A Case of Grave Danger. Sophie Cleverly
for business.’
I shivered a little, and took hold of a chair-back to steady myself. I remembered the young man she was talking about from earlier. He was fairly tall and pale, with blond hair (a little on the long side). He couldn’t have been much older than me – sixteen, perhaps? I’d sat with him for some time, just talking to him quietly – even the dead need company, though I never heard much back from them when they had recently passed. It was as though they hadn’t settled in yet.
‘Why do you ask, Thomas?’ I said.
He looked up at me. ‘I just wondered. There’s been a few in a row. What if it was murder?’ He made a horrified face. ‘Murder most foul?’
Mother narrowed her eyebrows at him, her favourite look of disapproval. ‘Murders? What nonsense. You’ve got a vivid imagination, my boy. Have you been reading those Penny Dreadfuls again? They are not suitable reading material for a boy of your age.’
Thomas stuck his tongue out, and I covered my mouth with one hand to suppress a giggle.
Mother tutted at him. ‘Your imagination is running away with you,’ she continued. ‘There have just been some nasty accidents, that’s all.’ She went back to her darning.
Bones padded round the table and sat by my feet. I stared into his soulful eyes and, not for the first time, wondered what he was thinking. He had a strange sense for these things, as did I. My skin was beginning to tingle, and I wondered if there was something to Thomas’s bizarre theory. There had been an unusual amount of men in their prime in the past couple of weeks – three or four, I thought. And now this boy. I wondered what could have happened to him. Surely it couldn’t be murder – Father would have noticed.
‘Violet!’ Father was calling me from the funeral parlour. Oops. He was certainly angry now. When I was sure that Mother wasn’t looking, I pulled a grotesque face at Thomas and then headed back down the corridor.
‘Violet,’ he repeated when I entered the room, followed by Bones. ‘Something’s missing.’
‘What?’ I asked. I noticed that he had removed most of the apples already, and began to wonder if the coffin would be the one for the blond boy.
‘One of the files.’
He gestured for me to follow him into the shop at the front of the house (not really a shop in the strictest sense of the word, of course – but death was our business, and money was exchanged here). The shop was filled with gloomy oak furniture – chairs, a desk, bookshelves and row after row of huge filing cabinets that contained all the information about those who were now resident in the cemetery. It was all so dark that I wondered how other people could stand to be in there for any length of time, especially when they had just lost a loved one. Father said it was respectful.
Thankfully, that day the autumn sun was bright and spilled in through the gaps in the heavy curtains. A carriage rattled past outside and a few flecks of dirt splattered on to the glass.
‘It was here,’ said Father. I blinked, my eyes adjusting to the light, and turned to where he was standing. He pointed into one of the drawers in the cabinet.
I walked over and took a look at a row of files. Bones sniffed them curiously. ‘I don’t see anything.’
‘Precisely! It’s missing!’ He wriggled two of the files this way and that with his fingertips. ‘There should be a file here, the one for the boy who came in early this morning.’
I looked at the names written on the top of the paper in my father’s neat hand. All of them read the same: John Doe. ‘The blond boy?’
‘Yes. Did you take it, perhaps?’ He gave me a stern look, and I began to feel a little uneasy. I certainly hadn’t taken it, but under his gaze I felt guilty, as though I had done something. Did he suspect me because he’d seen me talking to the boy as he’d lain there?
I squirmed. ‘No, Father. I haven’t seen the file at all.’
He wrinkled his brow. ‘Well, do you have any idea who might have done?’
I thought about it. ‘Thomas, perhaps? He was asking about the boy just now. He seems to have some theory about murder, but Mother said he’s just been reading too much nonsense.’
There was a moment of silence as Father stared at the wall, and then pushed his spectacles higher up his nose. ‘Thomas,’ he repeated. ‘Of course, I should ask Thomas as well.’ He walked back out of the shop again, in the direction of the house.
I went over to the window and brushed a few cobwebs away. We kept rows of flowers there, tastefully arranged in vases to show what manner of establishment we were. The sign above the door read
EDGAR D. VEIL AND SONS LTD, UNDERTAKERS.
The Edgar that it referred to was my grandfather, now five years dead, and my father Edgar Junior was his only remaining son. I’d told Father that he ought to change it to Edgar Veil and Son and Daughter Ltd, but he had only laughed and ruffled my hair.
I had been serious, though. Why shouldn’t I be recognised as part of the family business just because I was a girl? I did a lot more work than Thomas did.
Well, except for when I was picking apples instead.
The glass in the shop window was rippled with age, but you could still see through it. Now, as I glanced up, I could see a woman on the outside, looking in at the porcelain flowers.
A mourner, I thought. A widow in black. She must be here to arrange a funeral.
Yet there was something strange about her. I couldn’t see her eyes behind the waterfall of black lace and pale hair that cascaded past her shoulders, yet I felt for sure they were now staring straight at me.
Bones began to growl softly, a low rumbling in his throat.
‘Shh, boy,’ I said. ‘Don’t scare the customers.’
I thought I ought to go out and greet her, but then the woman quickly turned her head and darted across the street, hitching up her skirts as she went.
I frowned. Why had she looked so furtive? But before I could think anything more of it, I heard raised voices coming from the house.
‘I did not take your silly file!’
‘Thomas! Don’t you dare talk that way to your father!’
My family could be rather a nightmare at times. Was it any wonder that I often preferred the company of the dead? At least they seldom argued.
With a sigh, I headed back to the kitchen.
* * *
That evening, after supper, Father lit the gas lamp and we all sat round the fire in the parlour. I tried to read my book, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but I couldn’t concentrate and my eyes kept slipping away from it. It was dark outside, and I could hear the rain falling over the crackle of the fire. Bones was sleeping on the rug, pawing at imaginary rats in his dreams.
Thomas wasn’t talking to Father after their squabble earlier. He sat in the corner of the room, painting wooden soldiers with a grim expression on his face. Occasionally I heard him mutter something to himself under his breath about not being a thief.
I began to think again about the missing file as I stared into the flames. Maybe Father had just misplaced it, but was there a chance that someone had taken it? Who would want to steal records on a boy that nobody knew? If they’d known who he was, and that he was dead, they would have come to claim him, wouldn’t they? Unless Thomas was right, and someone had murdered the blond boy. I felt a tingle of a shiver run down my spine.
We’d had murder victims in before, of course. Not many, but enough. Yet the blond boy, who now lay in his apple-free coffin, seemed different somehow.