Sophie Cleverly - A Case of Grave Danger

He huffed at me and shook the broom out of the open door. I turned to see Bones trying to get a mouthful of broom before Father tugged it back. ‘And what about the family members? They could be visiting the deceased.’

‘We don’t have any visitors. Not today. I know the arrangements. I do pay attention sometimes , you know.’

‘Really? You surprise me.’ He tousled my hair affectionately and then mopped his brow. ‘What are you going to do with all those apples?’ he asked, but he turned away and I could tell he was no longer paying attention. In the past he would have played with me, juggled the apples, told me some little story about how fruit was somehow a metaphor for life – but he always seemed rather distracted these days.

I looked around the room. My arms were aching with the weight of my skirts, and I suddenly realised I wouldn’t be able to hold on to them much longer, but neither did I want to spill the apples all over the floor.

Aha! There was a coffin on the dais, freshly varnished and upholstered but currently empty. Perfect. I lifted the front of my dress and tipped them all in.

It made quite a racket, as you can probably imagine. That got his attention.

‘VIOLET!’ he shouted, spinning round. ‘Good heavens, girl, whatever do you think you’re doing?’

I grinned at him. ‘I just needed somewhere to put them down for a moment. Don’t worry! I’ll have them out of here before you can spit.’

‘I do not. Wish. To spit,’ he replied.

I realised it was time for a hasty exit. So, with Bones trailing behind me, I scooped up an armful of the red apples and headed through the door into the house.

Mother was in the kitchen, darning some of Thomas’s socks by the fire.

‘Apples!’ I called cheerily.

She looked up and smiled, her bright eyes lighting the room. ‘More apples? I’ll be making a pie or three, then. Add them to the basket in the larder.’

I did as she said. When I returned, she spoke again. ‘You know, my dear old mother used to say that an orchard in a graveyard could only grow bones. How wrong she was!’ She pulled a finished sock from her darning mushroom and tossed it aside. ‘Though we do seem to be overburdened with apples.’ She looked down at the dog. ‘I’m sure this one would prefer a beef bone.’

Bones pricked up his ears and sat wagging his tail, perhaps hoping Mother might actually have one somewhere about her person.

‘You could make a fine bone broth with one,’ I said.

My brother, Thomas, came in just then, his black trousers scuffed at the knees with dirt and grass stains. ‘Yeeuch!’ he exclaimed, throwing his leather football to the floor. ‘Who wants nasty old bone broth?’

Mother reached up and gave him a gentle clip on the ear– he was only six years old, and not yet as tall as me. He was at home for a few weeks after his school had been flooded. I still thought it unfair that he was seven years younger than me, but got to go to school when I didn’t. But then I was a girl and he was a boy and that was just how it was.

‘You’ll eat what you’re given and be thankful, whether it’s broth or five apple pies. We have to make do these days. And look at the state of your trousers!’ Mother was forever having to fix and alter our clothes, whether it was for repairs or to try and keep up with the latest fashions.

Thomas dragged a chair out from under the table, scraping the legs on the floor. Then he sat down heavily on it and ruffled a hand through his dark hair. A few blades of grass fell out. Bones ran over and sniffed them while Mother rolled her eyes at the sight.

I was about to return for more apples (after all, Father would not be pleased if I left them where they were) when Thomas spoke again.

‘Mother,’ he said, ‘who’s to be buried in plot two hundred and thirty-nine?’

Bones looked up at him, his eyes like small galaxies.

Mother put down the darning mushroom and stared at the wall for a moment in thought. ‘Is that one of the new ones? It’s just been dug out?’

‘Yes,’ he replied solemnly.

‘A young man, I think. He came in this morning. No relatives have come forward for him, poor thing. But your father will see to it that he gets a good burial. He always does. Even though it isn’t very good for business.’

I shivered a little, and took hold of a chair-back to steady myself. I remembered the young man she was talking about from earlier. He was fairly tall and pale, with blond hair (a little on the long side). He couldn’t have been much older than me – sixteen, perhaps? I’d sat with him for some time, just talking to him quietly – even the dead need company, though I never heard much back from them when they had recently passed. It was as though they hadn’t settled in yet.

‘Why do you ask, Thomas?’ I said.

He looked up at me. ‘I just wondered. There’s been a few in a row. What if it was murder?’ He made a horrified face. ‘Murder most foul?’

Mother narrowed her eyebrows at him, her favourite look of disapproval. ‘Murders? What nonsense. You’ve got a vivid imagination, my boy. Have you been reading those Penny Dreadfuls again? They are not suitable reading material for a boy of your age.’

Thomas stuck his tongue out, and I covered my mouth with one hand to suppress a giggle.

Mother tutted at him. ‘Your imagination is running away with you,’ she continued. ‘There have just been some nasty accidents, that’s all.’ She went back to her darning.

Bones padded round the table and sat by my feet. I stared into his soulful eyes and, not for the first time, wondered what he was thinking. He had a strange sense for these things, as did I. My skin was beginning to tingle, and I wondered if there was something to Thomas’s bizarre theory. There had been an unusual amount of men in their prime in the past couple of weeks – three or four, I thought. And now this boy. I wondered what could have happened to him. Surely it couldn’t be murder – Father would have noticed.

‘Violet!’ Father was calling me from the funeral parlour. Oops. He was certainly angry now. When I was sure that Mother wasn’t looking, I pulled a grotesque face at Thomas and then headed back down the corridor.

‘Violet,’ he repeated when I entered the room, followed by Bones. ‘Something’s missing.’

‘What?’ I asked. I noticed that he had removed most of the apples already, and began to wonder if the coffin would be the one for the blond boy.

‘One of the files.’

He gestured for me to follow him into the shop at the front of the house (not really a shop in the strictest sense of the word, of course – but death was our business, and money was exchanged here). The shop was filled with gloomy oak furniture – chairs, a desk, bookshelves and row after row of huge filing cabinets that contained all the information about those who were now resident in the cemetery. It was all so dark that I wondered how other people could stand to be in there for any length of time, especially when they had just lost a loved one. Father said it was respectful.

Thankfully, that day the autumn sun was bright and spilled in through the gaps in the heavy curtains. A carriage rattled past outside and a few flecks of dirt splattered on to the glass.

‘It was here,’ said Father. I blinked, my eyes adjusting to the light, and turned to where he was standing. He pointed into one of the drawers in the cabinet.

I walked over and took a look at a row of files. Bones sniffed them curiously. ‘I don’t see anything.’

‘Precisely! It’s missing!’ He wriggled two of the files this way and that with his fingertips. ‘There should be a file here, the one for the boy who came in early this morning.’