Free The Dead Beat by Doug Johnstone Page A

loony bin. I remember, Elaine.’
    ‘I know you do, sweetheart, I’m just saying . . .’
    ‘Well don’t. I’m not that person any more. I’m a big girl and I can look after myself.’
    ‘I’m still your mum.’
    Martha took a deep breath. Every conversation with Elaine seemed to end up the same way. ‘You have to let me live my own life.’
    Elaine backed off, poured liquid in the washing-machine drawer and switched it on. The room filled with the whoosh and whir of the drum spinning, the skoosh of water and soap.
    ‘Says the woman parading around in her underwear, shouting and stinking of booze. Please put some clothes on, Martha.’
    Martha saluted. ‘Yes, boss.’ She meant it to be sarcastic but it came out subdued. She headed out the kitchen and upstairs, thinking about tomorrow’s appointment and hoping that Cal would go with her, even though she hadn’t asked yet.

20
    Martha made straight for the grave this time. She wanted a quick word.
    No wind in the oaks today, sunlight playing through the leaves. A tortoiseshell cat with a long tail trotted along parallel to her for a while. She thought of yesterday’s wood pigeon, the notion of reincarnation.
    She stopped at Ian’s headstone and turned. She was being melodramatic. There was no one else in sight, but she felt like she was on stage, putting on a show. She was about to speak when she noticed fresh flowers on the grave, a small bunch of lilies. She reached down and picked them up. No card, no message.
    Who would leave flowers, someone from the office? Did he have people who cared about him that she didn’t know about?
    Martha looked round the graveyard again. Couldn’t see the cat any more, it had skulked away into a clump of trees by the fence. She felt like she was being watched. Stupid feeling, straight out of a cheap horror movie, the kind Cal subjected her to. Martha pictured herself as the idiotic damsel in distress – going out into the graveyard alone, against the advice of the grizzled old-timer at the local store who warned her about suspicious goings-on up at the old haunted cemetery.
    She shook her head to dismiss the idea. Threw the flowers back down onto the turned earth at her feet.
    ‘So, that was some first day at work yesterday,’ she said to Ian. ‘Is it always like that?’
    She chewed on her lip and raised her eyebrows.
    ‘Still got nothing to say for yourself, huh?’
    She shook her head.
    ‘What’s going on at the Standard , anyway? It’s a regular little suicide club down there. I know things are bad in the newspaper business, but come on. That’s two of you tried to top yourselves in a fortnight. There must’ve been some fucking depressing pay and conditions in your contract. Or maybe your generation have just discovered how shit life is. Took you long enough.’
    Martha turned away from the gravestone and looked around.
    ‘Well, much as I enjoy our little chats, Ian, I’ve got somewhere I have to be.’
    She noticed movement amongst the trees and got that feeling again of being watched. She imagined the soundtrack, atonal creepy notes building slowly, indicating a madman wielding a chainsaw just behind the nearest oak.
    She jumped when the cat crept out from behind a tree and headed in her direction. It was padding straight for her, carrying something in its mouth. She pictured it leaping out of the branches of a tree and grabbing the wood pigeon by the throat, ripping it to pieces, tearing the life out of it.
    But as the cat got closer she realised it wasn’t carrying the wood pigeon, but a rat. The sight of the tail made her queasy. Something about that ropelike extension, the baldness of it.
    The cat slowed. It had a submissive look on its face as it snuck the last few feet and laid the rat down in front of her, on top of Ian’s grave. The rat twitched its front feet and jerked its head around, but it couldn’t get up. Its throat was hanging open and the cat had made a mess of the flesh around its