Chapter 1: The Hands of Harold Phipps

Harold Phipps came to the chapel at ten to eleven on the sixth of July, a Friday, and by a quarter to three Edith Vane had put an asterisk beside his name.

She had not expected to. It was the hottest week of the summer. The lane outside was white with dust, the hedges hung limp, and the board over the porch, Vane & Son, Funeral Directors, Est. 1886, had blistered in the sun until the gilt on the ampersand curled like a wood shaving. The Son had been repainted in 1961, when her father took over from his. Nobody had ever suggested adding a daughter. She had never asked.

The morning had been given over to the plain business of arrival. She had been at Devizes since nine for a committal at the crematorium, a woman of eighty-two from Potterne whose son had read the eulogy off a phone and lost his place twice. The removal from Priory Farm had gone to Pickett's, the contractors who lifted for half the undertakers in the county. Edith did not care for them. They were courteous and they were quick, and they handled the dead the way a good carrier handles china, which is to say as freight. Her father had used them for nights and Sundays, and she had never found a way to stop.

She was back in Corder Lane at twenty to eleven. The van came round to the side door ten minutes later. Two men carried the stretcher through to the preparation room and set it on the table. The elder handed her the removal sheet on a clipboard.

Collected from: Priory Farm, the study. 10:20. Handed over by: D. Phipps, nephew. Remarks: found seated in armchair; rigor general.

"Fair weight for a thin man," the elder said. "The nephew stayed in the yard."

Edith signed the sheet and kept the top copy. She did not ask why he had mentioned it. The younger man, who had said nothing since the van door, was looking at the floor tiles.

"Smelt of smoke in there," he said. "In the room. Old smoke."

"Stove, I expect," said the elder, and took the clipboard back.

"In July," the younger said, and then, because the elder had looked at him, said nothing else.

When the van had gone she stood for a moment by the table with her hands at her sides. The preparation room faced north and was the coolest place in Nether Marlow. It was tiled to shoulder height, with a drain in the floor and her father's enamel table under a clean sheet, and it smelt, as it always had, of carbolic and cold stone. She had stood in that room at six hundred deaths. She had never grown used to the quiet of it.

She had known Harold Phipps all her life. He had been one of the six who carried her father. He had stood at the back of the chapel afterwards with his cap in both hands and said, "He did us all right, your dad," which was what people said, and which he had meant. Every October for thirty years he had left a sack of King Edwards on her step without a note. She had never once caught him at it. She had never once thanked him. He had never once expected it. She said his name aloud, once, to the room, as her father had taught her to do. Then she went to the office and opened the intake log.

Dr Asquith came at half past eleven. He was a tall man gone stooped, in a linen jacket too warm for the day, and he smelt of the peppermints he kept in his top pocket and sucked through consulting hours to cover the cigarettes he had given up. He stood in the office doorway with his bag in his hand and would not sit.

"Cardiac," he said, before she had asked. "Seventy-four. Angina since two thousand and nine, controlled. I attended at twenty past eight and certified. There is no call for anything further."

"Nobody has suggested there is," Edith said.

"No." He put the bag down and picked it up again. "The family would like it settled."

She gave him the effects list. He signed it where she showed him: a brown cardigan, a pocket watch on its chain, stopped at twenty past nine, and a gold wedding ring. He did not read it. His signature was larger than she remembered, and he did not once look towards the preparation room, whose door stood ajar. He left at twenty to twelve. She wrote the time in the log.

Dominic Phipps came at one, in the flatbed, in a clean shirt he had put on for the purpose. He was a broad man of forty-odd with a farmer's forearms and the careful manner of someone who has been told what to say and has said it over to himself in the lorry. He stood in the middle of the office floor and did not take the chair she offered.

He wanted it Monday. St Saviour's, half past ten, the plain oak, the churchyard. He had the doctor's envelope in his jacket, the certificate of cause of death, and meant to be at the register office in Devizes before it shut.

"Monday's soon," Edith said.

"He'd not have wanted a fuss." Dominic looked at the wall calendar rather than at her. "And no viewing. Not in this weather."

"The room is cool."

"No viewing," he said. "I'll bring the suit."

She gave him the figure: the plain oak, the grave fee, the vicar and the verger, the notice in the paper. Seven hundred and sixty pounds. He did not blink at it. People usually asked what the extras were, and he did not ask, and she noted that as well.

He did not ask to see his uncle. Edith noted that too. Most people did. It saved the families a decision, and it cost her nothing to let them believe it was theirs.

She tied on her apron at two o'clock and began as she always began, with the clothes.

He wore grey wool socks, darned at the heel, and no boots. She noted it and went on. The cardigan was buttoned to the throat, all seven buttons, in July. The shirt beneath was buttoned at both cuffs. She undid the cardigan and the collar, then the left cuff, and turned the sleeve back to wash the wrist.

She stopped.

Four centimetres above the crease of the wrist ran a band of abraded skin, pale at the edges and dusky in the middle. She fetched the tape from the shelf and laid it alongside. Twenty-two millimetres wide. Inside the band was a fine diagonal ridging, regular as the weave of a twill, pressed into the skin the way a thumb presses a pattern into putty.

She turned back the right cuff. The same band lay in the same place, the same width, with the same ridging running the same way. She measured both twice.

By the ledger's count, Edith had prepared six hundred and some people in forty years. She knew what work did to a man's hands, and Harold's were full of it: a split nail healed black, a white scar across the left thumb, knuckles like walnuts. These marks were none of that. There was no yellowing at their edges, no scab, and no sign that the body had begun to mend them.

She opened the right hand. The fingers had set closed and she eased them back one at a time. Across the palm, under the fingers, ran the callus that forty years of fork and gate and bridle had built, thick as a bootsole. It had been sheared sideways. One edge stood raised, and the skin beneath was raw. She measured the displacement against the line of the callus itself. Nine millimetres.

She stood for some time at the end of the table with the tape coiled in her hand. The tap over the sink dripped twice, and then a third time, as it always did. She was not a fanciful woman. She had learned long ago that a body does not tell you how it died. It tells you what has happened to it, in the order it happened, and leaves the rest to people with letters after their names.

Then she fetched the camera and the stand and the steel rule. She took nine exposures: the wrists, wide and close, front and back, the left hand, and the right palm with the rule laid beside the displaced ridge. She logged each frame number as she went. She would print two sets, as she always did, one for the ledger and one for whoever might ask.

Then she covered his hands with a clean cloth and finished her work. She washed him and combed his hair and closed what needed closing. Whatever had been done to Harold Phipps, he was owed that. When she had finished he looked like a man asleep who had been asked to be tidy.

At a quarter to three she sat down at the desk in the office with the fifth ledger open in front of her. She wrote the day's entry in her father's order: time, place, who said what, what was measured. It was the order he had set out on the flyleaf of the first volume, in his square capitals. Put down what you see. Put down who said it. Leave the rest to those who are paid for it.

Then, in the margin beside Harold Phipps's name, she made a mark in pencil. It was a small asterisk, three strokes.

She had made it twice before in forty years. The first had stood for nine days, until a coroner found a faulty flue. The second had stood for four, until a son wept in the vestry and told her about the tablets. She had ruled a line through each when it was explained. An asterisk was not an accusation. It meant a death that did not add up. It stood until someone had counted it.

It was not free, either. In a village of four hundred, a woman who says a death does not add up is a woman who will be served last at the Spar for the rest of her life. Her father had known that. It was why he had written the flyleaf the way he had.

She pressed harder than she needed to.

At ten to three she rang the surgery. The receptionist said the doctor was out on calls until the evening. Edith asked her to say that Miss Vane would be grateful if Dr Asquith would ring about Mr Phipps. She did not say why. Her father had taught her the order of things: the doctor first. A doctor can withdraw a certificate. An undertaker can only make a nuisance of herself.

She rang again on Saturday morning. He did not ring back.