She saw Colette push at the door of the Balmoral, and step back. Step forward and push again. Her face turned back towards the house. “Al? It’s stuck.”
Al hurried down the garden. The spirits edged away and lay in the verges. Dean was whistling. “Cut that out,” Morris said, speaking from within his bush. “Watch and observe. Watch how she goes now. Now she says to string-bean, well, what’s sticking it? Is it swollen up wiv damp? Stringbean says, what damp, it ain’t rained for weeks. Watch ’em now. Now she pushes. Watch how she breaks out in a sweat.”
“There’s something heavy behind the door,” Al said.
Dean giggled. “If she was any good at predictionating, she’d know, wouldn’t she? What we’ve done?”
Al crouched down and looked in at the window. It was dusty and smeared, almost opaque. Behind the door was an area of darkness, a shadow, which thickened, took on form, took on features. “It’s Mart,” she said. “Stopping the door.”
“Tell him to get away,” Colette said. She banged on the door with her fist, and kicked it. “Open up!”
“He can’t hear you.”
“Why not?”
“He’s hanged himself.”
“What, in our shed?”
There was a spatter of applause from the margins of the lawn.
“I’ll call nine-nine-nine,” Colette said.
“Don’t bother. It’s not an emergency. He’s passed.”
“You don’t know. He might still be breathing. They could revive him.”
Al put her fingertips against the door, feeling for a thread of life through the grain of the wood. “He’s gone,” she said. “Goddammit, Colette, I should know. Besides, look behind you.”
Colette turned. I still forget, Al thought, that—psychically speaking—Colette can’t see her hand in front of her face. Mart was perched on the top of the neighbours’ fence, swinging his feet in their big sneakers. The fiends now roused themselves, and began to giggle. By Al’s feet, a head popped up out of the soil, “Coo-ee!”
“I see you turned up, Pikey Pete,” Al said. “Fresh from that little job of yours at Aldershot.”
“Would I have missed this?” the fiend replied. “Rely on me for a nice noose, don’t they? I had a great-uncle that was an hangman, though that’s going back.”
Dean lay on top of the shed on his belly, his tongue flapping like a roller blind down over the door. Morris was urinating into the water feature, and Donald Aitkenside was squatting on the grass, eating a sausage roll from a paper bag.
“Ring the local station and ask for PC Delingbole,” Al said. “Yes, and an ambulance. We don’t want anybody to say we didn’t do it right. But tell them there’s no need for sirens. We don’t want to attract a crowd.”
But it was school-out time, and there was no avoiding the attention of the mums bowling home in their minivans and SUVs. A small crowd soon collected before the Collingwood, buzzing with shocked rumour. Colette double-locked the front door and put the bolts on. She drew the curtains at the front of the house. A colleague of Delingbole’s stood at the side gate, to deter any sightseers from making their way into the garden. From her post on the landing, Colette saw Evan approaching with a ladder and his camcorder; so she drew the upstairs curtains too, after jerking two fingers at him as his face appeared over the sill.
“We’ll have the media here before we know it,” Constable Delingbole said. “Dear, oh, dear. Not very nice for you two girls. Forensics will be in. We’ll have to seal off your garden. We’ll have to conduct a search of the premises. You got anybody you could go to, for the night? Neighbours?”
“No,” Al said. “They think we’re lesbians. If we must move out, we’ll make our own arrangements. But we’d rather not. You see, I run my business from home.”
Already the road was filling with vehicles. A radio car from the local station was parked on the verge, and Delingbole’s boy was attempting to move back the mothers and tots. The kebab van was setting up by the children’s playground, and some of the tots, whining, were trying to lead their mothers towards it. “This is your fault,” Michelle shouted up at the house. She turned to her neighbours. “If they hadn’t encouraged him, he’d have gone and hanged himself somewhere else.”
“Now,” said a woman from a Frobisher, “we’ll be in the local paper as that place where the tramp topped himself, and that won’t be very nice for our resale values.”
Inside, in the half-dark, Delingbole said. “Do I take it you knew him, poor bugger? Somebody will have to identify him.”
“You can do it,” Al said. “You knew him, didn’t you? You made his life a misery. You stamped on his watch.”
When the forensic team came, they stood thigh-deep in the low, salivating spirits that cluster at the scene of a sudden or violent death. They stood thigh-deep in them and never noticed a thing. They puzzled over the multiple footprints they found by the shed, prints from feet that were jointed to no ordinary leg. They cut Mart down, and the length of apricot polyester from which they found him suspended was labelled and placed carefully in a sealed bag.
“He must have taken a long time to die,” Alison said, later that night. “He had nothing, you see, Mart, nothing at all. He wouldn’t have a rope. He wouldn’t have a high place to hang himself from.”
They sat with the lamps unlit, so as not to attract the attention of the neighbours; they moved cautiously, sliding around the edges of the room.
“You’d have thought he could have jumped on the railway track,” Colette said. “Or thrown himself off the roof of Toys ‘R’ Us; that’s what they mostly do round Woking, I’ve seen it in the local paper. But oh no, he would have to go and do it here, where he would cause maximum trouble and inconvenience. We were the only people who were ever kind to him, and look how he repays us. You bought him those shoes, didn’t you?”
“And a new watch,” Al said. “I tried to do a good action. Look how it ended up.”
“It’s the thought that counts,” Colette said. But her tone was sarcastic, and—as far as Alison could discern her expression in the gloom—she looked both angry and bitter.
In spirit, Mart had looked quite chipper, Al thought, when she saw him perched on the fence. When she sneaked into the kitchen, in search of supper, she wondered if she should leave him out a plate of sandwiches. But I suppose I’d sleepwalk in the night, she thought, and eat them myself. She believed she caught a glimpse of him, behind the door of the utility room; livid bruising was still fresh on his neck.
Later, as she was coming out of the bathroom, Morris stopped her. “I suppose you think we was out of order?” he said.
“You’re an evil bastard, Morris,” she said. “You were evil when you were earthside, and now you’re worse.”
“Oh, come on!” Morris said. “Don’t take on! You’re worse than your bloody mother. We wanted a laugh, that’s all. Not as if the cove was doing much good this side, was he? Anyway, I’ve had a word with Mr. Aitkenside, and we’re going to take him on to clean our boots. Which is currently young Dean’s job, but with Mr. Aitkenside getting fitted with the sets of false feet, Dean could do with some assistance. He has to start at the bottom, you know, that’s the rule. I reckon he’ll shape up. He’s no more gormless than Dean was when we picked him out of the golf net. If he shapes up, in about fifty years he might get to go on Spirit Guide.”
“Don’t expect me to thank you,” said Al.