The Ninth Bed

Chapter One: Cash Only

The phone call that ruined Tom Rackham's life came at twenty past nine on a Tuesday morning, while he sat in the cab of a Transit outside a McDonald's in Basildon, eating a sausage muffin with the wrapper spread on his knee like a napkin.

He answered because the number was one he didn't know, and unknown numbers were sometimes work. More often they were the arrears people, or the solicitor his ex-wife had found somewhere, the one who wrote letters that used the phrase "without prejudice" as if it meant anything to a man with four thousand pounds of unpaid maintenance stacked behind him like water behind a door.

"Rackham Clearances," he said, which was a grand name for one van and one bad back.

The voice on the other end was a long way off, and drunk. Not slurring drunk. The other kind, the careful kind, where every word gets set down like a man laying eggs on a table.

"Is that the house clearance. The one in the paper."

"That's me."

"My mother's died." A pause. Ice moved in a glass. "I need a house doing. Everything in it. Everything out and gone."

"Sorry to hear it. Where are we?"

"Bower Sands. On the wall. Above the Hulk Marsh channel, do you know it?"

Tom knew it the way you know a bruise you've had since childhood. Bower Sands was seven miles of caravan park, a chip shop, a boarded-up amusement arcade and a concrete sea wall holding back grey water that came in flat and fast over mud so soft you could lose a dog in it. His grandfather had come from somewhere out that way, before there was nothing out that way. Tom had been taken as a boy to look at the water once and had cried and not known why.

"I know it," he said. "What's the property?"

"Bungalow. Four rooms. She was ninety-one. She died in her chair." The man breathed. "Now listen. This is the important part, so I'll say it once and then I'll say it again. Everything in that house is to be burned."

Tom looked at his sausage muffin.

"Right," he said. "Some of it might be worth—"

"Burned. On the shingle. Not sold. Not given to a charity shop. Not kept, not taken home, not offered round the family, not put on that internet thing. Burned, all of it, in one day, and a local man will watch you do it. His name's Arthur Cobbold. He'll be there."

"That's not really how it works," Tom said. "Normally, if there's value in the—"

"Four thousand pounds," said the man. "Cash. On completion. When Cobbold tells me it's done."

Tom went very still, the way a man does when a large amount of money is set down in front of him by a stranger.

Four thousand pounds was the exact size of the hole in his life. It was not a coincidence he thought about at the time, though later he would think about it constantly, at two in the morning, with the lights on.

"Four," he said. "For one bungalow."

"For one bungalow, and for you doing it exactly as I've said." The man laughed suddenly, and it was a terrible sound, more like a cough with a hinge in it. "Christ. You'll want to know why."

"I was working up to it."

"No, you won't. You'll think you do and then you won't. My name's Kenneth Ripley. My mother was Edna Ripley. I haven't set foot in England for nineteen years and I'm not coming back for the funeral, and the reason for that is on a shelf in her back room, and I want it in a fire." Another swallow. "You've got a van, have you? A big one?"

"Long wheelbase."

"Then you can do it in a day. Burn it in a day. Don't sleep in the house. Don't let the fire go out until it's ash. Cobbold has the keys and he has your money."

"Mr Ripley—"

"Please," said Kenneth Ripley, and for one moment the careful drunkenness fell away and there was just a frightened man of sixty-odd sitting in a kitchen in Alberta with a bottle, eight hours behind the sun. "Please just burn it."

The line clicked and there was nothing.

Tom sat with the phone in his hand and the wrapper on his knee and watched a gull walk across the car park like it owned the deeds.

He should have refused. He knew that even then, in the way you know that the second pint is a bad idea. Six months earlier he'd walked out of Chelmsford Crown Court with a suspended sentence for handling stolen goods — twelve months, suspended two years, and a probation officer called Michelle who wrote "engaging well" in a file every fortnight. He was not supposed to be taking cash jobs from drunks abroad. He was supposed to be building something respectable out of the wreckage. He had a laminated card in the van window and a public liability certificate he'd actually paid for, and he was, by his own private accounting, trying.

But four thousand pounds was Ellie.

That was the whole of it. Four thousand pounds was the arrears cleared, which meant Louise had nothing left to hold over him, which meant he could ring on a Saturday and not be told he had no right to anything. Ellie was sixteen in a fortnight. Sixteen, and he hadn't given her a birthday present since she was twelve that hadn't been a twenty-pound note in a card, sent late.

He rang Keith Nunn.

"Job Thursday," he said. "Bower Sands. Bungalow. Two days' work, maybe one."

"Bower Sands," said Keith. "Bloody hell. What's out there?"

"Mud," said Tom. "And four grand."

There was a pause on the line and Tom heard, faintly, the sound of Keith's kettle, because Keith was always making tea, in the van, at other people's houses, at three in the afternoon in a stranger's dead mother's kitchen, entirely at home in the houses of the dead in a way Tom envied.

"Four grand," Keith said. "For a bungalow."

"Family want it burned."

"Burned."

"Every stick."

Keith Nunn was fifty-four and had lived above a chip shop in Rayleigh for eleven years, and had a laugh like a drain unblocking, and did not laugh now.

"That's someone paying to make something go away," he said. "Not the same as clearing a house."

"It's four grand, Keith."

"I heard you the first time." A sigh. "Pick me up at seven. And Tom — if it's asbestos, or if there's a dog in there that's been shut in, I'm not doing it, and I'm not being talked round."

"No dog," said Tom. "She died in her chair."

"They all die in their chair," said Keith. "Nobody dies in bed any more. Seven."

They drove out on the Thursday with the sun barely up and the sky the colour of a wet bandage.
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The road to Bower Sands went out along the top of the flats, dead straight for four miles, with the marsh spreading away on the left in creeks and pans and shining runnels, and the caravan park on the right with its rows of white boxes shut up for winter. Keith drove with both hands on the wheel and his flask between his knees, and did not talk much, which was unusual.

At the end of the road there was a sea wall, a long grey lip of concrete with grass at the base and shingle beyond, and along the inland side of it, spaced out like teeth in an old jaw, six bungalows. Only three had cars. One had boards over the windows.

The fourth from the end was Edna Ripley's, and there was a man standing in the road outside it.

He was seventy or thereabouts, broad, in a green waxed coat that had been rewaxed and rewaxed until it had the shine of something wet. He had a flat cap and hands like a pair of boot soles and he did not move as the van came up the road; he simply watched it come, and then watched it stop, and then watched Tom get out, and did not offer a hand.

"Rackham," he said. "You're late."

"It's ten past eight."

"Tide's coming," said the man, as though that answered it. "Arthur Cobbold."

"Mr Ripley said you'd have keys."

Cobbold put a key in Tom's palm and held on to Tom's hand while he did it, which was a small thing but felt, obscurely, like being weighed.

"You'll burn it on the shingle," Cobbold said. "There's a pit dug already. I'll watch. When the last of it's ash I'll pay you and you'll drive home, and you won't come back out here, and you won't say the name of this road to anybody."

"All of it in one fire?"

"All of it in one day." Cobbold turned his head and looked out at the water, and there was something in that look that Tom did not have a name for. "Today's a good day for it. Wind's off the land."

"There's normally a bit of a system," Tom said. "You know. Electricals to the tip, metals to the yard, decent furniture goes—"

"You've been told what happens."

"I've been told," Tom said. "I'm just saying, a lot of it's going to be perfectly good stuff and it seems—"

"Mr Rackham." Cobbold looked at him then, properly, and his eyes were pale as skimmed milk and absolutely steady. "There's four thousand pounds in a bag in my kitchen. It's yours by dark if you do as you're told. It's not yours at all if you don't. I've no interest in what seems."

Keith had come round the front of the van and was standing with his arms folded, looking at the bungalow.

"Chimney's going," he said.

Tom looked. It was true. There was smoke coming out of the chimney of a house whose owner had died eleven days ago, a thin grey rope of it going sideways in the wind.

"Who's lighting fires in there?" Tom said.

"I am," said Arthur Cobbold. "Every day since she went. Somebody's got to." And he walked away up the road towards the last bungalow with the boarded windows, and did not look back, and Tom stood in the road holding a stranger's key and feeling for the first time — small, deep, like a stone in the shoe of the day — that he had come somewhere he ought not to be.

He unlocked the door.

Heat came out. That was the first thing, and it was the worst thing, worse than any smell. Every clearance Tom had ever done had been cold: cold radiators, cold kettle, three weeks of post on the mat and that stopped-clock chill of a house where nobody breathes. This house was warm as a bed. The hall was warm. There was a paraffin heater against the wall, lit, its grille glowing, and a coal fire alive in the front room grate, and the airing cupboard door standing open with the immersion on and the tank ticking.

"She's been dead eleven days," Tom said.

"Someone's paying that electric," said Keith from behind him, not coming in.

The house was spotless. That was the second thing. Not tidy in the way of old people, where the surfaces are clean and the corners are forty years deep. Actually spotless. Hoover lines in the carpet. Brasses done. A tea towel folded in three over the oven rail. The windows had been cleaned inside and out, and the nets were white as teeth.

And there was salt on the floor.

Tom nearly stepped in it. It lay across the threshold of the front room in a line about two fingers wide, poured carefully, unbroken from skirting board to skirting board, and when he crouched he saw that it lay across the kitchen doorway too, and the two bedroom doorways, and the back-room doorway, and along the sill of the front door, and along the bottom of every window. Nine lines that he counted in the first minute, and more later.

Under each line, the lino and the carpet edge had been scoured pale. Years of it. Poured and swept and poured and swept until the pattern had gone off the lino altogether and left a white band like a tide mark.

"Tom," said Keith.

"I see it."

"No, come here."

Keith was at the door of the first bedroom, and he had his hand over his mouth, and he wasn't laughing.

There were three beds in a room that should have held one. A double against the wall and two camp beds, aluminium and canvas, set up along the far side with barely a foot between them. All three were made up: sheets, blankets, a bedspread on the double, pillows plumped, and every one turned down at the corner, that neat triangle they do in hotels, an invitation.

On the foot of each bed was a folded set of clothes.

On the double, a man's clothes: brown trousers with braces still threaded, a collarless shirt, a knitted waistcoat. On the first camp bed, a woman's — a house dress, a cardigan, stockings folded flat as paper. On the second camp bed, laid out very small and very carefully, a child's pinafore, the sort of thing you'd see in a photograph from before the war, with a vest and a pair of knitted socks the length of Tom's thumb.

All of it aired. All of it clean. All of it warm, because the room was warm.

They went into the second bedroom. Three more beds, three more sets of clothes. In the front room, where the fire burned, the sofa had been made up as a bed and there were two camp beds in front of the window, and a third folded flat and leaning against the wall — no, not folded, Tom saw; open, made up, pushed sideways to fit.

Nine.

He stood in the middle of that little house and counted them again from where he stood, out loud, because his mouth wanted something to do.

"Nine beds."

"There's nine plates," said Keith, from the kitchen doorway, in a voice gone thin.

The kitchen table was laid for nine. It could not seat nine; four at most. The plates were set in two rows down the middle, willow pattern, and on each one was food, or what had been food. A slice of bread and a spoonful of something, gone dark and shrunken, a fortnight dry. Nine knives, nine forks. Nine glasses of water, gone cloudy, with a fine grey silt in the bottom of each.

Keith turned round and walked out of the house.

Tom found him on the sea wall with his hands on his knees, and for a bad moment thought he was being sick, but he was just breathing.

"I'm not being funny," Keith said. "I've done four hundred houses. I've done the ones with the buckets. I've done that fella in Wickford with the freezer. I'm not squeamish."

"I know."

"That house smells like the inside of a boat."

Tom opened his mouth to say something about the paraffin, and shut it, because Keith was right, and it was exactly right, and he hadn't had words for it until then. Under the warmth and the coal smoke and the polish, the bungalow smelled of bilge. Of wet rope and old fibreglass and the black water that sits under floorboards in a hull. It smelled of low tide in a room with the heating on.

"Four grand," Tom said.

"You keep saying that like it's an argument."

"It is an argument, Keith. It's the only argument I've got."

Keith straightened up. Beyond the shingle the mud went out for half a mile, brown and silver, cut with channels, and a mile out something stood in the water: a low black shape with a stub of tower on it, like a broken tooth in a wide grey gum.

"What's that?" said Tom.

"Old church," said Keith. "Village went under, didn't it. Long time back." He wiped his mouth. "My mum used to talk about it. Fifty-three. The big flood, when the sea come over everywhere down here. Canvey. Two hundred-odd dead in one night." He looked at the tower for a while. "Come on then. Let's get it done and get off."

The back room was last.

It was small, and there was no bed in it, and the salt line across its threshold was three fingers wide, and freshly poured, and it was the only room in the house that was cold.

Against the far wall stood a mahogany wardrobe, huge, Victorian, the sort of thing that has to be built inside the room because it won't come up a stair. Its door was shut and there was a band of brown parcel tape across it, from frame to frame, and over that a length of grey duct tape, and over that a strip of old cloth tacked at both ends. Sealed three times, by three different hands, in three different decades.

And on the shelf that ran along the other wall, in a row, were eight bundles of oilcloth, tied with string.

Each one had a paper label. Each label was written in beautiful old copperplate, the letters looped and even, the ink faded to brown on some and black on the newer ones, as though the same hand had rewritten them as they wore out.

Tom went along the shelf and read them out because his voice was the only ordinary thing in the room.

"Dulcie Barnwell. Thomas Vahey. Ruth Mullard. Sidney Grigg. Arthur Vahey — no, Alfred. Alfred Vahey. Grace Coates. William Loam." He stopped at the last one. "Peter Coates. Aged four."

Under each name, smaller: a word.

Hairbrush. Duck (tin). Shoe. Bible. Razor. Doll (rag). Pipe. Ring (gold).

And at the end of the shelf, on a card by itself, in the same copperplate, tacked to the wall where it would be at eye level for anyone standing in that doorway:

NINE PLACES. NINE BEDS. NINE THINGS UNDER ONE ROOF. LIGHTS ON, DOORS SALTED, FIRE IN.
THE WARDROBE IS THE NINTH. DO NOT OPEN IT.
WHOEVER READS THIS IS THE KEEPER NOW.

Behind Tom, out in the warm hall, the paraffin heater ticked.

He stood there rather longer than he meant to. It was very quiet in that room, and the cold in it was not the cold of a room without a fire; it was a wet cold, the kind that gets into a coat. And though he did not believe a word of what he'd read, and told himself so, he found that he had not stepped over the salt line, and that his heart was going like a man's who has heard a noise downstairs.

"Tom," Keith called from the front door. "Cobbold's out there watching the house."

Tom picked up the bundle labelled Ring (gold), because it was the smallest and because it was in his hand before he'd decided anything, and he put it in his coat pocket.

"Right," he said. "Let's start with the beds."