LAST RITES. Neil White

       Chapter Five

      As Rod Lucas pushed open the door to Abigail's cottage, the smell hit him first. It was strong, sort of smoky. Incense-burners, he guessed. His eldest daughter had gone through a phase of burning them in her room. It helped her sleep, or so she claimed at the time. It was to cover up the smell of cigarettes, he learned later. She was away at university now, and her twenty-a-day habit was one of a list of concerns.

      But he remembered the cloying smell, the way it made him cough and wrinkle his nose. He could understand an experimental teenager burning them, but why a pensioner living in a remote cottage?

      He looked around. Rod had expected chintz: patterned sofas, high-backed chairs, china ornaments everywhere and pictures of grandchildren, but the cottage wasn't like that. The walls were painted black, with thick red cloth covering the windows and tall mirrors on the walls, ornate and Gothic. There were candles everywhere – on the mantelpiece, the sideboards, the windowsills – everything from deeply scented ones in small jars to large black altar candles.

      He saw a rug pushed up against the wall, revealing the stone floor, large slabs worn smooth over the years. His eyes widened when he saw why it had been moved, and what was in its place, the thing that dominated the space.

      White lines criss-crossed the room, jagged and uneven, made up of something sprinkled onto the floor, like small white grains. There was a table and chair set in the middle of it all, as if the old lady sat in it when she was alone. Lucas stooped down to dab his finger into the lines. He tasted it. Salt.

      The lines made a shape. It wasn't perfect, as if it had been done in a rush, but he could make it out: a five-pointed star, with things placed at each point. A small posy of flowers; a large red candle; a sea-shell.

      Rod thought back to the explosive device. Why would anyone target this woman? Was her lifestyle the reason? This was the third explosion like this, but no one had reported anything strange in the other houses. Or maybe they just hadn't looked hard enough.

      He would go to the hospital next. Maybe Abigail could provide the answers.

      I shuffled on the bench at the side of the Magistrates Court in Blackley as I tried to get comfortable. It was still before ten and the court hadn't started yet, although I could hear the corridor getting busier. I looked up to the ceiling, at the flaking paint, and wondered how I had got to this point. I used to write crime features for the nationals when I was a freelancer in London, had always had the dream of writing a book, maybe ghostwriting a gangster memoir. Now, I churned out the small stories: incidents of local shame, drunken fights, domestic violence, sexual misbehaviour. The local paper paid me for each story rather than a salary, so if the crime scene went quiet, or if the police started another new initiative to keep people away from courts, then I didn't get paid. I worked my own hours, though, and it still left me to peddle the better stories to the nationals, but I used to do so much more.

      But I knew that Laura was right. The stories were steady work and provided a stable home. Laura was doing the same, working regular hours, no shifts, so that we were home each evening, and there was nothing for the judge to criticise when the trial for Bobby's custody started.

      I looked around the courtroom, empty apart from the prosecutor at the front, sorting out his pile of files, ready for the morning slog. The defence would arrive soon, wanting their papers for the overnight clients.

      ‘Anything decent for me?’ I asked.

      The prosecutor looked up. ‘Uh-huh?’

      He was one of the old guard; when the mood was right he was effective, but most days his job was just a plough through Blackley's grime.

      ‘Anything to report?’ I asked. ‘I'm not here because I like your suit.’

      He smiled at that, just a glimmer. ‘Just the usual,’ he said. ‘We've got a drink-driving teacher, crashed his car leaving school, if that's any good.’

      I raised my eyebrows. Another reputation ruined, but his shame was his problem. My mortgage was mine.

      ‘Don't get too excited, though,’ said the prosecutor. ‘Mick Boreman's defending. There'll be no guilty plea today.’

      ‘Too middle class to be guilty?’ I queried.

      ‘Something like that.’

      I exhaled and sat back. I couldn't write the story properly until he was convicted. It was good for a paragraph reporting his name and profession, but not much else.

      I thought about Mr and Mrs Goode as I waited for court to start. Was I right to turn down their request? Looking for Sarah would be a break from the mundane, and it might be a good feature to have written up and ready just in case she was caught and convicted. But then I thought about the bills that dropped onto the mat most mornings, how we needed the steady production line of small tales from the courtroom just to keep ahead of those, and if Geoff went all the way with his custody case then Laura's lawyers would soak up the rest, and quite a bit more.

      The tapping of my pen got faster.

      The family future was nearly resolved though. Anything I wrote now would be published later, long after the custody case had finished, and if the court was going to be quiet then it might be worth looking into Sarah's case, just to see if there was something to grab the headline. I could write the feature at night, after Laura had gone to bed.

      I felt some guilt creep up on me as I thought of Laura, but I dismissed it, perhaps too quickly. I was a reporter; selling stories was what I did.

      I put my notepad back in my pocket and rushed out of the courtroom.