Over one-thousand people came to mourn the murder of Simon Ross.
And Elizabeth Newton could've sworn she recognized almost every single one of them.
Some faces she knew better than others, true, but in every single person Elizabeth saw someone or something that she had seen before.
There was the lawyer.
The cop. (The baker)
And the bum... (The candlestick maker).
And every single one of them were all connected by one man. One tenuous thread amid the billions that made up the knot of the universe.
Elizabeth Newton appreciated moments like that, moments when she realized how small and truly insignificant she was. Most people would have found that knowledge depressing but then, Elizabeth wasn't most people.
Simon had known that. It was why they became such good friends, and why–when he needed help with his stories and vice versa–they made a terrific reporting duo. It was a friendship and only a friendship, but Elizabeth came damn close to calling it family.
He was the brother that wasn't killed in a car crash when she was sixteen.
And she was the sister who hadn't disappeared in Italy after Simon dug up something he shouldn't have.
The procession was a sad ordeal, and it took all of Elizabeth's reserves not to break down, bawling, like Simon's mother.
She watched the woman, keening softly next to her son's casket, and only wished that she knew why he had been murdered. Why he had been shot in the head and then left there-- brains oozing onto tile–at Waterloo.
There were dozens of hypothesis, sure, but Elizabeth found it hard to believe most of them. There were one or two that seem more likely to her, (the man Simon had been trying to find killed Simon in an effort to keep him quiet, or that the Americans muted him because he messed with the CIA) but everything else seemed preposterous
Elizabeth Newton was one of the last people to reach the casket. After the men and women in black (crows without their roosts, birds seeing death dancing before their eyes and unwilling to acknowledge it) walked by and nodded their last to Simon, she stepped forward and laid down her gifts to the dead one.
There was a subway token.
And a £500 fountain pen that had been given to her (by him) after her promotion to head editor of the Eastern European quadrant of The Guardian.
Elizabeth laid these gifts down gingerly on the casket, biting her lip to keep from bursting into tears, and then took a step back.
Stepping on the toes of the person behind her.
A smothered exhalation of surprise, and a look back to see who she had stepped on found Elizabeth Newton staring into the eyes of someone who she didn't recognize.
"Sorry," she said.
"No worries," the man said.
Exchanges are brief at funerals – and no one really minds. If you step on someone's toes, accidently bump or nudge someone on your way out, an apology is all that is needed.
Everything else is understood.
Or so Elizabeth thought.
She was halfway down the hill, handkerchief clutched in her right hand, when she stopped and looked back at the casket resting on the hill.
The man was still there, staring down at it.
It was only when Elizabeth got a little further that she realized the man spoke with an American accent.
Elizabeth Newton spun around.
But the man was gone.
A/N: Elizabeth Newton was a made-up character of my imagination. So I DO own something!! Mwah-ha-ha-ha...