‘Not now, Christopher – I’m talking to Mr Penrose.’
Archie was surprised at the response. His conversation with the undertaker was hardly too important to be interrupted, and he knew how close father and son were; their relationship had been Jago’s only solace after his wife died in childbirth.
The boy seemed reluctant to be dismissed so easily. ‘But it’s urgent,’ he said.
‘Even so, this isn’t the time or the place,’ Jago snapped. ‘You’ve already done enough for one day.’
The boy blushed and walked away. Feeling sorry for him, Archie said: ‘Loveday must be glad to have Christopher around at a time like this.’
‘What makes you say that?’ the undertaker asked sharply.
‘Nothing, really, except I noticed that he was kind to her at the funeral. With everything that’s happened, having a friend near her own age must help.’
‘They’re not friends, particularly, and being kind is what we do. If Christopher spent any time with her today, he was just doing his job.’
Archie apologised without really understanding what he had said to cause such offence. Feeling more like an outsider than ever, he excused himself to go and find Lettice and her father.
Jago and Morveth watched him walk back up the lawn. ‘Did she tell him anything, do you think?’ Jago asked.
‘I don’t know. He asked about the accident, but then he would, wouldn’t he? That’s only natural. I’ll find out what he knows, though. Leave it to me.’
‘Don’t get sucked in, Morveth,’ Jago warned. ‘I know you were close to the family and Penrose is a good man, but he’s not one of us any more. If it comes to loyalties, I know which side he’ll be on. Just be careful.’
‘One of us?’ The scorn in Morveth’s voice was out of character and took Jago by surprise. ‘Don’t be so naive. Harry was one of us, and look how he behaved. He went too far, but if we’d thought more carefully about what we were doing, he’d still be alive and none of this would have happened.’
‘It has, though,’ Jago said, regaining his composure and, with it, his authority. ‘Now we just need to make sure that we keep it to ourselves.’
Christopher hung around outside the cottage, trying to find the courage to talk to his father again and waiting for a moment when he might get him on his own. It was vital that he got to speak to him soon, before some do- gooder like Shoebridge found out what was going on and tried to interfere. It had to be Christopher who broke the news. He had sat by the church for a long time after the funeral, wondering what words he should use and watching Loveday, who had slipped back to the graveside while everyone else drifted off to the wake. She was beautiful, even there. Her white-blonde hair fell forward over her face as she looked down into the grave, taking some of the flowers from the netting around the side and dropping them gently on to her brother’s coffin. Intent on her task, she hadn’t noticed him at first, but a smile lit her face when she glanced up and saw him and, in that second, he was overwhelmed with relief that Harry was dead and buried. He wouldn’t have stood a chance with Loveday otherwise; the undertaker’s son would never have been good enough for Harry Pinching’s little sister. He remembered the time he had seen Harry coming out of the Commercial Inn with a bunch of his friends; buoyed up by beer and bravado, he had taunted Christopher and told him to keep away from Loveday, saying that his hands were only fit to play with the dead. It had made him so angry, and he smiled to himself now to think that his tormentor was suddenly a lot less free with his mouth.
Christopher had grown up in a house that lived with death and had never known anything else, so he found people like Harry – who covered their fear with mockery or superstition – difficult to understand. When he talked to girls in the village, he knew that they always had half a mind on what he did for a living; he might as well have worn his mourning suit all the time because it hovered around the edges of even the most inconsequential conversations. Loveday was different, though. She could see beyond the black. The first time they were together – properly together – she had sensed his hesitation and gently kissed his fingers one by one, letting him know that she didn’t mind, telling him without words that he should be proud of his work, that the dead deserved to be cared for as tenderly as the living.
It was always assumed that he would help his father run the business when he was old enough, and he had been happy with that – happy, and a little nervous at first. There was a lot to learn, but he enjoyed the camaraderie of working alongside his father and the satisfaction of doing a job which really mattered. Only once had he been truly afraid, and that was early on, when he had just turned thirteen. It was winter, the evening before a funeral, and he and his father had gone to a farmhouse half a mile or so out of the village on the Penzance road to make the final preparations. They were given a warm welcome – Jago Snipe knew everyone and was well respected in the community – and the dead man’s widow, glad of the company, had insisted on making tea. As she busied herself with the kettle, his father handed him a screwdriver and nodded towards the door to the stairs. ‘You start to screw him down, lad,’ he whispered, ‘I’ll be up in a bit.’ Christopher took the screwdriver, desperate not to let his father down, and made his way upstairs, looking more confident than he felt. His courage deserted him at the third stair from the top and he sank down onto the step, staring straight ahead at the room where the coffin lay, wanting to go on but reluctant to leave behind the comforting sound of voices from the kitchen. He sat there for half an hour or more, until he could barely make out the door in the darkness, and all he could think of was the first dead body he had ever seen, carried easily over Jago’s strong shoulders, pale hands tapping the backs of his legs as he walked. When his father came up to look for him, he realised immediately that he had asked too much of his son and gave him an apologetic hug. They went in together to shut the light out on the corpse for the final time, but the incident made such a strong impression on Christopher that he could still remember every detail of that room – the Bible under the dead man’s chin, the spectacles and pipe placed carefully under the coffin lining, the clock stopped at five minutes past three.
After that, his father was more careful about what he asked Christopher to do, ever mindful that he was still a young boy. Even now, he was not allowed to help with bodies which came in from the sea or after violent deaths – his father said there would be plenty of time for him to witness that sort of sadness when he was older, and always sent him on some sort of convenient errand when such a job was on. He was grateful for his father’s consideration, and knew how much he was loved, but today, thinking about what he had to do after the funeral, he was back on that third stair from the top – uncertain of what to say, scared of letting his father down, and wanting more than anything to run away. This time, he couldn’t count on reassurance and a hug – not when his father heard about Loveday, and certainly not if he ever found out that Harry Pinching’s death was Christopher’s fault.
Chapter Four
The sun sank lower over the trees, taking with it all the blue from the lake and transforming the surface of the water into a metallic palette of silvers and blacks. A heron took off from the tangled mass of shrubs on the opposite bank, its slate-grey plumage in perfect keeping with the rest of the landscape and, from her window at the Lodge, Josephine watched its languid progress across the water, enjoying the familiar, rhythmic beat of its wings until it reached the other side of the lake and disappeared into the impenetrable shadow of the trees. In the distance, a delicate curl of smoke from one of the farm cottages was the only indication of human activity. Except for the occasional drumming of a woodpecker from the trees at the back of the house, all was quiet and still.
The estate lodge was a handsome building of pale-grey stone, dating back, Josephine guessed, to the mid- nineteenth century and conceived in Victorian Tudor style. There was a small, sheltered garden at the side – well stocked with foxgloves, rose bushes and gnarled old apple trees – and she found it hard to imagine a more idyllic location. She had yet to see the main house, of course, but it seemed to her that in exchanging the worries of the estate for this peaceful retreat, the Penrose family had got the more desirable end of the bargain. She tried to imagine Archie here, but found it hard to separate him from their familiar London circles. The demands of Scotland Yard and the glamour of a West End first night were worlds apart, but he seemed equally at home in either and moved between them with an effortlessness which she admired, and occasionally envied; perhaps there was another, more rooted side to him which she was still to discover. He had always spoken lovingly of his parents, but never in much detail, although it may well have been her own tendency to compartmentalise areas of her life that discouraged Archie from sharing everything about himself. Certainly, looking around now at the images of a family home, stamped deeper with every generation, she realised how little she knew of his background, despite their long
