Chapter 194: The Earth on Top II

The City of London Cemetery was enormous, a green city of its own behind iron railings, with long avenues of plane trees dripping on the car roof and stone angels going grey in the wet and the chapel at the end of a drive with a spire on it. There were people waiting under the porch out of the rain.

Mara Doyle was there in a black coat to her calves and a small black hat with a net on it, her face pale and her eyes red already, and she came straight down the steps in the rain and took Pemberton’s arm before the driver could.

"I wasn’t asked," she said. "I came anyway. You took me to Gennaro’s and you taught me to breathe on the left in that pool and I wasn’t having you do this with 3 people. I asked Kieran what time."

"I am glad you came, Miss Doyle," Pemberton said. "Thank you."

Mara looked past him at Jodie, under Danny’s umbrella. She knew her face. She’d met her once and never been given a name.

Jodie held her hand out.

"Jodie," she said. "Jodie Carter. We’ve met. I never told you my name. I’m telling you now."

Mara looked at the hand for a second and then took it, and held it.

"Mara," she said. "He’s never said your name to me. I’d worked out he was keeping it for you to give. Thank you."

Deniz was there in a dark suit too tight across the shoulders with plaster dust still in the seams of his good shoes, and his wife beside him, small and upright in a black headscarf, holding his arm. He shook Pemberton’s hand in both of his and didn’t say anything at all, and Pemberton held on to him.

And there were 2 old men from Romford, in car coats and flat caps, one tall and one short, standing apart from everybody with their hands in their pockets. The short one came over.

"Len Croucher," he said. "That’s Alfie. We had the lots either side of Robin’s on the A12. You’ll be the brother. He talked about you. The gent, he called you. My brother the gent."

"Mm," said Pemberton, and took Len’s hand.

Inside, the chapel was small and cold and smelled of damp hymn books. The coffin was already on the trestles at the front, plain light oak, with a wreath of white chrysanthemums on top from Pemberton and a card. There were 9 people in a room built for 100. The funeral director, a woman in a black coat with her hair in a bun, stood at the side with her hands folded and nodded to Danny when it was time.

He went up to the front and stood beside the coffin with the folded page in his hand. He didn’t open it.

"My name’s Danny Flynn," he said. "I knew Robin Hollis for 2 mornings, 11 years apart.

"The first was a Wednesday in his office on Mare Street. I was 17. I’d left home that week. I wanted the top flat in a block called Pembury House, and I’d got 2 months’ courier money in an envelope and a school bag on my back. I told him I was 18. He knew I wasn’t.

"I counted the money out on his desk twice, to be sure of it. He didn’t ask for a guarantor. Every other office on that street wanted one. He gave me the keys, and I lived under the roof he gave me for 11 years.

"The second morning was 2 weeks ago today, in his brother’s flat by the river. I’d been sent to sit with him. I didn’t know he was the man from Mare Street when I sat down. He knew me straight away. He said my name and the block, and I asked him why he’d let me have that flat, and he said, You counted it twice.

"At 18 minutes past 9 he had 3 sips of water, and he put his fingers on my wrist while he drank. At 24 minutes past, he died, holding my hand."

Danny stopped. Mara had her hand over her mouth, and Pemberton sat in the front row with the rose on his knee and his eyes on the coffin, quite still, with his hat in his other hand.

"I don’t know much more about him than that," Danny said. "He went to Romford dogs on a Saturday and sold cars on the A12 with Len and Alfie either side of him, and his brother loved him for 90 years. That’s what I saw. Thank you."

He went back and sat down next to Pemberton. The old man didn’t look at him. He reached over without turning his head and put his hand on Danny’s knee, once, and took it away again.

They buried him at 20 to 12 in the rain, in a double plot under a plane tree on the far side of the cemetery, with room left beside him. The funeral director’s men lowered the coffin on straps. There was no vicar, so the woman in the black coat said the words herself, short and plain, and stepped back.

Pemberton dropped the white rose in. It landed on the oak and stayed.

Then he turned to Danny and held out his gloved hand, palm up.

Danny took the envelope out of his inside pocket and gave it to him. Pemberton slid the blank card out, cream with its brown edges, and held it for a moment between his finger and thumb in the rain, with the drops landing on it.

"He never knew about the cards," he said, quietly, to Danny and nobody else. "Not one of them. He thought I wanted that flat done up out of vanity. But he was the one who took you. He watched a boy count his money twice and he gave him the keys. Let Robin keep it."

He let go. The card turned over once on the way down and landed face up on the lid of the coffin, next to the rose, blank and pale against the wet wood.

The men from the funeral director’s put the first earth on top of it.

The wake was in the back room of a pub on the Romford Road, 5 minutes from the gates, where Robin used to stop for one on his way home from the lots, Len said, for 40 years. There were sandwiches under cling film on a trestle, and the fire was lit. Len had a pint in his hand before his coat was off, and he talked to all of them and nobody in particular.

"Your brother was the straightest man on the A12, and the A12 was bent as a nail. He sold me a Jag in 1977 that I’d have sold on for twice the money, and he wouldn’t let me. He said, Len, you’ll keep that car till it dies, it’s a good car. I kept it 14 years.

"And when my Maureen went, in ’98, he paid for the flowers and never told me. I found out off the florist. That was Robin. You’d never hear about it from him.

"And the other thing I’ll tell you, and then I’ll shut up. About 11 years back he come in here on a Saturday and he said, Len, my brother’s had me do up a top flat and let it to the first one through the door. Spent money on a ceiling. Never seen him so fussed. Robin thought it was vanity, the gent wanting his name on a nice flat."

Len drank.

"And then he said the first one through the door turned out to be a kid with a school bag who’d told him he was 18. Counted his money out twice on the desk, Robin said, like his life hung on it. Robin said that was the only time he’d ever been glad his brother was a fusspot."

Len stopped. He looked at Danny over his pint.

"That was you, weren’t it? In the chapel."

"It was, Len. I’d slept in my coat on a mate’s floor the night before, and I’d have counted that money 10 times if he’d let me."

Len put his pint down on the bar and shook Danny’s hand, hard, and didn’t let go of it for a full minute.

Mara found Danny by the fire with a cup of tea he hadn’t drunk. She’d taken the little hat off and her hair was coming down, and she’d had a gin.

"I’ve been talking to Jodie," she said. "She’s measuring me for a coat. Like hers. I asked what it’d cost and she said a number and I said yes before she’d finished saying it.

"And Mr Pemberton told me something on the way in, holding my arm. He said, Miss Doyle, the old account I spoke to you of at Gennaro’s is settled. He said it in the rain like it was the weather. Was that you?"

"It was me, with his say-so," Danny said. "He’ll tell you about it if he wants to. It’s his to tell, Mara."

She looked at him over the cup for a while and didn’t push it.