George still sounded embarrassed as he said: ‘I should go. I need to get to work. But I shall try to find an opportunity to ask Sir William if I can look at the surviving volumes of Glick’s diary. He has them at the moment. Maybe he has found something.’
‘An excellent idea,’ Liz agreed.
‘I’ll meet you this evening and let you know what I discover, if anything. Shall I …’ He hesitated. ‘Shall I come round to your house again?’
‘No. I have some business I need to attend to this evening. I shall come and find you when I am done, if that is convenient. I have your address from your card.’
George smiled. ‘Of course.’
‘I got business to do today and all,’ Eddie said, partly to remind them he was there. ‘I’ll tell you all about it this evening.’ They might have dismissed his idea of a seance, but Eddie wasn’t to be put off that easily.
Liz was on her own again at the side of the grave when her father returned a short while later with a police sergeant. The two men had been talking, and once Oldfield had convinced him there would be no objection from the Church, the sergeant had agreed that he would arrange for the grave to be opened up.
‘Just to check the coffin is intact,’ he warned. ‘Just so the poor soul is properly covered and can rest in peace.’
It was over an hour before two police constables started work with shovels. Liz was soaked through by then, and feeling cold and bedraggled. She must look a sight, she thought as she watched the men dig.
They scraped the wet earth from the wooden lid of the coffin.
‘Well, it’s still here at any rate,’ the sergeant announced. ‘All right, you can fill it in again.’
The constables both sighed audibly, and climbed out of the grave. One of them caught his boot on the coffin lid as he hauled himself out of the pit. The heavy wooden lid moved. Not much, but enough for the sergeant as well as Liz to notice.
‘Hang on a minute,’ he proclaimed. ‘That should be screwed down, shouldn’t it?’
‘Indeed it should,’ Oldfield agreed. ‘I fear it may have been tampered with after all.’
The sergeant took a deep breath of misty air. ‘You reckon we should open it up, sir? Just to check?’
‘I think it would be advisable.’
Liz turned away as one of the policemen jumped back down into the grave. She could hear the scrape of the wood as the coffin lid was lifted clear. She did not want to look, but she strained to hear the reaction from the men watching.
‘Well, he’s in there all right,’ the sergeant said.
‘Bit odd though,’ one of the constables said. ‘I thought Albert Wilkes died in his sleep.’
‘Indeed he did,’ Oldfield’s cracked voice replied.
‘Looks like his legs are broken, or something,’ the other constable said. Liz almost turned to see for herself.
But the sergeant said: ‘All right, put the lid back on.’
‘You’re going to leave it at that?’ Liz asked. Now she did turn round. From the expressions on the faces of the men, the body must have been a singular sight. Perhaps there was more wrong than broken bones.
‘I really do think some further investigation …’ Oldfield began.
The sergeant nodded, holding up a hand to stem the protest. ‘I quite agree, sir. The way the man was lying, the way the legs were bent and all. That didn’t look like any body I’ve seen, and I can tell you I’ve seen a few.’
‘What do you propose?’ Liz asked.
‘Either this body has been tampered with, or this man did not die peacefully in his sleep.’ The sergeant turned to Oldfield. ‘I propose, with your agreement sir,’ he said, ‘to suggest to my superiors that we seek permission from the deceased’s next of kin for an urgent post-mortem.’
Chapter 8
Her father was tired after his early morning exertions, and so Liz sat with him in the living room until it was time for her to get lunch ready. Once in the kitchen, she quickly laid out a plate of cold meat and some salad. She checked the clock, and seeing she still had twenty minutes before she needed to serve up the food, she opened a drawer in the kitchen table and took out a book.
It was not a novel, but a playscript. She sat down and checked that she could not be seen from the door. She did not expect her father to come looking for her, but if he did she would have time to push the book under the cushion of the chair. Not that there was anything untoward in the text. But she knew how much her father disapproved of the theatre. They had argued so often that Liz had given up trying to persuade him that plays were not the word of Satan and music halls the Devil’s own choice of entertainment.
It was an argument her father would never let her win, so instead she avoided it. And read her plays in the kitchen, or after he had gone to bed. With half an ear listening for the hall clock to strike one, Liz lost herself in Arthur Wing Pinero’s world of The Magistrate.
The crust was hard and dry, but when Eddie broke it open, the inside of the roll was still moist and fresh. He gnawed at it, making it last, letting the hard flakes of crust soften in his mouth as Annie watched with obvious amusement.
‘I don’t reckon you’ve eaten anything for a week,’ she told him.
‘Maybe I haven’t,’ he admitted, sending crumbs flying. ‘I don’t know.’
She laughed at that. ‘You want another one?’ she wondered as she watched the roll disappear.
‘You got one?’
‘Can get one. But it’ll cost you.’ Her pale eyes glinted with mischief, and Eddie could guess what was coming.
‘Got no money,’ he admitted.
‘A kiss then.’
He pulled a face and made a retching sound. Little Annie laughed again. But Eddie could tell that she was making light of her disappointment. She always did. One day perhaps he would give her a kiss, and see if she laughed then. Faint from the shock, more like.
Everyone called her little Annie, though she was as old as Eddie and slightly taller. But her dad, the baker, would tousle her hair with his floury hands and call her his little girl. Eddie liked Annie. He liked the way the flour flecked her dark hair, the way she half-smiled when she tried not to laugh. The way her eyes widened when she saw Eddie, and most of all the way she kept yesterday’s rolls for him.
‘Annie?’
She could sense he was going to ask her something serious, and frowned. ‘Yes?’
‘You know anything about talking to the dead?’
The frown froze on her face, lining her forehead and wrinkling the skin by her nose. ‘You’re weird, you are, Eddie Hopkins,’ she said. ‘Who do you know who’s dead?’
Eddie grinned at her. ‘Lots of people,’ he said. He laughed out loud to see her flinch at that. But inside, he wasn’t laughing.
A policeman called mid afternoon. He assured Liz and her father that a post mortem on Albert Wilkes was to be carried out that evening, and that the poor man’s widow had been informed and the relevant permissions obtained. He made it sound very formal, and despite the way in which events had come about, Liz supposed it was.
That evening, after reading evensong from his battered Book of Common Prayer, Liz’s father announced that he would retire early. Relieved, Liz helped him up the stairs. She did not want to be late meeting George Archer, and she had another appointment she intended to keep before that.
She sat on the top stair until the sound of her father’s gentle snores was rhythmic and settled. Then Liz spent another fifteen minutes washing up the crockery and cutlery from supper and tidying the living room. She crept up the steps again, listening carefully to check her father was still settled and deeply asleep.
In the drawer of the kitchen table where Liz kept her playscript there was a sheet of cartridge paper. On it she had written a short message. The ink was faded from age and the paper was curling at the edges, but she saw no reason to write it out again. It was a short note to her father and he had never read it. Liz hoped he never would. She placed the sheet of paper prominently on the table in the living room where he would be sure to see it if he woke and came downstairs. It was not much of a letter, and while it did not tell the whole truth it was not actually a lie: