Human Remains Read online

  Through the glass doors in the foyer I noticed Lisa and Roger standing outside the main entrance, chatting. She was standing at an angle to him, her hip facing him, the toe of her shoe pointing out and away from him. He was leaning in toward her, laughing, and—yes, there it was—moistening his lips with the tip of his tongue. And she laughed, too, and threw back her head, exposing her neck to him.

  I turned my back on them and studied the bulletin board in the entrance. I looked at the advertisements for flatshares, various social groups and sports societies, and student services including counseling. These I studied in a little more detail. A small advertisement, tucked away under a young mothers’ breastfeeding support group (really? here, of all places?) for bereavement support.

  We are a group of students who have all suffered loss. Our goal is to come to terms with our different situations through mutual support. Tuesdays 6:30–9:00 PM, Tutorial Room 13. All welcome.

  I stared at the advertisement for a few moments, not wanting to turn around in case Lisa and Roger should notice me and wonder what on earth I was up to. Next to it was another, this time for eating disorders. Another, a bigger, more official-looking advertisement for Alcoholics Anonymous.

  It’s strange how Fate intervenes at times like this. I was at the bulletin board reading about alcoholics and bereavement and she was suddenly there, standing next to me, reading the same inane things I was. I glanced across and I had the feeling from her, that little buzz of excitement. She was wearing a denim jacket and had a scarf wound around her neck several times. She had pulled the frayed, chewed cuffs of the jacket down over her hands.

  I looked at her and attempted a smile. She caught my eye and looked away again. She had that desperation in her face. I didn’t know what had caused it, where it had come from. But she had it, nonetheless.

  I put a hand on her arm and she jumped a little. “Now,” I said, “I think this might be what you need to be looking at.”

  I indicated a random notice on the board, one for a student counseling group. Instantly she leaned closer to the board, and to me, and studied the scrap of card intently.

  “I think . . .”

  “Or do you think this might possibly be the right one?” I said, pointing.

  “Yes,” she said, looking at me and smiling. “It is. I think it is. Thank you.”

  “It’s all so easy, making things better,” I said.

  She made a sound. I made eye contact with her just as a tear crept from the corner of her eye and dripped from her cheek.

  I touched her arm again.

  “What you need to think about doing is possibly coming to the pub with me; that would be very easy, wouldn’t it?” I said.

  There was barely a hesitation. Even I was surprised.

  “Yes, all right,” she said.

  Thankfully Roger and Lisa had left. I led her out to the parking lot, wondering whether taking her in my car so soon was a good idea. There was a pub on the corner; it wouldn’t be busy, which meant we would be more likely to be noticed, but it would have to do. I couldn’t risk taking her in my car. It was an old man’s pub, which made it more likely that two strangers would stand out, but on the positive side it was unlikely to have functioning CCTV.

  I took her into the public bar and got her to sit down next to the empty fireplace. “Where do you think you’d like to sit? Here looks like a good place. Don’t you think?” I said. She complied without hesitation. “Do you think you’d like a Coke?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  I glanced across to the elderly man sitting with a half pint of dark ale in front of him, the only other occupant of the bar. Across the other side I could hear the sound of pool balls clicking together and the laughter of some younger men. This was the right place to be.

  The barmaid came by. She was young, with bleached-blond hair in a rough plait over one shoulder. “What can I get you?”

  “A Coke and a pint of John Smith’s, please,” I said, handing her a note.

  While she was pulling the pint I glanced behind me at my new companion, sitting where I’d left her, nervously pulling at the sleeves of her jacket as though she were waiting to see the dentist, or about to have a job interview. All those years of wondering how to go about finding a woman and actually it’s ridiculously straightforward. You just have to tell them what to do. It’s so simple.

  I took the drinks back to the table and sat opposite her.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “My name is John,” I said, picking a name at random. A different one every time, recognition of the different person I had to be for each of them.

  “John,” she repeated, tasting the word.

  “And you?”

  “Leah.”

  “Your name is Leah,” I repeated. “That’s right.”

  She took hold of the glass of cola and drank from it, not questioning, not even looking perturbed at my strange choice of words. That was when I knew I had her. She’s mine now, all mine, to do with as I choose. We had a lot to talk about, Leah and I. I wanted to hear her story, I wanted her to tell me all about her woes and her fears and her lack of hope. And now I know how to help her.

  Annabel

  “It’s like fecking Bridgend,” Trigger said, slamming down his copy of the Briarstone Chronicle on to his cluttered desk.

  “Bridgend?” I said. “You mean the teen suicides?”

  “Yeah, something like that. And before you start, I know all these are natural causes.”

  I said nothing. In fact they weren’t all natural causes; the report provided to us by the Coroner’s Office had identified the death of two to be due to alcoholism, and one was believed due to an overdose of barbiturates. Several others seemed to have starved to death. It might have been natural causes of a type, but if they’d managed to eat once in a while it was likely that they’d still be here.

  “Now the bloody paper’s got wind of it, too. This’ll turn out to be one huge pain in the arse. You mark my words. I was chatting to Dave Morris yesterday. You know Dave? Duty inspector in the Control Room. Used to work in traffic?”

  I nodded as if I knew who he meant, just to stop him running through Dave Morris’s entire career history.

  “He says they’re getting loads of calls about neighbors now, thanks to the press getting involved. Every few minutes: ‘not seen the old girl next door for a while,’ or ‘there’s a funny smell around here; maybe someone’s died.’ He said they keep sending out patrols just in case, but it’s getting annoying now.”

  I smiled at him, hoping he wasn’t expecting me to apologize. It was as if this whole thing were my fault, just because I was the one who’d drawn attention to it.

  Just for a change, it was sunny outside. I’d finished the comparative case analysis and handed copies to Andy Frost, Bill, Trigger, and anyone else who might have been interested, just in the hope that someone would take it on. In truth, the document was sparse. There wasn’t a lot of data beyond what I’d already unearthed; the charts looked impressive, but my intelligence requirement and recommendations were twice as long as the main body of the report. It had been all I could do to refrain from begging, in the conclusion.

  I’d already read the newspaper. Trigger and Kate were assuming I’d tipped them off, but it wasn’t me. They had their own links with the Coroner’s Office; it would only have taken a passing remark about the number of decomposed bodies to spark off a journalist’s interest.

  When Trigger went to the late-shift briefing, I took the paper off his desk and turned the pages until I found the column about the bodies. It took a while to find the name—buried at the end. Sam Everett. I made a note of it in my daybook, and then replaced the newspaper on Trigger’s desk, exactly where he’d left it. And I went back to analyzing burglaries for the crime series meeting tomorrow. I tried not to look at the name, but my eyes were drawn back to it again and again. It was as though the angels had linked me to it already.

  After work I walked up t
he hill back to the Park and Ride, looking in the windows of the stores. Even though I’d left late, not having to shop for Mum tonight, I wasn’t in a hurry to go home. The cat could wait a little bit longer for her dinner. I wanted to be where other people were, even if those people were all rushing somewhere. Another few hours and the town would be full again: people coming out to meet friends, go for a meal, have a few drinks, maybe to a nightclub later on. I couldn’t loiter around until then, though—and besides, how much fun would it be? They would all be getting drunk and rowdy, laughing at each other and laughing at me, the only person in the whole town out on her own. It would be like being back at school.

  When I got to the stop, the back end of the bus was mocking me from the traffic lights a hundred yards farther on. It would be twenty minutes until the next one, so I kept walking. There was another bus stop outside County Hall that would cut off the great big circuit of the town center, and as long as I didn’t dawdle I should get to it with about five minutes to spare. The street was empty, all the stores closed and shuttered, newspapers and litter chasing each other toward me, funneled through the space by the wind.

  My father worked at County Hall, years ago. Something in its accounts department, although Mum was not good with specifics. There had been a job advertised fifteen years ago that I’d wanted to apply for; at the time I was doing admin for a solicitor’s office, bored with it and the petty bitchiness that went on between the women who worked there. But my mother had put me off. “You’d hate it,” she’d said. “Your father was never happy. All the bureaucracy. And you’re no good with figures; you’d get muddled up all the time.”

  The salary had not been much better than what I was earning, but the prospects were better—once you were employed by the city back then it was a job for life—but maybe that was why she wasn’t keen for me to apply. I think she was worried about letting me go, even fifteen years ago.

  When I saw the job advertised for the police, I didn’t even tell her I’d applied until I got the letter offering me the position. She was furious.

  “You’ll have to wear a uniform,” she told me. “You won’t like that, will you? That’s if they can find one to fit you.”

  “It’s a civvy job, Mum; they don’t have to wear uniforms unless they’re in the control room or on the front counter.”

  “Still, you know what they say about policemen.”

  “What?”

  “They’re all promiscuous. They’re all cheating on their poor wives. You’ll be there five minutes and they’ll all be after you.”

  As if! It made me laugh to think about it now, even though when I started the job I was a little afraid. It took a while to build up my confidence—everyone seemed to know so much more than me—but I concentrated on the details and soon there were new people starting and I was the one showing them what to do.

  I parked the car three streets away in the darkness, and walked briskly home. My feet were aching even though I’d been sitting down all day.

  My house and next door were both in darkness, nothing to distinguish them from the street, both the front yards full of weeds. I would have to sort that out over the weekend. I was drawn to the house next door, peered in through the window in the front, but I could see nothing—no light. The door to the hallway inside must be shut, the way it probably always had been.

  I could see nothing, smell nothing.

  The cat was winding herself around my ankles, no doubt wondering what on earth I was doing standing in the overgrown flowerbed of the next-door house. You don’t live here, you stupid cow, she seemed to be saying. Have you forgotten where you live now, as well?

  I left the house alone and fished in my pocket for my key. My hallway was empty, and quiet. I’d forgotten to reset the timer on the central heat again and the house was freezing, bitter. The cat tried to trip me up all the way to the kitchen, even though I grumbled at her and told her that I was no good to her lying in the hallway with a broken ankle.

  I turned on the kitchen light, found the cat food from the cabinet under the sink, and shook a load into her bowl. She meowed at me, her voice cracking on the highest note.

  The cat fed, I should have cooked myself something. I should have gone to the fridge—or the freezer, more likely—and found myself something decent to cook that involved vegetables and something healthy. But I had no appetite. I smiled at the thought that this whole business with the bodies was finally making me lose weight where diet after diet had failed.

  The house was echoingly quiet as well as cold.

  I turned the radio on in the hope of getting rid of the morbid shroud that seemed to be draping itself over my shoulders, hoping for something upbeat. The song, unidentifiable, was just coming to an end.

  “If you’ve just joined us, we’re talking about the Briarstone Chronicle’s campaign, which is good news for all of us, really, isn’t it? Sally, do you know your neighbors?”

  “Yes, I do! We have been in our house for a few years, though, and we’re really good friends. But the last house I lived in wasn’t like that at all. I lived there for five years and I had no idea who lived next door. And I think it’s a shame . . .”

  “Mmm, yes, and there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it. We just need to be friendly and make an effort to get to know people. You don’t need to make friends, if that’s not your thing—but you never know when you might need each other, after all—”

  “And the population is aging, isn’t it? I think in a few years’ time there will be many more elderly people living on their own, and having neighbors they can rely on is very important . . .”

  “We’re going to take some more calls on this, so give us a call! Are you friends with your neighbors? Perhaps you’re getting older, and starting to worry about being on your own? Or maybe you’re worried about your neighbors but don’t want to intrude? Give us a call on the usual number and we’ll talk to some people after the traffic . . .”

  They were missing the point I thought. Having neighbors didn’t make a blind bit of difference if you chose to ignore them.

  “And on the line now is Alan from Briarstone. Now, you don’t know your neighbors, is that right?”

  “Yeah, Rob, it’s like I’ve got this old couple on the one side, yeah, and they don’t even talk to me. I mean I said hello to them the other day and they nodded but nothing else, and—”

  “But do you think they might be waiting for you to say more, Alan? You know sometimes elderly people can feel vulnerable, and they don’t know who they can trust?”

  “Yeah, I know, but everyone used to talk to each other. I mean when I was growing up, yeah, everyone used to be out on the streets all the time, talking and that.”

  “And people stayed in one place for longer; let’s not forget that. These days people move around more; they change jobs or upsize or downsize all the time . . .”

  I opened the back door to let the cat out, and gave an experimental sniff. There was a breeze tonight, stirring the branches in the trees behind the house. Beyond the trees, the main road, and, beyond that, the cemetery. I could smell nothing, and for a moment I wondered if I had imagined finding Shelley Burton next door. The odor was gone; the remains had been cleaned up, no doubt by some city workers while I’d been in the office. She was gone, completely gone, every trace, as though she’d never lived.

  BRIARSTONE CHRONICLE OCTOBER

  Local Woman “Had Been Dead for Months”

  Police officers called to a house in Newmarket Street, Briarstone, last Friday were shocked to discover the body of Shelley Burton, 43, in the living room of her property. Ms. Burton lived alone and had not been seen for some months.

  See Comment, page 12.

  EDITOR’S COMMENT

  The finding of the body of Shelley Burton, a 43-year-old former actress and model, is the latest in an astonishing list of people in Briarstone and the surrounding villages who have met their ends alone, at home, and have remained undiscovered for some time.
/>   It is a sad indictment of our society that so many of our community do not know their neighbors, or choose to believe that someone else will be checking up, someone else will know where they are, someone else will take responsibility. In reality, there may be no one else.

  Dying Alone—the Shame of Our Communities

  The increasing number of bodies found a long time after death in the Briarstone borough has shocked us all in recent months. It has become clear that the community spirit that once made Britain proud has changed. No longer looking out for our neighbors, we have become a nation of curtain-twitchers and NIMBYS. Who do you know on your road? We took to the streets of Briarstone to ask.

  “Time was, you knew everyone in the street,” said Stan Goodall, 64. “You looked out for each other. You always knew when someone needed a hand.”

  “I don’t know my neighbors at all,” said a younger female, who asked not to be named. “They keep themselves to themselves and that suits me fine.”

  “I’m scared of dying alone, yes,” said Ethel Johns, 78. She looked frail but unbowed as we discussed the recent discoveries. “I knew Judith Bingham, who was found back in March, and it plays on my mind that nobody noticed she wasn’t around anymore. I hate to think of her lying there all that time.”

  Mr. Alan Wilson, 47, agreed. “It’s a disgrace. Call ourselves community-spirited? It’s a joke.”

  Your Briarstone Chronicle is launching a new campaign to highlight the tragedies of these unloved. Now is the time to check on neighbors who live alone. Make regular contact with people. Form support networks within communities. Look out for events in your area in the coming weeks, supported by the Chronicle, at which you can get out and meet your neighbors!

  Shelley

  Sometimes these things happen very slowly, so you don’t notice them at the time. With me it was a moment, a single second that divided my life like a scythe, so that there was always a before and an after.