Emotionally Weird(72)

I was astonished. ‘ That was the “mingin’ little bastard”?’

‘One of them,’ he said gruffly, driving off in a horrible grinding of gears. He drew level with the girl and said, ‘I suppose you want a lift?’

‘No thanks,’ she said, ‘I’m fine.’

‘Just as well,’ Chick said, ‘because I’m not a bloody taxi service.’

The girl laughed.

‘You must have quite weak genes,’ I said to Chick.

Our next port of call was a funeral parlour in Stobswell, where we settled into what I now recognized as surveillance mode, that is to say, Chick stubbed out his cigarette, folded his newspaper and closed his eyes.

‘Is there anything you want me to keep an eye on?’ I asked him, and felt an absent and invisible Professor Cousins give a little shiver of horror.

‘Just anything fishy,’ Chick said. Within seconds he was snoring.

No-one came or went and nothing fishy occurred, I reported when Chick woke up again.

‘Right, we’d better go and have a look, then,’ Chick said, heaving himself out of the car.

I followed him into the funeral parlour, where we were greeted by a businesslike undertaker. What a shame Terri wasn’t with us, she would have thoroughly enjoyed this kind of visit. Undertaking was probably the perfect profession for her. The bland atmosphere in the funeral parlour would have disappointed her, though – it felt more like the Haze-freshened front office of a plumbers’ supplies merchant than a house of death.

‘Come to see the deceased,’ Chick said to the undertaker.

It turned out that the funeral parlour was affording temporary shelter to several deceased and Chick was unsure which one he was visiting. ‘The one from The Anchorage,’ he tried. The undertaker was polite but wary and it was only when Chick flashed his defunct warrant card that we were finally allowed to visit our chosen corpse.

‘This had better not be anyone I know,’ I warned Chick. I had never seen a dead body, never known anyone who had died—

Nora begins to count the dead on her fingers again, and I tell her to stop. She shrugs. She is drying the wet hanks of her hair in front of a fire made from sappy green wood salvaged from the beach.

We are waiting on a supper of potato soup to reach a semi-edible state and are passing the time by drinking some strange liquor which Nora has been concocting in a home-made still.

‘From?’ I ask dubiously. The drink looks and smells like the bottom of a stillwater pond.

~ Kelp.

The thin light of the fire is our only illumination tonight. There is no electricity here, of course. It went dead a long time ago. We are conserving our resources for we are down to our last few candles and have only one can of paraffin left. We need supplies but the seas are too heavy for the little Sea-Adventure . Nora’s seamanship is extraordinary and unexpected – she can row the little boat for miles without tiring, she can navigate by the stars, she knows every eddy and tide and current of these her home waters. All the years we lived by the sea I never once saw her on the water. Where did she learn about boats?

~ From my sister, she says, she was a water-baby.

Beautiful Effie who drowned on the day I was born? How do water-babies drown?

~ With some difficulty, Nora says grimly. You’re in the funeral parlour, she reminds me, like someone trying to change the subject, you’re about to see your first dead body—

Thankfully, the room was not brightly lit. I hovered by the door, suddenly terrified by the idea of looking death in the face. My heart started to thud so loudly I felt it must have been audible even to the corpse. Chick gazed at the contents of the coffin as unperturbed as if he were viewing fish in an aquarium. Had Chick seen a lot of dead bodies?

‘I’ve seen my share,’ he said tersely as if there was a quota for each of us. ‘Miss Anderson,’ he said to me as though introducing me to the body. I advanced cautiously towards the coffin. ‘She won’t bite,’ Chick said. One would very much hope not. Chick took me by the elbow to encourage me to move closer.

The coffin was lined with a kind of white ruff, like a soufflé dish, and the corpse of an old woman that nestled inside the ruff was, thankfully, unknown to me. The skin on the old woman’s face was like tallow candlewax and her thin lips were pursed in a way that suggested she had died with a complaint on her lips. Miss Anderson, I recalled, was a ‘crabbit wee wifie’ according to Mrs McCue.

‘So do you think someone killed her?’ I whispered to Chick.

‘Why would I think that?’ Chick said.

‘Well, why are you here then? And why were you at Senga’s funeral?’