The Big Chill Read online

  ‘Maybe,’ Dorothy said. ‘You could find out the psychiatrist’s name for me.’

  Thomas moved his tongue around his teeth as if he was thinking about it, but she knew he wasn’t.

  ‘Just the name,’ she said, innocent eyes.

  ‘So this was just a little chat between friends,’ he said. ‘No ulterior motive at all.’

  16

  JENNY

  She watched as Liam slid out of bed and pulled his shorts on. She reached out and ran a finger down his spine, across the muscles of his back.

  He looked back and threw her a smile. ‘I have to get back to work.’

  He stood and put his shirt on, then the suit. He’d come over on his lunch break, although they didn’t eat anything. One of the benefits of being self-employed for Jenny, and having your bedroom in the same building you worked in. She looked out of her window now, cherry trees, crows hopping from branch to branch, sun trying its best through the clouds.

  She looked back at Liam. She didn’t want to be the woman lying in bed, asking the man to stay, but she wanted him to hang around all the same. She didn’t know what this was between them, but it was something. She cared about him, believed he cared about her too, and he made her come. Several times.

  She got up and ran a hand across his bum as she went to her clothes on the floor. She dressed quickly so he didn’t see how inelegant she was, the creases of her belly as she bent over. She straightened up and saw that he’d been watching the whole time.

  She walked him downstairs, the vague smell of sex lingering.

  Indy raised her eyebrows at reception. ‘Nice lunch?’

  Jenny smiled. ‘Great, thanks.’

  Indy widened her eyes at the lie. Liam seemed oblivious, either being discreet or he really didn’t twig that Indy knew.

  ‘Call me,’ he said, kissing Jenny longer than necessary.

  She’d wanted to use him as a sounding board for this shit with Craig. But when he’d arrived she couldn’t bring herself to go into all that. Talking was useless anyway, talking about the bad things in your life just made you focus on the bad things. And she didn’t want Liam to think she was still hung up on Craig. But that was stupid, Liam had just divorced, he understood how an ex was still a big part of your life even if you fucking hated them.

  Liam eventually pulled away, then he was gone.

  ‘You look happy,’ Indy said.

  ‘Don’t tell Hannah.’

  ‘She’ll be glad to know you’re getting some.’

  ‘It’s more complicated than that.’

  ‘I don’t think it is,’ Indy said. ‘You don’t give her enough credit sometimes.’

  Jenny was glad she could talk to her daughter’s girlfriend. She tried to imagine a similar conversation with a boyfriend if Hannah were straight.

  ‘She’s much smarter than me,’ Jenny said. ‘You both are.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Indy laughed. ‘Gen Z will save you all.’

  The phone rang and Indy put a hand on the receiver.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Archie wanted a word with you or Dorothy.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  Indy angled her head towards the embalming room as she answered the call.

  Jenny walked along the corridor then stopped in the doorway.

  ‘Christ, Archie,’ she said quietly.

  Archie had a young girl on the embalming table, maybe ten years old, and he was reconstructing her skull. The skin and scalp were pulled away from the head, the brain in a tray on the trolley next to the table. There was a lot of damage to one side of the brain, the same with the shattered skull bone. Dead bodies didn’t faze Jenny but a ten-year-old girl was hard to take.

  Archie looked up. He was trying to glue a piece of skull into place, holding it with gloved hands, his mouth a thin line.

  ‘Evie Brockhurst,’ he said. ‘Hit by a bus crossing the road.’

  Jenny walked in, could see flesh and bone, the empty eye sockets. The rest of the body seemed mostly unharmed, two arms, two legs, torso intact, just a long bruise along her shoulder.

  ‘Fuck,’ Jenny said. ‘How are the parents coping?’

  ‘Dorothy says they’re not.’

  Jenny thought of Hannah at that age. She remembered grabbing her arm as she stepped into the road on Portobello High Street, a white van speeding past. Remembered catching her as she stumbled on Arthur’s Seat one time. If something had gone differently, a moment of imbalance, a gust of wind, Hannah could’ve been on this slab.

  Jenny couldn’t take her eyes from Evie’s skull, Archie’s delicate touch as he fitted another piece of skull into place. Jenny had watched him work like this before, this was above and beyond the usual embalming stuff, and there weren’t many in the country who could do cranial reconstruction. What was missing from the skull could be replicated by plaster, various methods of keeping the skull’s integrity, hopefully making her look in the coffin like the girl she was when alive. Their job was much harder now there were so many open caskets. That hardly ever happened when Jenny was growing up but the trend was growing all the time.

  Jenny reached out and touched Evie’s cold hand, the delicate fingers, chipped nail varnish, skin shrunk on the bone. Archie hadn’t embalmed her yet, reconstruction work first. Eventually these hands would look more lifelike. Not that it would make any difference to Evie’s parents.

  Jenny rubbed the back of Evie’s hand and swallowed. ‘Indy said you wanted to speak about something.’

  Archie nodded, didn’t look up, concentrating on the work. ‘That’s right.’

  Jenny wondered about Archie’s Cotard’s, if it was ever really under control. Working with dead bodies must be bad for him, but he said the opposite, that it helped him come to terms with the fact he wasn’t dead himself.

  ‘So what is it?’ she said.

  ‘I have another funeral to go on the books.’

  ‘OK.’

  They sometimes got referrals from friends, word spread in a small city like Edinburgh and if you did a good job on someone’s funeral it led to more work.

  ‘Who is it?’ Jenny said.

  Archie paused, still holding a piece of Evie’s skull in place, his other hand cradling her head. He kept his eyes on what he was doing.

  ‘My mum,’ he said.

  17

  HANNAH

  She was back in the lecture theatre she’d fainted in, this time in a cosmology class with Dr Harper, a grey middle-aged man with a paunch who thought a dreary monotone was the best way to convey the wonders of the universe. Having said that, Hannah also hated the Brian Cox approach, standing on a windswept mountain saying we’re all made of stardust. That was true, of course, but so banal. We all come from the big bang, but where do we end up? Scientists used to think we’d collapse into nothing, a big crunch, but recent evidence suggested the universe might expand forever, constantly cooling until the massive expanse was too cold to support life. Matter would be so spread out and energy leaking into black holes that we would end in a meaningless nothingness, a void of existence, a big chill. Physicists sometimes called that ‘heat death’ but Hannah preferred the big chill.

  Dr Harper was talking about dark matter and dark energy. The start of this course was fun, finding out how galaxies were made, but as it had gone on it became clear how little we actually know. The fact that all we can detect of the known universe is less than five percent of it seemed like a massive cop out. Then again, with her many-worlds idea for Mel, maybe those other dimensions were the dark energy we couldn’t detect.

  Hannah had plenty of her own dark energy. She saw Xander across the room, head on the desk, eyes closed. She looked around and felt lonely. She’d thought she was part of a team in the physics department, but Mel had been her only real friend on the course. Now she was out in the cold. And she didn’t mind, to be honest. She resented the other students, still alive and coming to boring lectures, still going out socialising and studying together and going to that stupid Quantum
Club that she joined because of Mel but she’d never been back to because it seemed pointless.

  Yeah, she had plenty of her own dark energy, thank you.

  Dr Harper was droning on about quintessence theory, a theoretical model for dark energy, a scalar field that tied into observations about the universe’s acceleration. Possibly a fifth fundamental force, but there was no evidence for it yet. Hannah had got excited about physics at school because it seemed to provide answers. The neatness of solving an equation, the perfect way classical mechanics could be applied to everyday problems and give elegant yet simple solutions. But this stuff was pie in the sky, the closer you looked at the fundamental nature of things, the fewer answers you got.

  She could relate. More dark energy.

  Dr Harper checked his watch and finished and everyone woke up, got their stuff together and left. She watched everyone go, daring them to make eye contact, but no one did. She was the woman who fainted, the woman whose dad killed their classmate, the woman who worked at a funeral director’s and private investigator’s. Weirdo.

  She packed her bag and left. Checked her phone then decided to go and see Hugh Fowler, what the hell. He was easy to talk to, not like most people.

  She pulled Jimmy X’s notebook from her bag. She hadn’t tried to get any more out of it last night but it had a hold over her, as if there were secrets inside. Maybe just more dark energy swirling around her head, penetrating her body millions of times a second like cosmic rays, the dark neutrinos stripping all hope from her quarks, her atoms, her soul.

  Jeeze, she needed to lighten up.

  She took the stairs up two flights to the top floor, looking for room 442. One side of the corridor was small offices, grad students sharing three or four to a room, members of staff in pairs, senior staff with rooms of their own. The other side was labs – optics, condensed matter, fluid dynamics. First years in protective glasses fiddling with light sources or clamps, computers in a row.

  She walked through swing doors, found the room, knocked and waited. No answer.

  Knocked again.

  Waited.

  She remembered being on this floor six months ago, walking into another lecturer’s office and finding pictures of him with Mel. She’d exposed him, thinking he’d killed her, but he was only having sex with her. His wife threw him out, the university dropped him and he killed himself.

  Dark energy.

  She knocked a third time and listened.

  Heard a gentle thud.

  ‘Professor Fowler?’ She swallowed. ‘Hugh?’

  She cleared her throat and looked up and down the corridor, then turned the handle and opened the door.

  He looked asleep, head on the desk, but something about the way his arms were positioned made her step inside. She glanced round the room, shelves of textbooks, notepads, journals. A poster of the Milky Way on one wall.

  She stepped up to the desk. ‘Hugh?’

  It was only then she noticed the froth at his mouth.

  ‘Hugh.’

  In one hand he held a gold medal with something engraved on it. In his other was a small vial.

  No, no, no.

  She touched his hand, still warm. Felt for a pulse, pushed hard with her fingertips, as if she could conjure it with force.

  Nothing.

  ‘What the hell,’ she said.

  She lifted the vial from his fingers and held it up. ‘Hydrocyanic acid’ written on it. She caught a whiff of almonds and felt dizzy, her head spinning, tongue sweating, bile rising in her throat. She dropped the vial and pulled her jumper over her nose and mouth, backed away from Hugh and the desk and the poison, bumped into the doorframe as she staggered, nauseous and disoriented, then out through the doorway until she hit the opposite wall and sank to her knees.

  18

  DOROTHY

  The whiteboards were getting full. Dorothy stepped back holding the marker pen and stumbled over Einstein lurking behind her. She apologised to the dog and scritched under his chin. The funeral board had more names, Walter Veitch, Evie Brockhurst and now Archie’s mum, Veronica Kidd. Dorothy felt awful that she hadn’t seen Archie since the news. She was frustrated that Jenny hadn’t got all the details of Veronica’s death, just that it was cancer, they had to pick the body up from the Marie Curie hospice in Frogston. That made Dorothy even more annoyed, that Archie hadn’t spoken about what was happening with his mum. It was up to him, of course, but after all they’d been through she was sad he hadn’t confided in her. She wondered if he would do the embalming.

  When Jim died he hadn’t wanted embalming, eschewing all the funeral protocols to be cremated on a pyre in the back garden. Dorothy wondered about that, Jim spending his life caring for the bereaved, carrying out the traditions only to abandon them for himself. Christ, if anyone knew about grief it was Dorothy, and her heart ached right now for Jim, and for Archie, what he was going through.

  ‘What are you thinking, Mum?’

  Jenny sitting at the table brought Dorothy back to reality. She turned.

  ‘There’s so much death.’

  Jenny laughed. ‘We’re a funeral director’s.’

  Dorothy smiled. ‘I know, it’s just…’

  She sat down opposite and tapped the marker pen against the table.

  ‘Who’s Abi Livingstone?’ Jenny said.

  Dorothy followed her gaze to the PI board, where Dorothy had written Abi’s name. She had the names of Abi’s mum, stepdad and biological dad underneath.

  ‘One of my drummer girls,’ she said. ‘She’s missing. I think she’s gone to find her biological dad. At least I hope she has.’

  ‘The parents hired you?’

  Dorothy shook her head. ‘I just need to find out.’

  Jenny frowned. ‘Like your joyrider.’

  Jenny had already got Dorothy up to speed on the car owner. She reached over and plucked a loose hair from Dorothy’s cardigan, and they both watched it drift to the floor. Dorothy still thought of herself as blonde but she’d been grey for a long time. The evidence of her body contradicted her mental image of herself, her aches and pains doing their best to remind her exactly how old she was. Maybe it was time to give up on all this, the mysteries, the missing and unknown, the dead and grieving. But she couldn’t give up, she would die if she retired, and that realisation came with its own deep melancholy.

  ‘So what did Thomas say about Craig?’

  ‘He’s going to try to get us a meeting with Craig’s psychiatrist.’

  ‘Not the solicitor?’

  Dorothy rolled the pen between her hands. ‘He doesn’t think that’s possible.’

  ‘And my assault charge?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Dorothy said.

  She felt guilty, unable to protect her daughter. That never went away. She heard the front door slam then footsteps up the stairs. Hannah appeared in the doorway, eyes puffy, cheeks red.

  ‘What’s up?’ Dorothy said, already dreading the answer, feeling it tighten her stomach.

  Hannah walked over and took the marker pen from her hand, went to the PI board and wrote ‘Prof Hugh Fowler’ and underneath, ‘hydrocyanic acid’.

  Jenny stood up. ‘What’s that?’

  Hannah burst into tears.

  19

  JENNY

  Ann Street was tasteful, rich Edinburgh, two rows of neat Georgian terraces in Stockbridge, some running to three floors and a basement, costing a packet but not ostentatious. Tasteful shrubberies on the steps leading to front doors, the original setts on the road, top-of-the-range family cars parked in the street.

  Jenny found number eleven and rang the doorbell. Fiona answered looking bedraggled but somehow still elegant. She was wearing a St Andrews Uni sweatshirt that was too big, denim shorts, bare feet.

  ‘You came,’ she said, voice flat.

  She walked inside, which Jenny took as an invite. She glanced up the spiral staircase and followed Fiona’s tight ass into the living room, where a huge glass of white wine was sit
ting on a teak coffee table, almost empty, ring marks on the wood.

  It was 10.00 am.

  ‘You want one?’ Fiona said, lifting a bottle from the floor and topping up.

  ‘No. Thanks.’

  ‘The sun’s past the yardarm somewhere, right?’ Fiona said, swigging.

  Jenny looked at the abstract art on the walls, the stylish open-plan kitchen.

  Fiona flumped into a cream sofa. Wine spilled on her hand, which she sucked at. ‘Sit.’

  Jenny sat opposite, ran her tongue around her mouth.

  ‘We’re fucked,’ Fiona said, and took another drink.

  Jenny raised her eyebrows waiting for more.

  Fiona waved the glass around the room. ‘A PR company stands or falls on its reputation. Can you imagine what Craig’s bullshit has done to the company?’

  Jenny sat with her hands in her lap.

  ‘But we deserve it,’ Fiona said. ‘I mean, what does fucking PR matter when that poor young woman is dead.’ She drank again. ‘We’ll have to sell this place, of course. And I’ll need to take Sophia out of Edinburgh Academy. She’ll be heartbroken.’

  She ran a hand through her hair, scratched behind her ear. ‘I need this divorce to straighten things out but his solicitor is being a prick. And now the sudden court case coming up.’

  Jenny frowned. ‘Have they set a date?’

  Fiona’s eyes went wide. ‘Didn’t they tell you? They got a slot, rush job. After six months of fuck all he’s in court for the first hearing or whatever it is in three days’ time.’

  Jenny shook her head. ‘That can’t be right.’

  Fiona sucked her teeth. ‘It’s not like the trial proper, just a plea thing.’

  ‘So we won’t have to give evidence.’

  Fiona drank. ‘You really need to speak to your solicitor.’

  Jenny didn’t have a solicitor. Fiona meant the prosecution, but they were useless at getting in touch and Jenny had tried to forget about it. Until Fiona turned up with the news he was pleading not guilty.