protected by trees and closely studded with markers in marble and stone. Late afternoon, the winds that had earlier scoured the day had all but died and the light was fading in the sky. Cordon’s own father was here, had been here for some little time; his grave, as he would have wanted, plain and largely unadorned. Three lines from Robert Louis Stevenson, cleanly carved …
Cordon had found them in a book of verse that had lain beside his father’s hospice bed, uneasily underlined.
Three plots away lay the grave of an unknown French merchant seaman, a victim of the First World War, who for some reason had washed up on this part of the coast. There were other sailors buried there, too, Cordon knew; they had learned about it at school. Seventeen of the crew of the trawler
Only the smaller of the two chapels was in use today, Maxine’s friends a staunch but motley crew: some who’d known her from the streets, the squats and sleeping rough, those who’d survived; others she’d known from the Churches Breakfast Project or Addaction Community Support; a few neighbours from the street where latterly she’d lived, one of whom had invited mourners back to her house after the ceremony for sandwiches and tea.
Of Maxine’s immediate family, there was no sign.
No Clifford Carlin.
No fostered children.
No Letitia: no Rose.
Seated on hard wood, knees pressed against the pew in front, Cordon struggled to concentrate on the clergyman’s words, the benign platitudes, the elisions that skated over a misplaced life. An irregular death.
Behind him, an elderly man’s suit exuded an almost overpowering smell of mothballs. Heads bowed, tears here and there were sniffed or coughed away.
When the organist wheezed out the introduction to the 23rd Psalm, ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’, Cordon turned smartly and pushed his way outside.
She was standing immediately opposite the double doors, pale raincoat unbuttoned over a black dress, her mouth a dark red gash across her bloodless face.
Startled, Cordon stopped in his tracks.
‘Not a ghost,’ Letitia said. ‘See.’ She plucked at the skin tight on her cheek. ‘It’s real.’
The lines, the gauntness made her somehow more attractive, Cordon thought, not less. Then banished the thought as quickly as it came.
‘Been a while,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘How long?’
‘I don’t know. Years.’
‘Too long, that’s what you’re meant to say.’ Mocking him with her eyes. ‘You don’t look any different — that too.’
‘It’s true.’
‘Is it, bollocks.’
‘We all get a bit older.’
‘Not you. You were always fucking old.’ She reached into her bag for a cigarette.
‘Now you’re running some hotel in the Lake District.’
‘Anything wrong with that?’
‘Bit slow for the likes of you, I’d’ve thought.’
‘Gets too quiet we go down the Pencil Museum for a bit of a laugh.’
‘We?’
‘Me an’ anyone else who’s around.’ She glanced towards the doors. ‘Let’s shift before we get knocked down by the crowd.’
They stood by a section of stone wall, yew trees to either side. Car headlights hollowed yellow and amber along the road at their backs. Fifty metres away, the upturned earth of a freshly dug grave.
‘She came to see you,’ Cordon said, ‘in London. Maxine.’
‘Silly cow.’
‘She was worried.’
‘Because I didn’t want to spend time listening to my dad’s old records while he tells me what I could’ve done with my life?’ She flicked ash towards the ground. ‘I changed my mind, didn’t I? No fuckin’ crime.’
‘But you did see her? In London?’
‘Jesus, what’s with all the questions?’
‘Did you see her?’
‘No, I never saw her. Didn’t know she was there, did I?’
‘She had an address, Finsbury Park.’
‘So?’
‘She would have gone looking for you there.’
‘And not found me.’ Letitia turned towards the doors. ‘They’re coming out now, we better move. See her — what is it? — committed to the earth.’
Cordon fell in step beside her, rested his hand on the crook of her arm. ‘Maxine. The train. You really think she fell?’
She knocked him angrily away. ‘She’s dead, right? Inside that soddin’ box. A closed bloody coffin ’cause of what the train …’
She ran an arm across her face, her eyes.
‘You want to play the fucking policeman, don’t do it with me. We understood?’
Fragments of earth showered against the coffin lid, small stones bounced once and slid off to the sides. The trowel passed from hand to hand. Ignoring it, Letitia reached down and scooped up raw dirt from the ground, then, leaning out over the graveside, let it fall between her fingers till there was nothing but air.
There should have been rooks cawing at the sky, Cordon thought, but instead there was silence, a moment of almost true silence, and then the awkward shuffling of feet, a few mourners already, hands in pockets, moving away. He had been thinking of his father, the meticulous way he would plan each step, each journey, each and every trip they made to this or that bird sanctuary or wildlife refuge; the small notebooks in which he would record everything they had seen. A meticulousness that had driven the young Cordon close to distraction.
He did hear a bird then, rook, crow or jackdaw — his father would have known in an instant — but when he raised his eyes to look the bird was not there but in the past.
Shoulders brushed by him as he stood unmoving, remembering the last time he had bent to kiss his father’s cheek, the roughness of the older man’s unshaven face, the smell of something slowly rotting on his breath. Leaving, he had stepped out into a failing light much like this.
Gradually, he realised someone was standing beside him.
‘Are you all right, love?’ A woman, round faced, bundled in black. He didn’t know who she was.
‘Yes, thanks. I’m fine.’
‘Sometimes it takes a while.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘You’ll come back to the house? No sense letting all that good food go to waste.’
When he looked for her, Letitia had already gone. Taken one of the taxis, doubtless, that hung, like carrion, around the cemetery gates. From there to the station. The early evening train. Plymouth, then Bristol. Where then? East to London, north to the Lakes?
