She slipped quietly away from him before Robert Nield turned to look their way. But Nield’s eyes were dull, and his attention was focused on his wife, who was barely able to walk without his support. He hadn’t noticed Cooper talking to one of his staff members. Or if he had, it didn’t register in his face. Cooper wasn’t yet sure how practised Robert Nield was at hiding his feelings.
And there was Alex standing behind his father, awkward in his black suit, a little too big for him. No thirteen-year-old boy had a black suit, so it was either borrowed, or bought specially for the occasion.
The boy showed no interest in the flowers, or in the other mourners. Cooper saw him gazing at the nearby graves, tilting his head to one side as he studied the moss-covered memorials and Celtic crosses. Some of the oldest graves were close to the church entrance, and he gradually edged away from his parents towards a massive stone tomb, commemorating some notable Ashbourne family. He seemed to like the shape of it, the suggestion of a giant stone coffin with an inscribed slab for a lid.
Well, Alex Nield was thirteen. He and his friends had probably watched lots of horror films. Zombies and vampires were back in fashion in a big way these days. The world was full of evil creatures coming back from the dead, scrabbling their way out of a grave or sitting up in a velvet-lined coffin with blood trickling from their mouths.
But in the real world, the dead weren’t evil. There was no reason to be afraid of them. In fact, they were pretty boring and mundane — they just lay around doing nothing for the rest of eternity. Alex Nield’s curiosity was actually rather healthy. He looked as though he wished he had his digital camera tucked in the pocket of that black suit, so he could pull it out and take a few shots, catch the patterns of the gravestones, the light now casting the shadow of the spire across the grass.
Cooper shook his head as he watched the Nields ignoring their son, unaware of what he was doing while they talked to friends and relatives.
But perhaps he shouldn’t blame them. Grief affected people in different ways. Sometimes, the greatest effect was shock, which seemed to numb the emotions. The death of a child in a tragic accident was the biggest shock of all. And this had been a girl of eight, drowned in a few inches of water on a bank holiday outing.
Of course, the dynamics of most families were difficult to understand from the outside. Some were inexplicable on the inside, too. He’d seen families whose way of living wouldn’t be considered normal in any society, who seemed to be held together by hatred and cruelty rather than any other form of blood tie. In fact, the complexities of their relationships were enshrined in the crime figures. Most murders happened within the family. Only ten per cent were committed by someone who was a stranger to the victim, and the figure was even lower for serious assaults and rapes.
Far too many parents seemed to get so caught up in the business of earning a living, paying the bills and bringing up a family, that they forgot what it was like to be children themselves. That, or they wanted revenge for their own miserable childhoods.
As for Alex Nield, his absorption in the online game was undoubtedly a retreat from reality. Cooper suspected he’d become as addicted as a junkie, with War Tribe his drug of choice. If left to run out of control, it could destroy his ability to handle real life as surely as shooting heroin into his veins. So the question became — what particular aspect of reality was he retreating from?
Cooper watched the boy’s parents walking towards him now. The father, cool and distracted, the mother fidgeting anxiously with her coat. Outside of school life, they represented Alex’s reality.
He turned to find a girl watching him. About seventeen years old, black eye liner, black lipstick. Black clothes, of course. A funeral was a place she fit right in.
‘Load of pious hypocrites, aren’t they?’
‘That’s not fair.’
‘Isn’t it? I bet there isn’t one of them who believes the words.’
‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust?’
‘Oh, that bit’s all right. I meant “in certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life”. That’s not true, is it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Yes, you do. When someone’s dead, they’re dead.’
The girl gazed back at him, her Doc Martens planted firmly on the gravel.
‘And who are you?’ asked Cooper.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
But Cooper knew who she was. He’d been a bit slow at first, might have noticed her earlier but for the predominance of black clothes. Gavin Murfin’s comment came back to him, and it clicked.
‘You’re Lauren.’
The girl turned on her heel and began to stamp away.
‘No, wait,’ called Cooper.
But Lauren ignored him, and carried on walking. Cooper ran after her, pulling a card from his pocket.
‘At least take this.’
Reluctantly, she accepted the card. And in another moment she’d stepped through the gothic gates on to the street and was gone.
A cavalcade of cars went back to the Nields’ house for the funeral lunch, lining the streets on the estate. Outside the house, Cooper met Marjorie Evans again, getting out of someone’s estate car. He stopped at the end of the drive, noticing something different about the house. He turned to Marjorie with a question.
‘Why are the curtains closed?’ he said.
She gazed at the front windows. ‘Well, it used to be customary. When there was a death in the family, I mean.’
‘But no one does that now, do they?’
She shrugged. ‘Some folk hang on to traditions. They might feel it was expected of them.’
‘By who?’
‘By the community.’
Cooper looked around the estate. Streets of executive homes, each house separated from the next by hedges and drives, cars safely locked away in their double garages, no one visible on the pavement. Any activity was taking place around the back, each family in its own private space. Not much community here. Surely no one cared whether the Nields kept their curtains closed or not? Those ideas of respectable behaviour had vanished decades ago.
But Marjorie was reminiscing.
‘I remember once, years ago, my gran went mad,’ she said.
‘Just because we kids went out on the street with no shoes on, in the summer. She said people would think we were ragamuffins. It was okay in our back garden, but not on the street. Not respectable, you see.’
‘When was that?’
‘About 1968.’
‘But the sixties are long gone,’ said Cooper. She smiled.
‘In some places,’ she said.
During the funeral lunch, Dawn Nield seemed to spend most of her time in the kitchen, despite the fact that she had friends and relatives to help. Cooper was getting a feeling about her now. She was one of those people who needed to be in control of everything, as though no one else could be trusted to do things right. He saw her straightening the plates on the table, brushing up the slightest crumb. A little bit obsessive. And probably quite difficult to live with at times.
Even while he was talking to people in the dining room, he could hear Dawn’s footsteps clacking backwards and forwards on the ceramic tiled floor. The sound never seemed to stop. Back and forth, back and forth she went. Clack, clack, clack. He sneaked a glance at Robert. But that was a man who didn’t reveal his feelings very much. If he was aware of his wife’s absence from the room, he didn’t show any concern.
Cooper pictured Dawn Nield doling out carefully measured amounts of food to her family, as if she were a prison warden, or an aid worker in a famine-stricken Third World country. Her manner suggested that supplies were strictly limited, that the recipient ought to be grateful. There even seemed to be a slight pause before she handed over a plate, as if she were waiting to see how each individual would express that gratitude. Cooper recognized that Dawn had found her role, a function where she could exercise power over those around her.
Why did the way she smiled so possessively at the family waiting at the table remind him of his childhood?
