‘Not here. Next door …’
He stood up, expecting me to follow. And that was what I meant to do. But when I tried to get to my feet, I discovered that I couldn’t.
Actually that’s not even the half of it. What I’m describing was without question the single most terrifying moment of my life. I couldn’t move. My brain was sending a signal to my legs – ‘get up’ – but my legs weren’t listening. My arms had become foreign objects, attached to me but not connected. I was aware of my head, perched like a football, on a body that had turned into a useless pile of muscle and bone and somewhere inside my heart was hammering away in panic as if it could somehow break free. I will never fully be able to describe the bowel-emptying fear I felt at that moment. I knew that I had been drugged and that I was in terrible danger.
‘Are you all right?’ Cornwallis asked, his face full of concern.
‘What have you done?’ Even my voice didn’t sound like me. My mouth was having to work twice as hard to form the words.
‘Stand up …’
‘I can’t!’
And then he smiled. It was a horrible smile.
Moving very slowly, he came over to me. I flinched as he took out a handkerchief and forced it into my mouth, effectively gagging me. It hadn’t even occurred to me until then that I really ought to have screamed, not that it would have made any difference. I knew now that he had made sure we were on our own.
‘I’m just going to get something. I won’t be a minute,’ he said.
He walked out of the room, leaving the door open. I sat there, exploring my new sensations – or rather, my lack of them. I couldn’t feel anything – except fear. I tried to slow my breathing. My heart was still pounding. The handkerchief was pressing against the back of my throat, half suffocating me. I was actually too terrified to work out what should have been obvious to me: that I had blithely walked into a place of death – and that my own death was almost certain to be the result.
Cornwallis came back pushing a wheelchair. Perhaps he used it for corpses although it was more likely that he kept it for the elderly relatives who came to pay their last respects to the departed. He was whistling quietly to himself and there was a curious, empty quality to his face. He was no longer wearing his tinted glasses and I looked at his twinkling eyes, his neat little beard, his thinning hair, with the knowledge that they were nothing more than a mask and that they had concealed something quite monstrous which was now showing through. He knew I couldn’t move. He must have put something in my coffee and I, fool that I was, had drunk it. Already I was screaming at myself. This was the man who had strangled Diana Cowper and had sliced up her son. But why? And why hadn’t I worked it out – hadn’t it been obvious? – before I came here?
He leaned down and for a moment I thought he was going to kiss me. I recoiled in disgust but he simply picked me up and dumped me in the wheelchair. I weigh about eighty-five kilograms and the effort made him pause for breath. Then he brushed himself off, straightened my legs and, still whistling, wheeled me out of the office.
We went past an open door with a chapel on the other side. I glimpsed candles, wood panels, an altar that might be equipped with a cross, a menorah or whatever religious icon was appropriate. At the end of the corridor there was an industrial lift, large enough to hold a coffin. He pushed me in and stabbed at a button. As the doors closed, I felt my entire life being shut off behind me. There was a jolt and we began our descent.
The lift opened directly into a large, low-ceilinged workroom with more neon lights, evenly spaced. Everything I saw filled me with fresh horror, intensified by the fact that I was completely helpless. At the far end there were six silver cabinets, refrigerated compartments arranged in two sets of three, each one large enough to hold a human body. A whole side of the room was given over to what looked like a basic surgery with a metal gurney, shelves containing darkly coloured bottles and vials, a table with an array of scalpels, needles and knives. He parked me so that I was facing them, with my back to the lift. The walls were whitewashed brick. The floor was covered in grey sheet vinyl. There was a bucket in one corner, and a mop.
‘I really wish you hadn’t come here,’ Cornwallis said. He still had that very reasonable, mannered way of speaking which he had cultivated over the years and which suited the role he had taken. Because I knew now that it was just a role. With every second that passed, the real Robert Cornwallis was revealing himself to me.
‘I’ve got nothing against you and I don’t want to hurt you but you made the decision to come here and poke your nose into my fucking business.’ His voice had risen as he completed the sentence so that by the time he reached the swear-word it was a high-pitched scream. He recovered himself a little. ‘Why did you have to ask about RADA?’ he went on. ‘Why did you have to go digging around in the past? You come here asking me these stupid questions and I have to tell you and then I have to deal with you – which I really don’t want to do.’
I tried to speak but the handkerchief prevented me. He pulled it out of my mouth. As soon as it came free, I found my voice. ‘I told my wife I was coming here,’ I said. ‘And my assistant. If you do anything to me, they’ll know.’
‘If they ever find you,’ Cornwallis replied. His voice was matter-of-fact. I was about to speak again but he held up a hand. ‘I don’t care. I don’t want to hear anything more from you. It doesn’t really make any difference to me any more. But I do just want to explain.’
He touched his fingertips to the side of his head, staring into the mid-distance as he gathered his thoughts. And I just sat there, silently screaming. I am a writer. This can’t happen to me. I didn’t ask for any of it.
‘Do you have any idea what my life has been like?’ Cornwallis said at last. ‘Do you think I enjoy my job? What do you think it’s like, sitting day after day after day listening to miserable people going on about their miserable dead mothers and fathers and grannies and grandpas, arranging funerals and cremations and coffins and headstones while the sun is shining and everyone else is getting on with their lives? People look at me and they see this boring man in a suit who never smiles and who says all the right things – ‘my condolences, oh I’m so sorry, please let me offer you a tissue’ – when inside I actually want to punch them in the face because that’s not me and it’s not who I ever wanted to be.
‘Cornwallis and Sons. That’s what I was born into. My father was an undertaker. My grandfather was an undertaker. His father was an undertaker. My uncles and aunts were undertakers. When I was a boy, everybody I knew was dressed in black. I was taken out to see the horses pulling the hearse along the street. That was a treat for me. I’d watch my father eating his dinner and I’d think to myself that he’d spent the whole day with dead people and that those hands of his, the same hands that had embraced me, had touched dead flesh. Death had followed him into the room. The whole family was infected by it. Death was our life! And the worst of it was that one day I would be exactly the same because that was what they had planned for me. There was never any question about it. Because we were Cornwallis and Sons – and I was the son.
‘They used to tease me about it at school. Everyone knew the name, Cornwallis. They’d pass the shop on the way to get the bus and it wasn’t as if it was Jones or Smith or something forgettable. They called me “funeral boy” … “dead boy”. They asked me if my dad got off on corpses … if I did. They wanted to know what dead people looked like with no clothes on. Did they get hard-ons? Did their nails still grow? Half the teachers thought I was creepy – not because of who I was but because of what my family did. Other kids talked about university, about careers. They had dreams. They had a future. Not me. My future was, quite literally, dead.