The Other People: A Novel(75)

“Right—thank you. I’ll take a look.”

She had no intention of taking a look. It was probably some happy-clappy Christian site. This was obviously a ploy to spread the good word.

“You won’t find it on the normal Web.”

Katie frowned. “Then?”

“You’ve heard of the Dark Web?”

Katie stared at the frumpy, bespectacled florist. The Dark Web. Was this a joke? Some hidden-camera show?

She frowned. “I thought that was illegal.”

“Not always. Sometimes it’s just for individuals who want to be more private.”

Katie flipped the card over. A sequence of letters and numbers was written on the back.

“That’s the Web address and password. If you want to visit,” the woman said.

“So, it’s just a chatroom?”

“Not just. If you’re serious about finding justice for your father, they offer other services.”

Other services.

The conversation had taken a surreal turn. The small room suddenly felt claustrophobic; the smell of the flowers sickly, the taste of the coffee bitter. Why had she confessed all of that to a stranger? Grief, she thought. It was playing with her mind. She needed to get out of here.

“Well, thank you—for the chat and the coffee, but I should really go now.”

“What about the words on your card?”

“Just…‘We’ll miss you, Dad.’?”

She hurried from the shop, out into the flow of midday foot traffic, gulping in the cool air. She walked briskly along the pavement, toward the car park. She meant to throw the card into a litter bin, but she didn’t see any, or maybe there were people in the way.

Somehow, when she got back home, it was still in her purse. She took it out; her intention, she was sure, to chuck it into the recycling bin. But she must have been distracted because, instead, it ended up sitting on the small table in the hall.

She was busy with Sam and work and it continued to sit there with unopened junk mail for several days. She had almost forgotten about it when Fran came round to finalize the funeral arrangements.

Her sister didn’t come round very often. She had always maintained a distance from the rest of the family. To be fair, Katie didn’t mind all that much. She found her elder sister hard work, in the same way that Mum could be hard work. Spiky, often confrontational. Difficult to love. Which made it sound as though you were the one with the problem when, in fact, it was more that Fran put obstacles in the way of affection. Katie wasn’t sure why and, after all this time, she wasn’t sure if she had the energy to climb over them.

This particular afternoon Fran hurried in, saying she couldn’t stop long. And then her eyes fell to the card on the table.

“What’s this?”

Nothing. Just junk. I was about to throw it away.

That’s what she should have said.

But she didn’t. She felt a compulsion to share it. Perhaps because it was something she and her sister could actually have a conversation about.

She said: “It’s a weird story, actually…”



* * *



—

THE FUNERAL WAS a week later. It passed. That was probably the best thing she could say about it. Their mum managed to stay sober enough not to embarrass herself during the service, although a couple of times Katie had to grab her arm to hold her steady.

There was no one to do the same for her because Craig was at home looking after Sam. Again. Although they had agreed that they couldn’t bring a screaming baby to a funeral, Craig hadn’t made much of an effort to persuade his parents to step in and babysit so he could support his wife. Katie tried to convince herself he was just being a good father, and almost succeeded.

The vicar delivered a speech which talked a lot about their dad in life, as Katie and her sisters had requested, but omitted the brutal and senseless nature of his death. He also talked about acceptance and forgiveness, but every time she glanced at the plants arranged around the coffin, which she would take away and put in his beloved garden, she thought about the myopic mole—other services—and fought to contain a shiver.

Standing at the graveside felt surreal, like she was in a movie, playing the role of the grieving daughter. Despite the very real sound of Lou wailing and sniffing beside her, red-faced and snot-full of grief, it didn’t seem possible that this was actually happening. It couldn’t be her dad, in that hard, wooden coffin being slowly lowered into the earth. This wasn’t his ending. This wasn’t the way things were supposed to be. It was inconceivable that she would never see his smile or feel his warm touch again. Gone, she thought. Forever. The tears rolled down her cheeks and she felt a hand take hers. Fran.

Katie had booked a small village pub for the wake. It was crowded. Dad had been popular, and she knew he would have been happy to see so many people there. The room buzzed with conversation and, away from the bleak solemnity of the church, she felt some of the heavy grief not exactly lifting, but dissipating. This was Dad, she thought. Not that cold grey church and hard wooden coffin. This. Here. People. Friends. Laughter.

She had put Lou in charge of monitoring Mum, but it was a pointless task. People kept buying the grieving widow drinks and she was already pretty drunk. In a way, Katie envied her. She wished she could just throw back the gin and surrender to oblivion. But she couldn’t. Someone had to circulate, to accept condolences, thank people for coming, chat to the vicar, make sure that there were enough sandwiches. A funeral certainly seemed to make people hungry.