A Dark Matter Read online

  A DARK MATTER

  DOUG JOHNSTONE

  This one is for Chris Brookmyre, who has

  more faith in me than I have in myself.

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  1 JENNY

  2 JENNY

  3 HANNAH

  4 DOROTHY

  5 HANNAH

  6 JENNY

  7 DOROTHY

  8 HANNAH

  9 DOROTHY

  10 HANNAH

  11 DOROTHY

  12 JENNY

  13 HANNAH

  14 DOROTHY

  15 JENNY

  16 DOROTHY

  17 HANNAH

  18 JENNY

  19 HANNAH

  20 DOROTHY

  21 JENNY

  22 HANNAH

  23 DOROTHY

  24 JENNY

  25 HANNAH

  26 JENNY

  27 DOROTHY

  28 JENNY

  29 HANNAH

  30 JENNY

  31 DOROTHY

  32 JENNY

  33 HANNAH

  34 HANNAH

  35 DOROTHY

  36 JENNY

  37 HANNAH

  38 DOROTHY

  39 JENNY

  40 HANNAH

  41 DOROTHY

  42 HANNAH

  43 JENNY

  44 DOROTHY

  45 JENNY

  46 HANNAH

  47 JENNY

  48 DOROTHY

  49 JENNY

  50 HANNAH

  51 DOROTHY

  52 JENNY

  53 DOROTHY

  54 HANNAH

  55 JENNY

  56 DOROTHY

  57 HANNAH

  58 JENNY

  59 DOROTHY

  60 HANNAH

  61 JENNY

  62 HANNAH

  63 DOROTHY

  64 JENNY

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  1

  JENNY

  Her dad took much longer to burn than she expected.

  Jenny watched the deep flames lick his body, curl around his chest and crotch, whisper in his ear. His thin hair crisped then turned to smoke, grey sinewy strands reaching into the mottled sky. A sprig of juniper in his hand caught alight and threw out blue sparks, and Jenny smelt the scent, reminding her of gin. The spruce and pine logs packed around Jim’s body were blazing bright and hard. The fire had destroyed his suit already and his skin was tightening around the bones as moisture evaporated from his body.

  But still, it seemed to take a long time.

  The funeral pyre wasn’t much more than a makeshift, oversized barbecue, two rows of concrete breezeblocks with a metal grill suspended between them. Underneath was a long silver tray borrowed from the embalming room, which they would use to gather his remains once the pieces were small enough to fall through the grate. Archie had been working on the pyre in the garden ever since Dorothy announced what her husband’s last wishes were.

  It was contrary, Jenny had to admit. Her dad spent forty-five years orchestrating the funerals of thousands of people, arranging music and flowers, orders of service, funeral cars and sermons. Making sure every detail was right for the bereaved, ensuring all rival factions got what they wanted and the deceased was sent off in style. And yet his own funeral was the opposite. A pyre in their back garden, no speeches, no sermons, no friends or flowers or ceremony, just the five of them standing next to the throbbing heat of an illegal fire.

  Jenny looked away from the flames to the others standing around the fire. Her mum stood at the head of the pyre. A dancing mote of ash landed on her flowery yellow dress and she flicked at it with a bright fingernail. She brushed a strand of wavy grey hair from her forehead and lifted her face to the flames, eyes closed, like she was sunbathing.

  Next to Dorothy, Hannah and Indy had their arms linked together, Hannah leaning her head on her girlfriend’s shoulder. They were so striking together, Hannah’s pale features and long, black hair the opposite of Indy’s brown skin and blue bob. Jenny wondered what was going through her daughter’s mind as her grandpa’s remains went up in smoke. It still seemed crazy to Jenny that she had a grown-up daughter in a relationship.

  The flames were higher now, black smoke stretching into the air. The smell of pine and spruce made Jenny think of Christmas. Dorothy had placed bunches of herbs on the corpse before they began, and now bay and sage came to Jenny’s nose, mingling with the smell of burnt flesh to remind her of Sunday roast dinners.

  She looked to the far end of the pyre, beyond Jim’s melting feet, and exchanged a look with Archie. He was busying himself with the logistics of the process, peering underneath, checking that the grate was holding up to the weight and temperatures, using a long pair of tongs to replace a fallen log by Jim’s shin. Jenny saw an iron poker and rake on the grass behind him, for sifting through the ashes once the flames had died.

  Archie was short and thick, a heavy brown beard and shaved head, the way he moved suggesting something of a Tolkien character. He was the same age as Jenny but seemed older. He’d been Jim and Dorothy’s right-hand man for ten years, but it felt like he’d always been here. Archie was one of Dorothy’s strays, she had a habit of taking in lost souls, becoming an anchor in their lives. He had appeared one day to arrange his mother’s funeral. Over the next month he was often seen at cemeteries and cremations, crashing the funerals of strangers, trying to feel connected. At one in Craigmillar Castle Park, Dorothy approached him with a proposition, and within two weeks he was driving the hearse in a suit, changing into overalls to hammer together coffins, eventually taking over the embalming under Jim’s training. And Dorothy stuck by him when the details about his condition came to light. She sought a second opinion, kept an eye on his medication and therapy sessions, and trusted him around the place, which went a long way to saving his life.

  The same went for Indy, another stray who pitched up three years ago to bury her Hindu parents, dentists killed in a car accident, leaving behind a rudderless daughter. But Dorothy saw something in her, and a month later she was answering phones, gathering information from clients and sorting admin. Now she was training to become a funeral director in her own right. Meanwhile she had slipped her way into Hannah’s heart and persuaded her to move into the flat she’d been left by her mum and dad, ten minutes’ walk away on Argyle Place.

  Jenny stared at her dad as he charred and shrivelled, his essence mingling with the flames and smoke, dissipating into the universe. Part of her couldn’t believe she would never hear his dumb jokes again, that terrible vampire accent he put on sometimes to talk about death. The way he would wink at her, his little girl, during services, at the most inappropriate moments, making her cover her mouth and leave the room she’d sneaked into, because death was fascinating to kids.

  But that fascination waned, being brought up around funerals began to take its toll. As a teenager she distanced herself, left home as soon as she could, studied journalism, worked, fell in love with Craig, had Hannah, divorced Craig, all the time staying away from death as much as possible.

  But now death was back in her life.

  She looked around. Tall oaks and pines lined the far wall of the garden, blocking the neighbours’ view. Over to her left was the open garage with the silver hearse parked inside, next to the workshop and embalming room. Those rooms adjoined the main house behind her, the large, three-storey Victorian sprawl that had been the Skelf family home for a hundred years. It had doubled as a funeral director’s for all that time, and a private investigator’s for the last decade, the businesses taking up the ground floor, the family living on the two floors above.

  There was a rustle in the bushes to Jenny’s right
and Schrödinger padded out from the foliage. The most recent of Dorothy’s strays, Schrödinger was a ginger tabby with the wiry body of a street cat and a supreme air of confidence. The name was Hannah’s idea and it stuck. As he got closer, Jenny saw something in his mouth. A bird, flashes of red, white and black on the face, yellow under the wing. A goldfinch.

  Schrödinger never usually came near Jenny, she was a stranger round here, but he walked past the others and placed the finch at her feet. The cat glanced at the fire enveloping Jim’s body, sucking the energy from him, then wandered back into the bushes.

  Jenny looked down at the goldfinch, blood smeared across the puncture wounds on its chest and throat.

  Another dead body to dispose of.

  She scooped it up in her hand and threw it onto the pyre, watching as its feathers burst into flames. She wiped the bird’s blood on her jeans and breathed deeply.

  2

  JENNY

  Dorothy raised her glass. ‘To Jim.’

  The three women clinked tumblers and sipped Highland Park. Jenny felt the burn as it went down. Any half-decent gin was her usual drink, but Dad loved whisky and this was for him. She placed her glass on the kitchen table and ran a finger over the grain of the oak, thought about the thousands of meals she’d eaten here as a kid.

  Dorothy took a gulp of whisky and played with a clay dish in the middle of the table, something Hannah made at primary school with the yin and yang symbols on it. She made it for Dorothy, even back then interested in her gran’s worldview, the balance and connectedness of the world. The dish had a used-up tea-light in it, and Jenny thought of her dad in the garden, smouldering away as they sat here. She took another drink.

  Archie was still down there tending the fire. When he’d begun using the poker on Jim’s body the three women had adjourned upstairs to the kitchen, Indy slipping off to look after reception. The same front desk dealt with both funeral and investigator businesses, different numbers to call but they came through to the same phone.

  Jenny looked round the large open-plan kitchen. They were at the old table next to the functional kitchen stuff – cooker, fridge-freezer, cupboards – running along two walls. The adjacent wall was taken up by two large bay windows looking out over Bruntsfield Links. From here Jenny could see the crenellations of Edinburgh Castle ahead and the dome of Arthur’s Seat to the right. In between was the tree-lined park, a stream of students and school pupils crisscrossing from Bruntsfield to Marchmont and back the other way.

  The final wall of the room had large whiteboards from waist to head height. One had ‘FD’ in thick letters across the top, the other ‘PI’. The kitchen doubled as the ops room, from which both businesses had been run for the last decade, since Jim surprised everyone by announcing he intended to expand out of the death industry into private investigations. Maybe it didn’t surprise everyone, Dorothy didn’t bat an eye, but Jenny struggled to get her head around it, and Jim evaded any questions from her.

  The funeral whiteboard was the busier of the two at the moment. Four names were written in black marker under ‘FD’ – Gina O’Donnell, John Duggan, Arthur Ford and Ursula Bonetti – all in Dorothy’s neat hand. Beneath the names were various details for each. Where the body was to be picked up and whether it had been done yet, so one said RIE for the hospital at Little France, another read Marie Curie for the hospice in Frogston, the third was the city mortuary. The mortuary meant the police were involved and a post mortem had been done. Jenny was surprised that she remembered all this, despite never being involved in the business and not having lived here for twenty-five years.

  Under each body’s pick-up information were the time, date and venue for the funeral, a spread of churches, cemeteries and crematoriums across the city. Warriston Crematorium for one, Morningside Cemetery for another. There were other shorthand acronyms for each service, how many cars were needed, who the celebrant was, what type of service. On the wall next to the whiteboard was a large map of Edinburgh covered in different coloured pins. A map of the dead of the city. Jenny imagined the pattern that would emerge if you joined all the dots together.

  In comparison the PI board was pretty empty. It was less regimented too, a bit like those boards in police dramas but without the pictures of mutilated women with red lines to serial killers or terrorist suspects. Instead there was a name at the top, Jacob Glassman, with another name, Susan Raymond, written underneath. Then some scribbles in Jim’s handwriting that Jenny couldn’t decipher. She stared at the writing, a thread connecting her dad to a world that was trundling on without him. Outside the window, school kids were kicking a football around, an old woman walked her sausage dog, two cyclists in Lycra zipped along the path to the Meadows, none of them aware of the man crumbling to ashes in the garden downstairs. The only dad she would ever have.

  ‘I can’t believe Grandpa’s dead,’ Hannah said. She held her tumbler to her chest. Not much of a drinker, something Jenny was happy about. Such a different attitude to alcohol now in Scotland. As a teenager, Jenny was sneaking half-bottles out onto the Links to drink with her mates, Dorothy and Jim oblivious. It had left her with a legacy of drink in her veins. Not a problem, she wouldn’t call it that, but alcohol was background radiation in her life, a trace of it in everything.

  She finished her Highland Park and poured another for her and Dorothy.

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  Dorothy breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, a considered movement from decades of yoga.

  ‘He had a good life,’ she said, a hint of her Californian accent still there after all these years.

  ‘I’m not ready for him to go,’ Jenny said.

  Dorothy leaned back and her chair creaked. ‘There’s nothing we can do.’

  Jenny shook her head and sipped her whisky.

  ‘What was that all about, anyway?’ she said, angling her glass towards the door.

  ‘What?’ Dorothy said.

  ‘The human barbecue downstairs.’

  Dorothy shrugged. ‘It’s what he wanted. He was sick of the formal stuff, the ceremony of it.’

  Hannah frowned. ‘But he always said people needed the rules and structure to give them closure.’

  ‘Maybe he thought we didn’t need that,’ Dorothy said.

  Jenny wanted to kick her chair back and scream out of the window, lift her tumbler and smash it against the funeral board, splatter whisky over those other deaths. She sat still.

  ‘But it was illegal,’ she said. She knew enough about the funeral business to know that burning a body in your back garden was not OK.

  ‘No one will know,’ Dorothy said. ‘Or care.’

  ‘You think?’ Jenny said. She hated how she sounded, like the bratty teenager she once was, sitting at this same table, moaning that Dorothy and Jim wouldn’t let her go to some all-night rave at Ingliston with two thirty-year-old men she barely knew. Here she was, a forty-five-year-old divorcee with a grown-up daughter, and she still felt like a brat. Maybe it was Dad’s funeral bringing it all to the surface, or maybe it was simply being back in this house of death.

  ‘I know this is hard on you,’ Dorothy said. ‘Both of you.’

  Jenny felt ashamed. This was Dorothy’s husband of fifty years she was saying goodbye to, they had all lost a massive part of their lives. It wasn’t a competition.

  ‘And for you, Mum,’ she said, reaching her hand across the table.

  Dorothy chewed the inside of her cheek and took Jenny’s hand. Her skin was still soft at the age of seventy. She seemed much younger than that, and always had a look on her face, even now, suggesting she was at peace with the world.

  Hannah put her hand on top of Jenny’s and Dorothy’s, which made it feel like they were a gang about to execute a heist. They each pulled away just as the doorbell rang downstairs.

  Dorothy sighed and pushed back her chair, but Hannah put a hand out to stop her.

  ‘Indy can handle it,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

&n
bsp; Dorothy hesitated then nodded.

  Hannah was so in love it made Jenny’s heart swell. Jenny had only felt the overwhelming power of love like that once before, with Craig. And, well.

  She heard muffled conversation downstairs, then steady footsteps and a tap on the open kitchen door.

  ‘Dad, you came.’ Hannah jumped up with a scrape of her chair and ran over to Craig standing in the doorway. He held a bunch of red lilies and had a demure expression. Hannah put her arms around him and squeezed, and he hugged her back.

  ‘Hi, Angel,’ he said.

  Hannah released him and he looked towards the table and nodded. ‘Jen.’

  ‘Craig.’

  He walked into the room, offering the lilies. ‘These are for you, Dorothy, I’m sorry about Jim. Hannah told me and I wanted to pay my respects. He was a good man.’

  He glanced at Jenny and she rolled her eyes. Damn it, he still looked good. He never seemed to thicken around the middle like most guys his age, and the flecks of grey through his hair made him look better somehow. Maybe being a dad again to little Sophia was keeping him young, or maybe it was the sex with Fiona, the blonde dynamo who was now the second Mrs McNamara. That was the most annoying thing, that he’d cheated on Jenny with someone the same age, a diminutive Reese Witherspoon type, go-getting and ambitious.

  Enough. She resisted the urge to say something sarcastic. It was ten years ago and he’d always been a good dad to Hannah. None of which made it easier.

  ‘They’re beautiful,’ Dorothy said, accepting the flowers and a kiss on the cheek. She fetched a vase from a cupboard. ‘Stay for a drink.’

  Craig looked at Jenny. ‘I don’t want to impose.’

  Dorothy poured water into the vase and arranged the lilies. Jenny could smell the flowers, powerful and musky. Lilies always struck her as masculine.

  ‘Stay, Dad,’ Hannah said.

  Craig looked at Jenny with his eyebrows raised, waiting for her to say OK.

  She swept a magnanimous hand across the table. ‘Sit.’

  When he first told Jenny he was having an affair and leaving her, it almost killed her trying to stay civil in front of Hannah. But she was damned if she was going to let hate and bitterness eat her up, and she didn’t want all that toxic shit infecting her daughter. As the years went by it became easier, much to Jenny’s surprise. You could get used to anything, it seemed. But she still had to bite her tongue, stop herself becoming the vicious harpy, the wronged woman. Of course, that let him off the hook.