“Watch it, now! Watch it “IA little bit more to the left. That’s it.”
The old coffin dropped into the new, the lid was closed. He turned triumphantly to Fallon. “I told you there was nothing to it, didn’t I? Now let’s get moving. I’ve got a cremation at nine-thirty.”
The gravediggers seemed badly shaken. One of them lit a cigarette, hands trembling, and said to Fallon in a Dublin accent, “Is it a fact that they’re flying him over to Germany this afternoon?”
“So I understand,” Fallon said.
The old man made a wry face. “Sure and I hope the pilot remembers to wind the windows down.”
Which at least sent Fallon to the car laughing helplessly to himself.
Donner drove and Meehan and Fallon sat in the back seat. Meehan opened a cupboard in the bottom half of the partition between the driver’s compartment and the rear and took out a Thermos flask and a half-bottle of Cognac. He half-filled a cup with coffee, topped it up with Cognac and leaned back.
“Last night. That was very silly. Not what I’d call a friendly gesture at all. What did you have to go and do a thing like that for?”
“You said the priest would be left alone,” Fallon told him, `then sent O’Hara to the crypt to smash it up. Lucky I turned up when I did. As for O’Hara – he and I are old comrades in a manner of speaking. He’s cleared off, by the way. You won’t be seeing him around here any more.”
“You have been busy.” Meehan poured more Cognac into his coffee. “I do admit I got just a little bit annoyed with Father da Costa. On the other hand he wasn’t very nice when I spoke to him yesterday evening and all I did was offer to help him raise the money to stop that church of his from falling down.”
“And you thought he’d accept?” Fallon laughed out loud. “You’ve got to be joking.”
Meehan shrugged. “I still say that bullet was an unfriendly act.”
“Just like Billy playing Peeping Tom at Jenny Fox’s place,” Fallon said. “When are you going to do something about that worm, anyway. He isn’t fit to be out without his keeper.”
Meehan’s face darkened. “He’s my brother,” he said. “He has his faults, but we all have those. Anyone hurts him, they hurt me too.”
Fallon lit a cigarette and Meehan smiled expansively. “You don’t really know me, do you, Fallon? I mean, the other side of me, for instance? The funeral game.”
“You take it seriously.”
It was a statement of fact, not a question and Meehan nodded soberly. “You’ve got to have some respect for death. It’s a serious business. Too many people are too off-hand about it these days. Now me, I like to see things done right.”
“I can imagine.”
Meehan smiled. “That’s why I thought it might be a good idea to get together like this morning. You could find it very interesting. Who knows, you might even see some future in tie business.”
He put a hand on Fallon’s knee and Fallon eased away. Meehan wasn’t in the least embarrassed. “Anyway, we’ll start you off with a cremation,” he said. “See what you make of that.”
He poured another coffee, topped it up with more Cognac and leaned back with a contended sigh.
The crematorium was called Pine Trees and when the car turned in through the gate, Fallon was surprised to see Meehan’s name in gold leaf on the notice-board, one of half-a-dozen directors.
“I have a fifty-one per cent holding in this place,” Meehan said. “The most modern crematorium in the north of England. You should see the gardens in spring and summer. Costs us a bomb, but it’s worth it. People come from all over.”
The superintendent’s house and the office were just inside the gate. They drove on and came to a superb, colonnaded building. Meehan tapped on the glass and Dormer braked to a halt.
Meehan wound down the window. “This is what they call a columbarium,” he said. “Some people like to store the ashes in an urn and keep it on display. There are niches in all the walls, most of them full. We try to discourage it these days.”