Dead Men's s Boots

Like I said, Carla generally goes for older men, but when she finally took possession of her hand again I thought I could detect a little reluctance on her side at least.

I was half-hoping that Blondie would offer the same hand to me, for curiosity’s sake – he had a lot of poise for a guy ten years my junior, and I would have been interested in reading him, but he just stepped back and indicated the doors with a gesture that was almost a bow.

‘I presume everything is ready inside,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been able to check – I’ve got a lot to do elsewhere, and I’m running late already. And I wouldn’t presume to join you for the actual ceremony. But my very best wishes to you all – and especially to you, Mrs Gittings. If there’s anything I can do to help, please don’t hesitate to call.’

He took a card from his pocket and gave it to her with a decorous flourish. Carla took it without even looking at it. ‘Thank you,’ she murmured throatily.

The personable young man swept us all with a frank blue-eyed gaze, and then with a final murmur of farewell to Todd he headed off towards a small sleek black sports car parked at the other end of the drive. Todd watched him go, his attention taken up to the exclusion of everything else around him.

‘The owner?’ I said, as the bearers slid John’s coffin noisily onto the runners and drew the lawyer out of his reverie

Todd looked surprised for a moment, then he laughed with a slightly odd inflection. ‘No, Mister Castor. The owner is a man named Lionel Palance. He lives a long way from here, in Chingford Hatch, and he hardly ever leaves his house at all now. No, that was Peter Covington, a man who Mister Palance employs as a sort of – personal assistant.’ He rattled off these facts with a lawyer’s precision, as though it mattered that I should get the details straight in my head. Then he seemed to recollect himself, and his tone became more formal and solemn. ‘Mrs Gittings, shall we go in?’

We crossed the drive, following behind the bearers. Carla was still holding Covington’s card, because she’d left her handbag inside the car. ‘Fix,’ she said. ‘Would you . . . ?’ I took the card and secreted it away in the well-worn leather wallet where I keep my mostly useless credit cards.

The front doors of the crematorium opened onto a narrow entrance hall, almost long enough to count as a corridor, whose dark woods and vaulted ceiling confirmed the impression of age I’d got outside. Four huge inlaid panels dominated the space, two to each side of the door: a lion and an eagle to the left, an ox and a robed angel to the right. The symbols of the four evangelists. The carpet was royal blue, scuffed pale in places by the passage of many feet.

Ahead of us was another door. Black-suited men, pres citen pumably also hired by Todd, stood to either side of it and nodded respectfully to us as we passed. They looked like bouncers at a nightclub.

We walked though into a large high-ceilinged room that looked like any church hall anywhere, except for the dumbwaiter-like doors at the far end and the slightly sinister platform placed in front of them: a platform whose surface was a plain of slick, frictionless plastic rollers. I abreact to furnaces, probably because of having had to take my dad his lunch a couple of times when he worked behind the ovens in a bread factory. Places like this one always put me in mind of Satan’s locker room.

The bearers placed the coffin on the platform and stepped back, and at the same time a very short man in a black ecclesiastical robe came out through a curtained doorway off to one side. Todd went forward and had a brief murmured conversation with him, presumably along the lines of ‘This is the action replay, but let’s dispense with the slow motion and get it over with.’ The man nodded briskly. He had a slender face with a very long, sharp nose that made me think of a fox or a wolf. I’d seen a Japanese ivory once – a tiny figure, barely bigger than the top joint of my thumb – of a fox dressed as a priest, with a long robe and a staff and a pious expression: maybe it was unfair, because the nose must have been enough of a burden to bear in itself, but this young cleric brought the statuette vividly into my mind.

Todd had presumably told him that Carla didn’t want any prayers said, but he clearly wasn’t happy to let the occasion go by without ruminating on mortality just a little: force of habit, I figured, although technically he was wearing a surplice.

‘In the midst of life,’ he said, ‘we are in death.’ Two cheers and a thump on the tub for the Book of Common Prayer. Sitting in the front row, with Carla to my left and Todd to my right, I let my attention wander. Unfortunately it wandered to the furnace doors, where it found no comfort and shied away again pretty fast.

I was still feeling tired and rough: worse than I had when I woke up, if anything.