Elizabeth George - This Body of Death

The street climbed a modest hill and then they were among the shops. Mothers pushed prams here, and people mixed. Africans talked to whites. Asians shopped for halal meats. Old-age pensioners sipped Turkish coffee in a café advertising pastries from France. It was a pleasant place. It made him relax, and it almost made him turn his music off.

Up ahead, he saw her begin to stir. She closed her A-Z after carefully turning down the corner of a page. She had nothing with her but her shoulder bag, and she tucked the A-Z into this as she made for the door. He noticed they were coming to the end of the High Street and its shops. A wrought-iron railing atop a brick revetment suggested they had reached a park.

It seemed odd to him that she’d come all this way by bus in order to visit a park, when there was a park-or perhaps more accurately a garden-not two hundred metres from where she worked. True, the day was wretchedly hot and beneath the trees it would be cool and even he looked forward to the cool after that ride in the moving furnace. But if cool had been her intention all along, she could merely have gone into St. Paul’s parish church, which she sometimes did in her lunch hour, reading the tablets on the walls or just sitting near the communion rail to gaze at the altar and the painting above it. Madonna and child, this painting was. He knew that much although-despite the voices-he did not think himself a religious man.

He waited until the last moment to get off the bus. He’d placed his instrument on the floor between his feet, and because he’d watched her so closely as she headed in the direction of the park, he nearly forgot to take it along. That would have been a disastrous mistake, and because he’d come so close to making it, he removed his earphones to silence the music. The flame is come is come is here went round in his head immediately when the music ceased. I call on the birds to feast on the fallen. He blinked hard and shook his head roughly.

There was a gate of wrought iron fully open, at the top of four steps leading into the park. Before mounting these, she approached a notice board. Behind glass, a map of the place was posted. She studied this, but only briefly, as if verifying something that she already knew. Then she went inside the gate and in an instant she was swallowed up by the leafy trees.

He hurried to follow. He glanced at the notice board-paths wandering hither and yon, a building indicated, words, a monument-but he did not see the name of this park, so it was only when he was on the trail leading into its depths that he first realised he was in a cemetery. It was unlike any cemetery he’d ever seen, for ivy and creepers choked its gravestones and cloaked its monuments at the bases of which brambles and campion offered fruit and flowers. People buried here had been long forgotten, as had been the cemetery itself. If the tombstones had once been incised with the names of the dead, the carving had been worn away by weather and by the encroachment of nature, seeking to reclaim what had been in this spot long before any man had contemplated burying his dead here.

He didn’t like the place but that couldn’t be helped. He was her guardian-yes, yes, you begin to understand!- and she was his to protect and that meant he had a duty to perform. But he could hear the beginning of a wind howling in his head and I am in charge of Tartarus emerged from the gale. Then listen just listen and We are seven and We stand at his feet, and that was when he fumbled about, shoved the earphones back on, and raised the volume as high as it would go until he could hear nothing but the cello again and then the violins.

The path he walked on was studded with stones, uneven and dusty, and along its edges the crust of last year’s leaves still lay, less thick here than upon the ground beneath the trees that towered over his head. These made the cemetery cool and its atmosphere fragrant and he thought if he could concentrate on that-the feel of the air and the scent of green growth-the voices wouldn’t matter so much. So he breathed in deep and he loosened the collar of his shirt. The path curved and he saw her ahead of him; she had paused to gaze at a monument.

This one was different. It was weather streaked but otherwise undamaged and clean of undergrowth; it was proud and unforgotten. It formed a sleeping lion atop a marble plinth. The lion was life size, so the plinth was large. It accommodated inscriptions and family names, and these too had not been left to wear away.

He saw her raise a hand to caress the stone animal, his broad paws first and then beneath his closed eyes. It looked to him like a gesture made for luck, so when she walked on and he passed the monument, he touched his fingers to the lion as well.

She took a second, narrower path that veered to the right. A cyclist came towards her, and she stepped to one side, into a mantle of ivy and sorrel, where a dog rose twisted round the wings of a praying angel. Farther along, she made way for a couple who walked arm in arm behind a pushchair that each of them guided with one hand. No child was within, but rather a picnic basket and bottles that shimmered when he passed. She came across a bench round which a group of men were gathered. They smoked and listened to music coming from a boom box. The music was Asian, as were they, and it was turned up so loud that he could hear it even above the cello and the violins.

He realised suddenly that she was the only woman he’d seen who was walking in this place alone. It came to him that this meant danger, and this danger was underscored when the heads of the Asian men turned to watch her. They didn’t move to follow her, but he knew they wanted to. A woman alone meant either an offering to a man or a female in need of discipline.

She was very foolish to have come here, he thought. Stone angels and sleeping lions could not protect her from what might roam in this place. It was broad daylight in the middle of summer but trees loomed everywhere, the undergrowth was thick, and it would be a small matter to surprise her, to drag her off, and to do to her the worst that could be done.

She needed protection in a world where there was none. He wondered why she did not seem to know it.

Ahead, the path opened into a clearing where uncut grass-browning from the lack of summer rain-had been beaten down as walkers sought a means to get to a chapel. This was brick, with a steeple that soared into the sky, and with round rose windows marking both arms of the cross that the building formed. But the chapel itself was not accessible. It stood as a ruin. Only when one approached it could one see that iron bars fronted what had once been its door, that sheets of metal covered its windows, and that where there should have been stained glass between the tracery of the roundels at each end of its transept, dead ivy clung like a grim reminder of what lay at the end of every life.

Although he was surprised to see that the chapel was not as it had seemed from even so short a distance away as the path, she did not appear to be. She approached the ruin, but rather than look upon it, she made her way towards a backless stone bench across the uncut grass. He realised she would likely turn and sit here, which would make him immediately visible to her, so he dashed at once for one side of the clearing, where a seraph that was green with lichen curved one arm round a towering cross. This provided him with the cover he required, and he ducked behind it as she settled herself upon the stone bench. She opened her shoulder bag and brought out a book, not the A-Z surely, for at this point she must have known where she was. So this would be a novel, perhaps, or a volume of poetry, or the Book of Common Prayer. She began to read and he saw within moments that she was lost within its contents. Foolish, he thought. She calls for Remiel, the voices said. Over the cello and above the violins. How had they ever become so strong?