Killer Cases: A Lambert and Hook Detective Omnibus by Gregson J. M

Author:Gregson, J. M. [Gregson, J. M.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Endeavour Media
Published: 2017-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

The weather held for the funeral. The dappled shade of the trees round the old churchyard scarcely moved on the bright, still morning. The slow ritual of interment gave Stanley Freeman a dignity he had rarely been afforded in life.

It was Denise Freeman who had decided upon a burial rather than a cremation. They had been married long ago in a Catholic church, and Stanley had been made to promise that the children they had never had would be brought up in that faith. She no longer attended regularly herself, but the influence of those unsmiling French nuns of her childhood, with their faces of ancient parchment, was with her still, long after she had thought it dead. Mumbo-jumbo she might assert it all to be, in the spacious and brilliant drawing-rooms of her friends, but some superstitions were better respected than ignored.

It was cool in the small stone church. She wished the funeral men would not shuffle their feet as they brought the coffin down the aisle. With its polished brass fittings, its inscribed plate, its single large wreath, the coffin brought its usual moment of breathless silence, as the thought of its contents forced itself upon even the most sluggish of imaginations.

Denise Freeman’s imagination was scarcely sluggish. The occasion crystallized the strange, unexpected mixture of emotions she had felt since they had brought to her the news of Stanley’s death. There was regret for what might have been, deeper than she had ever thought to feel. There was guilt for attempts left unmade and deceits carefully organized. There was uncertainty about her immediate plans, disconcerting to one used to making decisions and projecting her certainties to those around her. There was elation at her freedom from a marriage which had long ceased to work. But over all, most disturbing because least expected, there was a numbing loneliness about the future which stretched before her, a feeling of solitariness which threatened to descend into panic.

‘Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord. Lord, hear my prayer.’ The priest intoned the ancient words, happy to retreat from the uneasy platitude of consolation in an age which did not believe. His tiny congregation struggled raggedly to make the half-forgotten responses; only the three elderly women at the back who attended all the services were confident of their words. Denise was glad Stanley’s old mother had gone before him: she would have been the only one in the church who felt crippling, undiluted grief.

When they moved outside to the graveyard, there was one other such, but Denise neither saw nor knew her.

The undertaker’s men shouldered the coffin with practised ease, moving without a stumble over the uneven paths between the green mounds. Behind them, the widow headed the pathetically diminished procession of mourners. She was the only relative to witness the end of the Freeman line, for Stanley’s cousins had declined the long journey from the North. Now George Robson even detached his wife from the group; after their whispered colloquy, Audrey remained in the porch of the church.

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