Burial of Ghosts

Chapter Twenty-three

Inspector Farrier rang at lunchtime the next day to say that as far as he was concerned I was no longer a suspect in the Mariner murder. Joanna had promised that Howdon would go to the police, but it had happened more quickly than I’d expected.

‘Stupid prat,’ Farrier said. ‘I’d like to do him for wasting my time, perverting the course of justice, but he’s persuaded someone more important than me that it was some kind of mistake. A misunderstanding.’

Joanna had said ‘misunderstanding’ the night before at the exhibition, but I’d heard the quotation marks. We’d both taken the irony as read. Just before I’d left the room in the gallery, where she’d sat like a leading lady before opening night, drinking the last of the wine, I’d asked, ‘Why do you put up with him?’

‘Who? Stuart?’

‘Yeah. The Fat Controller.’

That had made her start for a moment. Perhaps she was thinking of Philip too. ‘Because he’s kind. Really. He’d do anything for me. He’s a sweetie.’

But I’d remembered what Dickon had said about his mother hating Howdon and I wasn’t taken in. If she was the sort of woman who needed admirers to feel good about herself, there’d be plenty of other men to play the part. I’d heard the way the rugby players talked about her at the funeral. Howdon had some power over her. I wished I knew what it was, but only in a vague, curious way. It didn’t seem personal any more.

When I replaced the receiver after talking to Farrier, I supposed I should celebrate. I was in the clear. The trouble was that I had nobody to share the celebration with. Jess was out with Ray and anyway I couldn’t spend all my time with a mother substitute. It suddenly hit me how lonely I was. It hadn’t always been like that. When I’d worked at the unit I’d had lots of friends: colleagues, people from university who’d stayed in town. I’d done all the usual stuff – drank too much, danced, laughed. Since Nicky I hadn’t wanted company. Now, for the first time, I missed it.

So I thought I’d celebrate alone. I drove up the coast to Craster, left the car there and walked out to Dunstanburgh Castle, grey sprawling ruins surrounded on three sides by the sea. The headland was almost empty. A stiff westerly blew against the incoming tide and helped clear my head. I walked back along the beach and hit the pub in the village in time for an early supper: crab soup, then smoked salmon from the smokery over the road sandwiched between chunks of home-baked bread. I made the food last. I didn’t want to hurry home.

When I got back to Sea View I was still feeling a bit low. It hadn’t been fun being a suspect in a murder inquiry, but it had been exciting. And it had given me an excuse not to think about my future. What was the point of making plans if I was likely to be arrested at any moment? Now everything seemed flat and I was restless and disengaged. Jess and Ray were sitting in the living room, cuddled up together on the sofa, listening to music. Not folk this time but that sort of jazz where all the notes slur into each other, so it makes you think of a drunk telling stories, being mellow and nostalgic. No one else was in. The bad lads were out causing chaos in town.

‘There’s some wine open in the kitchen,’ Jess said. She was as mellow and sleepy as the music.

I poured myself a glass, then went back and joined them. It was nearly dark but they’d not bothered to close the curtains. A light buoy was flashing in the bay. Three sharp flashes then a gap. I sat cross-legged on the floor and looked out at the water.

‘That solicitor’s realized he’s made a mistake,’ I said, without turning towards them. ‘He’s told Farrier.’

‘Eh, pet, what a relief!’ She didn’t ask how I knew. She didn’t even care that much that Howdon had lied. She was so full of happiness that there wasn’t much room for a response to my good news. I was pleased for her. Really, I was. But I was jealous too. I wanted to be curled up on a sofa with someone who made me feel that way. I didn’t want to feel empty and bitter and frustrated.

‘They’ve released his body,’ Jess said suddenly. ‘That lad, Thomas. It was in the Journal. His funeral’s next week.’

I decided then to go to the funeral. There seemed no reason not to. I thought that for me it would be the end of the matter. If Philip’s funeral had marked the start of my troublesome relationship with the Samsons, then Thomas’s would mark the finish. I didn’t tell Jess. She’d have thought it was an intrusion, sick even. Why, Lizzie, a funeral’s a time for families, pet. Families and close friends. You didn’t even know him.

But I knew his father, I thought. And that makes me family in a way. None of the other Samsons will be there. I’ll go to represent Philip. Of course, that wasn’t the real reason. My motives were more mixed up than that. Not nearly so noble. It was about missing the excitement, and wanting to see Ronnie Laing again, and feeling that until I knew who killed Thomas I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the money Philip had given me. All that besides a sense that by not finding Thomas alive I’d let Philip down.

Thomas’s funeral was in a new Methodist church not far from where the Laings lived. It was built of red brick. Inside the brick was exposed and hung with banners, a bit like the ones the unions carry on gala day. The banners were in bright primary colours and letters cut from felt spelled religious texts. It wasn’t like being in St Bartholomew’s. I left my car at Nell’s house and walked to the church with her and Dan. I’d phoned Dan up the day before to find out if they were going.

‘Nell’s keen,’ he’d said. Then, ‘Why on earth do you want to bother?’ I could tell he’d be glad of an excuse to get out of it but he’d go because of Nell.

‘Oh, you know, to show my respect.’ I still wasn’t sure I had a real answer and that was as good as anything.

It was a close and overcast day, with thunder flies swarming under the trees outside the church. We waited at a distance and watched the mourners go in. There were a number of well-dressed women in early middle age. The Methodist Wives, I thought, there to support Kay and to eye up each other’s black frocks. Thomas’s grandparents, Mr and Mrs Mariner. Mrs Mariner was already patting her eyes with her hanky and Archie was doing his best to comfort her. He had to take her arm to help her up the steps. Harry Pool with Kenny and a couple of lads from the yard. Ellen from Absalom House in a snot-green velvet skirt and jacket, her hair freshly dyed. A young man wearing an expensive suit who could have been Marcus Tate. Without the animal mask it was hard to tell. As they climbed the white stone steps, everyone wiped the thunder flies from their faces and their clothes, and shook their heads to clear them from their hair.

‘Well,’ Nell said, ‘are we going to stand here all day?’ And she led us in behind the stragglers and we flapped and shook the flies away just as the others had.

We sat near the back, sheepish, as if we had no right to be there. The church seemed mostly to be full of Kay’s friends. Apart from the boys from Harry’s Haulage and Marcus, I thought we were the only people Thomas would have bothered with. When I turned round once, halfway through the first hymn, I saw Farrier across the aisle from us, singing lustily. He must have come in at the last minute. He didn’t seem shocked to see me. He winked.

I didn’t see Kay and Ronnie until they followed the coffin out. They had been sitting on the front row with the little girls. It appeared that Thomas would be cremated. There would be a brief service but only for close family. I thought Ronnie saw me as he walked out, holding the hand of a little girl on each side. He gave a brief glance in my direction – shocked recognition, disbelief. Then something else which I couldn’t place immediately but which could have been fear. Almost a hunted look. Why would he be frightened of me? I waited in the church until all the other mourners had left, blocking the pew so Nell and Dan couldn’t move either. I didn’t want to meet Ronnie there, and I certainly didn’t want to see him in Kay’s company.

When we did get outside the hearse had gone.

Harry Pool wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. His face was even redder than I remembered, glistening with sweat.

‘I don’t know about you lot,’ he said. ‘But I could use a drink.’

So we all trooped off to the pub on the corner, which was one of those soulless, cavernous places, built in the 1930s but more recently done up in mock Victorian, with two different wallpaper prints and dark furniture and hunting pictures. And even that had started to look shabby. It had just opened for the day. It had that morning smell of last night’s beer and last night’s cigarettes. We must have seemed an unlikely crowd to the barmaid, who stood, her bum leaning against the wall, languidly rubbing glasses with a tea towel. Harry Pool got in the first round. He’d loosened his tie and undone the top button of his shirt, but he still seemed breathless and wheezing.

‘And you, lass,’ he said to me when he asked what I was drinking, ‘how did you know the boy?’ He seemed not to remember my visit to the yard. It wasn’t surprising. I’d just been one of a crowd of reporters.

I was going to say I knew Thomas’s father, but stopped myself just in time. Whatever my views on the matter, it wasn’t fair to Kay to spread around information about Philip.

‘I didn’t really,’ I said. ‘More a friend of the family.’

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Like me.’

So we sat down at the tables and at first we looked awkwardly at each other, not speaking. Dylan’s ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’ was playing on the jukebox. It seemed to be playing all afternoon. Harry Pool came back from the bar with a tray loaded with drinks. I remember that Ellen was drinking whisky. That surprised me. The rest of us were on the beer: the lads on bottled lager, everyone else on hand-pulled bitter.

‘I think we should drink to Thomas,’ Harry said. He was still standing, leaning forward onto the table as if he needed the support. ‘No one deserves to die like that. Specially not someone with his whole life ahead of him.’

We all raised our glasses, solemnly, like a toast at a wedding. ‘Thomas,’ we said. One of the lads stifled a nervous giggle. If he was mentioned after that it was only in whispered conversation between individuals.

It seems now that I was drunk after the first pint. Perhaps it was the strangeness of the occasion. Perhaps it was a mistake to mix the alcohol with my medication. I can remember snippets of conversation freeze-framed like in a home movie, but in my memory the background’s always blurred, and I don’t know the order in which the discussions occurred or their context.

At one point Ellen was talking to me. It must have been close to the beginning of the session, because I was still sitting next to her. There were empty plates on the table. I think Harry must have ordered sandwiches for us all, though I don’t remember eating. I looked at her mouth moving. She was wearing scarlet lipstick, which had leached into the face powder around her lips. The effect was geographical – tributaries feeding into a lagoon in the desert, with her mouth as the lagoon. I was still staring when I realized she was waiting for an answer to a question I hadn’t heard.

‘Sorry?’ I said. Dylan was knock, knock, knocking in my brain.

‘We need to talk. Thomas was special.’ Even though I was focusing on her, I had to strain to make out the words. She didn’t want to be overheard. It was one of those secret Thomas conversations. ‘He was troubled.’

‘I was going to write something.’ By this point I was expansive. The fiction that I was a journalist seemed a huge joke. ‘An article.’

‘Yes, yes.’ The words came out as a double hiss. She gripped my arm with her hand. ‘Come to Absalom House. Any time. I’m always there. We’ll talk.’

Then she whirled away and the next time I noticed her she was at the other side of the table, smoking a cigarette, holding it in a stagy way between two fingers, her head slightly tilted back, looking at Harry Pool through the smoke.

Nell and Dan sat together throughout the afternoon, but they never seemed to be speaking to each other. A few times Nell looked at me with that intense and piercing stare which she seemed to have adopted as part of her style, like the chopped hair, and once, when we met outside the Ladies, she asked, ‘Who was that man in the church who winked at you?’

I’d forgotten about Farrier. He must have disappeared immediately after the service, or perhaps he’d been invited to the crematorium with the family. I could imagine him being a source of comfort to them.

‘He’s the detective in charge of the murder investigation.’

‘Do they know anything?’ Her voice was as urgent, as pressing, as Ellen’s grip on my arm had been.

‘They’ve accepted I had nothing to do with it. That’s all I care about.’

‘No,’ she spat back. ‘It’s not all you care about. It can’t be. I can tell. We have to know why he died. Don’t we?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. She made her way back to Dan so carefully, her body so upright, that I know she was pissed too.

Harry’s lads were less demanding in conversation. One must have been older than he looked because he’d just got his HGV licence and was already talking about the trips to Europe for the firm. He was excited at the prospect of the long drive alone, but nervous too. He’d already been on some of the usual routes with a more experienced driver – Spain, he said, and Poland. I asked him what he carried back from Poland. Vodka, I wondered, jam, fruit? But he seemed unsure about that. Everything was in containers, he said. How could he tell?

The last encounter I remember was with Marcus. He approached me, carrying a drink for us both, and sat beside me on a padded bench which ran along the wall. He had taken off his tie. One end of it flapped out of his trouser pocket. He was playing at being drunk but even then I didn’t think he was. I could see through the act with the sudden flash of perception you sometimes get even when you can hardly stand. He rested one arm along the window-sill behind me, not making contact with my shoulders but very close.

‘I recognize you. You were at Wintrylaw.’

I don’t know why, but I pretended not to understand what he was talking about. Perhaps it was just too much effort. Anyway, I didn’t answer.

‘I was the bear,’ he said. He formed circles with the thumbs and middle fingers of each hand and held them to his eyes. ‘I wore the mask. You were going to join up.’

‘The Countryside Consortium.’ As if it had all just come back to me.

‘What are you doing here?’ He leaned forward diagonally across the table so our faces were almost touching. ‘Did you know Thomas?’

‘I found his body.’

He jolted away from me, but I didn’t know how much of a shock that actually was. Because he was playing at being drunk, I didn’t trust the reaction.

It was at that moment that Harry Pool stood up. He said he was going to call it a day. He had his wife to get back to. She’d been stuck with the grandchildren all day. And we followed him out. He’d brought us together and we couldn’t continue without him. Marcus and I were last out. I found his arm round my shoulder, his hand resting gently on my neck. I didn’t have the energy to push him away. And anyway, I really quite liked it.

We stood on the pavement to wave the others down the road. The next thing I knew I was in a taxi on my way to Seaton Delaval, to the little house where Thomas had died. I don’t remember there being any discussion about it, but perhaps that’s not fair. There may have been. I do remember standing with Marcus on the doorstep, watching him grope in his pocket for a door key. When he couldn’t find it he tipped the plant out from the pot on the window-box and took the spare key from the bottom. And I remember being violently sick in the gutter.