Viridian Tears (2 page)

When all the attendees had filed in and found seats, some of them looking quizzically at the leaflets outlining the order of service, Eden closed the doors. Michael raised his hands.

“How do?” He grinned at the mourners. “That’s what Eddie would say if he was here. He loved everything about life, didn’t he? He loved his beautiful wife.” Shirley Burbridge managed a weak smile. “His three children and his first grandchildren, Philip and Bethany.”

“That’s me, mummy.” The same voice as before piped up. It brought a collective chuckle from the mourners.

Michael referred to his notes. “Eddie loved the town here. He became a firm favorite among the locals and was elected to councilor the second year he was here. Another three years later he was the mayor. Everybody loved Eddie, and Eddie loved everybody.” He looked out at the congregation. “Is Robert Beswick here?”

“Aye. That’s me.” A man in a camelhair coat stood up.

“Except you.” Michael waved an index card as if it was evidence. “Eddie says he couldn’t stand you or your stupid statue at the town hall. He left explicit instructions if you had any more questions you could spin on the top of St. Pity’s spire for the answer.”

The room was silent for several seconds, then Robert Beswick guffawed. “What a card, eh? He always had to have the last laugh.”

The rest of the mourners laughed with him. Eden heaved a sigh of relief and couldn’t help catching Michael’s eye. He was relieved, too. Shirley had insisted the slight be in the service. It had been Eddie dying wish, she said.

The rest of the service went smoothly. The two eulogies from his sons brought laughter and tears and even the rendition of
Jerusalem
Shirley had claimed was Eddie’s favorite hymn was belted out loudly enough to wake him if he’d only been asleep. Eden knew he wasn’t. Not with the great Y-section in his chest and several internal organs missing, courtesy of Laverstone Police Pathology Unit. Eden doubted he’d have woken for the Last Trump. When the final
Green and Pleasant Land
had faded, Michael pressed a button and the coffin sank out of sight. A few closing words and it was all over. Eden opened the doors again, standing to one side as all the mourners filed out.

“That went well, I thought.” Michael spoke softly.

“You do us proud, Michael. Thank you.” She was aware the family were within hearing range and smiled into his twinkling eyes. “I can always rely on you.”

“You can, Eden. Anything you need. You know that.”

“So you say.”

Chapter 2

When all the mourners had left, the eulogy room had been cleaned and the chapel tidied ready for the following day, Eden dismissed the staff for the night and locked up. She unpinned her hair as she walked through the business side of the funeral parlor, shaking out her shoulder-length curls and catching them into a more comfortable elastic scrunchie. In the scrubbing room she exchanged her black dress for a white lab coat and pulled a pair of latex gloves from the dispenser. There was no one else in the building so she felt comfortable in just her underwear under the lab coat. The only person likely to see her was David, her husband, and he rarely got home from work before six. The only other eyes were those of the dead, and they never voiced an objection to her casual attire.

The room behind the two chapels was a chilled area for temporary storage of caskets as they came off the memorial bier. She rolled Edward Burbridge onto a gurney and pushed him across the floor to the freezer, a bank of six state-of-the-art mortuary drawers able to drop the temperature of a corpse down to minus sixteen degrees. It took about three days, but monitors on the inside of the drawers took readings on the state of the corpse within and displayed the information on a front-mounted panel.

“Sweet dreams, Mr. Burbridge.” She slid him into a drawer and switched on the freezing unit. Shirley Burbridge had paid for the full service, which included the casket. Eden was relieved. It made the whole process a little more tasteful than the disposable cardboard coffins favored by the council’s accounting department. Bodies shipped to her for disposal at public expense were rendered down as cheaply as possible.

Eden checked the readings on the only other drawer currently occupied. Elizabeth Pilgrim was as deep-frozen as she’d ever be in here. Time for stage two of the process. She donned heavy leather gloves of the sort used by blacksmiths and pulled open the door. Minus sixteen was cold enough to rip the skin off the palms with the slightest touch and Eden didn’t believe in taking chances. Not when her hands were the stake, anyway. She pulled the old lady’s casket onto the gurney just vacated and moved it to one side while she closed the door.

“That was stupid, Eden.” She’d developed a habit of talking herself through her apprenticeship. When she worked alone with bodies it felt natural to talk to them and to imagine them talking back to her. David called it ‘puppeteering’ whenever he walked in on her holding both sides of a conversation. Now she was imagining Elizabeth speaking from inside her beech-veneered pine casket. “You should have taken me out first and put Eddie in the same drawer. It would have saved you a bit of money on the electricity bill.”

“Not to worry, love.” Eden kept the gloves on as she wheeled Elizabeth through the automatic doors to the next room. “I’ve got two council disposals scheduled for tomorrow. They’ll make the money up soon enough. This time next year I’ll be running at a profit, you wait and see.”

She stopped at the machine and slid Elizabeth’s casket into the chamber, then removed the heavy gloves to seal the cryomation chamber. She checked the liquid nitrogen tanks and switched the machine on. A readout showed Elizabeth’s weight including casket, the current temperature and current phase of the process. She patted the inspection panel. “Good night, Elizabeth. See you tomorrow.”

She pressed the process button and listened to the machine’s hiss as liquid nitrogen poured into the tank. She’d trained herself to gauge the state of the jets by the sound they made, since they were prone to becoming brittle from the sub-zero temperatures. At the far door she turned the lights out, leaving the cryomation chamber to automatically reduce Elizabeth to thirty pounds or so of sterile powder by morning.

Eden left her white lab coat in the lobby as she went upstairs to her private suite. That was the benefit of living above the shop. No commute to go home. On the first floor of the building, which was once the home of a wealthy Edwardian gentleman, was the suite of rooms she and David called home. She slipped on a pair of jeans and a blouse, mentally reprimanding herself for leaving the black dress in the scrubbing room. A quick detour to the bathroom while the kettle boiled, then a trip upstairs to the third floor.

This was Eden’s sanctum, her holy place if she’d been at all religious. Here she indulged herself in her passion for art and painting in particular. The air was heavy with the scent of oils from the two canvasses propped on easels at the far end of the attic. Each was a portrait of someone she’d never known, the decomposition of each figure rendered in exquisite detail. She was fond of watercolors, too, though her work in that medium tended to be much looser, almost abstract with only a hint of a gaping eye socket or exposed ribcage in the delicate tracery of viridian green, Prussian blue or alizarin crimson.

She set her coffee on a side table and sank into the deckchair furthest from the oils. Clouds plastered the sky like the world’s slate roof, leaving little illumination from the bank of north-facing skylights, but Eden was reluctant to switch on the overheads. They made everything look artificial.

The gloom deepened as she sat back in the deckchair, sipping her coffee.

As an early November twilight fell, the two canvasses sank further and further into the shadows. All Eden could make out was a crescent of ivory white where the skull of the left-hand painting showed through where rippled skin had slipped from the subject’s facial muscles. She put her cup down and stepped forward. The skull was too obvious. It turned the portrait into a
memento mori
, a reminder of the death that awaits the human condition. Not what she’d intended at all. It was supposed to represent the cycle of life, hence the daisy chain trailing from the corpse’s fingers and the housefly laying eggs in the corner of her mouth.

Eden switched on the overhead light, picked up her palette and brushes and began to paint.

The painting had changed completely by the time she heard David calling her name. She glanced at her watch to find it was almost seven and the skylights had become dark holes in the roof above her head. She dropped her brushes in the jar of white spirit and eased the palette from her left hand, massaging some life back into the thumb as she crossed to the stairs. “I’ll be right down.”

She went to the paint-stained sink to wash her hands and caught sight of herself in the mirrored cabinet doors. She had a streak of blue paint across one cheek, probably from scratching her nose while holding a loaded brush. She reached for the pot of hand cleanser and rubbed the streak away, hoping the pigment hadn’t stained.

She clattered downstairs and dropped her cup in the kitchen sink before threading a path through the boxes of files in the living room to the bedroom, where David was shedding the last of his clothes onto the floor. The sound of running water came from the en-suite bathroom.

“Darling! There you are.” He stepped forward to embrace her, his flaccid penis banging against her jeans. “What a bloody awful day I’ve had.”

Eden perched on the end of the bed. “Who did you get?”

“Fear Me Fearney.” David shook his head. “He must be down on his quota for this month. I thought I’d be in and out in ten minutes. I mean, it was only supposed to be a slap on the wrist for soliciting and my client was pleading guilty anyway. We should have been ‘Yes, your Honor. No, your Honor, fifty quid fine and away, but instead the old fool wants to make a stand against the declining moral standards of Laverstone and its environs and sends her down for six months. I mean, she’ll get four with good behavior and come out in two but it’s a hell of a difference to a slapped wrist. Now Social Services has to be involved because she’s got two little ones.”

“Oh dear. How old?”

“I don’t know. Under ten.” David frowned, scratching his left man-boob. “It’ll be in the case files. So anyway that’s why I’m late. Amy-blasted-Fitzroy from Social Services insisted on a dialogue.” This last was illustrated by his making quotation marks with his fingers.

“Your bath will overflow.”

“Yes. Thank you.” He hurried into the bathroom and shut off the taps. “So there you go. The poor little mites were held in the police station for three hours while she sorted out a temporary fostering. What sort of life for a kid is that, I ask you? Less than ten and they’ve already seen the inside of a cop shop.”

“So had I and I turned out alright.”

“In a manner of speaking.” David appeared at the doorway and laughed. “Anyway, it’s not the same for you. You were a copper’s daughter.” He disappeared from view again and Eden heard splashes as he lowered himself into the hot water. “Would you pass me my drink?”

“Sure.” Eden picked up a wine glass and carried it through. Water had splashed onto the tiled floor where David’s bulk had displaced it from the over-full bath. She put the drink on the corner, where there was an indented section for the soap he was currently running under his arms. “Had she no family then?”

“Amy Fitzroy? I’ve no idea. Obviously not, since she was in no hurry to go anywhere. I think she’d have kept me there all night if I hadn’t capitulated to her request for fostering.”

“I meant the girl you were representing. Didn’t she have someone who could look after the kids?”

“No. A mother, I think, but she’s in Bournemouth and wants nothing to do with her daughter. She’d have probably taken the kids, though, if I’d been willing to spend another three hours trying to convince Amy Fitzroy it was worth pursuing.” He sank back with a groan of pleasure and closed his eyes. “You wouldn’t scrub my back would you?”

“Okay.” Eden stood over him with the soap worked up a lather with her hands. He leaned forward again and she worked the lather over his shoulders and down his spine. “You’re going gray.” She leaned forward to plant a kiss on the little bald spot.

“I’ll blame that on Amy Fitzroy as well.” He reached for his drink. “You have the softest hands, you know.”

“A combination of linseed oil and rendered human fat.” Eden grinned. “Why do you think I wanted to work with the dead? Now you know my secret. It keeps me young.”

“I know what else is good for the complexion.” He reached up for her hand and pulled her forward, thrusting it to his groin.

Eden laughed. “There really isn’t room for two of us in there.” She lowered herself to her knees at the side of the bath. His penis hardened under the attention and she began to alternate squeezing with gentle tugs on the shaft.