The Pure in Heart (19 page)

‘She noticed your balloon.’

They got inside as the gale took the door and slammed
it behind them.

‘Get your things off and bring them into the kitchen. I’m soaked just from across there, the water’s gone right over the sides of my shoes.’

In ten minutes the curtains were drawn, lights and heating on and they were huddled in the kitchen. Sometimes, at the end of the long day shift, Rosa came to have supper and sleep on Shirley’s sofa bed to save the trek on the bus across
town. She could have slept in one of the staffrooms in the home but it wasn’t as cosy and, besides, at the end of work you wanted to get out of the building. It was odd,
the bungalow was just across the grass – you could see the home from the windows – yet it felt a different world.

It was a world Rosa liked after the stuffiness and mess of her family house, full of her brother’s computer kit
and music decks, her grandmother’s bazaar knitting, her mother’s black sacks of stuff from her market stall. Shirley had been to tea once or twice and said she liked being part of a family again, but there was nowhere to talk, nowhere without the noise of a television or sound system. Here was better.

‘Funny old day.’

They had a routine. Always when they came off this shift they had a breakfast,
at eight thirty at night. Shirley took eggs and bacon and tomatoes out of the fridge, Rosa put on the kettle and sliced the bread. The wind shook the badly fitting metal window frames now and again and the rain lashed.

‘I don’t know how you can stand it here on your own with those trees moaning. I’d be scared out of my wits.’

‘The Good Lord and His angels look over me. Praise be. I don’t know
what’s to be scared of in a bit of wind.’

‘Do you really think she liked the balloon?’

‘Didn’t you see her face? She laughed at it.’

‘Poor little thing.’

‘I think she had a really nice day … all those things, those lovely bright flowers the Chief
Inspector brought and just about all her family come to see her.’

‘Poor Mrs Fox. No one came to see her for four years and now she’s gone.’

‘It
was best, Rosa, she’s with the Lord and she’d no life. There was nothing in there, just a shell. I mean, Martha’s got more.’

‘What do you think God made them like this for then? You always say there’s a reason for everything, only look at Martha Serrailler, look at Arthur … what reason’s God got for that?’ Rosa found Shirley’s robust religion by turns fascinating and repellent. She had once been
to the Gospel Chapel with her and the singing and dancing and clapping had been great, really uplifting. People came from miles. Only then there was the funny stuff.

‘It’s not up to us to question. The Lord knows.’

‘You can’t say it’s a punishment, can you? Not for Martha, at any rate. She’s never done anything. She’s never been able to.’

‘Oh no. Martha’s one of God’s innocents. One of His
chosen angels.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘You will one day. I pray for you every night, Rosa.’

‘I don’t need any praying for, thanks.’

‘Of course you do. We all of us do. Praise the Lord.’

Shirley slipped eggs and bacon neatly on to their two plates as Rosa buttered the toast. The wind
almost broke the pane in one roaring gust. The lights flickered.

‘That’s all we’d need, a power cut in this.’

‘I am the Light of the World,’ Shirley said, and began to pour out the tea.

Across the wet grass, past the wildly flailing trees, the lights shone from the back of Ivy Lodge. In the end there was no power cut.

Hester Beesley took the drinks trolley round and filled spouted plastic beakers with lukewarm Ovaltine. Those patients who had medication were seen to last by the nursing staff.

Absent-mindedly,
Hester pushed open the door of Room 6 and for a moment was puzzled that it was in darkness and felt cold. She clicked the light on. The bed had been stripped. The radiator was turned off. The wardrobe door was hanging open. It didn’t take long, she thought, backing out again. Mrs Fox had only been dead half a day and her room had lost all trace of her. She might never have existed.

Mr Pilgrim
existed, though, sitting motionless and silent apart from the trembling of his hands and the line of dribble that went from his chin down on to his bib. When she had seen to him, she went in to Martha, whose room was bright with flowers and cards, a new soft toy and the balloon still tied to the corner of her bed.

‘Don’t settle her down yet,’ Sister Aileen said, putting her head round the door.
‘Someone else is
coming in to see her – there was a message on the pad from the doctor.’

‘I’ll freshen her up then. Oh look, someone’s painted your fingernails, lovey, I bet that was Shirley. Do you like it? You’re a pretty girl.’

Aileen Whetton made a face at the baby talk but it was Hester’s way and how was Martha to know the difference?

Animals left the runt of their litter out in the cold
to die. People used to do the same. Now there was everything to bring them back every time they were ready to go through the door. No one would let them just slip away.

But at least Martha’s family did more than write cheques.

Aileen unlocked the drugs trolley and counted out Lady Fison’s sleeping tablets into the plastic cup. To get her to take them could be a fifteen-minute job. She opened
the door. The old, bald woman sat up in bed, staring into space, while her radio played Irish dance music. Lady Fison’s radio played some music or other from morning till night. If it went off, she cried; if it stayed off, she screamed.

‘Here we are,’ Aileen said, rattling the capsules in the little transparent cup.

Down the corridor, Hester was sponging Martha Serrailler’s face and retying
her ribbon.

‘Make you look lovely for the ball, Your Royal Highness.’

On a whim, she took one of the bright red flowers out of the bouquet on the table and pinned it in the girl’s soft, blonde hair.

‘You’re my beauty,’ she said. ‘Who’s my beauty?’

Martha did not move.

In the bungalow, the parrot Elvis made his train noise quite suddenly, making Rosa start in her chair. They were playing Racing
Demon.

‘Bugger off.’

‘Elvis, I’ll put your cloth on. I won’t have swearing.’

‘God save the Queen.’

‘Yes, that’s better. We love Her Majesty, don’t we?’

‘Did you see that picture of Prince William in the
Mail
? Image of his mother, the way he looks down all shy, you know.’

‘I like William.’

‘Well, I like Charles. He does such a lot of good things you never hear about … all that stuff with
young people, and trying to stop them putting up too many of those skyscrapers.’

‘Sod me, sod me, sod me.’

‘Right, that’s it, I warned you.’

Shirley picked up the red velour cover and dropped it on to the parrot cage.

‘Never surrender,’ Elvis said before descending into silence and the dark.

They stayed up until eleven, watching television, talking about royalty, playing cards. At ten, Shirley
had brought out the bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream for their usual glass.

‘I always thought chapel people were teetotal,’ Rosa said.

‘That’s Methodist chapel … English … that’s nothing to do with us.’

‘Oh.’

‘Wine that gladdens the heart of man.’ Shirley held her glass up.

‘Cheers.’

‘Oh good, it’s Huw Edwards,’ Rosa said as the news came on.

The wind blew more strongly, lashing the trees.
One or two cars came up the drive, rain streaming sideways in the headlights. One or two of the residents had visitors. There were no rules, people could come and go as they wished. It made the place more like a home than a ‘home’, Matron Scudder said.

The corridors were quiet. Some slept. The drinks were finished, the drugs given out. Lamps were still on beside beds here and there but the lounge
and the conservatory were empty, the chairs set back against the walls ready for the morning cleaners.

In the hall, the bright fish swam soothingly in their neon tank among the little trees of vivid weed.

Shirley and Rosa were in bed by ten past eleven, asleep not much later. They were on early shift, which was how the rota worked. Both would finish
at two the following afternoon and then have
thirty-six hours off.

The last visitor’s car drove away. The lights began to go out.

The storm worsened.

Tuesday morning and an overcast sky. Rain threatening. In Sorrel Drive a police van and two cars arrived at seven, a few yards from the house of Alan and Marilyn Angus. In a blue Ford Focus behind them, Hugo Pears, ashen-faced and anxious, sitting between his parents.

‘I hate ’em, reconstructions,’ DS Nathan Coates said through a mouthful of crisps. ‘They spook everyone. Poor kid.’
He nodded towards the Pearses’ car.

‘Yeah, well, but if it turns up something –’

‘Won’t.’

‘How can you know? What’s up with you?’

Nathan scrunched the crisp packet. ‘It’s got to me, this one … he’s in my head, know what I mean? All day he’s there … it feels bad.’

He had told Emma as much the previous night. ‘He’s dead.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘I do though. So do you. Don’t you?’

Emma had
not replied.

‘In my head,’ he said again, and got out of the car into the dark avenue as the DCI pulled up just ahead of them.

‘Guv.’

‘Morning, Nathan.’ They stood together for a moment, looking towards the Anguses’ house, set behind its hedge. The lights were on upstairs.

‘Poor sods.’

Serrailler shook his head. ‘There’s got to be something,’ he said, half to himself, ‘there has to be. Something
… or someone … It’s going on too long.’

‘Anything come in overnight?’

Serrailler barely shook his head, turned his collar up against the drizzle which had begun, and walked away towards the house.

It’s got to him too, Nathan thought. It’s in his head.

A car slowed down on seeing them and slid slowly past, the driver staring, but as Nathan made a move, picked up speed and shot away.

Nathan
got back in beside DC Martin. ‘You get his number?’

David Martin gestured to his notebook.

‘Bloody voyeurs.’

The drizzle greased the car windows. It was still dark.

In the bungalow, Shirley Sapcote scalded her mouth with tea. Rosa was repinning her hair which was slippery and all over the place. The
parrot Elvis was silent, the cloth still over its cage.

‘Like the middle of the flaming night,’
Shirley put a dribble of cold water in her tea mug.

‘Roll on summer.’

‘You want toast?’

‘No thanks.’ Rosa came into the kitchen. She went to the window and twitched the corner of the curtain.

‘Black as pitch. Raining. Days like this you feel like pulling the blanket over your head.’

Shirley pulled the cloth off Elvis’s cage.

‘Bugger me,’ the parrot said, bouncing on and off its perch. ‘Bugger
me. Bugger me.’

They crossed the grass, arm in arm, through the dark drizzle towards Ivy Lodge.

‘Things can only get better,’ Rosa said.

Shirley put her foot into a puddle of muddy water by the back step, which sent them first into giggles and then into gasping laughter so that they had to stand just inside the door struggling for breath.

Outside, the drizzle turned to heavy rain.

It was
not yet light when Shirley carried the tray into Martha Serrailler’s room, so she did not draw the curtains back, but switched on the bedside lamp and set down the tray.

‘You’re in the best place there, my darling, it’s horrible outside and I stepped up to my ankles in a puddle and you should have heard that parrot swear
fit to make you blush … you’ve never heard words like it in your life …
well, you haven’t, have you, sweetheart? Wake up.’

‘I knew,’ she said afterwards, ‘straight away. It wasn’t that she looked different, she looked just the same, only there was that … that silence in the room, that stillness, you know? Everything’s changed. I looked at her and her face was the same … only it wasn’t. It just wasn’t. God bless her. God love her spotless soul.’

But she had cried
then, sitting in the staff kitchen with Rosa holding her hand, the tears had run down her arms to her elbows. In a house where death was so often at hand, and dealing with death merely part of a working day, that of Martha Serrailler distressed them all.

‘It wasn’t raining,’ Marilyn Angus said over and over again. ‘It wasn’t raining. How can they do this if everything is so different? I would
never have left David outside in the rain.’ She was right, Serrailler knew. She did not want the reconstruction to go ahead because she couldn’t face it and that was a normal reaction … but rain made things look different, made people who would have walked that other morning take their cars and those who still went on foot hurry, looking down. And David Angus would not have been on his own in the
rain at the gate.

‘You have to call it off, don’t you?’

He could hardly bear to look into her haggard face. Her hair was unwashed and roughly combed back and she wore no make-up. Marilyn Angus had aged twenty years.

‘No,’ he said gently. ‘We’ll do it. Everything’s in place and the rain is easing … and I don’t know if Hugo could manage it twice.’

The boy Hugo Pears stood with his parents near
one of the police vans. If he had fantasies of acting in films about the Roman Army, his real-life role in such a police reconstruction had made him so anxious they had been uncertain if he would take part after all. In the end a lot of encouragement and a pep talk about how much good he would do had got him as far as the doorway of the Anguses’ house, where he was now, huddled against his mother,
stricken-faced.

Marilyn had on the jacket and pashmina she had been wearing the morning of David’s disappearance, carried the same bag and briefcase. But she would have looked smart, the DCI knew, made up, hair freshly washed.

There was no way he could tell her. He opened the front door. They were running.

Somehow they got through it. Somehow, Marilyn dredged up the courage to lead the small
boy, who looked so extraordinarily like her son, out of the house and towards her car which was parked in the drive. The rain began to teem down. Simon Serrailler cursed, watching from the opposite side of
the road as cars sloshed past, and a couple of neighbours valiantly followed their own routines exactly as they had then.