Down Cemetery Road Read Online Free PDF Page B

points for style. It was a strange new spectator sport: catastrophe aquatics. The frogman would collect what used to be a life, and pack it all in polythene bags for the experts to put together again.
    ‘Shocking, I call it. They should do something about it.’
    ‘Like what?’
    But the woman didn’t know.
    She went back to join her mates, the word spread, the message passed on. Sarah felt she’d fumbled the encounter, but couldn’t think how to recover it. And felt clumsy, too, standing here; looking on someone else’s accident. Then she saw the man on the other side of the river, standing on the apron of grass below the flats: he too was a voyeur. But something about him held her gaze.
    He looked to be forty, though that was an outright guess. The first glance told Sarah he’d lived a life that had aged him fast, though she’d have been at a loss to supply the detail to back up that notion. His long hair flopped untidily across his forehead and was tied in a knot at the back; it also sprouted in a stringy, undernourished beard that looked fairly recent. Outfitted by Oxfam, Sarah thought: denim jacket, patched jeans, scuzzy white T-shirt; he could have been one of the dozens of homeless who mumbled round the city centre, carting bundles of newspaper and litter-filled plastic bags, but something took him out of the category; she couldn’t fathom what. His air of concentration perhaps. Something, anyway. She’d work it out. And all the while Sarah gazed down at him he didn’t once look up, yet she was sure he was as aware of her presence as he was of all those presences on the bridge, enough to have described any one of them a week hence . . . Perhaps she’d drunk more than she’d thought last night.
    Enough, anyway, not to notice Wigwam until she was nearly on top of her. Or recognize, rather, for Wigwam was not unnoticeable. Bright yellow shorts this morning, with a pink, hugging T-shirt that walked a line between brave and downright stupid; turning a figure you might call generous into one that looked plain greedy. Though Wigwam, Sarah had long since known, cared nothing about her appearance.
    ‘Are you all right?’ were her typical opening words.
    ‘I was miles away.’
    ‘Poor thing.’
    But Wigwam, Sarah realized, wasn’t addressing her any more. ‘Did you know her?’ she asked.
    ‘Maddie? Yes, of course. Didn’t you?’
    ‘Don’t think so.’
    ‘You must have done. Tall woman, blonde hair. Her daughter’s just a tiny.’ Wigwam’s eyes filled with tears.
    Sarah was remembering a flitting shape, a head of hair, an outline without a voice. ‘Red overalls?’
    ‘Maddie?’
    ‘The child.’
    ‘Dinah. I think so.’
    She had sat on the towpath throwing crusts to the swans. Sarah remembered her now; a fair child with her hair in bunches, and grubby clothes, and bright yellow jellies. She couldn’t have been much more than three. ‘Swans,’ she’d said to Sarah, and pointed. There’d been a mother there, but she hadn’t left a mark on Sarah’s memory.
    It had only happened once. But now, even looking at it, she found it hard to picture a towpath without a grubby blonde child casting stale bread into the water.
    ‘Poor love. All alone now, even if she does –’
    ‘She’s alive?’
    ‘Oh, she wasn’t killed. Not Dinah.’
    ‘I thought she was.’
    ‘She was shielded by a wardrobe or something. From the blast. She was in bed, and the bed just dropped through when the floor caved in. She didn’t even fall out.’
    ‘How do you know all this?’
    ‘Rufus was talking to one of the firemen. They were still here this morning.’
    ‘What about Maddie?’
    ’Oh, she died.’ Wigwam’s face crumpled. ‘She was downstairs when it happened –’
    Sarah hugged her friend. She felt weepy herself now, having latched on to an image: a fair child, a pair of yellow jellies; the kind of tear-trigger newspapers relied on, but genuine enough for that. ‘Come on. Let’s go.’ They were