the curtain round them both again. ‘Look at the abbey,’ he told his brother. ‘The bone men are alive.’
Joe pressed his face to the glass and looked. The two boys watched one of the bone men run across the grassed area that used to be the nave. It disappeared behind a pile of stones. Tom turned to Joe. Who didn’t look in the least bit surprised. Tom felt the excitement in his ribcage plummet.
‘It’s her, isn’t it?’ he said in a low voice. ‘The bone men aren’t moving by themselves. She’s moving them.’
Joe turned away from his brother, getting ready to climb down from the ledge. Tom stopped him, holding so tightly to his arm he knew it had to hurt. Joe muttered something his older brother didn’t catch. Tom didn’t think. He just shoved him hard. Joe’s head cracked against the glass and then he fell on to the carpet.
Later, when Joe had been declared out of danger of dying, more’s the pity, and was tucked up in bed with hot chocolate and stories and a huge great fuss on the part of his mother, and Tom had been told to stay in his room for the rest of the decade, he finally worked out what Joe had said, just before he’d been clobbered.
‘Not posed tell,’ he’d muttered. Which in Joe-speak meant: not supposed to tell.
Part Three
Day of the Dead
42
2 November
‘GO IN PEACE TO LOVE AND SERVE THE LORD,’ SAID Harry. The organ began to play the recessional and Harry stepped down from the chancel. The Renshaws, as always, were first to leave church. As Christiana stood to follow her father and grandfather out of the pew, she appeared to be clutching something in her right fist.
Harry went into the vestry, crossed the room and unbolted the outside door. Stepping outside, he walked quickly to the rear of the church, just in time to shake Sinclair’s hand as he left the building. Christiana held out her hand without looking at him. Nothing in it now. Next came Mike and Jenny Pickup. Jenny’s eyes were damp and she carried a small bouquet of pink roses. A week earlier Harry had put a blank book by the church door, inviting parishioners to write the names of people they wanted remembered during the service. Lucy’s name had been at the top. ‘Thank you,’ Jenny said. ‘That was lovely.’
The rest of the congregation followed, each needing to take the vicar by the hand, thank him and tell him something of their lost loved ones. Almost at the back came Gillian, who never seemed to miss a service these days, which he supposed he should be glad about, one more Christian soldier and all that. Hayley, too, had been remembered during the service. Harry shook Gillian’s hand and, knowing she had no grave to honour, almost bent to kiss her cheek. Except the last time he’d done that she’d turned her head at the last second and their lips had met. It had been an awkward moment, which his hastily muttered apology had done little to smooth over.
A middle-aged, red-haired woman followed Gillian out, and she was the last. Harry walked back into the church. Checking that the nave was empty, he set off up the aisle. Someone had scattered rose petals.
He glanced up. They could almost have been dropped from the balcony. They lay at the exact spot where little Lucy Pickup had died, where Millie Fletcher had almost fallen. Harry remembered Christiana’s clenched fist as she left the building. Leaving the petals where they were, he walked quickly up the aisle and into the vestry once more. He checked that the outside door was locked and started to undress. Three minutes later, he was stepping out on to the path again, bracing himself against the cold and locking the vestry door behind him.
‘And tha’s a quick-change artist as well, lad.’ One of his parishioners, a man in his seventies, was walking towards him. His wife, his parents and two brothers were buried in the churchyard, he’d told Harry earlier.
‘I’m a man of many talents, Mr Hargreaves,’ replied Harry, leaning against the church wall to stretch out his hamstrings.
‘Tha’s not goin’ up ont’ moor, is thee, lad? Tha’ll take off in this wind.’
‘Ah never knew vicars ’ad legs,’ chortled a woman, hobbling her way up behind Stanley Hargreaves.
‘Healthy body, healthy soul, Mrs Hawthorn,’ replied Harry. ‘Sorry I can’t show you a better pair.’
Harry jogged slowly past the two elderly people. As he left