Good Bait (DCI Karen Shields #1)(40)
Karen sat back, starting to run the possibilities, the variables, through her mind. ‘How do you want to play this?’ she asked.
‘You run with your investigation, let your team know as much as you think they need. We’ll keep up our surveillance on Dooley, maybe widen it to take in a couple of the others. Anything important starts to show, I’ll put you in the frame.’
‘Likewise.’
‘Okay, good.’ He got to his feet and Karen followed. A scattering of scruffy pigeons made as if to take flight but their hearts weren’t in it.
Karen thanked him, meaning every word, shook hands, and set off towards Westminster Tube station. The protesters she understood to have been moved on from Parliament Square still seemed to be present in quite large numbers. No tents any more, no one sleeping rough, but banners a-plenty. Capitalism STILL isn’t Working. Stop the War in Afghanistan. Bring Our Troops Home Now. And alongside that last, writ large, the ever-increasing numbers of fatalities from what some general or politician, without irony, had named Operation Enduring Freedom, the total growing, growing, growing, year on year.
Compared to that, she thought, crossing against the slowly moving traffic, what she had to deal with, serious in its way, was small beer indeed.
25
The cemetery was just south of the road that separated Heamor from Penzance proper, an expanse of land protected by trees and closely studded with markers in marble and stone. Late afternoon, the winds that had earlier scoured the day had all but died and the light was fading in the sky. Cordon’s own father was here, had been here for some little time; his grave, as he would have wanted, plain and largely unadorned. Three lines from Robert Louis Stevenson, cleanly carved …
Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die.
Cordon had found them in a book of verse that had lain beside his father’s hospice bed, uneasily underlined.
Three plots away lay the grave of an unknown French merchant seaman, a victim of the First World War, who for some reason had washed up on this part of the coast. There were other sailors buried there, too, Cordon knew; they had learned about it at school. Seventeen of the crew of the trawler Wallasea, killed in an attack by German surface craft down in Mounts Bay in January 1944. In his primary class they had made drawings, heavy the lurching blue of the heaving sea, the sky above erupting with the scarlet crash of exploding shells. The teacher had taken them to the causeway that leads, at low tide, across the edge of the bay towards St Michael’s Mount and had them stand there, silent, staring out, thinking the unthinkable. His fingers had been cold, Cordon remembered, the first inklings of returning water pooling around the thin soles of his plimsolls.
Only the smaller of the two chapels was in use today, Maxine’s friends a staunch but motley crew: some who’d known her from the streets, the squats and sleeping rough, those who’d survived; others she’d known from the Churches Breakfast Project or Addaction Community Support; a few neighbours from the street where latterly she’d lived, one of whom had invited mourners back to her house after the ceremony for sandwiches and tea.
Of Maxine’s immediate family, there was no sign.
No Clifford Carlin.
No fostered children.
No Letitia: no Rose.
Seated on hard wood, knees pressed against the pew in front, Cordon struggled to concentrate on the clergyman’s words, the benign platitudes, the elisions that skated over a misplaced life. An irregular death.
Behind him, an elderly man’s suit exuded an almost overpowering smell of mothballs. Heads bowed, tears here and there were sniffed or coughed away.
When the organist wheezed out the introduction to the 23rd Psalm, ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’, Cordon turned smartly and pushed his way outside.
She was standing immediately opposite the double doors, pale raincoat unbuttoned over a black dress, her mouth a dark red gash across her bloodless face.
Startled, Cordon stopped in his tracks.
‘Not a ghost,’ Letitia said. ‘See.’ She plucked at the skin tight on her cheek. ‘It’s real.’
The lines, the gauntness made her somehow more attractive, Cordon thought, not less. Then banished the thought as quickly as it came.
‘Been a while,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘How long?’
‘I don’t know. Years.’
‘Too long, that’s what you’re meant to say.’ Mocking him with her eyes. ‘You don’t look any different – that too.’
‘It’s true.’
‘Is it, bollocks.’
‘We all get a bit older.’
‘Not you. You were always f*cking old.’ She reached into her bag for a cigarette.
‘Now you’re running some hotel in the Lake District.’
‘Anything wrong with that?’
‘Bit slow for the likes of you, I’d’ve thought.’
‘Gets too quiet we go down the Pencil Museum for a bit of a laugh.’
‘We?’
‘Me an’ anyone else who’s around.’ She glanced towards the doors. ‘Let’s shift before we get knocked down by the crowd.’
They stood by a section of stone wall, yew trees to either side. Car headlights hollowed yellow and amber along the road at their backs. Fifty metres away, the upturned earth of a freshly dug grave.