Free FLINDER'S FIELD (a murder mystery and psychological thriller) by D. M. Mitchell Page B

his backside and upper legs were stinging from where his father had laid into him with a thin hazel stick which he used to keep by the door in the stand with the umbrellas for just such an occasion. Was it to make his son feel insecure, vulnerable, that one day he’d lose his parents one by one and be left all alone in the big, bad world? Well, when that day comes, George promised, a film of tears blurring his vision, I’m going to take such pleasure from it.
    That day had finally arrived . George had declined seeing his dead father’s face, so he had to imagine what his father looked like through the oak coffin that sat in the back of the hearse. He imagined his expression in death to be every bit as implacable, as cold, as devoid of emotion as it had been in life. He didn’t want to see him at peace. He wanted to remember him as the nasty old man he’d been.
    But that’s not what everyone else was saying about him. There was a lot of talk about a man George didn’t recognise, too many wet eyes and blowing of noses by those who came to the house on the morning of the funeral, and it was at odds with the way he was feeling. He felt like he was one of those aliens that came down and took Sylvia Tredwin – looking on slightly bemused, studiously, an outsider. Even neighbours came along to show their last respects to his father, lined the street and bowed their heads respectfully as the beetle-black hearse crept beetle-like towards the church.
    Here he took his place with three other men – Christian Phelps the landlord and George’s uncles, Robert and Gary Cowper – shouldering the weighty coffin on their shoulders. He heard his mother , sobbing and limping behind, and muffled words of comfort from Amelia, whose voice was also breaking. The service inside the church was experienced by George Lee in a kind of blur. He would afterwards recall the coffin sitting alone in front of two ranks of seated mourners – many of whom he didn’t recognise – the sunlight bouncing off a brass candlestick, the grey wiry hair peeking out of the vicar’s nose that seemed to draw his attention all the way through so that he missed great chunks of it, the hymn that wasn’t in his key so he mouthed it rather than actually sang along, and a tearful eulogy written by Christian Phelps that might have been about a complete stranger for all that it seemed to relate to his father. He was glad to get out of the stifling confines of the church where he felt God was frowning on his lack of emotion.
    He stood before the grave in the churchyard with a gathering of select mourners, snatched up a handful of dirt when his time came and tossed it onto the coffin, noticing how his fingernails were dirtied by it, and he tried to scrape it out as the vicar went through the ritual of ashes to ashes and all that. He smiled weakly as someone he didn’t know patted his shoulder reassuringly.
    It was then, as he looked up, that he saw the young woman looking over the church wall some distance away. Pale-faced, long dark hair, slim. He couldn’t help but stare at her. And she seemed to be staring directly at him.
    Who was she, he thought? She looked familiar, but at this distance, with the dappled shade from the graveyard trees causing her face to shape-shift with the agitated shadows playing over it, he couldn’t be sure. Eventually it just became too uncomfortable and he looked away, back to the grave. Someone had thrown in a rose, a large red one. It struck him as faintly unusual. Single red roses were signs of romance, not funerals. He scanned the line of people, his mother included, to see who might have thrown it, and guessed it must have been his mother. He couldn’t remember her having a red rose. Mind you, he couldn’t remember much of the day so far, he thought.
    When he looked back to the wall the woman had disappeared.
    Was this the same woman his father and Uncle Gary had seen?
    ‘Did you see the woman by the wall?’ he asked his Uncle