Tarnished (33 page)

The truth had waited long enough – a couple more weeks wouldn’t make much difference.

Peg tugged the shopping trolley the last couple of hundred yards along the road, worrying about the food she had bought. She had got in what she knew Doll liked to eat – Heinz tomato soup, pink ham with yellow breadcrumb-speckled fat, white sliced bread, proper butter, Branston Pickle, and Cheddar so mild it only had a passing resemblance to cheese.

But all the time in the shop, she imagined Loz nagging in her ear about good nutrition, asking her why there were no fresh fruit and vegetables in her basket. Her internal riposte was that because Doll ate so little, what she did put in her mouth had better be calorie-laden enough to keep her tiny frame going. Even Loz would struggle to wear down Doll’s toddler-force intolerance for new foods. She’d had nearly ninety years of practice, after all. Peg worked herself up into quite a lather with this argument, until she realised that she didn’t actually have to have it. That, in fact, she, Peg, was in charge and not Loz, who was tied up at work for at least a whole week.

She tried not to acknowledge how much relief this thought brought her.

‘Hi Nan, I’m back!’ she called as she let herself in through the front door. Kicking off her boots, she wheeled the shopping trolley through to the kitchen, and put the kettle on. Julie had left a little note on the Formica breakfast table, saying that she had come in and checked on Doll several times while she had been in ‘doing’ Jean, and all that time she had been sleeping like a baby. She added that she had plated up a ham and salad tea for her for when she woke up and left it in the fridge.

Blessing Julie, Peg poured two cups of tea and sliced two pieces of pink and yellow Battenberg cake and put them on the best plates on a tray.

‘Nan? Are you awake? I’ve got us a nice cup of tea here,’ she called as she carried the tray along the corridor.

She turned into the bedroom and stopped in her tracks, the tea ricocheting around the edge of the mugs, slopping over the dainty slices of cake.

Doll’s bed was empty, the sheets flung back, the pillow dented and decorated with a few strands of hair where her head had lain. Peg dumped the tray on the dressing table and dashed through to the bathroom, which was empty, then the lounge. Doll wasn’t there either – her chair was as empty as it had been when she was in hospital.

Wobbling with panic, Peg buzzed through to Jean.

‘Aunty Jean? Can you hear me?’

‘Yes dear,’ her voice crackled through the silver mesh on the front of the box. ‘Is everything all right?’

‘Do you know where Nan is?’

‘Isn’t she in her bed?’

‘No.’

‘The girl went through to check on her before she left, and said she was “sleeping like a mouse”. That’s what she said. I thought it was a bit of an odd thing to say, myself.’

‘She’s not here, Aunty Jean. She’s not in the bungalow.’

‘But have you only just got back?’ Jean said. ‘Where on earth have you been?’

‘I’ve been getting some food in,’ Peg said, her voice trembling.

‘You took a hell of a long time about it, Meggy, didn’t you? She must’ve gone out looking for you. She could be in Seasalter by now, the time you’ve been. You’d better get out there and see if you can find her.’

As Peg put the intercom down she caught sight of the picture of Doll with Raymond, Jean and Keith, which she had turned over on the bookshelf. It was on the floor, face up, exactly where it would have landed had it fallen from Doll’s shocked fingers.

‘Oh no!’ Peg gasped.

An image flashed through her mind: Doll, wandering along the seafront in her slippers and nightie, cold, scared and lost, perhaps looking for Keith, not knowing who she was or where she was heading. And Peg knew it was all her own fault.

She dashed through into the hallway and pulled her boots back on. Then she ran out of the front door and into the street, where she paused, bouncing indecisively on her toes. Which way would Doll have taken? Down the hill towards the sea? Or the other way, towards the shops?

Peg looked up and down the street, but there was no sign of her grandmother. It was pointless to take off in any one direction. She could have gone anywhere. The snow was falling quite thickly now, and for one disorienting second the sight of it settling on the ground gave her a childlike thrill.

She shook herself to her senses. Doll was gone, and she needed to do something quickly to find her.

The sensible thing to do would be to call the police. She let herself back into the bungalow and picked up the phone. But some innate – inherited? – mistrust of the law made her hesitate. And anyway it would be better to see first if Jean had any more detail to add to what had happened while she was away.

Peg let herself out of the back door. As she negotiated the ice-slippery slope down to the back garden, she noticed that something was awry on top of the pile of bin bags on the back lawn At first she thought seagulls had got to them and pulled out one of Doll’s old nighties.

But then she realised the horror of what she was looking at.

‘Nan!’ Peg yelled, and ran to her, stumbling over the bags, cutting her leg on something metal, rusty and protruding. She reached the old lady and turned her over, checking her throat for a pulse.

But there was none.

Doll’s eyes had rolled back to show only their whites, while snowflakes landed in her open mouth as if she were catching them on purpose.

‘No, Nan, Nan,’ Peg said, putting her head to the old lady’s chest. She looked down at Doll’s hands, which had already stiffened, something in their clasp. Peg prised the fingers open. Doll had been holding onto the wallet of photographs of Mary Perkins. The wallet Peg had thought she put back in the Gordon’s Gin box, but which had somehow got thrown away.

Doll had come out here to look for them. Peg’s questioning had stirred her up and she had come out here, into the icy cold back garden, to dig through all these bin bags until she found the photographs.

She had been doing this while Peg had been cocooned in the warm, dry library.

Weeping tears of guilt and regret, Peg clasped the birdlike body of her grandmother to her. With shaking arms, she picked her up and carried her indoors, where she gently laid her out on her bed. Then, in a daze, she finally called an ambulance.

‘I think my nan’s dead,’ she said, choking into the mouthpiece. She gave the address and some details, then lay down and held Doll’s body, hoping that she might find a thrum of life, or a hint of warmth.

Within what must have been minutes she heard the siren as an ambulance approached. At the same time as she heard the doorbell, the intercom buzzer sounded in the lounge.

‘Meggy? Meggy? What’s going on? Why’s there an ambulance?’

She had completely forgotten about Jean.

Thirty-Three

As soon as the private ambulance had driven Doll away, and the doctor who certified the death had also sedated a distraught and hysterical Jean, and a sympathetic policewoman had taken a statement from Peg ‘as a formality’, Peg sat down in Doll’s old chair and left a long message on Loz’s phone, telling her the news. She found she was shivering, even though she had wrapped herself in a blanket and turned the gas fire up high.

She tried to look at the booklet the doctor had given her:
What to Do When Someone Dies
. But she couldn’t focus her eyes or her mind.

Then she called Raymond in Spain.

‘Oh,’ he said, his voice as flat as Whitstable low-tide mud. ‘Oh.’

‘The doctor says it was probably a heart attack, but we’ve got to see if the coroner wants to do a post-mortem.’ Peg fiddled with the curly wire on Doll’s phone and rocked herself in Doll’s old chair. She felt tiny.

The idea of her grandmother being cut up and taken apart made her feel ill. The arms that held her when she was tiny and needy cut to bits. The breast she used to lean her head against sawed open.

‘Right,’ Raymond said.

‘It’s my fault,’ Peg said, in a small voice. The impersonal nature of the phone, and the physical and emotional distance she felt between her father and herself made the whole business feel like a confessional.

‘What do you mean it’s your fault? Come on, girl.’ His voice had a new softness in it, something she wouldn’t have thought possible when she met him face to face. ‘They sent her home early from hospital. She was old, she was poorly.’

‘I shouldn’t have stayed out so long. And I was asking her too many questions. I confused her. I upset her. I drove her to it.’

‘Questions?’

Peg sighed. To Loz, this would present an opening. But Peg knew that she couldn’t go down that route. What did she have to go on, anyway? Just a couple of photographs, which at the very worst showed that Raymond had been having an affair while married to her mother, which hardly made him unique amongst men.

What else was there?

Nothing but the dramatic storytelling of a bed-bound fantasist and a forgotten family storage facility. It amounted to nothing – except to Loz, who shared with Jean an extraordinary ability to wind a couple of random facts into a cut and dried case.

‘Oh you know,’ Peg said at last. ‘The kind of questions I was asking you. About the past.’

It was Raymond’s turn to sigh. In the background, Paulie splashed and laughed in the pool, calling to his father to join him.

‘Hold on, darling,’ Raymond said to his son, muffling the receiver. ‘Daddy’s on a call.’ Then his voice came back into focus. ‘You’re too hard on yourself, Margaret. You said yourself when you come over here you was worried about her, that you didn’t think she had all that long left.’

‘Yes.’ Peg swallowed back the tears. She was amazed that he had taken in so much of what she had said to him in Spain.

‘Is that sister of mine making a stink?’ he went on.

‘She was very upset. Hysterical. But the doctor’s given her some pretty strong pills. She’s worried about what’s going to happen next, though.’

‘I’m sure she is. Well, I’m not going to let you be lumbered with all that.’ Peg heard the click of a lighter and an exhalation so slow and thoughtful she could almost smell the cigar smoke.

‘Daddy!’ she heard Paulie shout and splash in the distance. ‘I’m
bored.
’

‘Hold on a minute, darling!’ he called to his son. ‘Look, Margaret,’ he said at last, his voice low. ‘I can help you out now.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ll put my brief in touch,’ Raymond said, either not hearing or ignoring her question. ‘Bloke by the name of Archer. And I’ll sort that aunt of yours out too. She can’t stay there now Mum’s gone—’ His voice caught a little on his last word, like a scratchy woollen, snagged on a rusty nail. ‘We’ll have to work out where to put her. Now then, are you all right for money, girl?’

Peg sniffed.

‘You loved your old nan, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Peg said, tears tumbling from her eyes again. ‘She looked after me.’

‘She was a great looker-after, my old mum,’ Raymond said, his voice small, gruffly on the point of breaking. Then he seemed to rally, as if having told himself to pull himself together. ‘Look. I want you to sort out the sending-off you want for her. What you think she deserves. Bury her good and proper, money no object. Get them to send all the bills to me, and as soon as you’ve got a date, let me know. There’s some invitations need to go out, people need to know.’

‘Are you going to come to her funeral, then?’ Peg said.

‘Nah, girl. Can’t do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Never you mind. But when it’s all over, I’ll get in touch, and we can take it from there.’

‘But—’

‘Look, love. Don’t try to change my mind. Don’t waste your breath. And if you’re still worried about me getting “closure”,’ – she could hear a faint, incongruous sneer in his voice – ‘I’ve had all the “closure” I need. Let’s just leave it at that. And Margaret?’

‘Yes?’ Peg sniffed.

‘I know you’re in bits about your nan passing away. But remember – she was old, she wasn’t so good. An end can be a beginning.’

His tone was that of a man cut free.

‘Perhaps it’s because he felt too ashamed to face her when she was alive,’ Loz said when she finally called back towards the end of her shift, and after Peg had cried again and been comforted. ‘With all he did.’

‘You’re not still on about that? Look, so he had an affair with Mary Perkins. So what?’

‘And what about Anna? Why were the pictures of two seemingly random missing girls in the same box?’ Loz had to raise her voice against the sound of an un-silenced motorbike farting down the road at the end of the Seed kitchen staff’s smoking alley.

‘I can’t believe Raymond’s a killer.’

‘He killed your mum . . .’

‘That was different. That was a mercy killing. She wanted to die.’

‘But Jean said—’

‘Jean’s a fucking liar.’

‘Peg!’

Peg screwed her eyes shut and shook her head. ‘Look, Loz. Can you please just leave it. Just for a bit? My nan, who was like a mother to me, has just died. Give me a break.’

‘OK, OK, I’m sorry,’ Loz said. Peg heard her put her hand over the mouthpiece of her phone, and the muffle of her voice as she said something to someone. ‘Shit Peg, I’ve got to go. She’s only squeezed in an unbooked party of eight. Listen, love, don’t let it get on top of you and if you need me, I’m here. I’m going to keep my phone on vibrate while I’m working. And I’m going to try to get another couple of days off.’

‘OK then. Good. Thanks,’ Peg said. ‘Love you.’

She put the phone down and sat there for a long time, rocking herself in Doll’s chair, the gas fire hissing at her side. She must have fallen asleep eventually, because the next thing she knew dawn was spreading its grey cold light in through the net curtains and Julie’s little car could be heard drawing up outside.

Peg pulled herself together and braced herself to go out and tell her the news.

Thirty-Four

Peg passed the following days in a numb haze, for the most part with a phone clamped to the side of her face. To her relief, the coroner had decided that no post-mortem was necessary – Doll was elderly and showed all the signs of having died from a heart attack.