To Catch a Rabbit (21 page)

She knew from his tone that it was something that she didn’t want to hear. ‘Keep it for later, Charlie. Just shut up for now and kiss me instead.’

He held her head in his hands and kissed her cheeks and all around her mouth before their lips met and their tongues played in and out. She climbed across into his lap, pulling at his belt and opened his fly.

‘We should be careful,’ he said.

‘I’ve got a coil, it’s okay.’ She kissed his forehead. ‘Or did you mean having sex in a car in broad daylight?’

Later, when the children were tucked up, she sat in bed in her pyjamas, looking at the pictures in a gardening magazine. The words were too hard, as if there wasn’t space in her brain for them. When Max came in she tightened her grip on the magazine, like a knight in chain mail, holding her shield. But it wasn’t necessary. Max hadn’t tried to start anything since the news of Phil’s death. After Cara died, they didn’t make love for weeks. Finally something had shifted and when they’d begun to have sex again, she remembered Max completely losing himself in her. Like it was therapy. A twinge of guilt tugged inside her. Maybe that’s what she was doing with Charlie. She glanced up. Max was getting undressed with his back to her. Folding his trousers neatly over the back of the chair. She saw the tight ropes of muscle on either side of his spine. Saw them, that was all. She felt nothing.

She tried to prepare her face. Civil but friendly? Sad but in control?

‘What’s up love?’

‘Sorry?’

‘You’re pulling faces. Is it heart-burn?’ Reg asked. ‘Runs in the family.’ He jiggled in his pocket for his packet of antacids. ‘I keep them handy for special occasions.’

‘Oh, Dad!’ She laughed, somewhere on the edge of hysteria and despair. ‘I was trying, I don’t know, to get the right face on.’

‘Well there you go. If you can’t laugh, what can you do? And Philip’s not here to be offended.’ Reg wasn’t taken in by the chapel or the stone angels. ‘An expensive way of making ourselves feel better. The dead don’t care. When you go, you go.’

Karen linked her arm into his and together they crunched up the path to the chapel. She spotted Jackie from The Volunteer Arms next to a big man in a flat cap - presumably Stan. An overweight woman in a tweed coat stood near them, holding Holly by the hand. Although they were still a couple of hundred yards away, Holly spotted them and broke free.

‘Grandad!’ She ran at full tilt, with the tweed coat woman puffing behind, unable to keep up. This must be Stacey’s mother. Her hair was tightly permed and the damp air had sent it off into sprigs of wiry antennae all over her head.

‘Holly! Come back! I’m so sorry!’ She called to them. Her shrill voice carried in the wind. ‘Her grandad’s parking the car. She’s got mixed up.’

By the time Holly had wrapped her arms round Reg’s legs, Stacey’s mother realised her mistake.

‘Oh, I see,’ she peered at him as if he were infectious. ‘Mr Holroyd is it? My name’s Clegg, I’m Holly’s nana.’

Karen wondered if she was wearing an invisibility cloak. Mrs Clegg was doing her best to ignore her entirely. Holly looked up at her and there was a flicker of recognition, followed by a cherubic smile. By the time they got back up to the chapel, everyone else had gone in. Everyone else consisted of Jackie and Stan, Stacey and three slightly embarrassed-looking blokes, drinking pals from the pub maybe. A couple came in, both in their early twenties, at a guess. She wore a smart camel coat and he looked uncomfortable in a suit. She knew him from somewhere. Mrs Clegg took her daughter’s arm and propelled her to the front row of seats. Holly let go of Reg’s hand and skipped after them, while Jackie and Stan hovered awkwardly and settled a couple of rows behind Stacey.

‘Let’s sit at the back,’ whispered Reg, slightly too loudly, ‘in case we need a breath of fresh air.’

He’d got his hand firmly gripped around the pipe in his pocket. She guided him to the back row of seats, which had an uninterrupted view down the centre aisle to the plain pine coffin. The door to the outside was just in front of them, to their right. From this vantage point they saw two people come in after the vicar had started his preamble. An older man, red in the face, with windswept hair was tucking a hip flask into his pocket. The other man was shorter and wearing a charcoal Crombie. She recognised him immediately. It was Johnny Mackenzie.

It was clear that this vicar had never met her brother. He’d been provided with a limited biography but had managed to get even that wrong. She winced at references to Philip’s virtuosity on the trumpet.

‘We note with sorrow that one should be taken so suddenly from his wife, Stacey and his daughter, Haley.’ Reg spluttered and Holly could be heard from the front.

‘Grandma, who’s
Haley
?’

Karen wished they could all stop being so ridiculous; this was not what Phil would have wanted. How could he have been married to a woman who had arranged him such a crap funeral? Then she shivered to think what Max might consider appropriate if she didn’t leave clear instructions. And if she got run over by a bus tomorrow, who would tell Charlie? Would he find out in time to come to her funeral? Without warning, she started crying, as much for herself as for Phil. Maybe that was what Reg meant; we do it for ourselves, not for the dead. She wondered what Charlie was doing now. He’d texted her after their trip to the coast.
Can I call you?
She replied:
Don’t know, I’ll call you, if that’s okay.
She’d ignored two more texts and then he seemed to give up. 

When the committal was over, Reg and Karen stumbled back out into the light. Nobody explained what would happen next. Jackie walked over to her.

‘Karen?’ She squeezed her arm. ‘Such a sad business, and to be found like that.’

‘Hi, this is my father, Reg Holroyd. Dad, this is Jackie. She runs the pub in Moorsby.’

‘Pleased to meet you…’ he shook her hand with a slightly formal bow.

‘Are you coming to the graveside for the interment?’ Jackie offered but Reg looked horrified.

‘For some reason I thought it was a cremation,’ Reg said. ‘I don’t know why. It’s just that it usually is.’ He was already filling his pipe with tobacco and shuffling in his pocket for a box of matches. ‘You seem to me, Jackie, to be a delightful human being, and in usual circumstances I would be pleased to accompany you on a walk among these…’ he waved the pipe across the vista of gravestones, ‘…monuments to human frailty. But I cannot, and will not, stand by any longer to see the discarded carcass of my only son, worthlessly immortalised by the carping of a man in a dress.’

He turned out of the wind and puffed furiously at the pipe, until it gave him the nourishment he needed.

Jackie prodded a bit of gravel with her foot. ‘I thought, well, I mean, Stacey said, that the request for burial came from your side. A family tradition.’

Karen knew she should have warned her father but she hadn’t found the right opportunity. Charlie had tried to explain that the pathologists would have taken everything they needed before they released the body, but she was haunted by something Jaz had said, ages ago, something about not burning the evidence. Stacey had agreed, as long as Karen was footing the extra cost.

‘We’re having a few sandwiches, back at The Volunteer Arms…’ Jackie cut through her thoughts. ‘I don’t know if you’ll feel…well, it’s up to you.’

She shrugged and scuttled off to join Stan and the small party who were shuffling between two tall yews towards a part of the cemetery where newly dug graves gaped open, ready for the dead. Karen watched them go. There was a strange atmosphere of the right thing being done here, but something was missing. It felt like a funeral to which everyone had come grudgingly. She had mourned Phil frequently over the past few weeks, long before she’d accepted he wasn’t coming back, but she still felt a piercing sense of loss. They may not have been very close as adults, but he’d taken with him the shared memories of their childhood and of their Mum. She couldn’t see her sorrow matched by the other mourners, except maybe in her father’s gruff defensiveness.

It was probably a mistake to go to The Volunteer Arms, but Reg had decided that he must be there for Holly’s sake. He said that with Phil gone, he was Holly’s only link to her real family. Karen didn’t argue with him, although she was sure Mrs Clegg had some views about who the ‘real’ grandparents were. They got lost and arrived long after the rest of the sparse congregation. They spotted the funeral party in the back room. Framed by dark wood and the brass of the hand pumps, Stacey’s Dad was sitting up at the bar, staring into his drink. Behind him were the three men from the chapel. As Reg and Karen approached from the main bar, they could clearly hear one of the young men sharing a joke with his friend.

‘Way to go! I mean, I wouldn’t mind a bit of that as my last rites!’

‘You sick fucker.’

Stacey’s father suddenly noticed Karen and Reg and hissed at the young men to shut up. It was too late. Reg had a look that Karen remembered from her childhood.

‘Perhaps you’d like to explain that comment?’

‘What the…?’

‘My name is Reg Holroyd. If you were talking about my son, whom we are mourning here, I would like you to elucidate a little.’

The young man looked nervously at Karen. Then, as if he had a sore throat, choked on the words, ‘Men’s talk.’

‘Oh, you don’t need to worry about my daughter, she’s a feminist.’

Stacey’s father finally came to the rescue. ‘Keith Clegg.’ He offered a hand by way of introduction. ‘Let me get you a drink, and then perhaps there’s a few things you ought to know. Bugger off you lot. You’ve had your fill. What’ll you have Mr Holroyd?’

He took Karen and Reg over to a small table, and when they’d got a drink in front of them, he began to explain the delicate matter of Phil’s body being found in a caravan, believed by police to be some sort of mobile brothel.

‘They’re saying the cause of death was a head injury. Of course the full inquest will go into much more detail. At the moment they’re looking into why the caravan was dumped in the quarry.’

Karen shaped a tiny lake of spilled white wine with her fingertip. A chill fog seemed to forming behind her eyes. Charlie had told her as they were driving back from Bridlington that someone was setting up working girls in caravans and trailers. She hadn’t known how to tell her father and she was glad he’d heard it from someone else. Reg nodded his head. His eyes were hooded with tired skin.

‘Shouldn’t the police be asking more questions?’ Reg cleared his throat, but his voice was still gravelled.

‘I expect they are, but they don’t do anything in a hurry.’

Of course, the police. Karen realised where she’d seen the young man in the chapel, uncomfortable in his suit beside the camel-coat girl. It was Sean, the PCSO from Doncaster. She wished she’d realised, she would have spoken to him. It was kind of him to come and pay his respects, and to drag his girlfriend along. He’d tried to help and it had all been for nothing.

The three of them sat in silence, until Keith pushed his stool back and walked over to a table against the wall where sandwiches had been laid out. ‘Here, grab a handful of these. You’ll need them on your drive home. I better catch up with the Missus. Holly didn’t last long, my wife took her home.’

‘I was hoping to see her.’ Reg seemed to come back from a dream.

‘Any time, mate, any time. Stay in touch.’ He scrawled a phone number on the back of a beer mat and thrust it at Reg. ‘Bloody sad business, especially for the littl’un.’

They were left alone in the back room. Father and daughter and an oval platter of stiffening ham sandwiches. Reg sighed deeply and pushed them away.

‘Nice thought. But I think I’ll give them a miss.’

‘You know what, Nan? I think I’ve been looking for the wrong person.’

Maureen didn’t look up.

At the railway station Sean stood with his back to the ticket machine, scanning everyone who came in and out. After twenty minutes, he went to the platforms. He checked where the trains were headed and where they’d started. The platform for the Edinburgh to London line revealed nothing.

There was a four-carriage train waiting on Platform Three. It had just come the slow way from Hull, via Brough, Gilberdyke and Goole. There she was, wandering slowly up the platform, checking out the benches and peering into the windows of the Pumpkin Café. Skinny, with a tight ponytail that pulled her hair back from her face, she was pushing the black pram with a baby in it. He waited. It was his day off and he had plenty of time.

She gave up her quest after an hour. He could hear the baby starting to cry. She pushed it out in front, as if the distance of her arms would be enough to stop the sound reaching her. Sean followed. She walked quickly and within fifteen minutes she was turning off Nether Hall
Road. The narrow pavement gave way to old red brick frontages that had once been warehouses or small factories. Their black doors were labelled with a splash of colour: Alley Cats, Zoom and the How Hi. Sean had been to a couple of these nightclubs; he couldn’t be sure which, they were so similar. He’d never really noticed the building on the corner. It must have been a corner-shop, when the clubs were still factories. An orange and black sign, glowing faintly from a dim bulb somewhere inside the frame, announced the All Star Massage Parlour. The girl went to the side door and let herself in with a key.