As I handed over some coins, and Reverend Bateman studiously looked the other way, I realised that the thinnest of the bearers was the man from the mortuary. I’d been trying to work up the resolution to go back there with some of the questions I’d been too shocked to ask on the first visit. At least this spared me the journey.
‘Were you there when my father’s body was brought in?’
He gave a reluctant nod.
‘I was as well,’ said one of the others, a fat man in a black tricorne hat with a nose like a fistful of crushed mulberries.
‘Who brought him in?’
They looked at each other.
‘Friends,’ said the thin one.
‘Did they leave their names?’
A double headshake.
‘How many?’
‘Two,’ said the fat one.
‘Or three,’ said the thin one.
‘What did they look like?’
An exchange of glances over my head.
‘English gentlemen,’ said the fat one.
‘Young, old, fair, dark?’
‘Not so very young,’ said the fat one.
‘Not old,’ said the thin one. ‘Not particularly dark or fair that we noticed.’
‘Did they say anything?’
‘They said they’d be back soon to make the funeral arrangements.’
‘And did they come back?’
Another double headshake.
‘What day was it that they brought him in?’
‘Three days ago. Saturday,’ the fat one said.
‘Saturday, early in the morning,’ the thin one confirmed.
Behind them, the gravediggers were shovelling the earth over my father’s coffin. It was sandy and slid off their spades with a hissing sound. Reverend Bateman was looking at his watch, annoyed that I should be talking to the men, all the more so because he clearly didn’t understand more than a word or two of French.
‘I have an appointment back in town. I don’t wish to hurry you, but we should be going.’
He clearly expected to escort me back. It was a courtesy of a kind, I suppose, but an unwanted one.
‘Thank you, but I shall stay here for a while. I am grateful to you.’
I offered him my hand. He shook it coldly and walked off. The four bearers nodded to me and followed him. The raw-boned unicorns lumbered their box-like carriage away. Reverend Bateman assumed, of course, that I wanted to be alone at my father’s grave, but I was discovering that grief does not necessarily show itself in the way people expect. I did indeed want to be on my own, but that was because I needed to think about what the bearers had said. Most of it supported the black lie. Two or three nameless gentlemen arriving with a shot corpse – that might be how things were done after a duel. Either it had happened that way, or the two of them had been well paid to say it did. But wasn’t it odd – even by the standards of duellists – that the supposed friends who brought his body to the morgue didn’t return as promised to make his funeral arrangements?
I began walking to the graveyard gates as I thought about it. I suppose I had my eyes on the ground because when I looked up the figure was quite close, walking towards me. At first I took him for one of the bearers, because he was dressed entirely in black. But no, this man was elderly and a gentleman, although not a wealthy one. His jacket was frayed at the cuffs, his stock clean and neatly folded but of old and threadbare cotton, not stiff linen, and his tall black hat was in need of brushing. A mourner, I thought; probably come to visit his wife’s grave. Indeed, his thin and clean-shaven face was severe, his complexion greyish and ill looking. He might have been sixty or more, but it was hard to tell because grief and illness age people. When he saw me looking at him he hesitated, then raised his hat.
‘Bonjour, madam.’
The accent was so obviously English that I answered, ‘Good afternoon, sir.’
He blinked, came forward a few steps and glanced towards the gravediggers.
‘Do you happen to know whom they are burying over there?’ he said.
It was not a bad voice in itself, low and educated. But there was something about the way he said it that made me sure I’d seen him before, and I went cold.
‘Thomas Jacques Lane.’ I tried to say it calmly, just as a piece of information, but saw a change in his eyes. So I added, ‘My father.’
‘Do I then have the honour of addressing Miss Liberty Lane?’
‘You were watching me,’ I said. ‘This morning on the sands, it was you watching me.’
He didn’t deny it, just asked another question.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘As you see, arranging my father’s burial.’
He said nothing. I sensed I’d caught him off balance, and he wasn’t accustomed to that.
‘You knew him, didn’t you?’ I said. ‘It was you who sent me that note.’
I’d guessed right about his watching me, so this was only a step further.
‘What note?’
He sounded genuinely puzzled.
‘That lying note, telling me he’d been killed in a duel, ordering me to wait at Dover.’
‘I sent you no such note. But if you were at Dover, you should never have left there. Go back. I tell you that as your father’s friend.’
All my misery and shock centred on this black stick of a man.
‘There was only one person in the world who had the right to give orders to me, and he’s lying over there. And you, sir, are lying too – only far less honourably.’
I was glad to see a twitch of the tight skin over his cheekbones that might have been anger, but he mastered it.
‘How have I lied to you?’
‘Did you not write me that note? My father would never in his life have fought a duel, and anybody who knew him must know that.’
He looked at me, frowning as if I were some problem in arithmetic proving more difficult than expected.
‘There has clearly been some misunderstanding. I wrote you no note.’
‘Who are you? What do you know about my father’s death?’
He
