3

Geraldine hadn’t worn her long black jacket since her birth mother’s cremation. It was hard to believe nearly a year had passed since then. Giving the jacket a shake, she pulled it on over black trousers and a grey shirt, an appropriate outfit to wear to a stranger’s funeral. Fulford Cemetery was not far from where she worked, and easy enough to find, but all the same she was nearly late. The car park was three-quarters empty as she parked her car and hurried into the prayer hall. Although the front rows were only half full, she slipped into a seat near the back of the hall. She had barely sat down when the funeral cortège arrived and everyone shuffled to their feet. As the coffin was brought in, Amanda caught sight of Geraldine and her expression tautened with recognition. Other than that, no one seemed to notice the stranger in the back row.

It was a dreary service, even for a funeral, with a dull and generic eulogy. Geraldine was reminded of her birth mother’s funeral, where no one had spoken apart from the celebrant who had never met the dead woman or her family, and had taken no trouble to find out anything about her. The ceremony seemed to drag on interminably, but at last it drew to a close and the congregation filed outside to gather in clusters in the chilly spring sunshine. Observing the mourners, Geraldine could see nothing to arouse suspicion. The widow’s grief was evident but restrained. At her side a man, presumably her son, stood stiff and dignified. A young woman was holding his arm, a solemn expression on her face. Her hair was as black as Geraldine’s but hung down to her shoulders, while Geraldine’s was short. A few people hovered near them, looking slightly awkward. It wasn’t clear whether they belonged to their group or not.

The dead man’s sister stood a few feet away from the widow and her party. After a brief hesitation, Geraldine joined her.

‘That’s his family,’ Amanda said, nodding her head in the direction of the group. ‘That’s his widow, Charlotte, with my nephew, Eddy, and his wife, Luciana.’

If Geraldine hadn’t heard Amanda accuse her sister-in-law of having murdered the dead man, she might have been startled by the hostility in her voice. But there was nothing Geraldine could do to question any of them, or to look into the circumstances of this death, and nothing about the funeral that prompted her curiosity. Amanda had been so insistent; Geraldine had allowed her own judgement to be overruled and had consequently wasted her time attending the service.

She was uncomfortably aware that she had only been tempted to investigate the death because it offered her an opportunity to assume some responsibility for her work. Having been recently demoted from detective inspector to the rank of sergeant, she was struggling to contain her frustration at waiting for tasks to be allocated to her when she had been accustomed to running her own team. Still, in attending the funeral, at least Geraldine had done her best to satisfy Amanda that her accusation had been taken seriously. With luck that would pacify her for a while, hopefully until she recovered from the shock of her brother’s suicide – if he really had taken his own life.

Geraldine was about to return to her car when a portly man accosted her.

‘Are you a relative?’ he enquired.

About to reply that she had worked with the deceased, Geraldine hesitated. ‘I used to be a neighbour,’ she muttered vaguely. ‘I kept in touch.’

It was as well she had been circumspect, because she learned that her interlocutor had been working with Mark Abbott until his death.

‘It came as a shock, I can tell you,’ he added, lowering his voice. ‘I still can’t believe it. Did you know him well?’

Geraldine shook her head and mumbled something appropriate.

‘He was the last person I’d expect to go and do anything like that,’ the man went on. ‘Not that there is anything quite like that, is there? But I mean, Mark of all people. You knew him, didn’t you?’

Geraldine mumbled quietly.

He glanced around, probably to check close family weren’t within hearing. ‘I thought it was a wind-up when I first heard the news. I mean, it would have been in pretty poor taste if it had been, but I simply couldn’t believe it. He just wasn’t that kind of person, was he?’

‘No, he wasn’t,’ Geraldine agreed. ‘Still, you never know.’

‘True,’ he nodded. ‘You think you know someone and then –’ he shrugged. ‘What gets me is that we were out the night before it happened, and he was right as rain then. Well,’ he hesitated, ‘that is to say, he seemed all right. He told me he was planning a holiday, and we arranged a game of tennis for the weekend. We used to knock up once in a while, you know. Nothing too serious. Not like when I was younger and could move around the court.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘But it’s hardly what you expect a chap to be talking about the night before he tops himself, is it? Oh well, you never can tell.’

He wandered off. Geraldine watched him go and talk to the widow and her son, before she turned to make her way back to the car park. Before she had left the forecourt, Amanda came over and barred her way.

‘I’ll be coming to see you again,’ she announced. ‘I’m not letting this go.’ She leaned forward conspiratorially and went on, without lowering her foghorn of a voice. ‘They think I’m going to give up, but I know what happened and I’m not going to stop until you find out who did it.’

‘Oh for goodness sake,’ Charlotte interrupted her sister-in-law, stepping forward and hissing at her in a furious whisper. ‘Can’t you ever shut up? This is his funeral.’ She burst into tears and her son and daughter-in-law bustled her away, throwing angry glances at Amanda as they moved away.

‘Oh yes, they’d like nothing better than to shut me up,’ Amanda told Geraldine. ‘Her and her crocodile tears.’ She turned to glare at Geraldine. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘I’m not likely to have anything new to tell you tomorrow,’ Geraldine said.

With a grunt, Amanda strode away. Nothing in the mourners’ demeanour had borne out the accusation that had been levelled against them. But now a second person had cast doubt on the idea that Mark Abbott had killed himself, and the dead man’s colleague from work was hardly likely to be harbouring a personal grudge against the widow. Aware that the dead man’s sister might be acting maliciously, Geraldine had to acknowledge that the funeral had raised a further question over Mark Abbott’s death. However hard she tried to ignore her unease about his suicide, she couldn’t shake off the suspicion that something was wrong.

Returning to the police station, she shelved her curiosity about the alleged suicide, and settled down to work. It had taken her a few months to learn her way around York and get to know her colleagues at the police station in Fulford Road, but now her new place of work had become familiar, and she had struck up a friendship with a couple of her colleagues. Ted Allsop was a stocky man nearing retirement who had befriended Geraldine right from her first day at Fulford Road. She soon realised that he was equally sociable with everyone, but that only made her warm to his broad smile all the more. Another colleague who looked set to become a friend was a raven-haired woman called Ariadne, who had a Greek mother and an English father. She was about the same age as Geraldine and also single. Apart from that they had very little in common, but it was enough. If Geraldine could make just one real friend at work, she would be satisfied. Besides the relationships she was hoping to forge, her old friend, Ian Peterson, worked in York. His presence hopefully meant she was going to feel less lonely. Conscious that she could never return to London, she tried to focus on the positive aspects of her new life.