A Prayer for the Dying - Jack Higgins [62]
He washed the scissors thoroughly in hot water in the kitchen, went back to the sitting-room and replaced them in the mending-box. Then he poured a little brandy in a glass and took it upstairs.
She was already half asleep, but sat up to drink the brandy. Fallon said, 'What about your uncle? Do you want him to know what happened?'
'Yes - yes, I think so. It's right that he should know.'
'All right,' Fallon said, and he tucked the quilt around her. 'Go to sleep now. I'll be downstairs. You've nothing to worry about. I'll wait till your uncle comes back.'
'He might be hours,' she said sleepily.
'That's all right.'
He walked to the door, 'I'm sorry to be such a nuisance,' she whispered.
'I brought you to this,' he said. 'If it hadn't been for me none of this would have happened.'
'It's pointless to talk like that,' she said. 'There's a purpose to everything under heaven - a reason - even for my blindness. We can't always see it because we're such little people, but it's there.'
He was strangely comforted by her words, God knows why, and said softly, 'Go to sleep now,' and closed the door.
Time, now, was the critical factor and he quietly let himself out of the front door and hurried through the churchyard to the Scimitar.
Strangely enough, the whippet gave him no trouble during the drive. It crouched in the rear beside the body, whining only occasionally, although when he put a hand on it, it was trembling.
He approached Pine Trees Crematorium by the back lane Varley had used that morning, getting out of the car to open the five-barred gate that led into the estate. He followed the same narrow track down through the cypress trees, cutting the engine for the last hundred yards which was slightly downhill. Not that it mattered, for as he remembered it, the superintendent's house and the main gate were a good quarter of a mile from the crematorium itself, so noise was really no problem.
He left the Scimitar at the side of the chapel and gained access by reaching in through the broken pane in the lavatory which he had noticed during his visit that morning and unfastening the window itself.
The chapel door had a Yale lock so it opened easily enough from the inside. He returned to the Scimitar. There was a torch in the glove compartment which he slipped into his pocket, then he raised the tailgate and heaved the body over his shoulder. The whippet tried to follow, but he managed to shove it back inside with his free hand and closed the tailgate again.
He gained access to the furnace room by sliding the body along the rollers of the movable belt and crawling through after it himself, following the route the coffin had taken that morning.
The furnaces were cold and dark. He opened the door of the first one and shoved the body inside. Next he produced the various items he had taken from Billy Meehan's pockets and examined them in the light of the torch. Those things which would burn, he placed on top of the body. The ring, the watch and the medal he put back in his pocket. Then he closed the oven door and pressed the switch.
He could hear the muted rumble of the gas jets as they roared into life and peered inside. What was it Meehan had said? An hour at the most. He lit a cigarette, opened the back door and went outside.
The sound of the furnace in operation was barely discernible outside the building. Not at all when he moved a few yards away. He went back inside to see what was happening. The gauge was just coming up to the thousand degrees centigrade mark and as he peered through the observation panel in the door, the wallet he had left on the body's chest burst into flames. The clothing was already smouldering, there was a sudden bright flash and the whole body started to burn.
He lit another cigarette, went and stood at the back door and waited.
At the end of the specified period he switched off. There was part of the skull, the pelvic girdle and some of the limbs clearly visible, and much of this crumbled into even smaller pieces at the first touch