Dark Undertakings (2 page)

When he’d answered the ad for a job in an undertaker’s workshop, and been selected from amongst seven applicants, Drew had felt little emotion other than relief. Four months on income support, after leaving his last job in uncomfortable circumstances, had been a time of limbo verging on panic. Only gradually did some of the implications associated with the funeral business sink in. Karen had gone carefully at first.

‘Dead bodies?’ she said neutrally. He nodded his head, slightly sheepish. ‘I’m not sure how I’m going to feel about that,’ she went on, looking at his hands.

He read her thoughts with ease. ‘We’ll get used to it,’ he assured her. ‘It’s just a disposal job, when you think about it. A service. I’ll be driving the hearse, carrying the coffins into church. Smart clothes. Grateful families. It’s …’ he paused, lost for the right word.

‘Different,’ she supplied bravely.

‘A challenge,’ he corrected.

The challenge had been there all right, but not from the corpses. He quickly came to appreciate the passivity, the sheer uncaring malleability of dead bodies. Treated with an almost ludicrous reverence in the presence of their families, once into the mortuary with them, they became
embarrassingly insignificant. It was an effort, sometimes, to remember that they had been living breathing people, only hours before. No, Drew had no difficulty with the bodies; it was the other men who made him watch himself constantly and resist any temptation to drop his guard.

‘Drew’s a funny name,’ said Big George, on his second day. ‘Where’s that from, then?’

Drew made the mistake of a small sneer of contempt. ‘
An
drew, of course,’ he said. From that moment on, Big George had called him
Andy
, with an air of innocent sincerity.

‘Lost your last job, then?’ Vince had queried. ‘What’d you been doing?’

‘Nursing,’ Drew replied readily, his story well prepared. ‘They cut the budget. Offered me permanent nights, but I knew I couldn’t take that. Worked for an agency for a bit, but it was too insecure. Never liked it much, anyway. Thought I’d find something new right away, but it took a bit longer than that.’

‘Nurse Drew,’ carolled Pat, a handsome Irishman who was normally the Conductor of the funerals; the widow’s darling. Too late, Drew realised that despite
Casualty’s
cast of hunky male nurses, the job had not yet achieved full credibility amongst coffin makers and pallbearers.

Four weeks into the new job, he was slowly
and painfully establishing himself as a good sport, a willing butt of jokes and teasing. He earned credit by cheerfully assisting Sid with mortuary work, putting in dentures, super-gluing lips together and removing pacemakers with a deftness never before witnessed by his new colleagues.

‘It’s going to be okay,’ he told Karen. ‘It’s obvious that the newest and youngest one is going to get some stick.’

‘Well, don’t let them bully you,’ she said, running her fingers lightly the wrong way along the hairs of his arm. She had found to her surprise that living with a man who worked with the dead was seriously erotic. ‘As if I have to prove we’re both alive,’ she’d laughed. Every time she did that to his arm, he felt raw and naked. Nerve endings sprang to attention in all kinds of places.

‘That baby’s going to be here in no time at this rate,’ he’d said, pulling her to him. She was almost as tall as him, and slightly heavier. Her forebears had been Polish, and she had the shoulders and cheekbones to prove it. She made him feel safe and important and lucky.

I must have a thing about shoulders
, Drew said to himself, as he followed Vince out of the mortuary. The other man was working his
upper arms in dramatic circles, a habit that Drew had noticed in his first week. Vince was due to carry a coffin later that morning, and had long ago established a routine in preparation. His shoulders were naturally built for the job, although he regularly remarked that pallbearing had further flattened them into neat shelves – ‘undertaker’s ledges’, he’d dubbed them.

‘Hey, Sid,’ Vince remembered, turning back for a moment. ‘We saw your Susie just now, having a right old ding-dong with some boy.’

Drew felt a moment of anxiety. Maybe the girl didn’t want her father to know her business. Wasn’t Vince being thoughtless? It was a generation thing, he realised. He automatically identified with the girl, Vince with her father.

‘Must have been that Craig she’s seeing,’ shrugged Sid. ‘She says she’s packing him in. Who’d be young, eh.’

Vince glanced at Drew with a smirk. ‘It has its compensations, I reckon.’ He worked his shoulders again, and swung his head from side to side. ‘You don’t get so stiff, for a start, after doing an early removal.’

In Primrose Close, the news of Jim Lapsford’s death was rippling outwards by fits and starts. Over half the houses were empty on a workday morning, and few of the neighbours had been
alerted by the arrival of first Dr Lloyd, then the Lapsford sons, and finally Vince and Drew. Neither had anyone witnessed the discreet and hurried removal of the body, swathed in black and smoothly rolled into the back of the undertaker’s vehicle in seconds.

There had, however, been an interested witness to the arrival of Philip, the elder son, when he drove urgently up to the house. His mother had met him on the doorstep, flinging her arms around him as if finally rescued from some unendurable torment. This witness was Sarah Simpson from next door, who had hurried upstairs to tell Dottie, with whom she lived, that something very odd was going on in number 24. The two women, respectable widows both, wondered what emergency could have assembled no fewer than four vehicles along the street between seven and eight o’clock on a Tuesday morning. They soon came to the conclusion that something really serious had happened.

‘You don’t think Jim might have
died
, do you?’ Dottie whispered, eyes wide. ‘That did look awfully like an undertaker’s vehicle, now I come to think of it.’

Sarah opened her mouth to dismiss the idea, but closed it again, the words unspoken. ‘We’ll have to wait till the sons have gone. Then we
could pop round. If something terrible has happened, we should do what we can to help.’ Small and energetic, Sarah usually made the decisions for them both.

‘But wouldn’t there have been an ambulance? Police cars?’ Dottie pursued. She peered out of the window again, over Sarah’s head. Dottie was tall and tending to vagueness; she had a long face, and eyes which had somehow stretched with age, like a bloodhound’s. ‘When Arthur died,’ she went on, ‘we had the whole
panoply
of emergency services.’

‘But he did fall downstairs, dear,’ Sarah reminded her. ‘It’s different when it’s natural causes.’

‘How do you know? Sarah, how do you always
know
these things?’

Sarah shrugged. ‘I just pay attention, I suppose. I never understand how it is you
don’t
know.’

‘Well, but Jim wasn’t ill. I saw him on Sunday, in the garden. Laughing and putting up that new trellis thing. The picture of health. And I saw him last night, when I was putting the milk bottle out. He waved to me, cheerful as can be. No, no. He can’t possibly be dead.’

‘It was probably a heart attack,’ pursued Sarah, as if Dottie had never spoken. ‘Isn’t that what they say? Never a day’s illness, and then dead in seconds.’ Sarah seemed to relish the idea. ‘Lovely way to go.’

Dottie shuddered. ‘Not to my mind. Too much of a shock for everyone. Think of poor Monica.’

Sarah frowned repressively. ‘Poor Monica has enough friends to see her through.’

‘Like us, you mean?’

‘I was thinking more of certain gentleman friends, certain
very attentive
gentleman friends.’

‘Oh, Sarah, how could you? That’s just gossip. And anyway, she works for him, if you’re talking about who I think you’re talking about. He probably comes round about business things.’

Sarah swept across the living room to the kitchen, where she had a large bowl of blackberries waiting to be turned into jam. ‘I know what I know,’ she said eloquently.

Dottie considered letting the matter drop, then decided against it. ‘Sarah, the woman’s at least forty-five, not some silly young thing at all. I really don’t think—’

‘That’s nonsense and you know it. She might be forty-five – more, I’d say, from the age of those sons of hers – but that means nothing. Goodness, Dottie, you seem to live in quite a different world from the rest of us.’

‘Well it’s no business of ours. And if something’s happened to Jim, then we have to be good neighbours and go and offer to help. We could take the little dog for a walk. I like that little dog.’

‘All right, all right. We’ll go when the moment is right, as I said. Now let me get on with this.’

Philip and David had each entered the house in his own characteristic way. Philip, older by three years, stood tall and stiff in the hallway, before taking a deep breath and charging up the stairs. ‘Leave me with him for a few minutes,’ he said, before closing the bedroom door. When he came out, his hand was to his mouth, and his eyes were pink. Ushered into the living room by his mother, he glanced nervously at his father’s chair, and then seated himself with his back to it. ‘Oh, Mum,’ he said grimly.

David had not even waited for his mother to open the door. He had used his own key and flung through the hall and into the living room as if pursued by demons. Finding his brother ahead of him, he glared angrily, visibly suspicious. ‘I came as fast as I could,’ he said defensively. ‘The car wouldn’t start.’

Then the last vestiges of control had left him, and he began to shake. He had not been to look at his father, and made no move to do so when the undertaker’s men arrived. The sight of them only increased his shivering, and he threw himself into a jerky circuit of the room. Monica watched him helplessly for a moment
before following the men up to the bedroom. Philip stayed behind, trying to ignore his brother. When the muffled thumps on the stairs announced the imminent departure of the men, David put his hands over his ears.

Monica came quickly into the room, carrying Cassie under her arm. ‘I still can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘It just isn’t possible.’ She dropped the dog onto the floor as if it had become suddenly offensive to her.

‘Sit down, David,’ she commanded. ‘Stop pacing about. I’ll make us all some coffee in a minute.’ David flung himself onto a black pouffe close to the television, and she had a sudden sweet vision of him there, aged ten, twelve, even fifteen. The corners were still ragged where he’d picked at them, one edge misshapen where he’d curled a leg under himself, as he did again now, though too tall and heavy to fit properly into the old contours. Philip remained in the armchair he’d chosen. Monica sat alone, queenly on the sofa, marooned.

Her gaze rested on her husband’s chair. An expensive recliner, it seemed to be waiting for him, inviting his ghost to return and use it. A bright blue coffee mug, left from the previous evening, still sat on the table beside it, with a pen he’d been using to do the crossword in the
Sunday Express
.

‘I didn’t hear him come to bed,’ she said quietly. ‘He must have stayed up late.’

‘Finished the crossword, I see,’ observed Philip, his voice refusing to match the forced casualness of the words. He took up the paper and rested it on his lap.

‘Made himself a nice hot drink, too,’ said Monica, looking at the mug. ‘That’s his favourite mug.’ Without warning, a brief storm of weeping overcame her. She smeared her eyes and nose with both hands, and forced a self-mocking smile. ‘Fancy crying about a cup.’

‘They say it’s the little things,’ Philip muttered. ‘Haven’t you got a hanky, Mum?’

She rummaged in the pockets of her slacks, but produced nothing. ‘No,’ she said in a small voice. ‘I think there’s a box of tissues upstairs.’

‘I’ll get them,’ said David gruffly, and levered himself up. Although his voice was harsh, Monica knew he was becoming calmer. She smiled hesitantly at him as he thrust the box at her. He folded himself back onto the pouffe.

‘Do you think he felt ill? Had any pain? How will we ever know whether he suffered?’ She poured out the unanswerable questions.

‘Might have felt a bit off.’ Philip nodded agreement, conciliatory. ‘Nothing bad enough to wake you up for, but enough to make him sit up for a bit.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘But I
don’t understand any of it. How the hell did he come to
die
?’

Monica felt something loosen inside her, in the region of her upper chest. She drew an easier breath. ‘I feel like one of those Russian dolls, but without any of the little ones inside,’ she said.

‘What?’ snapped David. ‘What on earth are you talking about, Mum?’

She turned her head to look at him. Her second son had the same energetic hair and long-fingered hands as Jim, though his other features were altogether different: eyes narrow and close together, the outer corners
downward-sloping
, giving him an appearance of permanent anxiety. Where Jim had been renowned for his reliable good cheer, David was never perceptibly happy. Trouble with David had been a perpetual current in the Lapsford family. He had been retrospectively diagnosed, after years of worry and hard work, as suffering from a condition labelled Attention Deficit Disorder. Jim had found it more amusing than worrying. ‘Stating the obvious, if you ask me,’ he’d laughed. Monica had silently wished they’d at least been able to put a name to the trouble in those early years when the boy had been so impossible. It would have reduced her feelings of guilt.

More recently, David had caused the biggest
trauma in their lives by disappearing for almost a year. Since his reappearance, he had been keen to make amends, with partial success. Monica and Philip had been pleased to see him; an angry Jim a lot less so.

Monica sighed now and turned to her other son. ‘Phil, we’ll have to phone people. The printworks, for a start. They’ll be wondering where he is by now. I think he was supposed to be paying some outside calls this morning, which explains why nobody’s phoned. And one of the biddies from next door will be around in a minute. They’re sure to have noticed something. Do you think you could go and tell them?’