Конрад Уильямс: Decay Inevitable

“Yes,” Sean replied, not knowing to which of his decisions she was referring. What pleased him was the knowledge that any of them could be answered in the affirmative. For a change he was doing something positive. Acting for himself.

“What if someone recognises you?”

She was talking about the funeral. The newspapers had given it a discreet mention, in contrast to the screamers that dealt with the murder itself on the front pages.

“I’m not going in,” he emphasised. “I’m just going to wait outside the church in the car for a little while. Pay my respects. You know.”

“But her parents,” Sally persisted. “They’ll remember you.”

Through the grimy window Sean thought of a couple eating breakfast on a patio overlooking a distant beach. A dog running through the dunes disrupting clumsy kisses that tasted of apple-flavoured bubblegum, under blankets that smelled of toast.

“That was years ago,” he muttered. “I doubt they’re still alive. They were old even then.”

They drove in silence until they reached Lewisham train station. Sean could have walked or jumped on a bus but Sally was adamant she would drop him off. They both knew what was happening.

“What will you do?”

It was one of the little things about Sally that he would miss, the ambiguous questions. He wondered briefly if it was a trick she had learned in training, a gimmick that might draw some intelligence from a suspect that might not have otherwise been forthcoming. He hoped that wasn’t the case, that it was a fluke in her make-up, like the way she mixed Sea Breeze cocktails or her habit of singing Sex Pistols songs when chasing a stolen car.

She was staring straight ahead at the buses growling and grinding around the terminus. From the train station beyond, a clipped PA announcement was borne down to them on a gust. Something about a diversion. Something else about Cannon Street.

“Work it out,” he said. “Work Naomi out. It’s been such a long time since I saw her last. I could barely recognise her. She looked so… womanly.”

Sally laughed, despite the gravity pulling Sean’s voice down.

“Sorry,” she said. “But maybe you’re right. You’re much too soft for us lot. Get on and be a poet or something. Grow your hair.”

“I’ll keep in touch,” he said, leaning over and kissing her cheek, a gesture that mildly surprised them both. “Sorry it didn’t work out.”

“If my new partner’s a spanner,” she warned, “I’ll send you a phone call so vicious you’ll need to wear armour to deal with it.”

He waved as she drove away, and she was shouting: “Be a dandy, a folk singer. Be a beautician! You northern ponce, you!”

HE SAT IN the car for five minutes before realising he had to get closer to her.

Wishing he had dressed in something more befitting the occasion than a jumper and jeans, Sean stepped through the kissing gate in the church wall and followed a narrow gravel path around the side of the tiny stone building. Tensing himself against a sight he knew he had seen in countless films and three or four times in the course of his work, Sean peered into the graveyard, feeling the weight of grief coming off the stones like something palpable, like heat. Around two dozen mourners had turned out to see Naomi buried. Already they were positioned around the grave: four of them facing Sean, the rest in various degrees of profile or with their backs to him. He moved off the gravel path and pushed through the willows to a spot where he could hear the occasional comforting phrase from the priest. Severed or faded names emerged from moss as he padded through the stones, together with dates and touching, if clichéd, couplets. He tried to maintain his focus on the group in front of him – and keep himself hidden – but the ancient call of the stones was too great. He gradually became aware of two things: that there were a couple of other attendants to the funeral, as furtive as he; and that he was being watched.

Had he not left the path when he did, the two men would have seen him. They had followed his route along the path and were now standing twenty feet away from Sean, on the spot he had just vacated. An instinct told him to be grateful for this. One of them was fiftyish, with talcum-white hair en brosse . His eyebrows and moustache were dark flat thickets; Sean could not see the eyes they protected. He stood like a suited barrel, hands in front of him, occasionally rubbing his chin against the knot of his tie. His companion was younger and more relaxed. His suit did not fit, and Sean could see the body beneath it labouring to catch breath. His face was scrubbed and scraped pink; his hair was like candyfloss, his eyes owlish and sore-looking.

A gritting sound: the lowering of the coffin. Sean watched as Naomi disappeared by degrees. The slow burn of self-hatred he had felt since the day of his blunder flared. It mattered not one bit that the pathologist’s report indicated she had been dead long before he and Sally arrived on the scene. He felt responsible. As he pickled in these sour juices, he saw someone, not ten feet away on the other side of the fence, watching him from the leading edge of a field of towering grass.

She was a small girl with long brown hair, clutching a perished sponge doll whose supportive wires were exposed in several places. The girl’s dress was a thin affair of plain sky-blue material. He could see her vested body through it. Her dark eyes watched him – not without humour – as he hunched in the protection of the trees. His main concern was that she would expose him, either to the mourners, or to the men standing to his right. But gradually her stare seemed to solidify in the brittle morning air, impaling him with something warm and comforting, so that presently he felt as though he and the girl were the only living creatures in miles.

She didn’t appear shy at all, nor was she intimidated by the location or his posture of stealth. She made no attempt to communicate with him, other than to give him a gap-filled smile. She anticipated his shooing gesture by a second, turning and barging into the shield of grass quickly enough to have him wondering if he had imagined her. But no, the shimmer of grass betrayed the course of her movements. He watched her progress until, unexpectedly, the shiver of grass ceased when she must have been only a third of the way across the field.

His concern for her safety was negated by the eerie certainty of his instinct that, should he plough after her, he would not find her. Irritated by the distraction, he returned his attention to the funeral, but the black suits were drifting away from the graveside like scraps of incinerated paper. A simple goodbye he had sought, but he had failed even in this, looking instead for intrigue in the irrelevances that surrounded him. Plodding back to his car, careful not to give away his position to the two stragglers with whom he had observed the service, Sean presumed that he was subconsciously reluctant to give up the police part of his brain – such as it was. From the sanctity of the driver’s seat he watched the slow dispersal of the mourners, recognising Naomi’s father as he did so. He had changed only marginally in the fifteen years since they had last met. Perhaps he was a little thicker around the middle; there was a deeper smattering of grey in the oiled black hair; there was sadness and fatigue in the eyes. Age and shock were pulling his body south.

Sean caught a glimpse of his own face in the rear-view mirror but shied from its scrutiny. In the wake of Naomi’s death and the acknowledgement of his own failures, he didn’t want the awareness of his own mortality to compound his misery.

He gunned the engine as the two men brought up the rear. They were relaxed, alert, like presidential bodyguards. Sean found first gear and moved sedately away, wondering why his heart beat so violently, why his head pounded with frustrated questions.