Day Two: 1,936 words

“Well,” Susan began, handing back the laptop to Paul who plopped it down on one of Susan’s coats, which had been on the side ever since she’d inherited it from a drunken night out three weeks earlier. It still smelt of booze and fags, and there was a suspicious stain on one lapel which Susan hoped was shampoo, but couldn’t be sure. She didn’t want to touch it.

“Do you see why this could be important?” Paul said. “Bartholomew didn’t kill himself after all. At least, I don’t think he did. I knew that gardener was a bad egg all along.”

“Hang on,” Susan interjected, “you didn’t know whether he was a gardener or a butler a moment ago.”

Paul got up out of the chair he had been sitting in until the moment he got up and started pacing thoughtfully around the room. “You know what this means, though,” he said. “Bartholomew left everything to his gardener in his will. He had a nice garden, but it wasn’t that nice. I mean, it had never won any awards or featured on a TV programme about nice gardens or in any magazines, books or even on websites or a throwaway blog post. Ever. I checked. So why was it so important that Bartholomew left all his money to Thimble instead of to us lot? Wasn’t there enough to go around? He lived in the biggest house in town, the one he’d built for himself twenty years ago which caused such a furore at the time because he demolished a whole block of executive flats to do it. Just because he could. And that was actually at a time that the idea of executive flats hadn’t even been thought of.”

“Look,” Susan began, “I don’t care about the money –“

“Well, I don’t care about all of the money,” Paul admitted, “but a few million would be nice –“

“I’m happy here,” Susan said flatly. “I’m doing an MA in obscure history. I have a shitty flat that I don’t have to pay too much rent for. Why would I want a whole load of money to come along and screw all that up for me?”

“I’m not saying you would,” said Paul, and sat down. Susan’s flat was indeed quite small, and it wasn’t easy to pace around its kitchen for very long without bumping into something, most likely Susan. Especially if you were trying to do it for dramatic effect, which in a way he wasn’t. He looked up at Susan. “Why did you put salt in my tea?”

“I wondered if you’d notice. Would you like another one?”

“No, sod it. I’ll have an éclair instead.” Paul helped himself to one of two slightly soggy éclairs from the fridge and bit into it, hoping the water content from it would help slake his somewhat dry thirst. “But anyway,” he continued through a mouthful of cream, “I mean… you don’t seem too bothered about this one way or the other. Did you care about Bartholomew’s death?”

Susan knew that Paul knew only too well how she’d taken Bartholomew’s death: he’d helped her through it only six weeks before. When the news had reached her she had been in the middle of a particularly tricky piece of research, which involved finding amusing videos of cats on YouTube and sticking them on people’s pages on Facebook. The library, archaic institution that it was, hadn’t cottoned on to the fact that virtually all of its computers were being used in this way rather than for whatever they were meant to be used for. Her phone had gone off rather loudly, she had scrabbled about for it in her bag, and answered it in a low, quiet voice: “Hello?”

“Hello, Susan,” her mother had said from her end of the phone, which was situated 98 miles away in a charming village with its own duckpond, which the locals were fiercely proud of to the extent that they had installed gun emplacements and razor wire around its perimeter in an attempt to protect it. “Are you busy?”

“No, er –“ Susan had closed down a video of a talking cat saying “ooooh yes oooh yes oooh yes” which she’d had to plug her headphones in to be able to listen to, and was still trying to stop herself from giggling about. “I’m just in the library. What is it?”

“Well, I’m afraid I’ve got some sad news,” her mother, whose name was Jill, had said. “Your uncle Bartholomew passed away last night.”

Susan had stopped in her tracks. Her uncle? But he wasn’t very old. How had that happened? “How did that happen?” she said, in a suddenly very small voice.

“I’m afraid we don’t know at this stage,” Jill replied. “The police have got involved – it seems there may be some element of foul play. He was found in woodland near Opocapopopoulos House.”

“I’m… sorry,” Susan found herself saying. She hadn’t known her uncle too well, as he’d always been distant and aloof due to his all-consuming habit of accumulating money as if it was dust. Her mother had always made the effort with Bartholomew, though, and Susan knew his death would have affected her quite badly. “Are you all right?”

“I’m coping,” was all her mother would say. “Yes, I’m coping. I’ve told Paul, I rang him just now.”

“Who else knows?” said Susan automatically. “Do you want me to call anyone?”

“No, don’t worry. Sue and Susannah and Matilda are ringing round everyone. I don’t want to interrupt you.”

Susan had rung off feeling somewhat numb, and found herself unable to concentrate on funny videos of cats any more. A week later when she and Paul turned up at the funeral in Paul’s battered old Nissan Bluebird, which he’d crashed gently into a wall a few days before and which now did a maximum of 38 miles per hour, the assembled throng was subdued in a way that people are at a funeral, but there also was a certain element of grief missing from the expressions on everyone’s faces. It was as if they were all there out of a sense of obligation. Susan had located her mother, which was quite hard in a sea of people all wearing black with big hats on and their heads bowed sorrowfully. She had been crying, Susan could tell. Paul wandered off to find some crisps.

“So good of you to make it,” Jill sniffled quietly. “What a nice turn-out.”

“I wasn’t not going to be here, Mum,” Susan said. “Are any of his other family here?”

“Yes, his other brother – my other brother – your other uncle, and Paul’s too – is here. Xavier.”

Susan had never wondered before about why her grandparents’ three children had been called Bartholomew, Xavier and Jill, but she inexplicably found herself wondering this now. She had mat Xavier infrequently, usually at funerals or weddings, and once randomly on a station platform which had been quite embarrassing because he hadn’t known who she was. Xavier was a bit weird, by any token. He dressed in black, did a mysterious job involving coffins or embalming or witchcraft or something – nobody was quite sure what – and professed to have the largest collection of Gothic and proto-magical knick-knacks in existence, although he hadn’t called them knick-knacks – he’d used an obscure word Susan couldn’t remember, because she never needed to describe that sort of stuff. He lived in a crypt, which was actually a basement flat with no light bulbs which he didn’t bother to clean, but was somewhat spooky all the same. Susan suspected that he’d only turned up at the funeral because it was a funeral, and had free tea and biscuits. Was it possible to be a serial funeral crasher? she wondered, and pictured him turning up at the funerals of people he’d never met, just so he had an excuse to stand there dressed head to toe in black and look moody. She was absolutely sure that if she went round to his flat and looked hard enough she’d find a few fluffy toys, all seven Harry Potter books and a collection of Disney videos.

“Do the police know anything more?” she had asked, without feeling able to stop herself.

“No, they said it might be about five weeks before anything else emerged,” her mother replied sadly. “We shall have to wait.”

The three other funerals Susan had been to before had been a bit different from this one. Her father’s had been a jolly affair, with three clowns turning up in a car that honked and fell to pieces, towing the coffin on a flatbed trolley covered in whipped cream. They’d formed a human pyramid, honked their noses sadly and played one of those Last Post type pieces of music that only ever get dragged out at funerals on a swannee whistle. Afterwards, they’d solemnly pushed the cakes and pies Jill had laid on for everybody in each other’s faces. Poor Jill smiled wanly at all this but didn’t say anything; by then she was used to their antics, and Gareth had been the undisputed king of cocking about for as long as they’d been married, so she’d let it go. Secretly she wished that either he hadn’t been a clown, or she hadn’t been a chartered surveyor, but wasn’t sure which she wished louder.

The priest, who like most priests seemed to know everyone in his catchment area without in some cases ever having met them, cleared his throat. “Dearly beloved,” he began, “we are gathered here today to mark the passing of a great man. Bartholomew Opocapopopoulos was always mysterious, he moved in interesting circles, and some of us may not have known him as well as we’d have liked. It’s true that he kept his counsel, and could be a difficult man to get to know. But as the Lord saith, still waters run deep. I first met Bartholomew when he moved to this village over twenty years ago, and when I was just a newly qualified rabbi. Despite the fact that he was the newcomer, he took me under his wing, and over the course of the next twenty years taught me the true meaning of the word tolerance.”

Susan couldn’t resist looking round at the other members of the congregation to see what they might be thinking about all this. Everyone knew that Bartholomew had been an utter bastard from the get-go. From the time he moved in, demolishing anything that stood in the way of his plans for a twenty-bedroom mansion with faux battlements, a moat and a battery of concealed anti-aircraft rocket launchers under the lawn, through the endless legal battles he fought with anyone who questioned how he did things, to the time only a few weeks ago when he’d decided he wanted the right to conduct dogfights over the village in a pair of decommissioned ex-Soviet MiG fighters he’d somehow acquired through one of his shady contacts (he protested he’d simply bought them off eBay), he had seemingly done everything he could to alienate people and arouse their disgust. It had almost reached the point where Susan felt she was somehow tarred with the same brush, despite not having any contact with Bartholomew at all, or having the benefits of any of his money. Did all the people who’d turned up to his funeral just want to make sure he was actually dead? Did they think they might have a hope in hell of getting their hands on any of his cash? Susan doubted it very much.