48. Ashes To Ashes

Funk to flunky

Same time.

Golden Gates is just a ten-minute walk from the largest cemetery in the county, so Waingard walks there without much hurry, hands in pockets, enjoying the chilled sunshine of the morning on the sparkling tarmac of the pavements. This town has its critics – in fact it as little else – but when the light catches it in a certain way, the richness of a few hundred years comes out of every turn and colonnade, the way it’s spread from the riverside over centuries, up the seven hills, each hill with its own faint architectural starting point. This area is coloured by its origins as the houses of wealthy merchants who wanted to survey the working smoke of the dry dock from their breakfast spots on white pickets verandas. The cemetery then would have been out of town, and then on the outskirts, and then at the separation point of the old merchant houses and the wartime prefabs, and then the council estate put up in the ‘sixties. Walk it slow with your head up and you can see the demarcation points, see the colours change from smoggy Victorian umber to wartime patch greens and then to welfare white. A beautiful story in stone and corrugated steel, Waingard thinks. Where does she come in to all this? The pattern Waingard sees don’t seem to have much colour after that baby boomer phase. She grew up in a tin house, as they called them, two storey prefab, nice size for her and her siblings, big garden with no fence or hedge. Her mother would sit in the centre of it lathered in cooking oil, face turned to the sun. The only time she’d turn to the kid was if there was a suspicion she was about to put food in her mouth. As Waingard gets closer to the cemetery gates, as the eras pass by her in the forms of the buildings, all this shit about her mum spreads up the walls of her brain like rising damp. Those summer afternoons flickering like water damaged 16mm home video. Don’t touch that. Don’t eat that. Black is slimming and boy do you need black. It started with less, moved to barely any fruit, she was allowed two apples a day, and then nothing, and when her dad found that her mum had given her a diet of newspaper after the kid had started fainting in school, he put a stop to it. That’s when he started calling her Jellybread, wasn’t it? Yes, that’s right. It wasn’t a cute pet name at all, it was the moniker of defeat. His little girl was going to be fat and the sooner they all came to terms with that the better.

Waingard stands over her mum’s headstone, not really recognising the name, something so formal and impersonal – Patricia Maud Jerick – Patsy to all who knew her and beyond no doubt. She was even Patsy to Waingard. Mummy to her face, but Pasty behind her back. Waingard feels nothing standing there now. It’s just a hunk of stone with some words chipped into it after all. She felt much the same way at the funeral. Just a wooden box with a hunk of meat in it. Did even feel much different before? Just a bed with wires and tubes weaving in and out of the thing that once used to be her cold and heartless fucking mother. Whenever she was in town she always came up here. It never did much for her. A few hundred yards up the path was what they used to call the top end, where the foreman’s house sat with its high hedges and hanging baskets. She lost her virginity to the foreman’s son. He had a prominent twitch that meant every few minutes or so he’d grind his teeth and jut his head out on the furthest reach of his neck. It was depressing to find out, on her back inside the wrought iron surrounds of the only family crypt in the entire place, that this twitch was also his cum face. As he made it, the rain started, and it came down quick and heavy and as she tried to pull her knickers up, they filled with rain, and he laughed as he scurried bent backwards away from her to the cover of the weeping angel that overlooked the crypt, his cock flailing about like the periscope of a distressed submarine. God, what a fucking horror that night was. She had just turned fifteen and it was probably her goth origin story. Not probably. It was definitely her goth origin story. She stops by the crypt. A Victorian merchant family, patriarch and matriarch and then all the baby archs the eldest of which only made it to fifty, probably the worst of them, probably riddled with syphilis from his patronage of dockside whorehouses. The patriarch, Daniel Frederick Morgan probably beat the kids, probably hated his wife, sired a thousand bastards with maids and the wives of his employees. An ex-East India Company man, bred for the cruelty of that culture, a sado-masochist, his nose high in the air, Godly and respected. Mabel Francesca Morgan was no doubt a right old cunt. Hated her kids, never hugged them, a face as cold as stone. All that money and nothing much else. Piety. Yes, that too. That’s why they put so much money into this crypt. The top end is the place reserved – or was, back in the day – for the big money, the performance artists of deathly architecture. This gated square of ten yards or so is marker to prove that all their sickness on earth is forgiven in the granite of eternal rest. And Daniel and Mabel didn’t want their brood to wander off and find redemption in emancipation. They buried them in there too. William Morgan dead and thirty eight, if Waingard’s quick maths were any good. Richard Henry Morgan buried and hopefully dead at twenty-five. It was Christopher John Morgan who made it to fifty. Dies 1915. And here we see the efforts to inter generations of Morgans, and see that shadow grow. William’s wife and kids buried too. They outlived him, obviously, but couldn’t resist the pull of the crypt. Mary (nee Wilson). Richard Henry, although he was only married for two years, also managed to trap his wife in her grave with him. Emma (nee Rathbone). But this is what Waingard was here for. This is what had niggled her. Christopher John’s widow, no doubt long suffering. Victoria (nee Wigley).

The significance? Waingard doesn’t know if there is one. But it’s been niggling at her all morning. Niggly Wigley. The name on a plaque somewhere in the recesses of her memory, like a whisper or a feint odour.

She looks over toward the foreman’s house. Something she caught out of the corner of her eye. A man on the front porch, stepped out of the adjoining records office to smoke a cigarette. Waingard approaches him. It isn’t her first shag, and perhaps even more of a relief, it isn’t his father either, the foreman at the time of the event. This man is the records officer, the manager of the cemetery, and he’s slightly dishevelled-looking, unshaven, tie loose, like he’s had some bad news which working in this must place must be a relative thing.

“I used to live around here,” Waingard says when he asks if he can help at all. “It wasn’t all so pretty back when I was a kid.” She gestures to the garden surrounding the war memorial, the cleanliness of it all, the eye for detail.

“That’s our gardener. He’s a bit of a perfectionist,” says the manager. There is a barrier being downed, Waingard reminiscing, the nostalgia shibboleth. He offers her a cigarette which he wouldn’t normally do to a member of the public.

“I used to hang out a lot in this place when I was a kid,” Waingard says.

“Listening to Sisters of Mercy? Reading Blake?”

Waingard matches his wry smile.

“You got it.”

He’s older than Waingard, maybe by a decade, but he has a younger feel to him, like he probably has a good record collection at home, maybe used to be in a band.

It’s her first cigarette of the day, and it’s making her need to take a shit, so she asks the guy if she can use the toilet in the offices and he thinks on it for a second but says yes. When she comes out, the door through to his office is open and she can seem him at the desk, his biro hovering over a ledger, his chin propped up on his hand, elbow to desk. She pops her head in, and he looks up and smile sleepily.

“Anything else I can do for you?” he says.

“Actually, maybe,” Waingard says. She takes a step further in to the office and sees the starkness of it. His desk is the largest she’s ever seen, like you could land a helicopter on it in an emergency, but there is also an accompanying desk that comes off it in an L-shape. This is all too much for the space. The walls are bare, if you can call whitewashed woodchip bare, and the room is dominated by the far wall of glass fronted bookcases showing off the spines of perhaps hundreds of enormous leather ledgers. That’s why the desks are so big. To take the ledgers. “Did you hear about the death yesterday in town?”

“Can’t say I did.”

“A man. On the tracks.”

“A New Port man?”

“Yes.”

“I dare say it’ll be my business in a few days.”

“I’m on the investigating team.”

“You’re police?”

“I am. But I wasn’t here on official business. Not at first. My mother is here.”

The man dips his head in consolation.

“What can I do to help?”

Waingard takes a few more steps in.

“These records,” she says, gesturing to the bookcases. “If I remember rightly, they are unusual in that they have addendums with family lineages attached.”

“Some do, that’s right. It’s an anomaly, really, but apparently the magistrate who kept the records in the late 1800s was something of an amateur social scientist and he started a tradition, handed down from manager to manager over the years, sort of like an unofficial census of New Port, only with much more interesting information.” The manager seems to have woken up a bit and at the same time revealed a nerdy interest in the history of his office. He gets up from behind his colossal desk and squeezes his way around to the bookcase around the edges of the subsidiary. “I’ll show you,” he says.

“I’m looking for something specific,” Waingard says.

“Even better,” he says. “What are you after?”

“The documents for a family by the name of Morgan.”

He smiles and goes to a row of spines. “I saw you over at the crypt. It still manages to draw a lot of comment that thing.” He runs his forefinger across the spines and finds the one he’s looking for. It’s no light task, pulling out one of these ledgers, and it’s a job not just for the arms but for the whole upper body, and he uses the weight of the book to swing it round onto the subsidiary desk. It lands with a bang. He invites Waingard round to join him. “Are you a family member?” he says. “A descendant of Daniel Morgan? Or is this something to do with the dead man on the tracks?”

“Possibly the latter,” Waingard says, and she pushes her hair behind her ears and leans over the ledger.

The manager opens it, and that smell of musty old library paper combusts up into the air. Waingard gives the huge pages a cursory examination. Names, dates, occupations, things like that, written in careful calligraphy, split by feint blue horizontal lines, and thick red vertical ones. The manager flips, concertation on his face, and then the look of accomplishment as he steps back and says, “Ta da. The Morgan from the crypt.”

Where the manager stepped back, Waingard steps in, and holding her hair back she leans down and reads over the information. Much of what is decipherable on the monument plaques is also supported here with the dates. Each of the boys seem to have taken management positions in their father’s export and import business.

“Can I ask how you knew about all this?” the manager says from behind her. “We get a few old, retired folk in here asking to see the ledgers occasionally. Tracing family trees has become quite popular in recent years. But never had anyone as young as you come up here about this.”

Is he hitting on her? Waingard doesn’t turn round to him just in case he has that sadly smooth expectant expression on his face.

“I saw them when I was a kid. We used to play here. The boy who lived here, he used to sneak us in and show us these.”

This is what she’s after. The children of Christopher and Victoria Morgan. Not buried here, but noted in the funeral address of both. Sarah (b.1908). Ralph (b.1910). Dennis (b.1915 – the same year his dad died). Dennis didn’t go by his father’s name, but for some reason went by Wigley. The same Dennis Wigley found in Waingard’s dad’s address book.

“If a child is noted in here, but not buried on the family plot…?” Waingard says, not entirely certain of where her question ends.

“There’s a chance they could have been buried elsewhere. And there could be any number of reasons for that. What the name?” He stands eagerly ready for the next phase of this exercise.

“Wigley,” Waingard says.

He goes to a separate bookcase, where the old leather ledgers are now an uncountable number of ring binders. He pulls one out with much greater ease than the last and opens it next to the big old leather one.

“Here,” he says. “You’re in luck. Dennis Wigley. Number CS6245.” He walks over to a small desk in the corner of the room Waingard hadn’t seen before. It has a roll mechanism on it, like the cover for a swimming pool, and he pulls at the end and unravels a huge survey map of the entire cemetery. “There,” he says. “CS6245. He’s buried right down by the ravine, near the Jewish plots at the far end of the site.”

Waingard goes to the corner and looks at the map, examines it.

“We’re here,” the manager says. “He’s there.”

There’s a knock at the door, one of those that don’t wait for the invitation to enter. Waingard pays it no attention, and the manager leaves her to the map. A conversation goes on behind her and then she hears her name.

“Chief Inspector Waingard, this is the gardener you whose handy work you were admiring earlier.”

Waingard has the route committed to memory and she turns to the door. Fuck. The gardener She recognises him straight away. Her first shag. That horror of a rainy night in the crypt. Stephen whatever his fucking name was. And he recognises her too, but by the mistiness of his eyes he can’t place her. Context is king. She holds firm and plays it cool.

“Great work, I was saying to your boss here,” she says. “Especially at this time of year. You know your stuff.”

“Thanks,” Stephen says, vaguely. And then there’s his twitch, the veins pumping in his neck, the grinding of the teeth, the push out of the face, and Waingard is taking straight back to that moment of ugly climax in the rain like it’s the trauma of trench warfare. Still, for all the shit going on in her head at that moment, she holds it together on the outside but for a small sharp jerk at the first light of his twitch.

“Hey, you two don’t know each other, do you?” the manager says. Waingard needs to swerve this, and it looks as though, if something is dawning for Stephen, he doesn’t want to reflect on it either. “The Chief Inspector said she used to hang out with the boy who lived here. Stephen’s dad used to be foreman here back in the day. You lived here for a few years didn’t you, Stephen?”

“Yeah,” Stephen says. “But I don’t think…”

“We must have missed each other,” Waingard says. “Thanks for all your help,” she says to the manager. “I have to go.”

“Hope it was a help,” the manager says. “Stephen, you have five minutes to talk about the bank holiday?”

Waingard is out of there, knowing Stephen has placed her, even if he doesn’t remember things the way she does. He looked well, had filled out, had the complexion, and build of a man dedicated to outdoor labour, but that twitch almost stripped her to the bone.

She walks quickly – almost at a canter – down to the far end of the cemetery. It takes a while – the shock of seeing Stephen shook a little of her composure and with it the memory of exactly where the plot was – but she finds it. Dennis Wigley, died 1989. A New Testament quote but nothing too flashy. But there, carefully arranged, is fresh flowers. She checks the dates. Not a birthday or anniversary of his death.

She hears a voice. A name. She’s been half expecting it. Stephen has followed her down here, probably asking the manager where she was headed. She turns and he’s just getting of the back of a golf cart type buggy pulling a trailer.

“I knew it was you, but I’m confused,” Stephen says.

“Easily done, if I remember rightly,” Waingard says.

“The name. You must have gotten married. Fair enough. But you’re a copper?”

He keeps himself a good few yards back from her.

“I didn’t remember you,” Waingard says.

“Bullshit,” he smiles smugly.

“I don’t think about this place,” she says. “I don’t think about those times.”

He’s still smiling.

“Have it your way,” he says. He takes a few steps toward her. “But no way are you a fucking cop.”

“Would you like me to arrest you?”

He laughs. Nods.

“I remember,” Stephen says. “You were a kid when I met you, and a woman by the time you left.”

For that comment, she wants to punch him the throat, chuck him in an open grave as he grabs for his breath and leave him there to fate. But she doesn’t.

“I thought maybe you were visiting Glenn’s grave,” he says. “But then I asked, and the boss says you’re here looking into some dead guy on the train tracks. No fucking way.”

“You said that to him?” That would be a problem. She’s not sure right there at that moment what the solution would be.

“No, I wanted to talk to you first.”

“First?”

“See if we were remembering each other right.”

“And are we?”

“I don’t know; are we?”

She recognises that Stephen is doing a terrible job at blackmailing her into sleeping with him, and an even worse job of evaluating where this is a good idea or not.

They stand in silence for a few moments, the beautiful cold air of the late morning coming down the hill to the ravine-side.

She doesn’t any part of this, doesn’t want to be forced into going to the place where she has to say what she’s going to say.

“I don’t want to be nasty,” she says.

He smiles and she wants to fucking beat it off his face.

“Let’s get nasty,” he says.

“We both know why Glenn killed himself,” she says, and it’s gradual but his smile fades. “Would you want to have your name attached to him if that were to come out? The real reason. All those parties, all those times we all knew what his problems were. You want to be labelled like he can be with just a few phone calls from me to some friends at the local paper?”

His smile is now a snarl.

“I had nothing to do with any of that,” he says.

“Want to let other people make their minds up about you?” she says.

He’s like a child now. He shakes his head. He looks afraid. Which is a good thing, because he just saved himself a punch in the throat and a chuck in an open grave.