Burton supposed there was a compliment in there somewhere. If she looked hard enough.
‘Excellent work, Kate. I mean it,’ Markham’s sincerity brought the colour to her cheeks. ‘It’s bought us some time and got the DCI off our backs . . . temporarily at least.’
She would always remember this moment and the warmth in the DI’s dark eyes. Even the suspicion of a smirk hovering about Noakes’s lips couldn’t spoil it.
‘Old octopus-hands looked like he fancied a debrief afterwards, sarge,’ Doyle grinned.
‘Thanks for lowering the tone, Constable,’ she said icily. ‘Barry Lynch is one of those conceited creatures who thinks he’s God’s gift. Ask those poor girls in the typing pool.’
‘There’s no fool like an old fool,’ Noakes observed sententiously.
‘Right,’ the DI interposed hastily, ‘let’s save The Life and Times of Barry Lynch for the pub, shall we?’
‘With pleasure.’ Burton shuddered, oblivious of the others’ winks and nudges.
‘We’ve got a funeral to go to.’
The DI’s reminder had a sobering effect.
Noakes tugged at his tie and smoothed down the lapels of his ill-fitting jacket which was obtrusively shiny with a couple of grease spots. He looked like a mafioso in a low-budget movie, but on the whole Markham reckoned it could have been worse. Burton and Doyle were eminently respectable. The latter’s trousers were perhaps suspiciously close to being drainpipes, but the overall effect was upmarket and smart while the DI’s own dark grey pinstripes would hopefully distract the eye from Noakes’s highly idiosyncratic tailoring.
‘Are we going to the eats afterwards?’ came the inevitable plaintive cry.
‘Yes, Noakes, but let’s show some decorum, shall we?’
‘Eyes and ears open, sarge — not gobs.’
The DS affected not to hear Doyle’s raillery.
‘Right, guv. Decorum. Got it.’
* * *
Afterwards, Markham reflected that it had been the most depressing funeral he had ever attended. And God knew, he’d been to plenty.
Timings for mourners’ ‘slots’ were pinned to a noticeboard at the entrance to the little crematorium in Bromgrove North Municipal Cemetery, a compact, timber-clad structure which bizarrely resembled a cross between a ski lodge and Scandinavian sauna.
‘Shawcross is down for twenty-five minutes . . . Frigging pitiful,’ Noakes muttered. Markham was hard pushed to disagree.
A little regiment of bouquets was lined up next to the gravel path beside the crematorium’s memorial garden.
Burton squinted down at the card on one of them. ‘Rosemary, that’s for remembrance,’ she read out, puzzled. ‘Bit odd, isn’t it? I mean, they usually say “in loving memory” or something like that . . . something conventional.’
‘Yeah, sarge. Creepy.’ Doyle leaned down to take a closer look. ‘It’s a line from Agatha Christie’s Sparkling Cyanide . . . the one where the murderer does it with poison.’ He looked around nervously. ‘The same way Loraine Thornley died.’
‘Could mean chummie’s inside,’ Noakes jerked a thumb at the interior of the building. ‘Sitting in there wi’ the audience — er, congregation — whatever.’
But once they were in the crematorium chapel, no one stood out to Markham.
That was the thing about funerals. They somehow smoothed everyone out, erased people’s individuality. Something to do with getting dressed up in one’s Sunday best and not looking conspicuous . . .
The DI glanced across to the trestle and sent up a silent prayer for Rebecca Shawcross. Halfway down the right-hand aisle Olivia’s head was turned in the same direction and he guessed she was trying to reconcile ‘the remains’ in the casket with her memories of a laughing, dancing, joking, singing colleague . . . Requiescat in pace.
Markham knew that Rebecca, like him, had been a lapsed Catholic. Somehow he wished she could have had the full panoply of a requiem mass — what Noakes would have called ‘all the bells and whistles’. Presumably it wasn’t deemed appropriate. Had someone been afraid that would make the occasion too press-worthy? He spotted the dead woman’s mother at the front of the chapel. Her bird-like frame swamped by her shapeless coat, she was flanked by two women in nurse’s uniform. How much was she taking in, he wondered. The one good thing about her Alzheimer’s was it meant she wouldn’t think of her daughter being trapped in this funny vaulted space, stuck in a box headed for the furnace and the chimney . . . to Joan Shawcross, Rebecca would remain forever young, unblemished and beautiful.
In the end, the service was pretty much a blur. A peculiar mishmash of Christian and humanist elements presided over by a kind-looking woman from the Methodist church down the road.
Mary Atkins, her features set in a perpetual smile, did the eulogy. At which point Noakes started to fidget, twisting his limbs into all sorts of queer shapes and rubbing his nose almost as though he hoped to erase it. Burton looked a small armoury of daggers at him, but he didn’t stop until the assistant head was finished and the canned music (Andrea Bocelli singing ‘Pie Jesu’) started up. Syrupy platitudes from senior teachers were quite inimical to Noakes’s concept of paradise. Nor was he enthused when two beefy women, well past their grand climacteric, launched into a rendition of the duet from The Pearl Fishers.
‘Why’re they singing that tune from the airport advert?’ he asked Doyle, earning further daggers from Burton. When the plump lady minister announced, ‘And finally, dear brothers and sisters’, he relapsed into a series of the broadest and most unmitigated grins, clearly anticipating the gustatory part of the proceedings with eager relish.
Afterwards, Markham noticed some pupils from Hope awkwardly eyeing one another up on the grass verges of the memorial garden, teenage Lolitas making the most of an opportunity for incipient flirtation with the dropping of mobiles, mislaying of handbags and sundry other ruses aimed at the dull-eyed male of the species. Oddly enough,
