Ben Cooper rolled his head over on the pillow and squeezed his eyes tighter shut. Promethazine hydrochloride had filled his head with glue. His limbs lay heavy and deadened, as if his body had been poured full of cement while he slept. His mind was too gummed up for logical thoughts to drag themselves free from the sticky embrace of the sedative.
For the past hour he’d been drifting in that state halfway between sleeping and waking, conscious of noises filtering in through the window, aware of the light flickering on the wall, but unable to dredge up the energy to stir himself. His mouth felt dry, and he longed for water. Deep memories swirled in the dehydrated depths of consciousness, and his body twitched with pain. They were memories filled with heat and flame, smells and sounds that churned and splintered in his mind but refused to coalesce.
A thump on the bed made him automatically stretch out a hand. Hope the cat purred loudly as she rubbed her head against his fingers. Cooper croaked a faint greeting through parched lips. The cat purred more loudly, and gave him a silent cry. He tried to push himself up into a sitting position. Apparently, it was feeding time.
There was no clock in his bedroom. He’d come to rely on his iPhone for the time, but he’d left it switched off for a while now. He wasn’t even sure he’d charged the battery recently.
He shuffled towards the kitchen, put the kettle on for instant coffee and prised open a tin of cat food. When the cat was satisfied, he drank his coffee in silence. The taste was dull. But he didn’t have the energy or interest to produce something better for himself.
His electric shaver had no charge left either. He’d forgotten it had stopped working yesterday, and he couldn’t be bothered finding the charger. It didn’t matter, though. Shaving was a nuisance, and there was no one to make the effort for. He wouldn’t see anyone again today, except his brother. He tried to look out to see what the weather was doing, but the windows of the flat were filmed with water. He ought to get round to cleaning them some time. At least the rain might run off them, if they weren’t so dirty.
The cat stopped eating, and gazed at him in sudden perplexity. Of course, she could sense the tension in the air. She had been restless for weeks, reluctant to stray too far from the back door of the conservatory into the garden, though it was surely a paradise for cats. Maybe it was just the rain she objected to. She’d always made it clear that she didn’t like to get her paws wet.
Cooper looked at the clothes he’d been wearing yesterday. They were damp from the rain and streaked with mud, and he’d failed to put anything in the wash basket or leave it out to dry. What was it Dorothy Shelley had said to him? ‘Don’t catch a chill.’ He almost laughed at the absurdity. Catch a chill? As if a minor physical ailment could compare with the havoc wreaked on the inside.
At times his recollections had a clarity he associated only with the memories of the dying. They said your whole life flashed in front of your eyes in those last few moments. They never said that a few minutes of your life could pass before your eyes over and over, endlessly repeating. Would they never stop until you died?
After Liz’s death in the fire at the Light House, the inquest had to be faced. Violent or unnatural deaths always required an inquest. But the coroner didn’t perform the role that people often expected. The inquest was only meant to establish the identity of the deceased, the place and time of death, and how the person died. Not the cause, but how they came by their death. The legal difference could be too subtle for bereaved relatives to understand.
Cooper had seen it many times, been asked himself by families to explain it. He’d struggled to make sense of it for people already worn down by grief and now baffled by the system they’d been thrown into. Though witnesses were called, it wasn’t a trial. The coroner went to a lot of trouble to make that clear. The verdict would not imply criminal liability. The purpose of an inquest wasn’t to attribute blame. Well, of course not. No one wanted to do that. It wasn’t politically correct. People weren’t responsible for their own actions. It was all due to their upbringing, their genes, the abuse they’d suffered as a child, their disturbed mental state.
He’d heard all that said, and more. A chorus of angry voices, some of them shouting their objections during the hearing itself, but most waiting until afterwards to express their despair. It wasn’t the British way, to make a fuss. But sometimes Cooper had been there, the person they could turn to with their feelings, the target for their anger, the man they hoped could put it all right.
Somehow he’d managed to get through his witness statement. When he looked at his notebook, he thought another person must have written his notes. He couldn’t tell. It seemed like a scrawl by some crazed fiction writer in the throes of producing a horror fantasy. It seemed to have nothing to do with him at all, this slow, careful prodding at the facts. The names, the times, the places, the extent and nature of the injuries. None of this was about Liz.
The outcome he feared most was a narrative verdict. It always seemed such a cop-out, an avoidance of judgment. Yes, it worked sometimes for families who didn’t want to hear the word ‘suicide’, a ruling that their loved one had taken his own life while the balance of his mind was disturbed. It helped them to deal with the reality if they could walk away without that fact written down in black and white on an official form. But in terms of justice, it was no more than an evasion.
That hadn’t happened. The jury returned a verdict of unlawful killing. Why did that feel such a relief?
And then there was the funeral. It had passed in a dark haze. Derbyshire Constabulary didn’t go in for all the ceremony, the way some other forces did. Standing rules said that a serving member of police staff didn’t get even a coffin shrouded in a flag, as a regular officer would, though uniformed pall-bearers were provided on a request from the family. Mr and Mrs Petty had been happy with that, though. Simple, dignified. It was all they’d wanted.
Throughout the service and burial, Cooper had felt as though he wasn’t really there with the other mourners. He’d been floating above the proceedings, looking down at himself in his black suit and tie, standing in the wet grass at the graveside, indistinguishable from all the others in their funeral clothes, just a flock of black crows squawking dismally in the rain.
Liz’s parents lived in Bakewell, and they’d found a corner of the cemetery on Yeld Road for her burial. Relatives from Dundee had arrived, gloomy and Presbyterian, yet first at the bar when the party retreated to a local pub afterwards for the sandwiches and sausage rolls.
Bakewell’s cemetery had hit the headlines in the 1970s with the murder there of a thirty-two-year-old typist, Wendy Sewell – the so-called ‘Bakewell Tart’ case. The place had become notorious all over again in 2002, when the man convicted of the Sewell murder, cemetery worker Stephen Downing, had his conviction overturned after serving twenty-seven years in prison. There was even a TV film, starring Stephen Tompkinson as a local newspaper editor who’d campaigned to get Downing released. Cooper didn’t remember the original case, but he was a serving police officer when the inquiry was reopened after Downing’s release. This cemetery had a different significance for a lot of people.
Like so many parish churches, the churchyard at All Saints had been closed for burials many years ago. Bakewell’s four thousand residents would end up in this cemetery, or in the incinerator at Chesterfield crematorium. There were two chapels at the cemetery, one for Anglicans and one for Nonconformists, neither of them used any longer.
The arrangements had been in the hands of the local funeral directors, Mettams. All very traditional. Handfuls of earth scattered on the coffin. ‘We therefore commit the body of Elizabeth Anne Petty to the ground. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.’
He supposed his family had been supportive. Well, of course they had. They were all there, Matt and Kate and their girls, and his sister Claire making an appearance. His Uncle John and Aunt Margaret had turned up, both of them well into retirement now and spending most of their time on cruises. The Eastern Mediterranean, Islands of the Caribbean. Their suntans looked out of place among the pale faces huddled in the rain.
When the crowd of mourners had dispersed, he still seemed to be there, a speck among the raindrops, gazing down on the freshly filled grave surrounded by a sea of mud. The ground had been churned by the feet of the mourners as they shuffled and stamped in the rain. Their departure had left a desolate quagmire where once there had been green blades of grass growing in the sun.
This wasn’t his world any more. Something was wrong with it, the whole earth was askew. He found he would often turn suddenly, twisting on his toes, holding his breath – thinking that if he was quick enough he might see Liz standing there, or catch a glimpse of her shadow passing from one room to another.
And then there were the lists. Even now, he would sometimes put his hand in his pocket, open a drawer or turn over a cushion and find a list. She’d made a lot of them, one for every aspect of their wedding preparations. They weren’t printed out, but written in her own neat hand, which made it worse. He didn’t have to read the words, but could recognise her personality in the curl of a ‘g’ or an ‘s’, the decisive ticks and crosses where firm decisions had been made. He could even identify the colour of the ink, her favourite electric blue ballpoint.
Table decorations, wedding breakfast menus, car hire companies. They were all listed somewhere. The options they’d once discussed were preserved on paper like the enigmatic remains of a distant civilisation, people long gone from the earth but for a few scraps of their hieroglyphics, perhaps significant at the time, but meaningless now, symbolic only of something lost. They were a glimpse into the past, a fragment of a world already dead.
He’d been trying to remember the last thing they’d said to each other. What had been their final words? He couldn’t recall. He knew all the words were there, deep in his memory, but he couldn’t dredge them up from the sludge. When he tried, all that he found were the more familiar images and sounds, the ones that recurred over and over in his nightmares, all the sensations from the minutes that had seemed like hours as the Light House burned around him. But Liz’s voice was missing from his recollection of those last few moments.
Sometimes it seemed the whole universe was outside, trying to get in. So many people called with their expressions of grief and pity that it became one long, meaningless howl.
Emotional numbness had set in soon after the funeral, his feelings becoming anaesthetised even as physical injuries racked his body with agony. It was as if he could only take a single kind of pain at any one time. The bodily anguish he couldn’t do anything to resist was pushing the psychological suffering out of his mind, and from his heart.
The human brain had functions that were still incomprehensible. One was its ability to filter out experiences and memories that it considered too traumatic, in order to protect sanity. The trouble was, he knew the physical damage would heal eventually. The sting of the burns would fade, the pain in his lungs would retreat into a background ache. And then his brain would turn off the filter and open the floodgates. When might that happen? Would he have any warning? Or would it poleaxe him in the middle of the street one day, or come crashing into his nightmares one night as he slept?
It was like having an anonymous stalker, a menacing shadow just waiting to pounce when he least expected it. No matter how often he looked over his shoulder, he would never see the darkness coming.
Cooper blinked and flinched, thinking a shadow had passed across his vision, flicking too close to his eyes. A fly, or a moth, or a speck of dirt thrown up by the rain. But there was nothing visible. Nothing real, anyway. Perhaps it was the first sign of that darkness.