookery programmes, yet more quizzes, and a comfortingly soporific programme about watercolours. He made beans on toast. He hadn't eaten beans on toast for a long time.

He called Bob at 5 p.m. -- two hours before Holly was due back.

Bob said, 'How have you been? I've been worried.'

'I've been ill.'

'Stress, I expect.'

'Yes.'

'So. Anyway.'

'So anyway. Let's do it.'

'When?'

'Friday night.'

'What will you tell Holly?'

'That I'm going for a drink with you. And that I'm sleeping at your place.'

'Is that wise?'

'I never go out. The only nights I've ever spent away from my wife, I've been at a sales conference. And there isn't a sales conference for five fucking months, and it's in fucking Dublin. Okay?'

'Okay. Steady on. Whatever.'

'I'm sorry. I'm on edge, here.'

Bob said, 'I'll be in touch', and hung up.

Nathan wrapped the duvet tighter round himself and turned up the volume on the muted television. He watched a shrieking advert for loan consolidation, then a quieter ad for orthopaedic beds, a third for stairlifts, and a fourth for a flu remedy which took the form of a macho, corporate mini-drama.

So this is who was watching with him. The unemployed, the elderly and the sick. A silent nexus of them, in lonely communion.

He turned it off.