Alex Gray - Five ways to kill a man

Maggie bent down by the flowerbed and pulled out a weed, adding it to the little pile in the plastic bucket. The rose garden had been Flynn’s idea and Maggie badly wanted to keep it neat and tidy. The late July sun beat down on her head as she stood up, her eyes on one particular rose. Several buds had opened up now and the blooms were a shade of deep amber. She didn’t need to examine the plastic tag to know the flower’s name: Remember Me. Flynn had brought it the day after Mum’s funeral, planting the rose where he knew Maggie would see it from the kitchen window. It had been a gracious gesture and she had hugged him silently, both of them weeping in that shared moment of grief. So Maggie had determined to keep this plot weed-free. Her mother’s remains were scattered elsewhere and now she only had her memories of Alice Finlay to console her.

Sometimes the night of her mother’s death would come back to her, a jumble of images and impressions like a bad dream that makes no sense on awakening. She felt the cat at her side, rubbing himself against her and automatically she put out a hand, stroking his fur. Chancer had howled like a banshee that night, prowling around the house looking for Alice. His eldritch screeching had unnerved them both. Yet once the sofa bed had been tidied away and all her things had gone he had settled down again. Had he sensed her death? Or was it simply that he could feel the tension created by all the hours of anxiety and sorrow? Maggie cuddled the cat at her side and sighed.

What should she do next? Perhaps she could cut one of the roses and bring it into the house? No, she decided, better to let it flourish out here, a constant reminder of Alice as she had been, vibrant and bright. She glanced across at the sunbed by the lawn. Bill was in Glasgow today and she had plenty of time to prepare work for her Advanced Higher class next session. Maggie rose to her feet, brushing the bits of grass from her bare legs.

There had been some altercation between the Chief Constable and her husband in the wake of their own personal tragedy. She was not quite sure what it was all about and Bill had been reticent on the subject. Still he seemed happy to be back in his own division even though Superintendent Mitchison had returned from the Met releasing Lorimer from his temporary designation. Now he was Detective Chief Inspector once more and he gave no sign that it bothered him in the slightest.

The books and papers were scattered on the grass beside her sunbed waiting for her attention. Maggie smiled as she picked up one of the books. It was an old friend, from her undergraduate days, this book with its blue cover. Lying back, Maggie thought of the writer. Hadn’t he spun tales that were woven around the changing seasons, giving a pattern to life? There was some comfort in such notions, she thought.

Come the winter there would be the time for Rosie and Solly’s baby to be born. A Valentine’s child, Rosie had told her dreamily, after calculating when she had conceived. The year would turn and death would give way to new life, just as the Orcadian poet had observed. Maggie smiled, browsing through the familiar stories. Her kids at school would love some of these.

Then she stopped, finding a page where her younger self had underlined an entire paragraph. Maggie gave a little sigh, feeling something heavy slip away from her as she read the words that told of this dance through the everlasting cycle of life.

‘And then suddenly everything was in its place.

The tinkers would move for ever through the hills.

Men would plough their fields. Men would bait their lines. Comedy had its place in the dance too — the drinking, the quarrelling, the expulsion, the return in the morning. And forever the world would be full of youth and beauty, birth and death, labour and suffering.’