Martin JP Green

Two criminal gangs fight over a corpse with a highly bankable secret. Read Chapter One for free.

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Chapter One

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“You’ve got to understand one thing. People don’t see this place. It might as well not be here. Until they need it, and they all do sooner or later. Then they see it all right. Then they’re on your back. You’ll get used to that.”

One hundred feet above Cemetery Road Malcolm Groom swayed slightly in the steady westerly breeze, his hands resting on the cool sandstone parapet of the clock tower. It was hard to imagine how such an architectural overstatement might achieve invisibility but, two years on, he knew what Brian Staniforth had meant.

 

People didn’t see the General Cemetery because they didn’t want to: the tower, the gates, the columbaria, the walls, the railings, the clock itself remorselessly marking off the minutes and the hours. All combining to remind the people of Cliffefield of something they would rather not be reminded about: the fact that sooner or later they would, figuratively or literally, pass through those gates on their journey to oblivion, the hereafter or whatever version of not being around they were personally, however reluctantly, espoused to.

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The bell tower, a flamboyant architectural embellishment, added another twenty off-centre feet to the edifice. From a distance this little-tower-on-top-of-a-big-tower looked authoritative, a spirited thumbs-up, but examined close to it was flawed, the masonry split inmany places where rusting supports to the long disused bell had swollen and proved too much for the stone mullions to contain.

 

Deep cracks had developed and Groom’s imagination saw the whole thing shatter into fragments as if struck by lightning and shower the cemetery forecourt with lethal shards. “I’ll get someone in to look at it,” he resolved and then, on considering the potential inconvenience, added, “Next week.”

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Brian’s grim words had been well intentioned but disconcerting and coincided with the new manager’s first day at Cemetery Rd, one 

beginning with cautious optimism but, as it drew to its close and after further well-intentioned cautionary words from just about everyone
in his path, taking on a profound aura of foreboding which the experience of subsequent weeks was to bear out. The transfer had been necessitated by the enforced contraction of the library service and the deletion of the post of Principal Librarian at Cliffefield Central
Library, one Groom had held without blemish for nearly twenty years.

 

It was marginally too soon for him to retire early so they had to find something for him to do, and there had been a vacancy for the manager’s job up at Cemetery Road, the previous incumbent having leftsuddenly under a cloud. Among his peers Malcolm Groom was regarded as a ‘decent sort of bloke’ and the world of bereavement seemed appropriate somehow, a terrain where an incongruous streak of decency would fit the bill.

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To read more, download the whole of Chapter One for free.

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