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Friday 1 August 2014

Tania’s funeral was held in the late morning. The church was full of people in their forties: Tania’s old school friends and the young musicians who had played with her in the local youth orchestra.

A young cellist and a pianist from the Royal College of Music had volunteered to play and the congregation listened to Gluck’s melody from Orfeo ed Euridice. The piano ran like water while Tania’s life played in images on a screen. Tania playing netball, Tania in a paddling pool, Tania with her arms round her friend Katherine. Then the congregation stood and somehow managed to belt out together ‘Lord of all Hopefulness’.

Katherine was in the church, next to Tania’s mother. Claire had allowed her to come in spite of those years of silence. In fact, she’d welcomed her. She’d been able to understand that Katherine was a victim too and perhaps someone from whom she could draw comfort. Sarah looked at their two backs, side by side in the front pew, and remembered that plate of Penguin biscuits, waiting for Tania to come home. For the first time she felt a pang of regret: finding Tania had been an end to hope. Here was the irredeemable present.

A recording of a single piano was beginning, and Mahalia Jackson’s voice soared. There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.

The undertakers turned the coffin and Claire filed out behind it with her ex-husband and Tania’s old friends, now all grown up: fat or thin, married or single, successful or disappointed, whatever it was they had made of their uninterrupted lives.

The cemetery was a drive away – a natural burial ground – and at the grave mouth there were fewer people. Sarah, standing back, recognized Claire of course, holding long-stemmed white roses, and Tania’s father with his third wife and their two teenage children.

Retired Detective Inspector Peter Stokes was there, like Sarah standing respectfully back from the family. He’d taken Sarah aside before the service and shaken her hand and said he was a man of his word and that there was a case of bubbly waiting for her in the boot of his car. Sarah had said, ‘I’ll have to split it with Elaine.’ Stokes had raised his eyebrows and said, ‘Fat Elaine?’ and Sarah had said, ‘That’s right. Couldn’t have done it without her.’

So Elaine was there too, and Robert McCarthy, with Ewan who was there to help Robert and had clearly borrowed the suit he was wearing. It was burgundy and too short in the sleeves. And there was Katherine, Tania’s friend, who had watched her walking away on 16 October 1987.

It was a light brown coffin and it held Tania’s name on its lid on a bronze plate. The undertakers put the straps underneath and lowered it into the ground.

At least Tania was known now. At least there was a grave to visit, and looking around, Sarah was pleased to see there were already trees: birches and ash.

She thought of Tania, fifteen years old, poised at the pivot between child and woman. Her imaginings of her were limited – she saw her on the netball court, an aggressive little wing attack; practising her violin in her school uniform; frizzing her hair and struggling into her jeans. She had been at that moment in her life when the world should have sung for her in all its glory. She should have made harmless mistakes, and agonized about teenage love, and adults should have shaken their heads at her behaviour; and she should have done both well and badly and, in the end, survived it all to become older and wiser.

Claire had chosen Psalm 98 for a graveside reading, and the undertakers handed out photocopied sheets. They read it together.

Make a joyful noise unto the LORD, all the earth: make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise.

Sing unto the LORD with the harp; with the harp, and the voice of a psalm.

With trumpets and sound of cornet make a joyful noise before the LORD, the King.

Let the sea roar, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.

Claire hesitated by the grave. The undertaker offered her the tray of soil but she declined to throw earth on her daughter. Instead she went down on her hands and knees and dropped the roses in.