4. WHAT TO DO WITH A CORPSE

There's a dead body, but he's nobody, so what do we do?

When Jed said, so quietly a passing mouse ignored him and the skies remained the same shade of blue despite the implications of his words, that Crin had been an illegal immigrant, things started happening in my head that would have driven a saint berserk.

What, I thought, is the idiot wittering on about? Of course Crin isn’t an illegal immigrant because I’ve known him all my life and now he’s lolling in that deckchair, cold and dead and with an arrow sticking out of his chest, he just can’t be because illegal immigrants don’t look like that.

“Of course he isn’t,” said Joanie, confirming my own suspicions, “he’s been our friend since the sixties.”

“And drummer,” I added for her, “we mustn’t forget he was our drummer.”

There was me using the past tense about him already. His flesh can’t have cooled much and he had become a was instead of an is.

“I’m afraid he is,” replied Jed, “he told me to keep quiet about it when he told me years ago, but he came over from somewhere in Eastern Europe when he was a kid and there was trouble with communists in his homeland and people being murdered for no good reason He was brought by his parents, and when he was in his teens and wanted to join us in The Sparklers his parents went back because they were afraid of the British authorities finally finding out about their illegal status and anyway things were better in their homeland, and he wouldn’t go. They tried to make him, but he ran away. Then he joined us and we had a brief career as a wannabe folk group before we saw sense and got proper jobs.”

My brain was settling, and I sniffed. I remembered stuff. He’d wanted to keep on drumming when I applied for jobs in offices and seemed quite peeved when the rest of us started to move on in our lives.

“So he’s a crook,” said Robin Hood harshly.

“He’s the sweetest, nicest and most honest man you’d ever hope to meet,” protested Joanie, “I mean was,” she added.

“There are too many illegal immigrants ruining our country,” hissed the geriatric outlaw, “it’s in all the papers.”

“Most of them are refugees fleeing for their lives, and as far as I’m concerned they’re welcome on my doorstep any time,” said Scabby harshly. “There’s not one of us who knows what it’s like, so don’t let’s get all holier than thou, shall we?”

“Granddad, shut up,” hissed June, then “what are you going to do about it? Are you going to report it to the police, which I suppose is what you ought to do?”

“And get us all in trouble for harbouring him?” asked Jed.

“We can’t be in trouble if we had no idea,” protested Scabby.

“Ignorance is no excuse,” muttered Robin Hood darkly.

And at that moment the space-time continuum did another wobble and nearly took my sanity with it when another Robin Hood appeared from behind the crumbling walls of the old castle.

This one, though, was younger. And disgustingly handsome in the kind of way that makes women want to melt into his arms and men dissolve into puddles of jealousy. And he was curious.

“What on Earth’s going on?” he asked.

“This is the young Robin,” said June, “he’s my brother, Mark. He’ll know what to do. He’s studying law.”

“Anyone going to tell me what’s going on?” demanded yet another new voice. It was getting to be confusing and probably just as well that Crin was no longer in the land of the living or he would have contributed even more sounds to the already overburdened air.

I pinched myself really hard for thinking that.

“Ouch!” I said.

“What?” asked a startled Joanie.

“Nothing. I just pinched myself,” I confessed.

“Robin Hood shot our good friend Crin,” explained Scabby in his best minimalist voice. “We’re trying to work out whether to report it to the police or deal with it without bothering them. After all, it was an accident.”

“Of course you report it,” said Mark, shocked that anyone should think differently, “he’s dead and the deaths of everyone have to be reported. It’s up to the police to work out whether it was accidental or not.”

“You mean...” stammered the original Robin Hood, “they might think I shot him on purpose? They might think I’m a murderer?”

“They won’t think anything of the sort, Simon,” soothed the second camerawoman.

“I’ve seen programmes on the telly, Jilly,” moaned Robin Hood, the one apparently called Simon in the real world. “They’re a law unto themselves, are the police. I’ve watched Morse. I know how they think.”

“They’re not that clever, granddad,” said June soothingly.

“I think we should bury him and forget about it,” I said, out of the blue, without even thinking about it first. That sort of thing can happen any time, random thoughts swirling around in my head and crashing together to make a brand new thought that just has to seep into the world via my mouth and words.

“Bury him?” asked Joanie, shocked, “without a proper funeral or anything like that?”

“We can say things as we bury him,” encouraged Scabby agreeably. “That would get over the problem of him being illegal.”

“I could film it,” enthused Jilly, “it’s no fun being second camerawoman with nothing really vital to contribute. But a funeral, maybe a rustic one with songs of love and gentle hopes being sung, and maybe a harpist...”

“I’ve got my guitar,” I said, suddenly being carried away by her need for recognition.

“Yes, a guitar,” she sighed, “I love the sound of a guitar being strummed...”

“I don’t strum….” I murmured, “I pick.”

“But what happens when he gets to be discovered?” demanded Robin Hood senior. “It happens, you know. A fox comes by and smells something tasty and starts to dig it up. Then two schoolboys playing truant the very next day chase a football past it and one of them trips over an exposed bony hand and the other one screams and bursts into tears… then the pathologist comes along in his white or blue suit and lifts a hair off the decomposing remains and says we’ve only got to find the owner of this DNA and we’ve got the killer...”

“Then we bury him deep,” said Jed, nodding slowly. “So deep no fox will ever find him. Six feet deep. After all, that’s how deep they bury folk in graveyards, and foxes don’t have fun and games in places like that.”

“I wasn’t thinking of fun and games,” protested Robin Hood, “I was thinking of hungry beasts of the wild, desperate for a decent meal.”

“So we bury him,” said Jed slowly, “but where?”

“In the woods behind the old ruins,” suggested Mark, the younger Robin Hood, indicating the crumbling castle walls. “We could make a decent fist of burying him in the ancient woods and it could be really romantic if one of his friends made tearful comments to the strains of a weeping guitar as he’s gently laid to rest.”

“And there’s no trouble for anyone,” concluded Simon, Robin Hood’s elderly incarnation. “And, because he doesn’t exist in the country nobody’s going to be looking for him.”

“Except his partner,” suggested Jed.

“And his kids,” added Joanie, “they’re bound to look for him. His kids, they’re grown up now, of course, but they think the world of him.”

“I suppose it was the rough start he had in life that made him into a particular good and loving father,” added Scabby.

“So … he was married?” asked June.

Jed shook his head. “No, it was nothing as simple as that. He was a non-person, and he had to live his life in secret. Away from officialdom. No birth certificate, no papers of any sort. But he had a partner and kids, only nobody knew officially that he was anything to do with them. They thought he was a lodger.”

I groaned.

This was getting to be too damned complicated and I’d only known about Crin’s status for half an hour. What would it be like tomorrow or next week or next year? Would it drive me round the bend until I started dribbling?

“Where shall we bury him,” I asked, avoiding too many thoughts about the future.

© Peter Rogerson 12.06.18