Mae West sofa – bright red lips on four legs – and the Rennie Mackintosh furniture that looked great but that she’d never want to sit in. She took the stairs to the local history unit.
Behind the counter a bald-headed man and a woman in linen were talking. They turned in unison.
‘I wondered if you kept records here of where people are buried,’ Kate said.
‘Good question,’ the man said. He looked at the woman. ‘Do we?’ She shrugged.
‘Not sure but they’ll certainly have records at Woodvale Crematorium.’
Kate took a phone number and on the way back to her car got through to a woman called Sally at Woodvale. She explained what she wanted.
‘She may have been cremated,’ Sally said. ‘They were doing cremations by then.’
Kate didn’t want to hear that.
‘The council would have buried her. They would have gone for the cheapest option, wouldn’t they? Which is cheaper – cremation or burial.’
‘Oh, a pauper’s grave, for sure.’
‘Can we try, then?’
‘When was she buried?’
‘I’m not entirely sure,’ Kate said. ‘She died in June 1934 and the police did an autopsy. I’m not sure how long they’d need to keep the body – well, her remains. Three months?’
‘Let’s try six,’ Sally said. ‘You have no name for this woman?’
‘That’s the problem.’
‘OK – I’ll see what I can do.’
I was feeling sorry for myself when Gilchrist phoned. I never thought I’d be the kind of person to pine but I was pining for my former life. The man who’d yomped 200 miles in six days during the first Gulf War, now acting like a wuss. I was really getting into the unfairness of it. Me, the poster boy for routinely arming the police. I took a lot of shit for that, then six months later every other chief constable in the country was clamouring for it. By then, for me, it was too late.
‘Someone has burnt my flat down.’ Gilchrist, breathing heavily.
‘Are you safe?’ I said, immediately on my feet.
‘I’m fine. I wasn’t intended to be in it – they got me out on a wild goose chase. They were warning me off, I think.’
‘Do you know who they are?’
‘Just a voice on a phone. Do you have any more ideas?’
‘I’m waiting on Tingley. You’ve lost everything – that must be dreadful.’
‘Actually, I haven’t. Most of my stuff is in store after my last move. I lost some nice CDs and, I assume, all my clothes. I think I can survive without the Mamma Mia DVD.’
‘Do you want to stay here?’
There was silence on the line.
‘Tempting but probably not a good idea.’
‘Do you want to come over at least?’
‘What I want is to go and find those Hayward Heath bastards and confront them.’
‘So much for being warned off. I’ll come with you.’
Death hadn’t touched Kate yet. Her grandparents on both sides had died when she was too young to remember them. At university she knew a couple of students well enough to say hello to who died from overdoses. But nobody close to her had ever died. She had never suffered that anguish. And never visited a crematorium before.
Woodvale was a big cemetery but it wasn’t exactly Arlington or those cemeteries for the war dead she’d seen in Normandy – line after line of white crosses. Normandy and Brittany had been regular holiday destinations when she was little, and her father had made them visit three or four of the World War Two battle sites and attached cemeteries for articles he had to write.
She went the wrong way at first. She drove up Bear Road, a steep, narrow road out of the clutter and noise of a bad road junction. It was a windy day, puffy white clouds scudding across the sky. She drove into the Woodvale cemetery. With its abundance of trees and colourful bedding, it might have been a country park.
She drove down a narrow, pockmarked road with gravestones among the trees – some ostentatious, others much less so. She followed the sign to the lodge, a Victorian flint and brick house on the right-hand side of the road. Below, she could see the road go down to connect with the hustle of the Lewes Road and the big shopping complex there.
It struck Kate as strange to have such an oasis of calm so near the bustle of rush-hour Brighton. But then that was Brighton – this hodgepodge of disparate things colliding – sometimes clashing – but somehow working. Not necessarily working together, of course, but definitely working.
She looked for cypresses as she drove through the cemetery. Those precise, evocative exclamation marks with their acutely delineated shadows so associated with death. But there were none. She went into the lodge, conscious of the heavy scent of rhododendra.
There was a narrow counter with a long, open office behind it. A pretty woman with a mass of grey hair and a tattooed ankle came over.
‘Is Sally here?’ Kate said.
‘I’m Sally.’
‘We spoke on the phone – about the Trunk Murder victim?’
The woman nodded and walked over to a cluttered desk. She picked up a sheaf of papers.
‘I found the grave,’ she said. ‘At least I found where it roughly is.’
Kate tilted her head.
‘We have grid references for a block of plots. I know roughly where she was buried but I don’t know which the exact grave is. And it’s in an area where other burials may have taken place across where she was buried.’
‘What does that mean if we’re thinking about exhumation?’
‘It means we’re not sure which is her body.’
Kate nodded.
‘I think in the circumstances she might be quite recognizable.’
The woman shrugged. She handed over the papers.
‘The woman is buried in the cemetery across the road,’ she said. ‘But these days her plot is one of a number given over to wildlife.’
Kate thanked the woman and went back to her car. She wound her window down. It had been raining and there was an earthy smell in the air. She drove slowly, avoiding the potholes in the road, past stone crosses on plinths, stained and lichened mausolea, headstones tilted at odd angles poking out of tangled undergrowth.
The entrance to the other cemetery was directly opposite. She drove in, turned right and drove up towards Woodland Grove.
The cemetery was deserted. She drove between a wall on her right and graves on her left. She took a left and parked beside a white van. An estate car was on the other side of the van.
The cemetery sloped away below her. Beyond it she could see, on the next hill, the racecourse. There was a giddy curve of houses, the railway station where all this began on another hill, and the sea beyond. Always the sea.
She checked the map and walked up the slope between newish gravestones. People who had died in the past five years. Now there were a few people in the graveyard. A couple laying flowers and a man on his own looking down on a small grave, lost in thought.
Quite a few young people buried here. Car accidents? Drugs? There were toy animals on a number of the graves. That of a three-year-old child was piled with teddy bears and other soft toys.
At the rim of these recent graves was longer grass, a grove of trees. She walked over. There was a sign: ‘This area has been designated as a nature reserve.’
The ground around and beneath the long grass was uneven – as well it might be, given that it was covering a score of graves. These were the paupers’ graves. People buried by the parish at the cost of the parish in unmarked graves. And the woman – the remains of the woman – found in the trunk at Brighton railway station was one of them.
