Crusher (10 page)

I’d expected Prendergast to be there, but he’d sent along a bland junior detective constable called Jenkins,
who took the witness stand and droned through the known facts of my dad’s death like he was reading his girlfriend’s shopping list. It all seemed accurate to me, except he claimed to have been one of the officers attending. I didn’t remember seeing him there, but then he had the sort of face that was easy to ignore. Also he told the coroner that they were pursuing several lines of enquiry, when as far as I knew they had one prime suspect—me. But I restrained myself from jumping to my feet and shouting “objection.”

After the detective left the stand my name was called, and I clambered self-consciously into the witness box, trying to push aside the bad associations. I wasn’t put under oath, but simply asked questions, and answered as clearly and as dispassionately as I could. I wondered if I was being too dispassionate, but the coroner didn’t seem to care. She made a few notes with her silver pen, conferred with the clerk of the court, and declared to the few people present that the victim’s identity and the cause of death had been established to her satisfaction: Noel Patrick Maguire had been unlawfully killed by person or persons unknown, and she was adjourning the inquest until police had completed their enquiries.

I must have looked surprised—from what Amobi had said, I thought the inquest would be opened and closed the same day—because the coroner took her specs off
and explained to me that I would be given a death certificate, and that I should take it to my local registry office to register the death. Since the police had declared they no longer needed to hold my father’s body, it could be released into my care as next of kin.

I was out before noon and back on the Tube for the long schlep west to our local council offices, where births, marriages and deaths had to be reported. I’d never been there before; the offices were hemmed in by wilting willow trees, presumably intended to soften the building’s brutal bulk and hard straight lines. I guessed it had been built in the seventies by an architect with shares in a concrete-pouring company. Signs in half a dozen languages pointed this way and that, to places where you could pay your council tax or complain about fly-tipping, but the location of the registry office appeared to be classified. Eventually I found a door with a glum notice sellotaped to the inside, forbidding the throwing of rice and confetti. It was oddly comforting to notice how often it had been ignored—there were lots of little pink paper horseshoes and grains of rice scattered about.

Through the door more signs led me to a small grey office where a small grey vase of plastic flowers sat on a small grey side table, and a small grey woman in a cardigan inspected my dad’s death certificate. She took
me through a list of routine questions—my dad’s full name, date of birth, what he claimed to do for a living—stamped a few bits of paper, gave one to me, handed me back the certificate and directed me to a revolving rack of leaflets in the corner.

What to do in the event of a death
. The same leaflets Elsa Kendrick had offered me from her big briefcase, the morning after I came home from the nick. I looked across at the main council building and thought about going over, finding the Social Services office and asking after Kendrick again. Maybe I could find out why she had gone off sick, why she’d come to visit me, and how she’d known about Dad’s death. But I knew they’d only keep me waiting for hours before telling me they couldn’t tell me anything, and I’d had enough of strip lights and plastic chairs and local government offices for one day. I caught a bus back east that dropped me outside the twenty-four-hour shop near my house, run by two Indian blokes who, as far as I knew, never left the premises. I grabbed a frozen steak and a pint of milk and took them to the counter. The bloke grimaced when I offered him the Guvnor’s fifty-quid note, scribbled on it with a security marker and held it up to the light. Then he reluctantly punched the purchase into his bleeping till, took the fifty and handed me my change. I was heading home when I noticed a business I had walked
past a million times and never once been curious about. This time I paused.

The premises looked like a suburban house, separated from the street by a manicured lawn and a flowerbed dotted with anaemic daffodils. Behind the net curtains in the front window I could just make out a mahogany desk with a fancy pen mounted upright in a stand, beside a thick blue ledger lying closed on a blotter. Beyond the house was a yard surrounded by high walls, and on the wall facing the street solemn white lettering read:
Parker and Parker, Funeral Directors
.

I went up to the door, turned the handle gingerly and pushed. Somewhere a mournful little bell tinkled, and the cloying scent of lilies hit me in the face.

Dad woke me by plonking a glass of orange juice on my bedside table.

“Sorry, Finn,” he said. “But you need the vitamins.” He smiled. His hair was still sticky with blood, I noticed. His mobile phone was ringing, but he just stood there, smiling at me.

“You going to answer that?” I said.

“You answer it. Tell them I’m not at home any more.”

It really was ringing, his phone—my phone—vibrating so wildly it was about to dance off my bedside table. No glass of orange juice. I picked up the phone and squinted at the screen.
Number withheld
. I pressed “answer.”

“Finn Maguire,” I croaked.

“Be at the Iron Bridge five p.m. Tell ’em I sent you.” It took me a second to register who was calling, but then I recognized the sneer in James’s voice.

“Five p.m.? Today?” Dad’s body was going to be laid out in the undertaker’s today. From the brief, angry pause before James replied I got the impression he didn’t like having his instructions questioned.

“You want this fucking job or not?”

“Yeah. I mean, thanks,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

He hung up.

I checked the screen for the time. It was just gone seven. I’d always supposed professional criminals slept late and did their gangstering at night. But maybe James was just going to bed. He’d done me a favour anyway; spring sunshine was streaming in the window, and my legs felt twitchy. I hadn’t been running for a few days, and I needed to make up for lost time.

While I ran I thought about the arrangements I’d made for Dad’s funeral. The undertaker, Mr. Stone, was a pale, podgy guy in his late twenties, with beautifully manicured hands and a practised sympathetic expression that looked even graver when I’d mentioned how skint I was. He’d asked me if I intended burial or cremation, and I’d gone for cremation. Dad had always found graveyards depressing, and I presumed he hadn’t wanted to end up in one. He’d never visited the graves of his own parents, and didn’t feel guilty about it—he said once that he’d done his bit while they were alive and could still appreciate it. The undertaker
explained smoothly that cremation required another doctor’s signature, but that he would see to all that. I guessed that service would be added to his bill as well.

One of Elsa Kendrick’s leaflets had explained the government grants that people with no income could get to help with funerals. The money went direct to the undertaker, but it didn’t cover everything, and I got the impression that under his sad, calm exterior Mr. Stone was taking every opportunity to bump up his bill. Of course, most people burying relatives don’t want to be thought stingy, and are too embarrassed to haggle, but I didn’t care what people thought. Especially when it came to my dad—finding a bargain was almost a vocation, for him. I sensed Stone the undertaker was getting a bit fed up with me insisting everything should be done on the cheap—like when I went for a Monday service because it cost less than one on a Saturday. When I asked if he was related to any of the Parkers, he explained smoothly there were no Parkers any more. The firm had been bought out years ago by a big national chain. I could see why big business had got involved: a market where the product never goes out of fashion and the clients think it’s bad manners to haggle. Not that I envied Stone his steady job.

I got back home from my run forty seconds over my average time, and scolded myself mentally for slacking
off. After a shower and a shave I ate my breakfast out of the bowl I’d left on the table. I rinsed it out first—I’m not a total slob.

I still wasn’t sure how I was going to pay for the funeral. I had no idea what this job at the Iron Bridge restaurant would pay, presuming they gave me a job. For all my attempts to cut corners, Stone’s written estimate suggested I’d end up owing him a few hundred quid. I still had most of the money McGovern had given me, but I was saving it for a piss-up for Dad’s old mates at the Weaver’s Arms. I was pretty sure that Dad would have preferred that to being cremated in a posher coffin.

But now the whole business of money was really starting to get to me. The bank, the benefits people, they’d have to be told. What would happen when I couldn’t pay the mortgage? Would the bank take the house back? Or was it my house now? Did I inherit it from Dad when he died, or was he supposed to leave it to me in his will? I didn’t even know if he’d made a will. Jesus … maybe it would end up belonging to my mother. Where the hell would I live then?

If Dad
had
ever made a will, I had a good idea where I might find it.

I pushed open the door of his room. The curtains were still open. Dad always made his bed right after he got up, but that was usually as neat as he got in here.
Shirts and jeans of varying degrees of dirtiness were still piled on his bedside chair. His chest of drawers was strewn with copper coins not worth the trouble of gathering up, old pens, and dried-up bottles of antiperspirant he hadn’t thrown away. The room still smelled of him, I noticed, but the scent was fading, succumbing to the smell of gathering dust. I transferred the clothes to the bed, dragged the chair over to the wardrobe, and climbed up onto it. Under a crushed, musty collection of hats was a Chinese fibre suitcase with two clasps, one busted. I grabbed the handle, dragged it down, plonked it onto the bed and flicked the good catch open.

The case was crammed with documents, some in manila folders, others in envelopes, in no particular order that I could see. The first envelope I looked into held yellowing official certificates. The topmost had the word “BIRTH” at the top. In a column on the left I made out my birth name, Finn Pearce Grey. The next document had the word “MARRIAGE” at the top. Noel Patrick Maguire, actor, to Lesley Helen Grey, actress. I put the certificates back. They were no use to me.

A second bulging manila envelope held a whole wodge of printouts, all similar. I recognized the bank logo on the top left-hand corner, but the entries and the figures and the endlessly repeated phrases merged and blurred as I stared at them. I did make out three words
that kept reappearing at the head of each page:
Interest-Only Repayments
. I stuffed them back in the envelope and went on searching. After half an hour my eyes were aching and my head was pounding and I hadn’t seen the word Will anywhere.

I stuffed the envelopes and folders back into the suitcase, flipped the lid shut and clicked the catch. I was going to shove the case back on top of the wardrobe, but decided not to bother; I’d probably need it again soon. I slid the case under Dad’s bed, picked up his shirts and stuffed them into the laundry basket. Then I wondered why. He wasn’t going to wear them, and I didn’t want them. But I wasn’t ready to stuff them into a bin bag and dump them in the doorway of a charity shop. I wasn’t being sentimental, though part of me wished I felt that way. I just couldn’t be arsed.

The Chapel of Rest was dimly-lit, slightly stuffy and windowless. For a moment it reminded me of the room in the nick where I’d been questioned, but this one was slightly larger. Its most distinguishing feature was Dad, lying in a casket resting on wooden trestles. The coffin was shiny lacquered chipboard trying to look like wood, with golden plastic handles that weren’t even trying to look like brass. Presumably when you bought the
cheapest possible coffin Mr. Stone made sure everyone could tell, in case any other punters got the same idea.

Dad was beyond caring, of course. He looked asleep, although his head was tilted slightly too far back, as if he was trying to keep his chin clear of his shirt, but maybe that was to conceal the damage to his skull. Stone’s people had dressed him in his second-best suit. My dad only had two: this one was the dark-brown designer number he found in a second-hand shop, and it still looked pretty smart. His charcoal one would have looked even smarter, but I needed that one myself for the funeral, even if my shoulders strained the seams of the jacket and I couldn’t quite button it closed. Dad’s fair hair and scruffy beard—tinged with grey—had been combed, maybe even been trimmed. If they’d used any make-up, I couldn’t tell. His skin was the colour it had always been; but it was too still, unnaturally still, deathly still. When I touched his forehead it was cold. I had a sudden urge to kiss it all the same, the way he used to kiss me, even when I got to be taller than him, but I held back, thinking that would look too weird and creepy.

Then I realized I didn’t give a shit what it looked like, and I leaned down, and I kissed his forehead. It was like kissing a smooth round stone coated in cold wax.

Stone was standing in the corner, hands clasped over his crotch. “Thanks, Mr. Stone,” I said. “He looks OK.” Stone nodded. I wasn’t sure if I’d said the right thing. I didn’t know if there was a right thing to say. I hadn’t prayed since I was a little kid at Catholic school, and I hadn’t cried since Mum left. I wasn’t going to start now; neither did anyone any good.

“Will you be staying to greet friends and relatives?” asked Stone, as I turned to leave.

“I haven’t told any of his friends yet,” I said.

“It’s just we’ve already had a call from a lady wanting to pay her respects,” said Stone. “Although I didn’t get her name, I’m sorry.”

“Did she say when she was coming?”

“I told her she could view the body any time after two.”