It was all going quite well. The china and glass nick-nacks had been sorted and boxed up. The books sorted into those to be returned to the public library, those worth keeping (a small heap) and those destined for the charity shop. The chest of drawers had so far yielded up three bags of blouses and cardigans. Jane was beginning to think she might finish up on time to catch the deli before it closed. Then she opened the wardrobe and the body fell out.
~o~O~o~
But let us begin Jane's story earlier in the day.
The sandwich generation. That was the name the magazine in the doctor's waiting room (her son George's broken arm) had given women her age. Teenage children still at home, needing constant ferrying around in the car and much more looking after than they themselves, proud of their new found independence, would admit. And elderly relatives who needed care and attention, moving into sheltered accommodation, and who then needed visiting while in sheltered accommodation. Or, when they shuffled off their perch, needed their sheltered accommodation emptied.
Not that her sister and brother seemed particularly sandwiched. Her sister had married an American and emigrated. Her main occupation these days seemed to be competitive face-booking. Endless updates detailing her children's school and extra curricular achievements (high), her golf handicap (also high), her weight (low, thanks to the intervention of a young Aussie fitness coach), and the square footage of their new house (approaching that of a small English county).
Her brother, though still technically resident in the same country, had raised procrastination and the evasion of responsibility to an art form. He made vague promises of visiting relatives, of contributing financially to the cost of their moves into new accommodation, of paying towards nursing care to lift the burden from his sister. But none of these vague promises ever materialised. Occasionally he would arrive, toolbox and power drill in hand, at the relative's new flat, and put up a shelf or a line of coat hooks, or a towel rail. This would be accomplished with great pomp and fanfare, almost as if he expected a standing ovation from an invisible throng of DIY aficionados, gathered specially to witness his daring exploits. The shelves, coat hooks and rails (which generally were not actually what the recipient wanted in any case) always ended up squint, or fell down within a matter of days. Jane's mind conjured another phrase from another earnest self-help column in another magazine in another doctor's waiting room (her daugher Julia's ingrowing toenail this time): strategic incompetence.
So the whole wretched business (wretched for both Jane and the relatives) fell on Jane's narrow, sloping shoulders. She supposed she could have nagged the teens into helping, but Julia wanted to go shopping in the sales with her friends, and George was already booked to go round to a friend's house to play something violent on the X-Box. Her husband had gone down the pub as he had done every Saturday lunchtime for the last nineteen years. As if it wasn't enough him being away three or four nights a week with his job as a sales rep. Not that they exactly interacted these days: more danced around one another in the little three bed semi, like the marionettes on the elaborate clock Jane remembered from their honeymoon in Europe – puppets running on rails that took them near to one another without their paths ever intersecting. The closest they got to contact was a peck on the cheek at bed time: come to think of it, a bit like the mechanical kiss the marionettes gave one another.
Still, at least clearing out Aunt Beryl's flat was nowhere near as traumatic an experience as clearing out Uncle Brendan's. Uncle Brendan had always had the reputation within the family for being a bit odd. It wasn't until Jane cleared out the flat after his sudden demise due to... what was it the doctor had called it? obstructive heart disease? … anyway, a heart attack brought on by a lifetime of Benson and Hedges that she realised how odd.
She reflected on the contrasts as she went through Aunt Beryl's possessions. Neatly filed copies of the Radio Times, Women's Weekly and crafting magazines, rather than well thumbed copies of Penthouse and Playboy. A Littlewoods' catalogue, with the corner of the page for thermal underwear turned down at the corner, rather than an Anne Summers' catalogue with all the pages dog-eared. A drawer full of sensible white cotton brocade bras and matching, capacious knickers, rather than a black PVC basque stuffed at the back of the wardrobe. (Jane shuddered at the thought of what had possessed Uncle Brendan to purchase a black PVC basque). A neat set of Russian dolls on the dresser, rather than the life-size inflatable doll shoved half under the bed, its feet sticking out. (This brought on not just a shudder but an intense wave of nausea).
No, Aunt Beryl was a lovely woman, pillar of the Women's Institute (and regular winner of the jam making contest), stalwart of the Thursday night crafting circle, quietly competent member of her whist drive, with modest tastes and interests. There were one or two slight surprises – she would never have had Aunt Beryl down as the sort of person to own a copy of The Lord of the Rings. Jane would have guessed that Catherine Cookson and Barbara Cartland would have been more her sort of thing. The same pattern was repeated in the DVD drawer in the TV cabinet: nestled between David Attenborough's latest nature series and the complete Poirot (David Suchet version) was the extended edition of the film trilogy. And the drawer in the bureau, full of old-fashioned school notebooks full of what appeared to be stories written by her aunt – that was a surprise too. But, unlike the contents of Uncle Brendan's flat, these things were puzzling, but not unpleasant. There were no nasty surprises here. Well, not until the moment Jane opened the wardrobe.
~o~O~o~
In Midsommer Murders, women of a certain age (Jane's age), when confronted with dead bodies, inevitably let out an ear piercing, eldritch screech. In real life, it turned out that Jane was rendered speechless. The body lay face down, its auburn curls flopping across the shagpile carpet.
It was a few moments before Jane's shock abated enough for her to start to take in the details of the figure. And a few moments more before her brain, rendered sluggish by the shock, processed them sufficiently to realise that all was not quite what it first seemed. For a start, the hair was way too coarse, and not at all a natural colour. Quite odd. The hands too – there was something not quite right. Very cautiously, she knelt on the carpet beside the body to take a closer look, reaching on top of her head to retrieve her reading glasses so she could make sense of the scene.
The hair wasn't hair – it was... wool. Four-ply by the look of it: Jane's brain absent-mindedly supplied the unwanted detail. And the hands – were they wearing pink, almost-but-not-quite flesh coloured gloves? No, the hands were... knitted hands. As was the rest of the figure. It was an enormous knitted doll.
Gingerly, Jane rolled the figure onto its back. It was quite heavy – not as heavy as a real body, obviously, but clearly stuffed with quite dense kapok or similar. The face was lovingly rendered in wool – blue eyes, a prominent nose, thin lips, a really quite chiselled jaw-line (amazingly so for what was, to all intents and purposes, an oversized doll), with a short, reddish beard. (Idly, Jane's whirring mind wondered how this had been achieved... A rug hook, perhaps?) The clothes were odd too. The doll or mannequin or whatever one wanted to call it, wore a tunic which stretched to mid thigh – a black tunic with a white tree surrounded by stars, lovingly worked in fairisle knitting. The legs were encased in leggings, with carefully knitted brown woollen knee-length boots.
Jane stared at it for some time before finally the penny dropped. She remembered now – George had made her sit through a DVD of The Lord of the Rings one Christmas. She'd nodded off half way through the first film, waking with a start towards the end of the second – or was it the third, where she vaguely remembered this character trying to do something bad, then redeeming himself. Or had he started off good and disgraced himself? She couldn't quite remember.
She popped her glasses back on the top of her head. Now slightly out of focus, the mannequin looked rather disturbingly lifelike, and, even more disturbingly, rather handsome.
It suddenly occurred to Jane that perhaps the notebooks might shed a bit of light on this unexpected craft project of Aunt Beryl's. She decided she needed to fortify herself, so went into the little kitchenette and made herself a cup of tea. Armed with tea and a digestive biscuit, she settled on the edge of the bed with a stack of the notebooks, randomly selected.
Several hours later, Jane's mind was left reeling. It was only relatively recently (courtesy of a friend insisting they have a girls' night out at the local cinema to see 50 Shades of Grey) that Jane had ever given much thought to anything other than very straightforward sex, and such thoughts as she had were more of a distant memory than a current experience. No silk scarves and satin blindfolds in her life. But Aunt Beryl's notebook contained references to all manner of unexpected things – pegging, rimming, fingering, tea-bagging (Jane suspected almost at once that this was not connected with PG Tips, a suspicion confirmed as she read on further into the notebooks). Many of the stories were written in the first person from the perspective of a woman called Éowyn – a woman as different from the jam-making, knitting, gentle Aunt Beryl as could be imagined. And they covered in great detail Eowyn's relationship – in all its aspects, from the loving and good-naturedly affectionate to the downright carnal – with a character called Faramir. It didn't take a great leap of intuition to realise that this was in fact the name of the knitted doll.
Shutting the latest in the series of notebooks, Jane sat and sipped her (now cold) tea and contemplated Faramir in all his woollen glory. Somehow the thought of her aunt living alone with this knitted life-size doll for company seemed at one and the same time tragically sad and defiantly brave. Then in one of those sudden Gestalt inversions the mind is capable of, she found herself wondering whose life was the truly tragic one, Beryl's, alone with the doll and her rich fantasy life, or her own, stuck in the loneliness of a marriage that no longer worked. She found herself unable to shake the thought that perhaps Aunt Beryl had actually had a more fulfilling relationship with Faramir than she had with her husband. Her husband who was absent three or four nights a week, leaving her alone in the big, cold bed – the big cold bed they slept on opposite sides of even when he was there.
And just as suddenly as the Gestalt switch, inspiration of a different kind hit her. If she moved her husband's golf clubs (the clubs he hadn't used for fifteen years) into the garage, that would leave a conveniently empty cupboard in the corner of their bedroom. And, as luck would have it, the cupboard was just slightly over six feet tall.