Chapter 58
Outside the chapel, the assembled crowds have dispelled slightly throughout the sunlit grounds – dark suits standing out like shadows on the areas of bright, neatly-tended grass.
Jasmina drifts between them, shaking hands and accepting condolences, until, after a while, she spots the two police officers standing to one side.
She presumes they are both officers, anyway.
It is the detective she reported her husband missing to, and he is standing with a woman who looks very much like him.
They are talking quietly between themselves.
She touches her sister’s arm. ‘Excuse me for a moment.’
‘Do you want me to – ?’
‘No, no. I shall be fine.’
She approaches the officers, remembering the man’s name just as she reaches them.
‘Detective … Hicks?’ she says.
He looks up. He looks haunted.
‘Yes. This is my partner, Detective Fellowes.’
‘Thank you both for coming.’
‘Not at all,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry for your loss. We both are. I’m so sorry that it didn’t turn out differently.’
‘It is not your fault.’
Hicks appears awkward at that; he looks down at the ground for a moment. She has no idea why, when he did everything he could, but some people are like that. They take on too much weight. They take on all the weight they can see, even when it does not belong to them.
‘What about the man?’ she asks. ‘The man who did this?’
‘James Miller.’ He looks up. ‘The man who did this is in prison. The man who planned it was called Tony Wilkinson. He took his own life during his arrest.’
Again, that awkwardness – but of a different kind this time.
She understands instinctively that Hicks saw Tony Wilkinson die, and that the sight weighs heavily on him.
She feels sorry for him, although in many ways it is the best possible outcome.
She does not mourn Wilkinson; he deserved to die.
But that does not mean someone else deserves to have killed him.
‘I am sorry,’ she says. ‘Was there a … reason? Some explanation for why he did what he did?’
‘We’re not sure.’ Hicks shakes his head. ‘We think his motivation was to murder his wife. To hide that crime amongst others so we didn’t realise he was responsible. She was pregnant, you see … we think he didn’t want the child.’
Jasmina frowns. It makes no sense to her that someone might not want their child. She has spent years doing nothing but.
‘But why … ?’
Hicks misunderstands the question. ‘Why not just leave? Again, we’re not sure.
He worked in the military as a janitor. He wouldn’t have been able to keep the job; it wouldn’t have paid enough to support a child, whether he was with the mother or not.
He would have had to find something else.
And we think working in the military meant a lot to him. ’
‘Why?’
‘His father was in the army, you see. He was a code-breaker in the war. But Wilkinson failed the entrance exams on medical grounds. He had several early episodes of self-harm on file. And he saw his father die and was hospitalised with an overdose just afterwards. When he applied, he was judged psychologically unfit to serve. But it seems that he was trying to, in his own way.’
He goes on, painting an incomplete picture of the man ultimately responsible for Gregor’s murder.
A man wanting to be like his father, but also perhaps competing with him.
A man wrestling incompatible memories, desires and needs.
A man who, ultimately, could not be fully understood from the outside.
Jasmina understands that much. Wilkinson’s motivations and reasons will remain sealed in a room to which they have no access; they can only guess and suppose. Even if those reasons were laid out, plain to see, what would it really matter? They would still not be enough. The effect remains the same.
In the end, the effect is all that matters.
‘We don’t know.’ Hicks looks pained. ‘I realise it doesn’t make much sense. I wish it did. I wish we could explain it all.’
‘It does not always make sense,’ she says.
Hicks looks even more troubled at that. He seems to consider something. Then he gathers himself together. ‘I also wanted to tell you that I’m sorry about what happened to your daughter.’
Emmeline. The mention stings a little more than usual today. But still – it is an old wound, and he means well. She nods once.
‘Thank you.’
‘It wasn’t right what happened. I’m sorry.’
‘It is not your fault. What is right is rarely the same as what happens. All we can do is try to live with it.’
Emmeline’s face is in her mind.
‘Do you have children, Detective?’
‘Yes,’ he says immediately.
‘Well, you must look after them as best you can. It is all you can do.’
He looks at her and then nods.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I will.’
That night, Jasmina lies alone in the huge, empty bed.
Her sister offered to share it, but she refused, so Corinna is now sleeping downstairs on the settee.
Jasmina left her slumbering, gently placing a blanket over her before retiring upstairs.
And although they are both old, she remembers how young her sister looked in repose.
Sleep erases lines, restores the peace of childhood.
It soothes troubles, however transiently.
If only she could have that. But sleep escapes her.
A lamp glows softly on the bedside table. Beside that is the photograph of her daughter, now joined by the framed image of her husband she chose for the funeral. They are together now, in whatever way they can be. Even if that is simply here, on her table and in her thoughts.
And before the photographs, the candle.
Jasmina stares at it for a long time. And then, because she cannot sleep right now, she slides out of bed and searches the drawers for the box of matches she knows is there.
The match makes a crisp, fluttering noise as it strikes and flares: the flame confused and frantic for a second – then suddenly shy and vulnerable.
She cups it gently, protectively, and lowers it to the wick.
There is a tiny crackle as it takes. The flame grows, while a single spot of dust lights on the wick, glowing bright yellow before winking away seconds later.
Jasmina shakes the match out, then licks her fingers and cools the tip.
She lies back down on the bed and watches the candle burn.
As it begins to melt, she smells the honey her husband infused into the wax.
It was cast at a single moment, this candle – the evening of their daughter’s murder – but it seems now to enfold an even deeper history: a string of cause and effect that stretches across the past. It begins many years ago, with the paramedic who saved her husband’s life; it passes through the horrific evening when they learned Emmeline was dead; and it ends today, with the combination of circumstances that have led to this, its lighting.
Jasmina watches the smoke drifting up from the flame, history unravelling in grey spirals in the air.
It is impenetrable to her. But then … perhaps that is how it works.
One moment leads inexorably to another, everything built on what precedes it, but there is no obvious reason or purpose behind it.
Any pattern will never be discernible to the human eye, and none of it will make sense in a way that matters to us.
But that does not mean there is no pattern.
It does not mean that none of this makes sense.
All it means is that, from the inside, we cannot see it.
Jasmina closes her eyes, surrounded by honey and history.
Yes, she thinks. That is how it is.
That is how it works.