Buried (DC Jack Warr #1) - Lynda La Plante Page 0,132

even seventies, approached and introduced themselves to Jack and Ridley as the other pallbearers. Maggie took this as her cue to stand by Penny’s side, put her arm tightly round her waist and help her to put one foot in front of the other. That’s all Penny had to do today. Tomorrow would be tackled when it arrived.

Penny was taking deep breaths, trying to maintain dignity in the face of such unimaginable tragedy. But Maggie’s touch immediately broke through all her defences and the tears came.

‘Sorry,’ Maggie whispered. ‘I didn’t mean to make you cry.’

‘Jack looks handsome in his uniform, doesn’t he?’ Penny’s words were barely audible. ‘He was the same as a Scout ‒ uniforms suit him. I was so disappointed when he got kicked out, because they wouldn’t let me keep his smart little shirt.’

‘Why was Jack was kicked out of the Scouts?’ Maggie asked, keen to keep the conversation light.

‘He was a bit on the naughty side. When all the other boys were lining up or sitting in a circle, he’d be off doing his own thing. Not very good with authority, they said. And when he was finally tracked down and the Scoutmaster asked what he’d been up to, he’d come up with some fairy story about playing cops and robbers. Not sure which one he was.’

Penny chattered on, hanging on to the past for dear life because she had no clue how to cope with the present or the future.

‘He lived in a fantasy world at times ‒ “always looking for excitement”, I used to say. More exciting things than we could give him. No surprise to me that he became a policeman.’ She managed a laugh. ‘He could be a little fibber, though. For the first two weeks he was with you, he told us he’d got shift work in a local pub.’ Penny could see that Maggie had taken this the wrong way. ‘Oh – he was never ashamed of you! He wanted to keep you all to himself, Maggie. That’s what it was . . . Look at him now. My beautiful boy walking beside my beautiful man one last time.’

Music began to play from inside the chapel and Penny’s grip on Maggie’s arm tightened. The five burly men and Ridley stepped up to the back doors of the hearse and formed two lines of three, opposite each other. The funeral director pulled the coffin far enough out for everyone to take up position on either side. Manoeuvring the weighty box up onto everyone’s shoulders was a jittery affair, but they all soon settled. The funeral director then led the way inside. Jack walked directly behind his dad. It took twenty minutes for everyone to file into the crematorium and find their seats. The walls were lined with standing friends, two deep. It was a wonderful sight.

The only person in the room who had no clue who Charlie Warr was was the Humanist celebrant. He started to read the prepared words dictated by Penny and redrafted by Maggie into something that at least sounded spontaneous.

Maggie glanced at Jack. He had his good arm tightly around Penny’s shoulder and he was listening, but there was a distance in his eyes. Maggie gripped his hand and brought him back to them.

‘Be with Charlie,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘You can never do today again, so be here.’

As she spoke, she stroked the back of Jack’s hand to lessen the impact of her words.

And he knew, that although she loved him with all her heart, she wasn’t going to stand for any of his nonsense. Not today.

12 AUGUST 2019

Jack laid a fresh bunch of flowers on Dolly’s grave. The card, written in Jack’s handwriting, read, ‘Love from Angela x.’ He then poured two glasses of whisky from his hip flask and placed one glass on top of the small stone wedge of the grave next to Dolly. Jack downed his whisky.

‘Here’s to your first grandkid, Dad.’

Back at the car, Maggie leant against the bonnet, waiting. As Jack got close with the second glass of whisky in his hand, she grabbed his wrist and inhaled the deep peaty vapours. She closed her eyes and imagined the taste.

‘Four months and counting,’ she sighed.

Jack moved his hand across her stomach and leant in to kiss her cold mouth.

‘Let’s get you home before you freeze,’ Jack whispered, his lips still on hers. ‘I’ll finish painting the nursery and you order the takeaway. Mum likes chow mein.’

*

‘A live-in babysitter! Heaven!’

The decision to move from a flat to a house with an annexe for Penny wasn’t hard after Jack’s surprise announcement that he’d won £250,000 on an impulsive, one-off lottery ticket. Maggie was pleased to be moving somewhere they could finally call home, but of course she didn’t believe Jack’s story about where the money had come from for a second, and when the time was right, she would make him tell her the truth. She liked her new husband with his new-found sense of his place in the world, but she wasn’t about to let lies become part of their relationship.

Jack Warr was no longer lost. He finally knew where he came from. With the best of Harry and the best of Charlie flowing through his veins – nature and nurture – he was now a man who effortlessly straddled two worlds: crime and punishment.

For most people, those worlds would be polar opposites, but Jack knew better – they complemented each other, like light and shade. And Jack knew he had to live in both in order to finally be the man he was always destined to be.