At last a man her father’s age came out of the tent, holding a purple sacados and a cardboard box. ‘Recognize this?’ he asked. No introductions or formalities. Syl shook her head at the blackening blood prints on its leather shoulder strap. ‘Or these?’ A pair of women’s shoes. Again she shook her head. ‘The phone?’ He held up a clear plastic bag with a black mobile phone inside.
She peered at it. ‘I couldn’t say,’ she said. ‘They’re all the same.’
‘Is that your parents’ number?’ He pulled the plastic tight and pointed to the line of digits written on the tag.
‘I can’t remember,’ she said. ‘That is my father’s handwriting, though. He does his fives like that.’
‘Or this?’ A rain-soaked copy of the Entomology, bloodstained.
‘They did subscribe.’
He didn’t show her the granite club they’d found, tossed in the grass and almost picked clean of the blood and human tissue by the crabs and flies, though he was tempted. He didn’t mind the public face of grief and shock. It was reassuring and appropriate. He was not one of the new school who considered mourning and weeping little better than masturbation. A daughter, in circumstances such as this, ought to be hysterical. His daughter would be, he hoped. It was her right. It was her duty. This woman, though, was far too sensible and rational. Too furtive and controlled. Too studenty and cropped. Too underdressed for such a solemn task.
‘OK, let’s have a look inside,’ he said, taking her arm. ‘Hold on to me.’
‘No thanks.’ She was used to such men, from her waitressing. She pulled her arm free, and stepped a pace away. Once he had turned his back on her, she followed him into the tent. The usual canvas smells were absent. There was no scent of cloth or waterproofing, just the odours of damp grass, with iodine, formaldehyde, and sweat. Any daylight that succeeded in penetrating the canvas was thin, green and ghostly.
It was warm inside. Out of the wind. There were four younger men already there, olive-faced and business-like. The older one who’d summoned her just said, ‘The daughter,’ then, ‘The lights.’ Two hanging fluorescent lamps stuttered into life for a few moments then shed their hard sheen on to a spread of improbably long white sheets laid out on the sloping grass inside the tent at Syl’s feet. The beds of sloping lissom grass seemed dulled now that the ghostly green had been supplanted by mechanical light.
‘It’s only the faces,’ the detective said. ‘We’ll make it very quick. Just nod. Or shake your head. We’ll do the woman first.’ He bent and turned back the top sheet and the refrigerating blanket, put there to keep the bodies cold and fresh. Celice.
Syl had only an instant’s view. It was her mother, much reduced, but unmistakable. Her face was cheek down, turned sideways, resting on the pillow of the grass. Her mouth was swollen and her skull collapsed. Her best front teeth were grinning, cracked from root to tip. Her skin was indigo. The hair was dappled with dead blood.
‘Just nod or shake your head,’ he said again.
‘It’s her.’
‘And now the man, if you’re ready?’ He knelt on the grass further down the array of sheets, looking at Syl, waiting for her to compose herself, hoping for some high response.
She was composed. She felt relieved, in fact. The pressure was reduced. Nothing could be worse than this, so there was nothing more to fear. ‘I want to see it all,’ she said. ‘Not just the face. Take all the sheets away.’ He did so at once, pulling the sheets and refrigerating blankets up towards himself and gathering them against his chest. She nodded twice. Then shook her head in disbelief. The doctors of zoology. The lost and secret couple, Joseph and Celice, on their sixth day of grace. At last, the mystery. At last, the solace of the world’s worst thing.
A trained mortician or pathologist, used to the pus and debris of exploded tissue, the ruptured membranes leaking lymph, the killing fields of murdered cells, might find a thousand signs of disassembly and decay on Joseph and Celice’s cadavers. Their eyeballs were already liquefying and their faces were enlarged. Their skin was blistered on the undersides. Their innards were so bloated from the by-products of decomposition — methane and ethium — that their nostrils, ears and open wounds had been made frothy by exuding gas.
But at the distance that their daughter viewed them from, in that exaggerated light, they seemed less troubled than they had even that morning when they’d been found in natural light. Except for the typical glaucous bruises above the small intestine, their livid colours had calmed down, more blue than purple, more grey than green. They had even tanned and darkened a little in the sun. And the hours of rigor mortis had long passed. Their arms and legs no longer stuck out like mannequins. Joseph’s one wild sign, death’s unkind erection, had reduced. Their bodies were unstiffened and fell into the hollows of the grass, like sleepers fall into the cushions of a bed, relaxed and rounded, fitting in.
The crabs had gone. Celice and Joseph were not fresh enough for them. And though the swag flies had deposited more eggs in the couple’s open cavities, most of the flies had now departed, kept away first by the covering of wind-borne sand that was embalming Joseph and Celice and then by the busy presence of the police. The forensic officers had hoovered out the maggots, ‘making them presentable’, before the daughter came.
Syl was too touched by the gentle nakedness and disposition of her parents to stop herself from sobbing. Sobbing on the edges of the sea as she had so many times before when Joseph and Celice were too far out to reach. The policewoman who had been standing outside was summoned. A job at last. She put her coat round Syl’s shoulders and laid her arm too heavily across her back.
The body sheets had been pulled across again without Syl noticing, but she had got a snapshot printed in her mind. She’d not remember all the wounds, the gull damage, the black dry blood. It was her father’s hand wrapped round her mother’s leg that haunted and delighted her. It looked as if the leg and arm were keeping them earthbound.
‘They didn’t drown?’
‘That’s right, they didn’t drown,’ the detective said. ‘Somebody with a rock.’
‘A murderer?’
A nod.
‘Who, then?’
The policeman shrugged. He meant, Maybe we’ll never know.
‘You’ve no idea?’ insisted Syl. ‘Do say!’
‘Mondazy’s Fish,’ he said — the old phrase, meaning Fate. The usual crap.
‘Show me their faces one last time. I’ll be OK.’
Her parents seemed oddly young and flourishing, in this second, edited glimpse of them, through half-shut eyes. Their skin was stretched. Her father’s forehead was unlined. Her mother’s underchin was firm. But there was something else that made them young, Syl realized. The very manner of their deaths. For violent death is usually the province of the young. Slow wasting is the property of age. And there was none of that. They were, indeed, quite handsome in their fast dilapidation; despite the damage and the wounds, they had not surrendered any of their nature or their character. They’d not depersonalized. They were uplifting in their way, and oddly calm. Here was a suicide of sorts, because her parents had escaped those last, geriatric shudders — convulsions was too strong a word — which dog a person from the womb. Yet this was also something happier than suicide. No evidence of anger, sorrow or despair. No farewell note. No self-inflicted wounds. No legacy of spite. No last regrets. They had departed from their world while there was still good health to keep them sweet and their old age to look forward to with hope. Syl had to allow them this at least: her parents had surprised her this one time. Not just their murder. Nor their nakedness. But that they had the power, on their deaths, to flush her heart — too late — with love. It was the light touch of his finger on her leg.